This blog focuses mostly on the reform, restructuring and transformation of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, so there haven't really been that many posts on pan-continental issues.
One could argue, I suppose, that matters that affect Nigeria are by definition matters of importance to the continent. What is indisputable is we Africans tend to pay too much attention to political matters in Western Europe (particularly France and the United Kingdom), North America (particularly the USA) and Western Asia ....
.... and too little attention to matters occurring in other African countries or regions.
The quality of information available, to the extent that we do follow events in our neighbourhoods (or even in our own countries) is questionable. We get a lot of "news", "analysis" and "discourse" from foreign (i.e. non-African sources) or from domestic sources that have been influenced by foreign sources (and are often led by managers or journalists who were educated abroad, or educated at home by professors who were educated abroad). What is presented as the consensus opinion about an issue is something that sounds like what an outsider would come up with from a brief glance at the surface, and does not sound like the product of a person or people who truly understand what is going on, or even just have the complete set of basic facts about the what, why, who and how.
But I digress.
Like I said, I don't write too often about pan-continental issues except insofar as the issues affecting Nigeria are similar to the issues affecting other countries, or insofar as anything that affects Nigeria is important to Africa at large.
I did, however, write this post about African governments that disguise and propagandize their efforts at undemocratic self-preservation against the will of their citizens by purporting to be opposed to "unconstitutional changes of government" (i.e. coups).
Sometime in December, 2012, elements of three Central African Republic rebels groups united to form a new, larger rebel alliance. This Alliance proved so successful so quickly that it was in position to overrun the capital, Bangui, in a short time. The USA shut down its embassy, and President Bozize called on his neighbours (and on France), to save his government. Bozize is desperate to agree to offer to share power with the rebels (as though he couldn't have done this a long time ago).
France and the United States are doing the usual thing of officially and publicly professing their political non-involvement, calling for peaceful resolution, etc, etc. As to what they are or are not doing secretly, practically and unofficially, one way or the other, we will only know after we see the results.
African countries have rushed to prop up Bozize's regime. His closest ally is the government of Chad, who rely on him to not support Chadian rebels the way other C.A.R. governments have done; Chadian President Idris Deby pledged to send up to 2,000 soldiers to bolster Bozize. Support also came from Congo-Brazzaville, Gabon and Cameroun. The hastily-assembled force currently on the ground to protect Bangui from the rebel alliance includes: Chad (400 troops), South Africa (200 troops), Cameroun (120), Gabon (120), and Congo-Brazzaville (120).
Look, if I lived in Bangui or had family living in Bangui, I would want to do anything to avoid the city becoming a combat zone ... again.
I understand that motivation. I have had family in a war zone before. And not just once.
However, the preservation of the Bozize Regime does absolutely nothing to fix the chronic and persistent problems (including a near-constant security crisis) that have plagued the C.A.R. for decades.
Mind you, allowing the rebels to sweep him out of office wouldn't fix the problem either.
This is my problem with Nigerian politics. It is also my problem with African politics. And while I do not have any particular visceral reaction towards the domestic politics of countries in the rest of the world, one notices the same pattern in that citizens are always presented with a situation where none of the choices they are allowed to make is a choice that would actually fix the problems they want to have fixed. You always get a choice between nothing you want, and are expected to choose the party or person that you dislike but dislike less than you dislike the other person or parties.
For other parts of the world, outside of Africa, the deliberately restricted scope of political choice is not that big of a problem, at least not at present. For example, I suppose the average Japanese person feels some sort of effect from the fact that neither the DPJ or LDP has any answers to Japan's 20-year economic questions, but none of them suffers in the way that a citizen of the C.A.R. suffers due to the absence of a political choice representing a solution to their dillenma.
Presented with this reality, a lot of people's reactions boil down to "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" or "don't let the good be the enemy of the better", but these so-called "solutions" to the problems of countries like C.A.R. are themselves no more than lubrication for the continuation of all of the basic problems. This isn't a case of opposing an improvement in the name of perfection, but is more a case of asking why we are fanning the flames when we should be putting them out.
Remember what I said about understanding how someone who lived in Bangui or had family there would want to avoid the city becoming a warzone? If I lived in Bangui or had family there, I would have experienced this same exact anxiety, trepidation and fear so many times over the last 50 years that I would be sick and tired of it, and would be wondering why we just keep lubricating the continuation of the never-ending conflicts. Being told that soldiers from the rest of Africa are here to make sure the same thing continues happening decades in the future would prompt me to join those people who make perilous journeys across the Sahara just to get to anywhere other than their own countries.
None of these things solve the problem.
It reminds me of a semi-acquaintance of mine, who supports the idea of sending Nigerian soldiers to go and fight in Mali. According to him, if they don't go, it would mean the forces holding the north of Mali would be able to send weapons to the insurgents behind a wave of violence in Nigeria.
But this is warped thinking.
There is nothing that Nigerian troops could or would do in Mali that would stop the flow of weapons to Nigerian insurgent groups. Even if Nigeria single-handedly conquered all of Mali, planted the Nigerian flag, and declared Mali to be the 37th State of Nigeria, all of the insurgent and militant groups in Nigeria would still be getting weapons. I wrote an essay nine years ago, ahead of the 2003 Elections, that complained about the Nigerian Federal Government's inability to do anything about the smuggling of heavy weapons into the country, among other complaints. Back then, everyone thought Mali was an African success story, rating them (along with Ghana) among the most democratic and well-governed countries on the continent.
Mind you, the fact that I wrote the essay in 2003 does not mean the problem of insurgent/militant groups' access to heavy weaponry started in 2003. On the contrary, it was already a long-standing problem by then.
Look, sending Nigerian troops to Darfur has not brought peace to Darfur, nor has it done anything to stop the flow of weapons across African borders in general, or in particular the smuggling of heavy weapons into Nigeria. Nigerian soldiers have died in Darfur, though nowhere near as many as died in Liberia and Sierra Leone. We've also lost soldiers in Somalia in the early 1990s without there being an appreciable difference in the levels of violence for another 20+ years.
Sierra Leone and Liberia are usually presented as examples of the success of this kind of intervention, but both countries remain fragile in security terms. If anything the "peace" has provided a veil behind which the same forces that created problems in Sierra Leone and Liberia have expanded to affect Cote d'Ivoire (especially), as well as Guinea and Guinea-Bissau to a certain extent. Weapons, armed persons and (in the case of Guinea-Bissau) globally proscribed narcotic products, continue to move across the borders of the wider Mano River Region with ease.
I am not being a pessimist. What I am doing is trying to promote some kind of proactive thinking. The truth of the matter is the Mano River Region is not so much at peace as it is in a sort of inter-war lull before the next outbreak, wherever that outbreak might be.
Indeed, proactive thinking is clearly nonexistent in these many crises. Whatever one may think of the prior government of Libya (or even for that matter of the current government of Libya), the NATO countries' actions in Libya have resulted in something of a catastrophe for Mali and West Africa, and nobody foresaw the possibility or did anything to ward it off or to contain it once it became clear what was going to happen.
I love the Federal Republic of Nigeria, but I hate the "Giant of Africa" tag that our political leaders like to bandy about. Self-hype is no substitute for basic, simple proactive thinking about strategic interests in our immediate neighbourhood, and self-praise does not hide from anyone the fact that we have little or no influence on events as near to us as Chad, Equatorial Guinea and Niger Republic, much less further afield. We watched what happened in Libya as spectators, watched the fallout as spectators. We are now scrambling to send soldiers to Mali because other people have told us to do so, and not because we have carefully considered what we have to do to finally fix underlying problems in our country and our region. These "experts" whose requests we are obeying are the same people whose "expertise" created the problem in the first place.
You are probably wondering when I will get to a suggested solution, as opposed to a long litany of complaints.
But that is just it. The name of this blog is "For A New Federal Republic", and it is sub-titled "Reform, Restructure and Transform" the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
We can't keep things in Nigeria the way they are, and then deceive ourselves that sending soldiers to this or that country will fix the problem with security in our country and in our neighbourhood.
We can't fight to keep the Bozize Government in place, essentially keeping everything in the C.A.R. fundamentally the same as it has always been, and deceive ourselves that we have brought peace to the place.
There is so much that is fundamentally problematic about the nature of the politics and economies of Nigeria and its neighbourhood and all of it has to be fixed, or we will remain excessively and unnecessarily prone to these type of problems.
Indeed, one can argue that the biggest reason why countries like the C.A.R. cannot reach their economic potential is Nigeria, the country that should be the engine driving the region, is doing everything in the world to AVOID achieving its economic potential.
You cannot correct this by sending soldiers here, there and everywhere across Africa.
We must REFORM, RESTRUCTURE AND TRANSFORM the FEDERAL REPUBLIC.
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