Traditional state-centric approaches to dealing with important developments have become obsolete. New conceptual tools and approaches are called for to grapple with the reality of proto states and their leadership in the emerged political landscape.
By Ademola Araoye
As a result of the geo-political transformations in the whole of Africa, especially south of the Sahara, many simmering conflicts remain under the radar. Due to deft public relations management, many a crisis incurring incalculable human and material costs, such as in the Casamance, has faded from global consciousness. The unremitting blood bath in the Niger Delta is consigned to obscure segments of global narratives. Slavery in Mauretania is a mere underreported snippet of news. The rampage of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, the Janajaweed militia in South Sudan, Darfur and the fringes of Tchad, and a legion of such organised chaos elements clutter the political landscape.
All these amorphous groups and elements, rather unfortunately with some justification, arrogate to themselves some tenuous claims to absolute control of significant swathes of territory - within and along the outer fringes of conventional states. These enclaves have lives of their own, even as they survive as proxies for important state actors in the neighbourhood. As a result, the concrete existence of real protoflstates surviving along with and in close juxtaposition with conventional states, has been consolidated beyond
a shade of reasonable doubt in the African political firmament. They have become quasi-legitimate, even if despised, stakeholders, and unwanted but inevitable interlocutors in international life. Their engagements transcend the battle eld where they first stamp their presence. In no time, navigating and exploiting the spaces around them, they foist their credentials as validated voices in regional and international diplomacy on their host states and international actors. These proto states rub shoulders with run of the mill sovereign states in their immediate environment. In effect the basic assumption of a normal state-system is invalidated in this environment and critical local actors have a perfect understanding and, more importantly, appreciate the import of this reality. In the face of this conundrum, calls have been made for the re-conceptualisation of the African state, authority and power1. In this setting traditional state-centric approaches to dealing with important developments have become obsolete. New conceptual tools and approaches are called for to grapple with the reality of proto states and their leadership in the emerged political landscape.
For ease of conceptual clarity, it is necessary to delineate the proto state from the concept of quasi state coined by Robert Jackson to describe those states which, despite the recognition of other states and international institutions within the global system, nonetheless often lacked ‘substantial and credible statehood by the empirical criteria of classical positive international law. Established states enjoyed what Jackson described as ‘positive sovereignty’: they had governments which exercised effective dominion over their peoples and territories, and they were capable of defending themselves, on their own or with allies, against external threats. Over time, they generally built up a level of legitimacy which helped both to demarcate their peoples and territories from others and to assure the stability and effectiveness of their domestic political systems. The ‘negative sovereignty’ of the quasi state, on the other hand, rested to a considerable extent on international recognition.
The true culprits are the perpetrators of a dangerous myth in international and African power circuits who impede negotiated settlement, reform, and the restructuring of the floundering African state, or even the outright liquidation of the killing fields that they call sovereign states.
The rise of proto states in the African political firmament is therefore the logical consequence of the fictional character of the post-colonial state and its inability to consolidate its hegemonic control of political space through effective penetration, entailing control of peoples, winning the loyalty of the people for the new state and developing strong political institutions. The negative sovereignty on which the states rested could only be a temporary device for easing the passage of ‘new states’ into the international order3. Over time such states were expected either to make good their claims to sovereignty, or else their inadequacies would be revealed. The emergence of the proto state resulting from the continuous unravelling of the state and the state system constituted by the quasi state informs of the heavy odds against the implantation of the strange concept of the nation state in the traditional setting where clearly de ned social systems of organisation were evolving. As Clapham further notes, the regimes of these quasi states in Africa could only be sustained as long as they were able to supply benefits to their protectors at a price which they were prepared to pay.
The evolution of the global international system has removed this cover that gave a veneer of external legitimacy to the quasi state. Without domestic legitimacy and increasingly deprived of this external cover, the states began to disintegrate. Where the people were able to talk about a new dispensation in national conferences in the post cold war era as in the Republic of Benin and Congo Brazzaville, the states avoided imploding. In every state that had a long period of one party state or a long period of one man rule that did not go for a conference, civil war ensued: as in Liberia following the end of the 150 years of Americo- Liberian hegemony and in the death of Houephouet Boigny in Cote d’Ivoire after almost four decades of the rule of the Parti Democratic de Cote d’Ivoire (PDCI). In both countries, proto states emerged to challenge the legitimacy of the old quasi state.
The grudging accommodation afforded proto states and their agents, that our fixated lexicon and antiquated conceptual systems persist in categorising as rebels, around the table by the tested and tired system, inform that the rules and protocols of the game that nations in these parts play have changed in the post cold war era. And nowhere have these changes been more manifest than in Central and West Africa. No major conflict in Africa in the post cold war era, from Sierra Leone, through to the newly emerged narco-state of Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Central African Republic, Cote d’Ivoire, Casamance, Sudan, Tchad, Mali and even Somalia since the fall of the Berlin Wall has been purely domestic. All have been largely intertwined with complex transnational affinities in their immediate sub region. In this new era, armed hostilities neither break out simply on account of internal developments nor also on account of the poverty of the people! This may seem a sacrilegious assertion here, but it is the rude and important fact, even in the face of the grinding poverty in Africa.
Conflicts are not purely domestic: not in Guinea Bissau where armed hostilities were instigated in 1998 by the controversy over the way forward with the historic relations between the military dominated hegemonic party PAIGC, which was undergoing internal decay, with the Movement for the Development of the Casamance (MFDC) in the Senegalese province of the same name. Fifty per cent of the fighting cadres of the Guinea Bissau army were Casamacaises who had fought in the revolutionary war that defeated the Portuguese military in one of the most brutal struggles for liberation in West Africa. Not in well- endowed Cote d’Ivoire, where 90% of the coupists of September 2002 were Burkinabes and a major issue was the legitimacy of the Ivorian identity of a vast segment of society. This crisis of national identity and integration was expressed in the refusal of the Ivorian establishment to recognise the claims to Ivorian nationality of a prominent citizen of the country who was aspiring to the Presidency. He was treated as a Burkinabe, even when he had been Prime Minister under the founding father of the Ivorian nation. The economy of crisis ridden Cote d’Ivoire’s is 400% that of Senegal. Not in Liberia where the three major warring factions – the NPFL, the LURD and the MODEL – were formed, financed as well as armed in Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Cote d’Ivoire.
The concept is revealing of the very lazy, unimaginative and limited vision of the mercantilist attitudes of Africa’s discredited leadership.
In 1980, when the slide to conflict effectively began, Liberia’s per head capital of $950.00 was easily one of the highest in the sub region. Conflict has therefore struck in the richest and the poorest countries in Africa. Notwithstanding the undoubtedly significant impact of economic factors on conflict, it is necessary to begin a serious interrogation of the very concept and expression of the post- colonial African state to come to a determination of the real sources of conflict.
The post-colonial state has to be deconstructed and somehow de-validated in order to begin to reconstruct the foundations for peace. There is palpable tension in the confounding realities in society and the phantom state that has been validated by the myth of an international legitimacy. The practical implications of this persistent and convenient myth are manifest all over Africa. See the Niger Delta, South Sudan, Darfur, Congo Brazzaville, the Democratic Republic of Congo, not to talk of Somalia. The unabating clamour for a sovereign conference of Nigeria’s ethnic nationalities, which is championed by the very erudite Octogenarian who moved the motion for Nigeria’s independence, is an eloquent testimony of this tension. In this scenario, the merchants of death are not the poor underfed opportunistic profiteers of chaos mining a paltry ounce of gold in the absence of an effective state who are vili ed on international air waves every day. They are not even the child soldiers whose childhoods are stolen forever. The true culprits are the perpetrators of a dangerous myth in international and African power circuits who impede negotiated settlement, reform, and the restructuring of the floundering African state, or even the outright liquidation of the killing fields that they call sovereign states.
In the contemporary African state and states system, the scale and nature of tensions are often in uenced by the structure of relations and interaction among forces that populate the shared social and geo-political spaces. These forces include states, proto states and transnational societies of various hues with stakes that they consider legitimate to protect in the floundering micro sub divisions of the macro sub-regional geo-political space. The structure of these interactions can be competitive/ adversarial or collaborative, but always involves the relative capacity to project power vis-à-vis other interlocutors in that space. If relations among interacting state and non-state actors alike are adversarial, the environment will necessarily be volatile, and conflict among constituent elements in one state or proto state or between any two forces will attract key allies that may include transnational communities.
The implication of this is the transformation of the canvass that the international business of managing Africa’s conflict has to deal with. A second implication is that in this intermestic environment, the character of regimes in second and third party states, relations among the transnational communities with competing claims and agendas which may define the undercurrents of the structure of relations among them especially where they share contiguous borders, are significant predictors of conflict in neighbouring states. They also provide early indicators of looming instability of the sub-region. Also conflicts generated in intermestic environments tend to spread fast across international frontiers. The structure of the ensuing conflict, among unlike units with a range of confusing structures of relations, can at best be only described as amorphous. The hostilities are not mediated by any known international protocols either in terms of the conduct of the war or the protection of unarmed civilians, including women or children. International rules of engagement or the Geneva Law of War requires a certain structure in the war itself to function effectively. While there is limited room for the international actors to try to monitor the conduct of war in an intermestic scenario, the more structured and formalised the military formations in hostilities are, the greater the room to manoeuvre.
The more unstructured the rag tag militia is, the less room there is to moderate its conduct in battle. There is always a focus of international accountability with formal armies of internationally recognised states. In advanced proto states, such as the UNITA enclave that existed within the legitimate state of Angola for over three decades, the putative head of state may be held accountable. This is more so if the proto state eventually succeeds in vacating the power of the state sovereign. Charles Taylor and Sierra Leonean Revolutionary United Front (RUF) leader Foday Sankoh come to mind. Among non-state actors, there is no such acknowledged focal point and their kind of war is unlimited and unmediated by any civilised protocols. This has been the situation in West Africa, Central Africa and the Lake region, the Horn as well as in the Sudan-Darfur-Tchad-Kenya- Somalia conflict axis. These regions are suffused with proto states in control of significant swathes of territory with the support of, and in quasi public interaction with, neighbouring states that offer them more than just military support to include critical diplomatic leverage.
The archaic conceptual tools applied in the mass media reflecting attitudes to the Laurent Nkundas betray the unfortunate lag in popular appreciation of the transformed nature of the conflict environment in Africa.
As a result of its peculiar evolution, the post-colonial African states system is unlike the conventional state system with like units. Actors in this kind of state environment are composed of unlike units jostling for pre-eminence in a near Hobbesian state. Afirst and dominant group of acting units arrogate to themselves the fiction of being conventional states. This status is largely validated by the continuous recognition of that status by elite actors in the global system. A second group comprises of emerged proto states with varying longevity that is a function of how the situation in the intermestic environment evolves, outright rebels and often-times chaos elements all interacting with conventional states in a peculiar dynamic that is yet to be systematically fathomed into the management of conflict.
The archaic conceptual tools applied in the mass media reflecting attitudes to the Laurent Nkundas betray the unfortunate lag in popular appreciation of the transformed nature of the conflict environment in Africa. The danger is that this attitude obfuscates reality and renders more challenging the task of designing tools and approaches to conflict management that are based on the essential realities of the transformed configurations in the confused theatre of the post-colonial state system. It may be recalled that in defence of Mobutu, Morocco went to battle to support the embattled defunct Mobustist Forces Armées du Zaire (FAZ) with UNITA - the Savimbi led proto state - in tow. On the other side were the Ugandan- Rwanda-Angolan MPLA forces fighting alongside the Kabila Pa forces. The presence of the unconventional non-state entities interacting with state actors in the political landscape, the leverage that they have acquired, including the historically proven capacity to transform themselves into legitimate states by vacating the powers of the host states in the long term, represents a serious indictment of the main philosophical planks on which interventions in African crises rest. Laurent Nkunda, like Jonas Savimbi of UNITA before him, has come to personify the nemesis of the dangerous good intentioned, but highly controversial, intervention, of the international community. A second important factor is the structure of intervention and the ineffectual character of the tools of intervention fashioned in the fecund minds of extra- African experts and effectively sold to the good natured financiers of their twenty first century mission civil atrice adventures in Africa.
Also in this regard, the emerging nebulous responses to assaults on democratic advances by status quo forces reflects the mindset of extra- African status quo forces working in conjunction with local status quo exploiters of international goodwill. The eventual delegitimisation of the controversial concept of union administrations in the face of egregious assaults on democracy is a question of time, in the short rather than medium term. The concept is revealing of the very lazy, unimaginative and limited vision of the mercantilist attitudes of Africa’s discredited leadership. Against this international backdrop, African conflicts have remained intractable as they have de ed the well-intentioned interventions of the international community. The situation raises many questions regarding the premises, nature and agenda of international interventions in conflict and the related humanitarian complexes in Africa. A close examination of the premises of these interventions and the methods of the major actors suggest fundamental lapses in the understanding of these conflicts.
A careful examination of the postures adopted by the major institutions engaged in the management of the various dimensions of conflict in Africa suggests that positions purveyed and the character of the engagements of these institutions are driven by the respective institutional agendas and interests of the major actors. Serious attempts at understanding the real causes of the wars are not that important in the media controlled world of good sound bites. The tragedies are exploited to sharpen their institutional relevance as well strengthen their places in the cut-throat competition for resources available at the international do-gooder elite clubs.
Serious attempts at understanding the real causes of the wars are not that important in the media controlled world of good sound bites.
For now, the jury is still out on the engagement of African status quo forces in managing conflicts in which they are implicated, or that they even instigate, and which may even have direct implications for their personal political careers in the immediate future. Is it a case of employing a seasoned thief to track the footprints of another thief on a rocky path? In the intermestic context of African conflicts, an interplay of the implied or explicitly stated interests of state and non-state transnational actors in the conflict generates an international politics of not only the crisis but also of the conflict mediation.
This has generated a unique dynamic of conflict mediation processes that has often rendered more complicated the management of the conflict and the restoration of peace.
The Liberia peace process provided critical challenges to the internal cohesion of the Economic Community of West African States. Tensions along colonial orientations emerged as Nigeria and a reluctant Ghana with troops on the ground squared off with Burkina Faso and Houphouet Boigny’s Cote d’Ivoire, a proxy of France in the sub region, on the way forward. This was re-enacted again in Cote d’Ivoire itself as African states were divided between those sympathetic to the Africanist orientation of the Laurent Gbagbo administration and those perceived as advancing the solidarity of Francophonie in the manner of the resolution of the Ivorian crisis. The outcome of recent crises in Kenya and Zimbabwe in which key African personalities and institutions played significant roles are illustrative of the potential for a well-organised Africa to manage its challenges without the dubious meddling of ostensible do-gooders from outside the continent.
These challenges represent threats to the future of Africa even as they have contributed immensely to the mortgaging of our recent past. The critical interrogations must commence with an exploration of the ideational foundations of action by Africans and continental as well as sub-regional institutions. It is important for Africa to come to certain understandings among itself and a clear sense of its locus within the universe. These understandings should then direct our energies on how to take our destiny in our hands in all the realms of our existential enterprises. Indeed, the elaboration of common understandings has not been the problem as such. Concepts such as Ethiopianism, pan-Africanism and more contemporaneously the African Renaissance, provide ample theological tenets for true emancipation of our spaces and selves. It is time to go back to the drawing board with authentic African perspectives in the lead on African affairs. As Thabo Mbeki affirms:
the defence of the independence of Africa surely means that we (Africa) should not delegate to others the similarly strategic task to which we must respond without equivocation, to entrench democracy in our countries, to protect human rights, and to ensure that our countries are governed properly, in the interests of the masses of our people.
It also means that we (Africa) have to strengthen our Continent’s cohesion, and therefore its capacity to act in unity, around a broad, progressive agenda, some of which is already contained in policies agreed through the AOU and the AU.
The main task around the drawing boards in Africa must begin with the infusion of the African Union with a commonly shared continental civic theology that should constitute the basic axiomatic foundations for political, social and economic action. It may be recalled that early attempts, since the days of Ethiopianism, that argued that the African nation was one of the oldest continuous civilizations in the world, Sylvester William’s Pan- Africanism, Marcus Garvey’s Garveyism the Lembede inspired African Renaissance of the 1940s, Nnamdi Azikiwe’s Zikism, Kwame Nkrumah’s Consciencism, seeking to entrench a quintessentially black philosophy of modernity faltered on the altar of differentiated African micro-identities de ned along linguistic and ethnic lines. This problem merely expressed the historic debacle of divisive black identities leading false interest articulation. In fact, it would seem that linguistic barriers were what prevented Marcus Garvey from having the same galvanising effect in the modern black world of Latin America, especially in Cuba, Brazil and Columbia.5 The same fate must not befall Mbeki’s and Mandela’s resuscitation of the African Renaissance at the end of the last century. Drawing from the African Renaissance is the intrinsic oneness and indivisibility of the destiny of black humanity. Mbeki’s affirmation of “I am an African” essentially distils this integrated commonness of a unity of an emergent African identity that is the common patrimony that transcends all perceived social divides across the universe of black humanity. This is transcendental in rising above the in congruous construction of the ethnic basis of the externally contrived African state system that has been at the heart of the pervasive crisis of the African state and its traumatised society. It is this incongruity that has been exploited by predatory global forces as well as a segment of African leadership that has been historically supportive of the falsified exploitative project of black humanity. The international conflict consortium falls squarely into this category.
This has generated a unique dynamic of conflict mediation processes that has often rendered more complicated the management of the conflict and the restoration of peace.
Only a continental response can begin to roll back these forces. For the African Union to be relevant for the future of Africa, it must be transformed into an instrument for the advancement of this emergent transcendental African identity through the articulation of the renaissance African vision. The logical outcome of this process would be the emergence of a true African Union. This new African Union would be the perfect antidote to the Laurent Nkunda phenomenon or the rise of proto-states feeding on contrived identities that set Africans apart and accordingly,define conflicting partisan interests within the larger umbrella of the African identity.
To achieve this singular definitive objective, a new generation of African-intellectuals, youth, students, women and technocrats-rather that opportunistic and discredited African politicians-should be groomed as the main arrow heads of this new expansive vision of the transcendental African identity. This new vanguard forces have to lead the way in the new partnership between Africa and the global Other as well as the global order. This includes new relationship to be forged with foreign peace activists other do-gooder consortiums operating in Africa. It is time to open up the discourse with authentic African voices in the lead. It is the historic task of the AU to midwife the vibrant new African voices. The African Union should begin to establish institutions dedicated to the formulation and support of Afrocentric ideas that push an integrated and common identity in in the context of this new African order. Africa has to learn to generate knowledge on, of and about his affairs as a first step toward the emancipation envisioned in the African Renaissance project. The discourse with the world on Africa must be led and driven by a new generation of gifted and youthful thinkers who can effectively challenge the distortions conveyed by the dominant extra African understandings of the African condition. The long term transformation of the deplorable state of the African Being must begin at the level of new ideas generated by Africans confidently envisioning a new future for Africans. One of the historic challenges of the African Union is to rise above itself and midwife this new era. The rebranding of the AU of 9 July 2002, in Durban, South Africa, must purvey more than just crass symbolism. It must acquire a new resilience to sanitize itself of dubious members who represent the failed past. The AU must be an expression of new beginnings, representing a tectonic shift marking the substantive rebirth of black humanity. As Mwalimu Julius Nyerere enjoins:
The current generation of leaders and peoples of Africa must pick of the flickering torch of African freedom, refuel it with their enthusiasm and determination, carry it forward.
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