Cameron Duodu
LETTER FROM THE NORTH
Tuesday night saw two of the most outstanding African diplomats of our time – Kofi Annan, secretary general of the United Nations, and Emeka Anyaoku, secretary general of the Commonwealth – on the same podium in London.
Annan, of course, will go down in history as the man whose skills saved the people of Iraq from suffering another barrage of Western bombs, as a punishment for the intransigence of Saddam Hussein.
And Anyaoku has, in the 10 years he’s been secretary general of the Commonwealth, presided over the suspension, in 1995, of his own country, Nigeria, from the Commonwealth for operating a barbaric military form of government, only to be readmitted, four years later, as a full democracy. Meanwhile, Anyaoku himself had adroitly stayed put, though the country that had nominated him for the post was out in the cold. His crowning glory, however, was to assist South Africa to regain entry into the club, and to perch itself firmly on the pole of leadership planted so shakily on the African continent.
The occasion that brought the two together was the Commonwealth Lecture, which was given this year at the Commonwealth Institute in London by Annan. Anyaoku was in the chair.
When I saw the topic for Annan’s lecture, I was sceptical. It read: Africa: Maintaining The Momentum. My mind immediately asked, “Momentum? What momentum?”
I was glad to see that Annan didn’t duck the issue. He spoke of the “substantial programmes of technical assistance” that the UN and the Commonwealth had put in place to help Africa overcome its conflicts, false starts and lost decades. However, he admitted, it had not “been enough”. At the dawn of the new millennium, conflicts continues in almost all regions in Africa, swelling “the ranks of refugees and internally displaced persons”.
Some of the conflicts had completely vanished from world headlines: Angola (where fighting continued unchecked); southern Sudan (ceasefire observed more in name than in fact); Somalia (still no recognised government); Ethiopia-Eritrea (war now in its third year, having already taken “55E000 lives”).
While “nothing can excuse the stubbornness of those who persist in using violence against their fellow men and women”, said Annan, “the guilt of a few unscrupulous leaders” should not be used to “excuse the callous indifference with which most of the world treats the victims of these near-forgotten wars” in Africa.
Annan added that, terrible as it was, conflict was not “even the worst” of Africa’s scourges. Last year, “Aids killed far more people than all the region’s conflicts combined. And of 36-million people now living with Aids worldwide, 23-million are in sub-Saharan Africa. In Cte d’Ivoire, a teacher dies of Aids every school day. The average child born in Botswana today has a life expectancy of 41 years, when without Aids, it would have been 70.”
(I must say I personally always take UN figures on HIV/Aids with a pinch of salt. I simply do not believe that UN Aids- monitoring agencies and the national health organisations with which they work are as yet adequately equipped to have the capability to provide accurate figures on the real incidence of HIV/Aids in Africa. I think they depend far too much on extrapolating small, probably unrepresentative samples, into global/regional figures. Nevertheless, one cannot ignore the trend illustrated by the figures, flawed though the figures themselves might be.)
Annan also touched on the contribution of poverty in Africa to war and disease. But he didn’t only recite what he called a “litany of deprivation and despair”. The era of coups d’tat and single-party monopoly of power was giving way to the restoration of constitutional government. Coup leaders were no longer welcome at Organisation of African Unity summits, and in one case, a former dictator accused of torturing thousands of his fellow countrymen (Hissene Habre of Chad) had been arrested in another African country (Senegal).
Difficult political problems in Central African Republic, Guinea-Bissau and Niger had been resolved; Nigeria had returned to constitutional rule, and although it had been experiencing an upsurge of communal violence, no one should imagine that a country of more than 100-million, with great ethnic and religious diversity, would make the transition from dictatorship to democracy without encountering problems.
Annan added: “South Africa, the other giant of Africa, has made an admirably smooth transition from the era of President [Nelson] Mandela to that of [Thabo] Mbeki, following an exemplary electoral process. Not long ago, chaos and bloodshed seemed to be South Africa’s destiny. Instead, today, we see not a problem-free South Africa, but a people tackling its problems through the mechanism of multiracial, multi-party democracy, with a Constitution that sets new standards in upholding human rights and enshrining the rule of law.”
Annan also paid tribute to South Africa’s most notable ambassador for peace in Africa – Mandela, who, “seemingly tireless, even at the age of 81, has placed his enormous prestige and wisdom at the service of fellow Africans”, by accepting the “arduous role” of facilitator in the Burundi peace process.
To sustain the momentum of positive developments in Africa, Annan offered the following thoughts:
l better, faster, more efficient debt relief;
l higher levels of aid;
l opening up of the markets of the industrialised countries to African products; and
l investment in human resources, which today means training in the new information technologies.
Annan concluded: “The agenda is clear. The calendar is full of opportunities to turn things around. President Thabo Mbeki likes to say about today’s South Africa that ‘the building has begun’. And I think one can say the same of Africa as a whole.”