In Mozambique’s pretty port city of Maputo, South Africa is omnipresent. Dominoes Pizza, Steers, Shoprite, even Clear Channel advertising hoardings hold up the signs advertising, well … more South African businesses, the Yellow Pages included.
This week at the African Union assembly in the city, South African airforce helicopters circled the port; its naval vessels protected the waters; South African sniffer dogs swept the spanking white convention centre (funded by the Chinese) while South African firemen and other security kept the continent’s governing elite safe.
The lesson is clear. While she had her own prawns in bounteous supply, Mozambique would not have been able to pull off even the meeting without a little help from friends. And this is Africa’s conundrum — while the AU pivots on the principles of self-reliance, autonomy, sovereignty and deciding for ourselves, the continent is too poor to pay the price of that autonomy.
This is the reason why President Thabo Mbeki has supported the growing call for United States President George W Bush to put more American boots on the ground in Liberia, the West African nation that has become what United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan this week called one of the “unspeakable horrors that fill every African with a sense of shame”.
There are other “unspeakable horrors” limiting Mbeki’s African Renaissance — they include the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, the Central African Republic, Sierra Leone and others.
These are wars, skirmishes and conflicts fought for turf, for profit, for history and for politics. Some are the malignant children of our colonial past; many the product of an avaricious present; a few (like the last fires in the north-east Democratic Republic of the Congo) are the last kicks of dying tinpots.
Conflict resolution is expensive and difficult. To be effective it requires funds for peace-making, peace-keeping, intricate political negotiations, transitional authorities, interim governments, elections … the peace list goes on and on; it gets longer and longer and more expensive.
Africa cannot do it alone. Mozambique’s national fiscus, for example, is 70% funded by donors. The AU has done an admirable job on an anaemic budget of $31-million.
Eight countries were in arrears with the AU this week; the wealthier continental economies like South Africa, Nigeria, Libya, Algeria and Egypt will pay at a higher rate because Mbeki wants the new institutions to wean themselves of aid. Donors have for far too long determined Africa’s developmental path and they have not done a great job. Self-sufficiency, walking our own path, making our own peace is laudable and must be supported.
But it is still a goal to work towards: Africa will require multimillion-dollar support to get the AU’s peace and security council, its standby force and its early-warning system working. Until then, US, French, Pakistani and other boots will need to help keep the African peace. That is the reality.
And that reality is why all attention and energy at the AU should not fall only on conflict resolution, no matter that it is the most pressing, the most “heart-breaking” — as Annan put it — of Africa’s challenges.
Trade, the end of the European and US subsidies that strangle the continent’s agricultural and textile producers, effective debt relief are all other areas that need, arguably, as urgent attention. Poverty is too fertile a breeding ground for despots and warmongers.
The more things change …
In South Africa’s often bizarre road to normalcy, it becomes difficult to avoid using clichés. So readers will forgive us for trotting out the old horse: “The more things change the more they stay the same.”
The lead story in this edition of the newspaper, which tells of how the Inkatha Freedom Party is plotting to divert state resources to its election effort, is proof that in many ways this nation still has much apartheid-era baggage to contend with.
The IFP plan, as crude and as unsophisticated as the party behind it, has been compiled by an elite party unit called Stratcon — whose name sounds ominously close to that of PW Botha’s Stratcom.
With its back against the wall the party, which thrived within the apartheid infrastructure, now wants to employ the same set of tricks that were perfected by the erstwhile National Party government.
Now one does not expect much of the IFP, a party that seemingly finds it difficult to join the rest of us in the modern world.
What we do expect is for our democratic system to rein in such obvious abuses of state resources. As we move closer to Election 2004, the temptation will be high on parties to abuse taxpayers’ money and public institutions.
Because others will no doubt be craftier than the Ulundi feudalists, we the public and the institutions that have been set up to protect the public good should permanently have our guard up.