A marketing guru seeking to promote the proposed African Peace and Security Council (PSC) could hardly have come up with a better example than the brief and bloodless coup in São Tomé and PrÃÂncipe this month.
Soldiers led by Major Fernando Pereira rebelled to express their unhappiness at the way the government of Fradique de Menezes was distributing the small country’s oil riches.
Within six days the intervention of former colonial power, Portugal, the regional power, Nigeria, and the continental chair, Mozambique, had settled their hash. With democracy restored, Africans are left wondering what would have happened if the story had not ended happily.
Said Djinnit, the African Union Commissioner for Peace and Security, said São Tomé underlined the case for an African rapid reaction force. To turn this from ”nice to have” to reality, Africa has to find both the money and the political will.
The latter has become President Thabo Mbeki’s pet project on the continent. He risked boring delegates at the AU summit in Maputo last month with repeated calls for members to ratify the protocols of the PSC.
This body, styled on the United Nations Security Council, will enable members to intervene in other countries in cases of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Despite Mbeki’s efforts the PSC has only half the 28 ratifications it needs to be brought into force.
South African Minister of Foreign Affairs Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma explained before the summit that this did not necessarily indicate a lack of political will or support for the PSC.
”It is a very complex issue making support for the PSC a part of your national law,” she said. ”We — who are very, very keen on the council — took a year to ratify the protocols. There are important issues of legality and sovereignty involved. It is not surprising that other countries are finding it a long process.”
Mbeki has meanwhile set the end of the year as the target date for making the council a reality. Even if this deadline is met, the possibility of a rapid reaction force remains distant.
Funding could be obtained from the Western powers and other’s who want Africa to assume greater responsibility for its own security. Previous concrete commitments from the United States to train such a force could presumably be revived.
But which African country would be allowed to assume the power of leading, housing, equipping and training an African force?
South Africa would be an obvious candidate and has made it clear it would expect to be a ”permanent” member of the PSC.
Fears of South African ”gigantism” that extend beyond the region would make this problematic. A smaller, democratic state might be more politically palatable. But this would require additional expenditure on infrastructure that would use money that should be spent on men and equipment.
A rapid reaction force would obviate the need for foreign military intervention in Africa, such as that by Britain in Sierra Leone, and France in Côte d’Ivoire and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
This foreign involvement is both politically sensitive and — as US reluctance to put boots on the ground in Liberia shows — unreliable.
At last month’s summit African leaders discussed no fewer than 11 conflict areas. They talked about the hot zones — the DRC, Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea, the Central African Republic, Burundi and Liberia — and they examined post-conflict problems in Angola, the Comores and Côte d’Ivoire.
Strategic analysts could ask: ”What about fundamentalist or separatist conflict in Algeria, Chad, Senegal and Uganda? And how far is Zimbabwe off this list?”
The fact is, Africa remains crippled by conflict. This week the UN Economic Commission for Africa confirmed again that conflict had hamstrung economic growth on the continent.
Estimates of the manpower Africa will need for peacekeeping in the short term run improbably into the millions. Providing such numbers is impossible for Africa and unacceptable to the international community where Africa takes up three-quarters of the UN Security Council’s time.
African misery does not make the A-list of world strategic considerations unless it affects on the all-embracing war on terrorism. Thus this elephant of conflict prevention and control has to be eaten by Africans themselves — one bite at a time.
The first of these should be to pre-empt conflict and send in mediators rather than wait for the explosion and send in soldiers, says Herman Hanekom, an analyst at the Africa Institute.
The second is to have a rapid reaction force to quell the fire as quickly as possible and prevent it spreading.