This year was one in which peace seriously threatened to break out all over the continent. However, true to form, Africa kept enough hot spots alive to maintain its status as the prime area of international concern.
That concern could have been translated into action without troops by addressing the greatest threat to the continent: HIV/Aids. But the developed world, in the words of United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, continued to behave callously towards the continent housing two-thirds of the world’s estimated three million people living with HIV/Aids.
The picture in Africa is grim: the continent has 27-million HIV-infected adults (nearly one in 10) and only 50 000 have access to treatment.
Annan admitted he was not winning his war on Aids because government leaders were not involved enough. He spoke plainly in the developing world about the causes of HIV/Aids and tried to convince the developed world that the $3-billion it allocated annually had to be at least tripled if the pandemic is to be beaten.
In another grim area on the continent, Zimbabwe, like the apartheid regime before it, demonstrated that a country does not have to be at war to pose a threat to regional peace and stability.
The country’s refusal to meet basic standards of governance drove it from the Commonwealth. More gravely, the apparent inability of its Southern African partners to see the problem it poses has hamstrung the continent’s rescue plan, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, which is based exactly on this precept.
It is a pity that Mozambique — with its economy still growing at about 8% a year and President Joachim Chissano doing a sterling job as chairperson of the African Union — could not have distanced itself from this error of judgement.
Blind support for Mugabe has also undermined efforts to get the UN more involved in peacekeeping in Africa.
The approach from the better-heeled members of that organisation remains to, as far as possible, throw money at African problems and avoid the tar baby of committing troops.
The United States announced last week that it had donated nearly $245-million for the assistance of refugees and conflict victims on the African continent in the current fiscal year. The apprehension of the grubby, bearded Saddam Hussein meant it did not have to apologise for spending a thousand times as much ousting him in Iraq.
Nigeria and South Africa have some fence mending to do. President Thabo Mbeki’s petulant attack on procedures at the Commonwealth summit in Abuja amounted to a personal attack on President Olusegun Obasanjo.
None of the agreements reached at the fourth binational commission were ratified at the fifth meeting of that body.
Nigerian Vice-President Atiku Abubakar put this down to a failure of the National Assembly. All indications are that Obasanjo applied the brakes himself.
South Africa made considerable progress in three areas of mediation.
In November the largest of Burundi’s rebel groups, the Forces for the Defence of Democracy (CNDD-FDD), was finally coaxed into the transitional government. Its leader Pierre Nkurunziza finds that the irresistible combination of international weight and peer pressure will not lift until he delivers the smaller National Liberation Front.
Since its leader, Agaton Rwasa, remains in no mood to talk, Nkurunziza feels compelled to subdue his fighters who continue to operate on the outskirts of the capital Bujumbura.
Nightly fighting flares there with the army of President Domitien Ndayizeye either unwilling or unable to contain the CNDD-FDD.
The war-weary Burundians continue to be denied their peace dividend. The 3 500 members of the African Mission in Burundi — including 1 500 South African soldiers — do not look like being relieved of their peacekeeping duties in the foreseeable future.
There is no minimising the importance of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) parties, both armed and civil, signing the Sun City Agreement that set that country on the road to its first-ever democratic elections.
Nevertheless the UN Security Council has recently had to remind the transitional national government of the urgency to adopt a national disarmament, demobilisation, reintegration programme, and to accelerate reform of the armed and police forces.
The DRC is currently the UN’s most expensive peacekeeping operation — the 10 800 UN peacekeepers there, including a South African battalion, cost $608-million a year.
The UN asked the international community to give its full support for the effective implementation of the arms embargo and for efforts to end the illegal exploitation of the DRC’s natural resources.
After 40 years of peace and prosperity, Côte d’Ivoire continued to slide into endemic violence with President Laurent Gbagbo paralysed between his thug-backed army and the rebels. Moving either way could spell his undoing or slide the country back into open war.
Political turmoil has wracked the country since the 2002 coup attempt. Having signed a peace agreement in France last January, the rebels pulled out of the government of national unity nine months later and returned to their northern headquarters of Bouake.
Earlier this month the rebels indicated they may be willing to return to Abidjan, sending delegations to discuss disarmament with loyalist military officers and senior government figures.
Liberia will eventually have 15 000 UN peacekeepers. But these will have to move in quickly to stop continued infiltration from neighbours. A bid to pay the estimated 40 000 fighters $75 each for disarming went wrong when the UN peacekeepers did not have enough cash on hand. After innocent civilians died in the rioting, the UN agreed to pay $150 within three weeks. The fighters continued to pour in to lay down their arms.
Nigeria, which gave refuge to strongman Charles Taylor to get him out of the Liberian equation, has had to beef up the guard on its guest. Bounty hunters, spurred by US cash offers, are planning to lift Taylor to face international justice.
Sierra Leone, which started legal action against those responsible for atrocities during the 11-year civil war that killed 50 000, has put Taylor on top of its most wanted list. They charge that he supported rebels and recruited child soldiers from across the border.
Angola, at peace after 27 years of war, faces a threat of land disputes from the 40 000 returning refugees whose houses and farms have been occupied in their absence.
It is not good enough to say that the oil wealth of this country, currently providing 12% of the US’s needs, will ease this problem.
More than a fifth of Angola’s $5-billion annual oil revenue disappears into the private coffers of the increasingly sleek President José Eduardo dos Santos, whose ruling MPLA has not allowed him to keep his promise to leave office next year.
It is oil revenue that put four countries off the west coast among the 10 fastest-growing economies in the world this year.
Top of these was Chad, steaming away with and incredible 58% growth predicted for 2004.