Manchester City striker Emmanuel Adebayor’s televised weeping after last week’s deadly ambush of the Togolese team in the Angolan exclave of
Cabinda brought a tragic global focus to a contestation President Eduardo dos Santos’s government did not want publicised.
But responses to the attack have been either inadequate or, in the case of the Confederation of African Football — which, after a prolonged silence following the ambush, has excluded Togo from the competition — downright repugnant. The inadequacy stems especially from the African heads of state, including President Jacob Zuma, who met this week in Luanda at the opening of the tournament.
Consider the background.
Cabinda secessionist claims have been dismissed as inconsequential by Luanda since the signing of a questionable peace accord in 2006 — and the Angolan government has repressed dissidence and clamped down on the media’s freedom to report on what is happening in the exclave.
A Human Rights Watch report released last year underlined that arbitrary arrests, lengthy incommunicado, detention, torture and lack of due process are all common in the Angolan government’s treatment of Cabinda’s population. Its military operations there also intensified in the build-up to the Africa Cup of Nations being staged in the country.
Excluded from negotiations
Formed in 1963, the Liberation Front of the Enclave of Cabinda (Flec) was excluded from the negotiations that led to the signing of the 1975 Alvor Agreement and Angola’s independence — and subsequent civil war. Luanda uses the 2006 peace accord signed with António Bento Bembe, president of the Cabindan Forum for Dialogue and Peace, and then vice-president and executive secretary of Flec, as proof that there should be no problem in the exclave.
Yet Flec leaders and their splinter groups have maintained that Bembe — now a minister in Dos Santos’s government — had no authority to sign such an agreement. After he had done so, Flec-Fac (Flec — Armed Forces of Cabinda) and the National Bank of Cabinda made an urgent application for intervention to the African Union’s Commission on Human and People’s Rights, citing an alleged Angolan land grab and the increasing threat of all-out war.
To date, a decision is still pending.
Multinational oil companies, and countries including South Africa, appear to prefer Dos Santos’s version of Cabinda. Analysts point out that the president’s 30-year reign provides the stability needed for the steady flow of oil from Cabinda, estimated to account for 55% to 65% of Angola’s yearly oil production that has overseen vertiginous economic growth, peaking at 26% in 2006.
Angola’s oil production is predominately offshore, but the 2006 peace accord also coincided with the extension to onshore oil exploration in Cabinda which, like much of Angola, retains a strong military presence with rifle-toting, sunglass-wearing soldiers common on every street corner. But the murder of Togolese assistant coach Amelete Abalo, media official Stan Ocloo and an Angolan driver suggests anything but peace in Cabinda.
This week presidential spokes-person Vincent Magwenya told Sapa that Zuma was impressed with the organisation of the opening ceremony and the infrastructure in Luanda: ‘[It] proves that Africa can stand with its head held high, confident that Africa can host events that it previously was not able to do.”
Evidence of democracy
Can Africa really hold its head high after three murders directly connected to the tournament? Do gleaming, freshly completed soccer stadiums really provide evidence of democratic progress?
It was certainly incumbent on Zuma to refute misinformed Afro-pessimism that the attacks could damage South Africa’s ability to host the Fifa World Cup later this year, but resorting to Afro-triumphalism amounts to defending Angola’s inability to resolve the Cabinda issue peacefully. And his suggestion in a post-January 8 SABC interview that the attack was ‘not at all an incident planned to interrupt the games” and that it ‘could have happened to ordinary people” misses the point.
Violence is being perpetrated on ordinary people in Cabinda, and in many instances by government forces. The Human Rights Watch report suggests that democratic ideals and freedoms are being crushed in the exclave — all in the pursuit of oil security, a booming economy and the continued lining of the ruling elite’s deep pockets.
South Africa’s wilful myopia in relation to Angola stems largely from its need to thaw relations with a regional military force that is swimming in much-needed oil; that much became apparent during Zuma’s first official state visit to the country late last year.
International relations advisers in the presidency say they will continue to take their cue from Luanda on the Cabinda issue because Flec has made no attempt to lobby or engage Pretoria. But the Africa Cup of Nations’ tragic deaths suggest it may be time for South Africa to start thinking outside of narrow national interest.
With the whole world suddenly aware of Cabinda, overtures by Zuma to bring Flec and Dos Santos’s government around a mediation table and a campaign applying pressure on the African Union to act more decisively on the issue, will certainly set him apart as an African statesman.
It will also ensure that South Africa pays more than just lip service to extending democratic practices to the rest of the region and the continent. An Africa Cup of Nations drenched in blood and football is an opportune starting point for this, for as goalkeeper, journalist and author Albert Camus observed: ‘All that I know most surely about morality and obligations I owe to football.”