Ubuntu Times

Political Instability, Intra-state Conflicts, And Threats To AfCFTA Agreement’s ‘Made In Africa’ Aspirations

Gibson Nyikadzino

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December 15, 2023

Political Instability, Intra-state Conflicts, And Threats To AfCFTA Agreement’s ‘Made In Africa’ Aspirations

The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is arguably the African Union’s (AU) biggest project since the launch of the continent’s Agenda 2063 in January 2015. Launched in March 2018, the AfCFTA agreement connects 55 African economies and is the largest free trade area in the world in terms of country membership.

When the AfCFTA agreement was initially proposed at an AU summit in 2012, it had two goals: to build a Pan-African agenda in trade and cooperation, and secondly, to lift a large percentage of people out of poverty by instituting structural economic changes and cooperative legislation.

AfCFTA is understood to be a groundbreaking opportunity to both create an industrial revolution within and across Africa and opt out of the types of deals like the United State’s Africa Growth Opportunities Act (AGOA) that keep the continent at the bottom of global production, trade, and investments.

But little of this has yet been achieved. The rising number of conflicts, military coups, terrorism, ethnic violence, warlordism, and the presence of mercenaries on the continent is dimming the hopes of the trade renaissance expected to have “Made in Africa” goods dominate world markets.

Hindrances to these aspirations were manifest in 2022. Libya, South Sudan, the Central African Republic (CAR), northern Mozambique, Ethiopia, and Cameroon’s north-west and south-west regions were six African conflict hotbeds that year, against expectations that the continent would silence guns by 2020. In other circumstances, democratic backsliding continues, with insurgencies, insecurity, and weak governance leading to military coups in Burkina Faso, Mali, Guinea, Niger, and Gabon, further restricting the prospects of sustainable trade practices and the successful implementation of the AfCFTA. Alongside dire humanitarian costs, the absence of peace in Africa is disrupting economic activities.

According to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, in 2022, the number of Africans who were forcibly displaced by conflict stood at over 40 million people. An additional 3.2 million Africans have been displaced due to conflict over the past year. This is impacting Africa’s intra-trade potential.

Though it aims to provide broader and deeper economic integration across the continent as well as attract investment, boost trade, provide better jobs, reduce poverty, and increase shared prosperity, in 2022, intra-continental trade share in Africa stood at only 12 percent, compared to 47 percent in North America, 53 percent in Asia, and 69 percent in Europe. This makes Africa the only bloc with the least trade among its 55 members.

What others are doing

The EU is considered to be the most advanced model of regional economic integration. In facilitating smooth trade, the bloc identified three categories where barriers needed to be resolved: physical, technical, and fiscal.

In terms of physical barriers, the bloc acknowledges that border posts entail additional costs that pass on unnecessary delays. In the end, the countries streamlined their procedures to abolish border controls within the EU.

For other concerns about technical and fiscal barriers, what is certain for the EU bloc is that the headway made is far more comprehensive and satisfactory to member states. This explains why the EU is very actively pursuing its goal of gradual irreversible progress on a worldwide scale on how it engages other partners in trade initiatives like the EU, Chile, and the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). This has helped the group adopt positions in favor of having binding multilateral rules in relation to the facilitation of trade.

Defining trade in African terms

Dr. Levious Chiukira, an expert on trade and lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe, thinks Africans need to redefine what they term trade and highlight at what level and capacity trade should be considered as such by African businesses and entrepreneurs. He fears Africa might be defining trade on the basis of blue-chip companies that might benefit alone from the AfCFTA, as it appears to be a platform to anchor white monopoly capital while substituting home industries or backyard start-ups, which contribute more to Africa’s economy.

“We need a new discourse that redefines what we call African trade. We have allowed trade to be defined by some blue-chip companies. African trade has to be redefined because the bigger elements of our trade lie in what has been labelled informal trade, yet that is what constitutes small and medium enterprises (SMEs), cross-border trade, and backyard industries. We need to break the hegemonic definition of cross-border trade as if African trade is illegal. By calling our people informal traders, they are being illegalised and their trade is not being recognised,” said Dr. Chiukira.

Working on upgrading the border management systems — Zimbabwe’s revenue collection authority has invested in modern border equipment to plug loopholes necessitated by the evasion of formal tax collection systems in the movement of goods. Credit: Gibson Nyikadzino / Ubuntu Times

The World Bank (WB) estimates that small businesses represent 90% of all businesses and that Sub-Saharan Africa alone has 44 million SMEs. While acknowledging their importance, the WB confirms that small businesses, especially those in Africa, are poorly understood due to a lack of or fragmentation of data.

Dr. Chiukira sees infant industries or SMEs promotion in the framework of AfCFTA as only developing not on the basis of free trade policy but of understanding the needs of what facilitates African trade.

“Sustainable African trade has to be done in the precept of understanding what facilitates trade. We have failed to address the needs of the African people, and we have failed to understand the challenges of trading within Africa. Conflicts are hampering trade. In the end, human capital will not be functional as conflicts might trigger movement of refugees,” added Dr. Chiukira.

Deepening regional integration and cooperation

Regional Economic Communities (RECs) are central to the AfCFTA agreement’s implementation. However, in every REC, there are one or two cases of internal or intra-state conflicts. In the Southern African Development Community (SADC), Mozambique and the DR Congo are facing upheavals; in the East African Community (EAC), Kenya and Somalia are fighting Al-Shabaab terrorists; in the Economic Community of West African States and the Sahel, military coups, terrorism, and internal conflicts are key characteristics.

The AU and RECs have a common goal of achieving regional integration. However, little progress has been made, and one of the challenges and criticisms of the institutions’ efforts towards achieving the African integration agenda is poor coordination. Achievement or failure to achieve regional integration for the AfCFTA agenda is highly dependent on these supranational bodies.

Zimbabwe's President Emmerson Mnangagwa and Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa's President — Zimbabwe’s President Emmerson Mnangagwa (left) shares a moment with South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa (right) after launching a joint Border Management Authority (BMA) at Beitbridge Border Post in October to prevent the illegal movement of goods, a key principle for AfCFTA. Credit: Gibson Nyikadzino / Ubuntu Times

Mr. John Bosco Kalisa, the chief executive officer (CEO) of the East Africa Business Council in Tanzania, believes that promoting deeper integration through regional economic communities is a starting point to ensure the success of the AfCFTA.

The failure to silence guns is a concern.

“Every region is grappling with conflicts; these conflicts are hindering the ability of individuals and firms to produce goods and services that are required to stimulate economic growth and prosperity that are aspired to under the AfCFTA. Our leaders need to make concerted efforts to silence the guns, as espoused by the AU, the agenda of an Africa we want.

“Our African economies have been for so long depending on global supply chains, especially on essential food stuff such as rice, wheat, barley, fertilisers and others. The current Russia-Ukraine conflict which we are not party to creates negative spillover effects. This serves as a wake-up call for policymakers to design appropriate policies to build resilience within their systems and RECs,” argues Mr. Kalisa.

So near yet so far

Indications enunciated in the Agenda 2063 and AfCFTA policy documents make Africa appear as if it is progressing. To be so close and yet so far implies that in the AfCFTA agenda, policy documents, plans, and coordination may reflect as if the continent is nearing its goals, but realistically, Africa is far apart in attitudes, emotions, understanding, or meaning of the goals it wants.

“We talk of the AfCFTA, but countries that experience unconstitutional changes of government through coups or other means are automatically suspended from participating in the AU bodies, including the AfCFTA. For instance, the AU and ECOWAS closed their airspace and borders to Niger after the July military coup. Conflict resolution and prevention are essential for creating a conducive environment for trade integration and development in Africa.

“The effects of conflict can have lasting consequences on the skills, capabilities, and opportunities of the current and future generations of Africans,” says Mr. Tanatsiwa Dambuza, an intra-African trade knowledge management expert for Development Dispatch and co-founder of the Zimbabwe Institute of African Integration.

The AfCFTA project is showing signs of difficulties for the AU, and soon, without good political commitment by leaders, it will be realised soon that a miss is as good as a mile.

Africa’s Rebirth At 60: Carrying Noble Ideas That Nobody Is Willing To Implement

Gibson Nyikadzino

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September 10, 2023

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Africa’s Rebirth At 60: Carrying Noble Ideas That Nobody Is Willing To Implement

To most academics, intellectuals, and pragmatists advocating for a genuine Pan-African renaissance six decades after the founding of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU, later renamed African Union in 2002) in Addis Ababa in 1963, the continent’s aspirations as highlighted in Agenda 2063 might fail to materialise as overwhelming evidence point to Africa’s lack of creative framing, knowledge and thought leadership in global affairs.

Since COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic in March 2020, Western global media corporations have put Africa at the tail end of post-industrial development by formulating narratives that befit Western ideology, markets, history, values, and perspectives at the expense of Africa’s existence. Even so, the outbreak of monkey-pox in Western countries got giant media deflecting the source and linking it to Africa.

When Russia launched its special military operation on Ukraine on February 24 last year, DSTV’s Multichoice shut down Russia Today (Russian television) Channel across Africa in the view that Africans must not listen to anything balanced or sympathetic to Russia, and even so, they decide on what information should be made available to Africans across the continent.

In the face of the hegemonic and dominant Western media organisations’ onslaught, Africa’s political leaders have not reacted with relevant material and content to diffuse narratives against the continent. Theirs has been an unresponsive and less committed call to action while thought leadership is needed.

The effect of the failure to provide African thought leadership has now seen African journalists writing stories about Africa without targeting the African audience but writing for a Western audience. The news framing is the same.

Dealing With A Distorted Image

Internal conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Sudan, and the war in Ethiopia that ended last November give hard lessons on the dangers of leaving foreign media corporations with the responsibility to frame Africa’s events.

African media houses have not done much to tell the African story, in most cases, they have allowed the dominant media from the Western countries to lead the narratives, and because Africa has become a ground of military, political and economic contests between the West and East, media companies such as China Global Television Network (CGTN) and Russia Today (RT) have also taken a side in framing Africa.

Instead of using hard power in Africa, both Western and Eastern countries now prefer soft and smart power, a component that infuses foreign values, principles and norms in which they assimilate and graft Africa into the phenomenon of their narratives.

At the 60^th anniversary event to commemorate the founding of the OAU on May 25, 2023, at the AU headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed restated a position he made last year before African heads of state that “Africa needs to tell her own story”.

PM Ahmed said, “On this same occasion last year, I called on all of us to tackle typically the negative portrayal of Africa by the global media. I stressed the need for Africa to tell her own story and not allow others to tell it in the service of their own interests.

“In this respect, please allow me to reiterate yet again the need to establish an African Union Continental Media House. Until Africa tells her own story, her image remains distorted. And distortions affect not how others view us, but also how we view ourselves. We owe it to ourselves and our children that Africa’s truths need to be told as they are, untainted with external interests and bias.”

Without a doubt, Africa’s leaders are not oblivious to what they need to do to reconstruct the image of the continent through having a devoted African Union Continental Media House.

Ahmed’s Old Suggestion

Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa, Admire Mare says the proposal by Ethiopia’s Ahmed is old as African leaders like Ghana’s independence President Kwame Nkrumah and Libya’s Col. Muammar Gaddafi made the same.

“The proposal by the PM of Ethiopia is not new. Similar proposals were made by Kwame Nkrumah and Muammar Gaddafi. It is an attempt to turn the gaze and use technological infrastructures controlled by Africans to speak back and showcase their own stories.

“Similar attempts have been seen with Al Jazeera, CGTN and Russia Today. The role of the media is still seen in instrumental ways, that is, as an enabler to speak back and speak out. On paper, the proposal is appealing but media sustainability and editorial interference are teething problems.”

According to Mare, African governments will face serious challenges in relation to financing models to fund the African Union Continental Media House, at a time when the AU is also failing to fund its operations.

He made reference to the closure of The Southern Times newspaper, an initiative set up by the governments of Namibia and Zimbabwe in 2004 to provide alternative narratives to Western views that targeted Zimbabwe at the height of its land redistribution programme. The Southern Times announced in 2019 that it was closing operations due to “dwindling financial resources”.

Prof. Mare adds, “We have seen the closure of The Southern Times (a Zimbabwe-Namibia) initiative, so there is no guarantee such a proposal by PM Ahmed will not close shop. To make it work, there is need to come up with a solid business model, strong and accountable board of directors and hiring of media professionals from all African countries. The media house should have bureau chiefs or correspondents in all the countries in Africa.”

Media and Journalism senior lecturer at Limkwokwing University in Lesotho, Mr. Tawanda Mukurunge shared similar thoughts with Prof. Mare that PM Ahmed’s proposal is old and documented in the 1980 MacBride Report also known as Many Voices, One World sponsored by the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

Findings of the MacBride Report were in response to the 1970s New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) debate on the non-equitable access to information and media imperialism.

“There is nothing new about this concept. We have the Pan-African News Agency that was formed in 1979, with headquarters in Senegal, to produce content that presents and preserves the voice of Africa. The essence of NWICO was to counter the reports that Global South countries should be in the periphery of information access,” said Mr. Mukurunge.

According to Mr. Mukurunge, the key challenge to the full realisation of this proposal is the lack of unity between African countries.

“Some of the Francophone countries rely too much on their former coloniser, France, to the extent that as African leaders might agree on something, but when it comes to voting and execution they tend to get directives from France, and that is problematic.

“Remember when Zimbabwe was seeking to galvanise African leaders through having support on its land reform programme, it was Senegal’s former leader Abdoulaye Wade who opposed Zimbabwe’s position to please the French. As long as some of our people are controlled by external forces, as a continent we will not go anywhere,” added Mr. Mukurunge.

So Much Work To Do

There is so much work to do. African journalism needs to go beyond the simple problem of news framing to epistemic framing. Epistemic framing is about the locus of enunciation of the story, that is, the body political and geopolitical of the subject that speaks.

When one listens to or reads African print and electronic news, there is no difference to tell whether the news is meant for an African or Western audience. This tends to show that African journalism seems to be preoccupied with lower-order ethics shaped by the social and epistemic location of the storyteller.

Politics and Journalism lecturer at the Africa University in Zimbabwe, Dr. Alexander Rusero says African journalism will never see an authentic framework as long as it remains in the shadows of the West.

“We (Africans) are still hunters and gatherers of information. We have no authentic African journalism or media but rather colonial mimicry,” says Dr. Rusero.

Towards The Progressive Acquisition Of Consciousness

Gibson Nyikadzino

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December 12, 2021

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Towards The Progressive Acquisition Of Consciousness

Africans and other blacks abroad need to develop a historical consciousness that enables them to revisit their forefathers’ history to validate the true journey of the black race. Slavery, colonialism, Christianity and the colonial education systems have created dominant narratives by the west that have registered successes in whitewashing African and black history.

This erasure continues to systematically act towards whitewashing the history of Africa through European hagiography. As a result, Africa has become a victim of European historiography that exclusively acknowledges its own cultural and historical contributions, dismissing the successes of Africa and the black race along the way.

Before slavery, African progress in the fields of nationalising African knowledge systems was remarkable. More so, through slavery Africans who were forcibly removed from their birthplaces to the United States through slavery, also succeeded in various spheres. Unfortunately, their contributions remain unnoticed despite their importance.

Some blacks taken from Africa participated in the United States war of independence against British oppression. Others also contributed through architectural designs which are today still visible in America. Through information suppression by the white establishment, the heroic adventures and contributions of blacks remain in the periphery. The first person whose blood was spilt in the revolution which freed America from British oppression was a black man named Crispus Attucks. Another black man, Benjamin Banneker, was amongst the team that designed the capital of the United States, Washington DC.

In 1721, the United States went through a perilous phase when it faced a smallpox outbreak. A black slave named Onesimus, who had been bought in 1706 by one influential Boston minister Cotton Mather, shared significant knowledge with his master on how to treat smallpox. According to black tradition, before being enslaved in the United States, Onesimus, whose name means Useful, and his people had knowledge on treating smallpox through variolation. The treatment of smallpox in the United States was not a white man’s discovery, but a knowledge system that was passed by a black slave.

From Onesimus, Mather learnt that in Africa, blacks took pus from the wounds of an infected individual and inserted it into a cut made on a healthy person. This process, while adjudged not to be entirely effective, caused a mild reaction that gave people a degree of smallpox immunity for the healthy individual.

Because of mistrust in African remedies, Mather shared information he acquired from Onesimus with a white physician named Zabdiel Boylston. Recorded history informs one that Boylston tried the technique on several people, including his own son, and was pleased to ‘discover’ that Onesimus’ procedure was a largely successful one.

Through the misrepresentations of white supremacy, Mather and Boylston were hailed as heroes and the African, Onesimus, was nowhere close to securing a place in this important milestone in medicine. And despite his life-saving contribution to the smallpox outbreak, he was still not a free man.

Countless blacks have been unjustly stripped of their rightful recognition as vital contributors to science and medicine, among other disciplines. These also include Lewis Howard Latimer, the black man who invented the carbon filament board that made the light bulb give its glow, continuously. Today credit on who invented the light bulb has been given to Thomas Edison.

While nothing can undo the damage done by such cruel omissions from defining moments in history, Africans need to work hard and do their part to acknowledge these innumerable contributions to humanity by continuing to share these important historical discoveries… Unfortunately, blacks are not told and taught this in school; instead, end up praising the white man.

These past lessons by Africans, slaves and descendants of slaves are never told because they humiliate the white man. To get into the future, the past has to be studied to get new perspectives, unlike the white man’s narrative that continues to brainwash black people by developing false narratives that even other races continue to believe.

Western Philosophy ‘Unimaginative, Even Xenophobic’

In his book Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto, Bryan Van Norden, a Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College in Singapore writes that the way the west projects African history is “narrow-minded, unimaginative, and even xenophobic.”

There have been ‘discoveries’ through exploratory excursions and military conquests done by white ‘explorers’ through the displacement of Africans in their territories. Statues have been erected in honour of these white ‘explorers’ and places renamed in their honour.

History shows that Africa, originally called Alkebulan, was named after a Roman general Scipio Africanus who had defeated Ethiopians. More so, one of the world’s seven wonders in Zimbabwe, the Victoria Falls, was ‘discovered’ by Scottish ‘explorer’ David Livingstone in 1855. Livingstone named the place Victoria Falls in honour of the British Monarchy’s Queen Victoria.

Livingstone named the falls after the queen, but the Kalolo-Lozi people in Zimbabwe had their own name for it, Mosi-oa-Tunya, “the smoke that thunders.”

Western ideology and narratives have morphed into a false white knight in shining armour, itching to swoop in and enforce their model of “progressive” Eurocentric history over black successes.

Van Norden: “The west has written Africa out of the history of philosophy and black success, presenting all of Western philosophy as a linear progression from the ancient Greeks.”

Professor of Sociology at the University of Zimbabwe (UZ) Claude Mararike said the black race needs to record, research, teach and distribute literature that praises black successes under the “patriotic history” platform.

“We need to teach patriotic history, which is the interpretation of history in our context as blacks and Africans. There has to be more funding into research, publication and circulation of such information. The media (personnel) should be able to dig more into the archives because some history has been distorted,” says Prof. Mararike.

The academic also blamed religion, both Christianity and Islam for enabling colonialism and oppression of the black man through slavery and colonialism.

“The revolutionary patriotic history of Africa also has to be understood from the context of Christianity and Islam as the two religions that have also done a lot of distortions to African history.

“Missionaries are the greatest culprits and the church has been distorting African history and culture. So writing about that is not opening old wounds, but that is the correct interpretation of history and Africa should know these things,” added Prof. Mararike.

Undermining Western Intellectual Foundations

The African Union (AU) and its governments ought to invest in knowledge that shakes the western foundations.

Strides by Africans and blacks from all over are written, the continuous recording of their successes are there. There is evidence that shows that black movements like the #BlackLivesMatter are giant testimonies to undermine racially skewed Western interpretation of history.

History has been white-washed so severely that often, African philosophers who generate ideas about Ubuntu, colonial independence and sovereignty are only regarded as public intellectuals. In the textbooks of Europeans, these African heroes are not incorporated.

The white race seeks to amass all the historical glory, incentives and talents for itself while consciously and voluntarily disadvantaging strong black constituencies.

This is a key matter of national and intellectual independence in which “woke” black students need to raise in order to undermine the intellectual foundations of the West and expose them for their desire for “multicultural inclusion”.

As the West gets away with murder on white-washing history, this continues to reinforce false assumptions that black history is substandard to other cultures in general, but to the dominant white culture in particular.

It is not ahistorical to remind people that Christianity was evil colonial machinery that was used to evangelize Africa.

“Areas of concern are schools and universities. It is unfortunate that in some African countries, they do not want African history to be taught. In the United States, Britain and South Africa, they do not want to teach African patriotic history,” Prof. Mararike continued.

It is time for African governments and the AU to put more funds to promote the Afro-centric movement. This, in the long run, will effect change from the enlightened grassroots.

SADC, AU Mistrusted By Activists As Zimbabwe Burns

Jeffrey Moyo

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August 11, 2020

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SADC, AU Mistrusted By Activists As Zimbabwe Burns

Harare — Amid a mounting political and economic crisis in Zimbabwe, pro-democracy activists and opposition leaders have dismissed prospects of rescue coming from the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and African Union (AU).

In 2008, SADC helped to broker a government of national unity in Zimbabwe between then-President Robert Mugabe and his erstwhile political nemesis, late Morgan Tsvangirai of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change Party.

Although the MDC back then argued that it had won the 2008 elections, the opposition played out a junior role in Zimbabwe’s rather tense unity government.

Amid reports of rampant human rights abuses in Zimbabwe, South Africa which currently chairs SADC, recently sent an envoy to engage the leaders of the Zimbabwean government.

But, even as this did not irritate some members of the ruling Zimbabwe Africa National Union-Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF), other pro-democracy activists and opposition leaders have cast doubt on whether or not SADC would help end the political acrimony bedeviling this country.

Taurai Kandishaya, who is National Coordinator of the Zimbabwe Citizens Forum, a civil society organization closely related to the governing Zanu-PF, said ‘AU and SADC never said the government of Zimbabwe should stop rights abuses, but they only encouraged the government to continue respecting human rights.’

On South Africa dispatching a special envoy to Zimbabwe following reports of acute human rights abuses, Kandishaya said ‘the special envoys are expected to engage the government of Zimbabwe and relevant stakeholders to identify possible ways in which South Africa can assist Zimbabwe.’

Yet, even as Zanu-PF diehard supporters like Kandishaya try hard to cover up for their party, South Africa which is also the economic superpower of Southern Africa, through the country’s governing Africa National Congress (ANC), acknowledged Zimbabwe is riddled with political challenges.

Lindiwe Zulu who is one of the leaders of the ANC in South Africa went on record in the media claiming that there is a political crisis in Zimbabwe. Ms. Zulu is also South Africa’s Minister of Social Development.

In a statement released on August 4, AU encouraged the government of Zimbabwe to uphold the rule of law ‘allowing for freedom of the media, freedom of assembly, freedom of association and the right to information.’

Even as AU said ‘violations of these rights are a breach of the African Charter on human and people’s rights,’ Zimbabwe’s opposition leaders have called for more action from the regional body to extinguish the political flames in the country.

“We continue to urge the AU to not only end issuance of statements, but to act decisively and save Zimbabwean lives,” Obey Sithole, MDC Alliance National Youth Chairperson told Ubuntu Times.

On SADC, Sithole said ‘their history of intervention doesn’t paint a good picture and that provides a justifiable reason for people to doubt their ability to resolve the crisis in Zimbabwe.’

Lashing out at AU and SADC, Owen Dhliwayo a Zimbabwean pro-democracy activist said ‘these are mere regional bodies making rather regional pronouncements that have no consequence on the member state.’

Referring to SADC and AU, Wurayai Zembe, leader of the opposition Democratic Party in Zimbabwe, said ‘the regional and continental bodies have not been effective when dealing with Zimbabwe’s electoral problems.’

“The two bodies have been clubs of friends of nationalists who fought for independence from colonialism, some through armed struggles. So, member countries have not criticized one another on matters of poor governance,” Zembe told Ubuntu Times.

Even civil society activist, Claris Madhuku, who heads the Platform for Youth Development, concurred with Zembe.

“AU is run on the basis of comradeship and brotherhood of sitting heads of states. This does not make it easy for this club to seriously chastise a member who has strayed. Zimbabwean problems are complex and will not be solved by these regional blocks,” Madhuku told Ubuntu Times.

Of late, police in Zimbabwe arrested and jailed journalist Hopewell Chin’ono who had become vocal in exposing high profile corruption scandals in Zimbabwe.

They (police) also arrested and incarcerated opposition leader Jacob Ngarivhume on charges of inciting public violence after he coordinated a social media drive calling for the Jul.31 anti-government protests against corruption.

Silencing guns in Africa: points to note

Michael Oduor

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February 12, 2020

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Silencing guns in Africa: points to note

African leaders just concluded the 33^rd African Union (AU) summit at their headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The 2020 theme has been choreographed as ‘silencing guns in Africa,’ a move that seeks to put an end to war and violence within the continent.

Reason for the theme.

The theme has been under preparation for several years now and several retreats have been convened to create a roadmap to this noble initiative. The theme was adopted on 25 May 2013 by the AU Assembly of Heads of State and Government during the 50th Anniversary of the Solemn Declaration. The then chairperson of the AU Commission, H.E. Dr. Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma called upon experts to discuss prudent ideas towards silencing guns in Africa. Several high-level retreats have taken place since then.

Africa’s post-colonial wars

A number of African countries have been in decades ravaged by un-ending wars leading to instability in their respective regions. Currently, there are over fifteen African countries involved in a war or are experiencing post-war conflict and tension. In West Africa, the countries include Guinea, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and Togo. In East Africa, the countries include Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Uganda. In Central Africa, the countries include Burundi, The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda. In North Africa, the country is Algeria and in Southern Africa, the countries include Angola and Zimbabwe. DR Congo and Somalia are among the top countries that have been experiencing instability for more than a decade.

The root of the wars

Most of these wars can be blamed on poor leadership and external influence. A report by the International Journal of Security and Development linked poor leadership to the root cause of violent conflicts in West Africa. They reported that ‘the roots of conflict in West Africa are much deeper and complex, and are embedded in the interplay of historical factors, socio-economic crisis, legacies of authoritarianism and the politics of exclusion, international forces, and local struggles.’

Other factors that have widely been reported include ethnic marginalization, poverty, human rights violations, and bad governance and corruption.

AU’s efforts to stop the previous conflicts

Conflict is inevitable in any society and requires taking risks to put an end to it. The African Union has in many instances tried to bring conflict resolution in all the countries that have been involved in an absolute war. The tasks of managing or resolving conflicts in Africa have been profoundly difficult for the AU. The AU peace mission brought stability in Burundi when a task force was deployed to protect, disarm, demobilize and reintegrate combatants. The ceasefire negotiations in Burundi has been described as the AU’s biggest success story.

DR Congo’s long fight has seen the central African state experience high levels of insecurity and a threat to neighboring countries like Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, Tanzania, and the Central African Republic. The neighboring countries had before 1998 invaded DRC to fight off the militants but this move was constantly criticized by DR Congo’s government. Lusaka ceasefire agreement was later signed by the affected countries under the AU observation mission on July 10, 1999, and brought an end to the second Congo war.

The AU also brought an end to the Darfur war in Sudan where the Arab ‘white’ Sudanese government fought a civil war against the predominantly black population. The Abuja Inter-Sudanese Peace Talks later led to the signing of N’djamena Humanitarian Ceasefire Agreement on 8 April 2004. This brought peace between the government of Sudan and the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army.

Advice to the AU

The African Union has to understand the fundamental issue at hand resulting to violent conflict in a given country. In his book, Understanding Conflict Resolution, Peter Wallensteen reveals that understanding the historical root cause of the conflict will help in settling down any issue at hand. The AU must understand the dynamics and how guns and other weapons get to our hands. Guns just don’t appear on our hands. There is a manufacturer, buyer, transporter, user and the victim. They have to identify who benefits from these conflicts. Multinational companies have been blamed by several human rights groups for fueling conflict in Congo that is known for its vast mineral deposits. The AU should also set up a unit that can investigate various leaders on their conduct and appropriate measures taken in case they are suspected of any mischievous deals leading to violent conflicts.

African Union

Political Instability, Intra-state Conflicts, And Threats To AfCFTA Agreement’s ‘Made In Africa’ Aspirations

Africa’s Rebirth At 60: Carrying Noble Ideas That Nobody Is Willing To Implement

Towards The Progressive Acquisition Of Consciousness

SADC, AU Mistrusted By Activists As Zimbabwe Burns

Silencing guns in Africa: points to note

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