Africa’s billions – the 50th anniversary celebrations of African independence

I wanted to share with you a project that is particularly dear to me in this year 2010 that is marked by the 50th anniversary celebrations of African independence (symbolically, as this is an average). It is an essay entitled “Africa’s billions”, which I have written with my colleague Olivier Ray and that was published in French by Odile Jacob on March 18 (the English version is due to be published early next year).

This book was born out of amazement and arose from an encounter.

We do not understand Africa

The amazement lay in the fact that we do not understand Africa, and that we are blind to the tremendous interplay of forces which give life to Africa. Is China’s arrival on the continent a good or a bad thing for Africans? Is sub-Saharan African over- or under-populated? Will the region be able to feed its fast-growing population? What are the effects of climate change to the south of the Sahara? Should we expect increasing outbreaks of civil war and wide-ranging genocide, like the one which tore apart Rwanda in 1994? Or is the peace process initiated at the turn of the new century likely to carry on in the long run? Should we fear hordes of African migrants? Or, on the contrary, is the economic growth of the last few years here to stay, turning Africa into the next emerging power? Does Africa have a place in a multipolar world?

Africa is the subject of countless works, but they speak of another place: historic Africa. Our key texts are now out of date, so much so that we are unable to make sense of the events that are transforming Africa before our very eyes. Two out of every three sub-Saharan Africans are under the age of twenty-five. Unlike our sclerotic European societies, the dynamic demographics of Africa are setting an unrelenting pace for change in the sub-Saharan region. In 1960, the Ivory Coast had a population density of just 11 people per square kilometre. That figure stands at 60 people today, and will rise to 110 by 2050. If France had experienced the same rate of population growth as the Ivory Coast between 1960 and 2005, today’s population of France would stand at 240 million – including 60 million foreigners!

Africa is experiencing vertiginous changes of scale and of direction. Given the speed and extent of those changes, we ought to be looking several miles ahead down the road to have a chance of following the right track. And yet, we are watching Africa hurtling along – in a rear-view mirror. We should not be surprised by our inability to follow its trajectory. There are profound differences between our view of Africa, one that has not changed since the last century, and the contemporary realities of the continent. Public debate has depicted sub-Saharan Africa as an accursed land that is marginalised and set apart from globalisation. The region is viewed as being worthy of compassion and evokes a charitable response at best. At worst, the region is viewed as a problem that needs to be contained. Its inhabitants face a dark future, one in which international solidarity, like a dose of pain-relieving medicine, does no more than attenuate suffering and reduce convulsions. Charity work has largely been sub-contracted to humanitarian and philanthropic organisations. Containment is carried out by UN bodies and by African states themselves. This view, whether it describes itself as charitable or “lucid”, is in line with the realities of an Africa that is emerging painfully from several decades of crisis. However, it ignores the upheavals affecting the continent, changes of which few grasp the extent or the opportunities today. Unsurprisingly, it is the “youngest” players of our global society – Chinese, Indians, Brazilians – who seize the opportunities of this incredible adventure. Is it known that since the turn of the century, African economies have experienced a rate of growth far higher than that experienced in Europe and the USA?

Europe is abdicating its position

And yet, the time is not so distant when we felt we “knew” Africa, where our industrialised countries had identified “interests”. However, since the end of the Cold War, Europe has turned away from Africa: our large southern neighbour has fallen to the bottom of our list of public policies. The societies on the northern shores of the Mediterranean, especially their economic actors, largely turn their backs on Africa. At the start of the 21st century, Europe is abdicating its position whilst new actors on the stage of international relations take an interest in the changes affecting Africa and in their relations with the continent. We no longer have a strand of public thinking that is considered, coherent, and searching with respect to Africa. It is now time to get to know Africa afresh.

This book is an attempt at thinking through a subject that is at once complex and unsettled, one that challenges us to go beyond our standard reading grids. This thought process is based on a refusal to allow oneself to be trapped by past certainties. It relies on a process of observing changes that are happening before our very eyes. Finally, it locks on to the few landmarks that we have in the future. We already know that the population of the sub-continent will double in just a few decades. We also know a majority of the population will live in urban areas. The way in which Africans live, travel, define themselves, and interact with their environment will determine the path followed by their societies.

It is not a case of predicting if the Africa of tomorrow will develop “well” or “badly”, or to decide whether to praise to the skies or play the blame game. The pages of the book are not part of the sterile debate between “Afro-optimists” and “Afro-pessimists”, who have long monopolised discussion on the topic. The time has come to consider the consequences of these seismic changes for Africa, her neighbours, and the world at large. By examining the present and looking into the future, we can detect the strategic re-emergence of Africa, with all the risks and opportunities that the continent presents.

1.5 billion inhabitants

Africa is complex, and perhaps never more so than at the time of its metamorphosis. Any prospective analysis of a subject in flux is fated to deliver crude diagnoses and erroneous forecasts. We take on these inaccuracies and mistakes, convinced that complexity should not paralyse the thought process. It is important to be in phase with this moment in history in which we find ourselves, otherwise we risk having chaos on our doorstep, chaos that no humanitarian aid would be able to contain. Africa, with its 1.5 billion inhabitants, will soon make its presence felt in the globalisation game. If we do not come up with coherent, flexible policies, we run the risk of having Africa barging in on our internal politics. The changes affecting Africa mean that radical choices have to be made in the field of public policy.

We met Ibrahim in a taxi in Johannesburg. The drive from the airport to the city centre was long, and took us through heavy traffic. We sympathised with the driver, a Malian of about thirty. When asked about the reasons for his emigration to South Africa, he told us of his journey after leaving the village of his birth, in the north-east of the country. After several years of scarce rainfalls, cereals were in short supply on the market. Speculators quadrupled prices during the lean period between the end of the dry season and the beginning of the rainy season. Ibrahim’s father’s standing as one of the wealthiest men in the village counted for nothing: portions at mealtime began to shrink for Ibrahim as well as his six brothers and sisters. Unlike his cousins, Ibrahim refused to join the rebels, for he felt no anger towards the government. “What can the government do? It has no money in its coffers; it cannot even pay the village teacher.” Ibrahim’s story fitted: at the time, Mali was going through the lean years of structural adjustments*, and had borne the full force of the fall in cotton prices.

The tale of a great migration, one that is unique in the history of the world

Ibrahim decided to leave, and began wandering through the principal cities of West Africa. He was in Abidjan when the crisis befell the Ivory Coast; it was not a good time to be a foreigner in that country. However, whereas his friends decided to set out on the long haul to Paris or London, Ibrahim decided to head South. He had heard of Mandela’s “New Africa”, bursting forth after the apartheid era. It was not immediately easy: Ibrahim found himself in a township, where he spent time doing odd jobs and living precariously. Ibrahim noticed that we were looking at the small rosary hanging from the rear-view mirror; he told us that he had changed religion. A small evangelical community in the township did a lot to help him when he first arrived. Money borrowed from churchgoers and from an American charitable organisation helped Ibrahim to set himself up in business. Today, he owns five taxis, each linked to the other four by a state-of-the art radio system. He was planning to buy a minivan to run a service between hotels and airports – “like the Chinese”, who have also entered the sector. Another few months and he should be able to give up driving and concentrate on managing his business from the small, fully equipped office that awaits him. What next? Ibrahim has big plans: he would like to get married and have children, but first he wants to move house: his priority is to leave the township and buy an apartment in the city center. And what about returning to Mali? His answer: “No. Africa is my country. I am at home here. What’s more, business is good in South Africa.” When questioned about the anti-immigrant violence that led to bloodshed in the townships during the winter of 2008, Ibrahim changed the subject.

To us, this seemed to be a tale of Africa in motion, an Africa that is anything but static, and not at all on the sidelines, perhaps even a tale of an Africa that works. The tale of a great migration, one that is unique in the history of the world. This book tries to tell the story of this African change, a change that is rich in opportunities and challenges of a new order. A metamorphosis that will affect the planet as a whole, and before which no human being can remain indifferent.

I hope that these initial thoughts will make you want to discover this book, and to join the discussions on Africa in the 21st century. We warmly invite you to discuss our intuitions, and share your own experience of Africa’s changing social, economic and political landscape, the challenges and hopes that it unleashes. You can do so here in the columns of this blog, as well as on the forum of the book’s website: www.letempsdelafrique.com.

Share this article :

Comments (0)

Conflict Prevention can (still) be highly profitable

Several regions of the world profited from the ensuing peace at the end of the Cold War. Europe was one of the first to benefit from the end of the conventional weapons race. Southern Africa saw the end of open conflicts in Namibia, Angola, and Mozambique. Central America finally witnessed the end of the Contras and revolutionary fronts. Reaping the benefits of peace in these regions was only possible because the different agreements that ended the conflicts were accompanied by credible measures to prevent the return of tensions: military power accompanied disarmament measures, confidence and security measures, international deployment to reassure those who were disarming. Then, it was time to adopt social measures complete with reconciliation processes, followed by reconstruction, and the reintegration of opposing forces. After, there were economic measures with large sections devoted to regional development and economic restructuring. Finally there were symbolic measures that involved all the moral forces and the guarantors of the legitimacy of the agreement process: political parties, churches, unions, international institutions.

Investing in something other than weapons

There are still large peace dividends to be harvested in an impoverished world  emerging from an economic and financial crisis, a crisis that will have wreaked warlike damages in a time of peace. Across the globe , we must impose a principle of reasonable sufficiency over the desire for ever more weapons. In Europe, our neighbours have unusually high military expenditures. The Balkans, Greece, and Cypress are in the lead with Russia following close behind. Against whom and for what reason is the latter prolonging its stockpiling of weapons at three to four times the rate of Germany? As for the Near East and the Middle East, they still spend as much on weapons as before the war. Not to mention developing countries…

All of this money could go to alleviating social, regional, and public deficits that have worsened with the economic crisis! Potential investments have been utterly wasted!

Inventing new prevention tools

To succeed, we must invent new prevention tools: solid treaties we can trust on issues where none exist (conventional weapons in Europe is a case in point) or guarantees of security to reassure those who are sincerely starting to disarm, such as the populations around the Black Sea. Most importantly, we need exchanges, synergies, interactions between non-governmental entities, and common interests. Such efforts are impossible if frontiers are closed to migrant workers. Nothing can be achieved without a minimum of solidarity, developmental aid, and disinterested, third party support.

A new generation of opinion leaders must commit

However, a new institutional framework for security, trade, and development is insufficient. A new generation of opinion leaders must commit to prevention alongside the institutional elite: those who speak to youths, to women, to the poor, and to those at the extremes. Societies are more complex, less reined in, and directed than at the end of the Cold War. Political leaders strive to capture the media spotlight but their legitimacy is diminished. This is especially true when establishing the particular sort of trust that is necessary for opposing parties to fearlessly disarm during new conflicts. We need mediators with bare hands, opinion leaders at the local level, a dense network of peace and disarmament lawyers, capable of discovering in others a fellow man, a neighbour, perhaps even an ally.

In addittion, please read this article from Jacques Delpa : Greek Crisis: Ending (at last) the Trojan War

Share this article :

Comments (0)

What role for development assistance in the face of violence?

Development organizations such as AFD work in societies that undergo abrupt change. Economic and demographic growth, rapid urbanisation or the changes in identity that it precipitates change societies and their modes of organisations. Dynamics of violence can emerge in the absence of formal or informal mechanisms to manage these accelerated changes. What can be the role of development organisations in the face of states and societies considered as “fragile”? I would like in this post to trace the long learning process of development institutions in the quest for responses to such situations of violence.

The 1990s: failed state to rebuild

A wave of particularly murderous conflicts followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. Civil wars that bloodied the 1990s called on an “international community” that was increasingly aware of its limits. A decade after the start of structural adjustment programs, the weakness of State structures risked eroding governance structures, as exemplified in the conflicts in the Gulf of Guinea, around the Horn of Africa and in Central Africa. This erosion of governance caused a loss of control over many territories and the piracy, drug trafficking and terrorism that we have seen in the aftermath. Hence, the issue of “fragile states,” low-income countries that are characterized by weak state capacity and/or weak state legitimacy, emerged in the space of a few years as one of the major challenges to our collective security. International development organizations worked urgently (and somewhat clumsily at times) to build or rebuild states’ capacities. These interventions aimed to “cure”: managing failures left little time to reflect on preventative action that could be taken in states that risked following a similar trajectory.

This decades’s turning point: analyzing situations of fragility

Susceptible of causing violence

The acceptance of the term “fragile state” that progressively came into use at the turn of the twenty-first century marks a change in the analysis of failing nations-states and the strategies used to help them. The change in terminology initially met an institutional requirement: providing aid to states that did not perform according to standard economic recommendations. Yet it also allowed the international community to think beyond “failed states” to consider the political, economic and social signs of impending failure – the stresses or situations of “fragility.” In the European Union’s definition, fragility refers to weak or failing structures and situations where the social contract is broken due to the state’s incapacity or unwillingness to deal with its basic functions and meet its obligations and responsibilities regarding service delivery, management of resources, rule of law, equitable access to power, security and safety or the protection and promotion of citizens’ rights and freedoms. Development professionals must be alert to many warning signs and think about what triggers conflict, such as the unemployed urban youth who took up arms during recent violence in Côte d’Ivoire and Kenya. Or the difficulty of managing precious natural resources – such as acute pressures on land use – that contributed to unleashing violence in Rwanda in 1994. Or access to water and grazing lands, which poisons relations between communities in Eastern Chad and Darfur. Or prolonged social and economic inequalities that create frustrations that engender violence.

Reducing ‘fragility’: a first step toward preventing conflict?

Lessons learned from two decades of experience dealing with fragile states and societies shows that there is a first fundamental requirement for any development operation: ‘do no harm’ (as famously recommended by Mary B. Anderson). That means not exacerbating stress and fragility inadvertently. It is both a fundamental goal and a permanent challenge. But can we go further than “doing no harm” today? At AFD, we have decided to create a specific strategy for action in fragile states that aims to identify the development operations that will treat some of the stresses that provide fertile ground for violence. This strategy requires an ongoing investment of resources to gain knowledge about the societies in which we intervene. AFD is pursuing this effort with its partner network. For example, AFD worked with non-governmental organizations on the preservation and reconstruction of social ties that are broken or weakened by certain social and economic upheavals. AFD will soon launch a research program to better understand the ways development projects can affect the political economy of violence by reducing certain vulnerabilities that feed violence.

Despite important progress over the last decades, this field of analysis and action is still in its infancy, at a time when new stresses emerge, such as the impacts of climate change. That is why investing in knowledge about the forces that animate developing societies is crucial if aid hopes to contribute to the peace and stability of developing societies with the tools at hand –and with all the humility the subject commands. The Fondation Chirac’s prize for the prevention of violent conflict is in this sense an important initiative to encourage steps forward in this collective learning process.

Share this article :

Comments (0)

Christianists and Islamists in Africa: face to face

It was a personal privilege to meet Imam Ashafa and Pastor Wuye; they are warriors and men of the cloth. They invest as much energy and conviction into disarming Christian and Muslim militia today as they had consecrated in the past to training and encouraging these same militia to fight.

Religion upturns classic conflict typologies

Meeting them also opened my eyes. I thought I knew what caused the conflicts in Nigeria, in Africa in general:

- inappropriate frontiers, interference, and destabilization between neighboring states,

- armed competition for natural resources,

- armed ethnic minorities resisting against the dominant State power of an ethnic majority,

- wars between military dictatorships for power,

- the hardening of Cold War conflicts.

The interactions and effects of reinforcement and appropriation exist amidst these five types of conflicts, as well as the constant possibility of criminalizing conflicts. All these factors contribute to a brutal, complex, yet familiar landscape. According to the Pastor and the Imam, this geopolitical tangle has masked another reality, one that is more discreet because it has long been hidden in the depths of civil society, more difficult to define because it is largely covert, less talked about because it has long been considered a secondary issue by the States. A low intensity, religious based conflict endures between Christian and Muslim militias who both feel mutually threatened. This slowly burning conflict between Christianity and Islam could potentially spread throughout the Sahel; extending across the eastern edge of the continent where successive migrations and influences have resulted in the co-existence of both religions.

Low intensity, religious based conflicts

The type of mobilization discussed by the Imam and the Pastor follows a precise sequence:

- the feeling that the “provocations” inflicted by others remain unpunished by a weak and partial State, determined to look the other way,

- a desire by minority groups to defend themselves,

- the parallel organization of an armed, secret community at the periphery of the official community of faithful,

- the militia’s tactical organization of the territory (training fields, arsenals, surveillance networks, front lines to defend, positions to maintain),

- tension mounts in the society at the thought that others are armed; any incident can lead to conflict,

- desire to make a portion of the territory safe by deporting, destroying, and/or disarming the military structures of the other side. Confronted with the different options – surveillance, defense, demonstration of strength, frontal attacks – factions of the militia eventually diverge, divide, and break off.

A complex pattern that holds true throughout the continent

When listening to the Pastor and the Imam, who have become advocates for disarmament and conflict prevention between « Christianist » and Islamist militia, several things become evident:

- the disparity between what drives the religious force and what mobilizes the militia. Both the Pastor and the Imam describe communities of intense faithful searching for a new authenticity in their faith, looking for a more personal appropriation of the legacy of tradition. This can give rise to not only a temptation for a religious radicalism, but also to changes in affiliation due to the search for a reformed faith: changes in spiritual leaders, brotherhoods, churches. The religious landscape is changing but this change does not provoke political mobilization.

- The misleading overlap of two levels: the majority of the faithful and the religious leaders call for civil peace and harmony but prove to be incapable of controlling military logics of self defense that is implemented undercover of an apparent peace, logic they ignore or tolerate;

- the profound similarities that the Pastor and the Imam acknowledge in the military context of Christian/Muslim confrontations in different African territories;

- the generalized criticism of all the States, presented as corrupt, weak, passive, manipulating…

Civil society, a solution to State failings

This leads us to two possible conclusions:

- the potential for destruction between Christians and Muslims remains intact and constitutes a serious, endogenous threat to peace;

- the State is so discredited that grass-roots initiatives are the only credible entities capable of reducing tensions. International intervention would not be any more efficient. This is why using a purely religious desire for a more authentic faith to call for forgiveness and harmony between militias is perhaps, despite its utopian appearances and inherent risk of excess, one of the more realistic paths.

Share this article :

Comments (0)