African Union: The need for a common defence system. (Viewpoint).

Africa can only ignore organising a workable defence system at its peril. The lack of such a system has made Africa open and vulnerable to the hazards of unending armed conflicts.

We know about the fashionable argument that says poor African countries don't need armed forces. "We need hospitals, roads, food, education, not armies; afterall armies only stage coup d'etats and make our conditions worse."

This would have been the greatest of all arguments if it did not mimic textbook conditions. In the real world, you need a security system to ensure and assure the safety of your hospitals, roads, food and education. "What use is a full stomach today," a friend of mine reminds me, "if the owner of that stomach can be, or is, captured tomorrow by a rebel army or a foreign predator?"

The continent has been exposed to a protracted regime of insecurity since time immemorial. Even before the onset of the colonial era, Africans lost Ancient Egypt because they neglected their own defence and security requirements. Intruders owing mainly to the lack of organised credible defence systems overran all subsequent African empires. The situation degraded to a point where in the early 1500s the continent fell to the ignoble history of slavery.

We like to think that a nation is the aggregate of the individuals in it. If the individual, after eating to his fill, goes to bed at night and locks his door (for security), then the nation has even more reason to have a solid system of doors (or security) to protect the individual from rebel and outside predators. There are economic, political and other benefits that flow from a solid national (in the case of this article, continental) security system.

Throughout history, Africa's failure to defend itself from others has not only led to loss of territory, resources and young men and women to slavery, but it has also created the oppressive assumptions, prejudices, beliefs, attitudes and paradigms about Africans as a people, and what they can and cannot do.

Those who held superior arms subdued our ancestors who had only spears and shields to back their courage and determination to remain free.

The Africans resisted and even won significant battles from Southern Africa (Zulus, 1879), to Ghana (the Asantes) and Ethiopia (Emperor Menilik).

Invariably, all the African empires and chiefs lost the war despite winning some battles, and came mostly under the direct occupation of a colonial power or under its equally pernicious indirect pressure (e.g. Ethiopia).

Modern times

In Africa's current armed conflicts, all the patterns set by colonial slavery appear to be re-enacted and replayed. Today, few African countries manufacture the weapons that Africans use to kill other Africans. The arms are purchased from the outside.

Behind almost every African armed conflict is an external actor who self-justifies its interference either to make profit or by allusions to humanitarian and moral reasons. The external world continues to patronise Africa, describe and analyse the continent's armed conflicts and armies with nothing short of a violent contempt.

That ugly model of constructing the African as the stupid other has not changed. What is remarkable is that this same chapter has not been completely closed along the important achievements of the continent's numerous states raising flags of independence.

Africans are yet to unfurl the one flag to symbolise their iron-clad solidarity and to express the overriding purpose of unity, where an attack upon one of them is taken truly -- not simply rhetorically -- as an attack on all.

That destiny of collective security is what Africans must organise, shape and create together as the African Union evolves.

This is what Kwame Nkrumah foresaw 40 years ago and called it, in his famous speech in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) on the eve of the founding of the OAU, "a common defence system , a common African army with an African high command". These were items No. 9 and 11 on his still relevant 11-point proposal for African unity.

Interestingly, all 11 points -- (1. A union government for African states; 2. A common economic and industrial programme for Africa; 3. An African common market; 4. A common African currency; 5. An African monetary zone; 6 An African central bank; 7. A continental communications system; 8. A common foreign policy and diplomacy, 9. A common system of defence; 10. A common African citizenship; and 11. A common African army with an African high command) -- have since been implemented by the Europeans for their Union, the EU.

Establishing a credible continental defence system is the secret for opening a new historical imagination to free the African. It will help to free Africa from being a plaything for assorted foreign players whose surreptitious hypocrisy knows no bounds.

They ship the arms that kill Africans; and they fight turf wars for credit to be the mediators of the very armed violence they themselves have spearheaded in the first place, (see NA, Sept, p l8-22 -- How America Ran, And Still Runs, The Congo War).

The African Union must turn into a catalyst for unity in freedom. As an all-African national project, it must undo the current pattern where over half of all the armed conflicts in the world have been made to take place in Africa.

There is absolutely no way Africa can move forward and undertake rapid social and economic transformation without creating an alternative liberation narrative, principles, and ethically and service-guided institutional arrangements and strategies for making a continent-wide crusade to eradicate armed violence from its soil.

The strategy is armed-violence prevention, rather than cure, built on a rapid response with a combined and enhanced command, control and communication system as Nkrumah envisaged.

In a situation where there is already armed activity, the strategy is to bring African mediation to bear immediately, and rapidly remove the situation of armed violence, even though it may not be possible to remove the conflict.

Congo Brazzaville showed an entirely internal based mediation without external meddling, and this mediation appears to be holding well than in other places, even where other African leaders are mediating (e.g. Burundi).

More than ever, Africa does not need outsiders to organise its defence. The US initiated the African Crises Response Initiative (ACRI) only for the Pentagon to arbitrarily recruit some African leaders who seemed to be loyal to American intentions.

The ACRI has ended up deepening the division of the continent rather than providing anything capable of enhancing African security. Big-power involvement is always a problem in a weak continent.

US intelligence agencies have been implicated with testing biochemical warfare techniques that led apparently to the outbreak of human anthrax in Zimbabwe in the 1970s. There is worry that the more they are involved in the African security system, the more they may be tempted to see Africans as expendable guinea pigs.

This shows that Africa must rely on itself in organising its own security; believe in itself, and must nor rely on others (whatever their motive) for the provision of its security. Defence is too important to be ignored or left for others.

The AU's role

If the AU is to undertake any meaningful role in transforming Africa, it must be made gradually to build the capacity and the authority to make Africa an armed violence-free zone.

Without this component, Africa's integration will be crippled; and the AU will be rendered toothless. The Europeans are building up their Rapid Response Force in addition to NATO. Africa has more reason to have one of its own.

There must be a prior condition of security and stability in order for the African population to go to work, to live, to ear and to govern themselves. Nkrumah's "common defence system" and "a common African army with an African high command" are even more relevant now than those heady days of Africa's rise to political freedom.

Today the continent has become game for all and sundry -- from freelance mercenaries to international security companies and foreign big power armies under the cover of UN peacekeeping forces.

No continent is open to abuse and interference as Africa. Even those goodies sent by others to assist the continent uncannily turn into negative. The conditions they impose often affect Africa's spirit, confidence, self-reliance, independence, humanity and liberty.

All sorts of intruders can violate African land, sea and air space. Despite the fact that Africa has more than half of the world's UN peacekeeping missions, armed violence has not abated. The UN mediators have brought no enduring solutions. It is clear that Africa cannot rely on UN-sponsored peace missions for its defence. We know all too well what the UN did in 1960-61 to Patrice Lumumba and the aspirations of the Congolese nationalists, (see p42-46 of this issue, United Against 'Saran').

There is no alternative to setting up the framework of Africa's defence system on a pan-African imagination and foundation. Security is not piecemeal. Unless the states of Africa are locked into a system of security with explicit reward and punishment systems, the security problem will not be solved.

The AU must make it impossible for external actors to recruit internal agents of violence that daily invade and subtract Africa's humanity and liberty.

As armed conflict has never been contained or confined within one state, its removal cannot be accomplished within a single-state border. Armed violence has always spilled over to neighbours owing to the fact that as soon as a violent conflict situation is created, it attracts all sorts of interests; and also because there are no natural borders in Africa. Our current frontiers were delineated by Europeans in their ignoble scrambles and shredding of the continent at the Berlin Treaty of 1885!

Today Africa faces a contradictory globalisation where the Cold War competition to divide and recruit loyal allies has lessened, while new transnational actors have emerged and multiplied much the security hazard of the continent from earlier times.

The transition of the OAU into the AU offers opportunities to review the security dilemmas faced by the continent and pave the road to establish a pan-African political, legal, moral and intellectual framework for the production and sustenance of public safety.

The deeper Africa's integration process succeeds, the easier it would be to identify and control the manifold and intricate security problems. The more the African people feel secure and safe, the better their political, economic and other contributions would be to stimulate Africa's integration process.