Africa Up Close

 A Nigerian citizen using his iPhone to connect with the internet. Photo courtesy of ARipstra (WMF) via Wikimedia Commons. 

Social media has emerged as an indispensable tool for accelerated globalization and development in the 21st century. It has created spaces for more interconnectedness among individuals and states. Like other regions in the world, in West Africa, increased internet penetration, mobile services, laptops, and other technological gadgets, have increased interactions and amplified people’s voices in the governance landscape. While social media has become an instrument for social, political, and economic development, it also provides an avenue for potential threats to regional security. Social media has become a channel for terrorist groups and transnational criminal networks to scale-up their operations in the region. However, key stakeholders from within the states and regional security apparatuses have paid little attention to social media threats and their impact on regional stability, focusing only on traditional military response strategies. This missing link continues to undermine the effectiveness of resilience strategies to mitigate threats to security in the region.

South Africa’s then Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe, and Turkey’s then Prime Minister Erdogan, signed the South Africa-Turkey Bi-National Commission in 2012. Photo courtesy of the Government of South Africa via Flickr Commons.  

Turkey is getting ready to hold its third Turkey-Africa Summit, probably this April, in the framework of its eye-catching Africa partnership policy. Launched in the early 2000s, this policy is widely considered successful given Turkey’s prior near-absence from the continent for almost a century. However, two major dynamics negatively impact this engagement. First is Turkey’s increasing involvement in the Middle East’s conflicts, starting from 2011. And second is the internal rift between the Turkish government and the socio-religious movement led by Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim cleric who has lived in self-imposed exile in the U.S. since 1999, and Ankara’s designation of the Gulen Movement as a “terrorist organization”[1] in 2016. These major developments have considerably impacted Turkey’s agenda and priorities vis-à-vis Africa.

Before making an assessment of the fallout of these issues on Turkey-Africa relations, it would be appropriate to begin with brief historical background.

A UN soldier during a MONUSCO-FARDC operation against the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) in Beni, a city in the North Kivu province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Photo courtesy of Sylvain Liechti for MONUSCO via Flickr Commons. 

The Beni people are demanding the departure of the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO). Since October 2014 to this day, close to 6 years, the civilian population of Beni in the North Kivu province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have been the victim of repeated atrocious massacres that the Congolese army and the United Nations troops are struggling to stop. This situation has caused revolts among the people who accuse the Congolese army and United Nations troops of complicity in the massacres.

President Kagame leading a discussion during the 9th National Dialogue at Parliament. Photo courtesy of the Government of Rwanda via Flickr Commons. 

Young techies are a growing sight on the streets of Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, where not long ago volunteers from an alphabet soup of development organizations once dominated. Indeed, the country’s growth story borders on the miraculous. Since the 1994 genocide, which led to an estimated 800,000 deaths and decimation of its national infrastructure, the Rwandan economy has grown exponentially.

South African agricultural workers plant cabbage seedlings on a farm in Rustenburg. Photo courtesy of Solidarity Center via Flickr Commons.

South Africa has emerged as the African continent’s preeminent economic powerhouse by making laudable strides in addressing the social, political, and economic remnants of apartheid. However, the tacitly polarizing issue of land-ownership has, once again, reopened the nation’s old wounds. As outlined in Section 25 of South Africa’s constitution, the state maintains constitutional rights to expropriate land “for a public purpose or in the public interest.” Recent deliberations on amending Section 25 to allow land confiscation without compensation, however, has garnered diverging reactions from the South African public as well as political parties. Putting aside the social and political implications of such a landmark decision, the economic effects of the policy would lead to an eventual collapse of South African markets and financial systems.

On March 21, 2018, close to 50 African Union (AU) Member States signed the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) agreement during the 10th Extraordinary Summit of the AU Assembly of Heads of State and Government in Kigali, Rwanda. Photo courtesy of the Government of South Africa via Flickr Commons.

The operational phase of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Agreement was launched in July 2019 amidst excitement and a sense of hope, and rightly so. AfCFTA, which is on course to become the largest free trade area in the world is an agreement among 54 African nations for the creation of a single continental market for goods and services, in addition to the free movement of persons, labor, and investment geared towards a customs union. Its purpose is expanding intra-African trade through harmonized and well-coordinated trade facilitation regimes. It also aims to harmonize trade instruments across the Regional Economic Communities (RECs).

Local fishermen at Lake Victoria, Kenya. Photo courtesy of Ryan Harvey via Flickr Commons. 

Migingo, an island roughly the size of a football pitch on Lake Victoria, has been a site of contention between Kenya and Uganda, due to the large fish population found in the surrounding freshwaters. As populations increase, environmental degradation and pollution put pressure on the flora and fauna in the lake basin, creating a natural resource conflict time bomb. East African countries, especially Kenya and Uganda, are witnessing diminishing returns in fish and related products, leading to rising competition for the increasingly scarce natural resources.

Tomato farmers from USAID’s Tanzania Agriculture Productivity Program in Tanzania. Photo courtesy of USAID via Flickr Commons. 

There are some 40 countries that can easily enter in the category of fragile states today, and a good number of them are found in Sub-Saharan Africa. These are countries with weak governance or institutional incapacity. They fail to carry out some critical governance functions such as ensuring the security of their populations and territory, maintaining the rule of law, and delivering key public services. Life in fragile or weak states is marked by endemic corruption, bad governance, political instability, insecurity, rampant poverty, hunger, high (child) mortality rates, social and political unrest, etc. As time goes by in such an environment, populations and communities tend to have their resilience eroded. They become particularly vulnerable to a range of shocks without the ability to face them adequately. Violence, conflicts, and sometimes the breakdown of institutions start to factor in.

Factory workers produce shirts for overseas clients. Photo courtesy of the World Bank via Flickr Commons.

What are the perceptions of African workers in Chinese firms? How do these perceptions relate to media criticism of Chinese labor practices and the spirited defense of African leadership and Chinese investors against such criticism? For employees that extol Chinese employment, is their position informed by genuine satisfaction, or is it a case of ‘either this or nothing’? These questions inspired me to interview a group of workers in a Chinese-owned retail firm in Kamwala Market in Lusaka—Zambia’s capital city. I also interviewed representatives of workers in a Chinese-run ceramics plant in Kenya. I will test my findings against a 2011 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report about China’s labor practices in Zambia.

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed alongside military commanders. Photo courtesy of the Office of the Prime Minister of Ethiopia via Wikipedia Commons. 

Ethiopia has undergone some crucial political development since the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) coalition elected a new prime minister. Among other achievements, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed ended a 20-year conflict with neighboring Eritrea, freed thousands of political prisoners, unfettered the media, and appointed women to 50 percent of cabinet positions. In addition to that, Parliament accepted his female nominees for president and head of the Supreme Court.