Africa Up Close

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.

A farmer harvesting goods in a farm in Bouar, a town in the Central African Republic. Photo courtesy of the United Nations via Flickr Commons.

The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2019 released on July 15^th is quite alarming. The joint annual report finds that the number of people suffering from hunger or undernourishment continues to increase. This increase has occurred for the past three consecutive years, putting an end to a decade of progress in the global battle against hunger.

Participants from the G5 Sahel Investment Conference in September 2018, a joint conference by the International Republican Institute, the G5 Sahel Permanent Secretariat, and regional youth leaders which aimed to publicize economic investment opportunities for young people in the Sahel. Photo courtesy of the International Republican Institute. 

In December 2018, leaders of the G5 Sahel Joint Force Member States—Mali, Mauritania, Chad, Burkina Faso, and Niger—and international donors gathered for a coordination conference in Nouakchott, Mauritania to orchestrate funding for the Joint Force’s Priority Investment Program (PIP) aimed at addressing the Sahel region’s chronic violence and fragility. The G5’s PIP reflects the strategic intention to operationalize the Joint Force as an instrument both of security and development—a strategy that would adequately address the complex socio-economic, political, and climate change challenges driving instability across the region.

High school students in Mankon, Bamenda, Cameroon, an Anglophone speaking region that has protested against the Francophone majority. Photo courtesy of Alberto Vaccaro via Flickr Commons. 

The immediate future of Cameroon is fraught with uncertainties. On October 1, 2017, during rallies marked by calls for a secession from French-speaking Cameroon, dozens of people were killed by security forces in the two Anglophone regions of Northwest and Southwest Cameroon. Besides Boko Haram in the North, the resurgence of the Anglophone Problem in the Western regions is the single biggest threat to the unity and stability of Cameroon today. This is especially concerning as the country braces for a challenging electoral year in 2018 amidst calls for President Paul Biya to step down after 35 years in power. The ongoing resurgence of the Anglophone crisis in Cameroon requires immediate international attention. The stability of Cameroon is of crucial importance not only for the sub-region of Central Africa, but also for the fight against terrorism in the entire region. The ruling regime’s poor management (repressive approach) of the ongoing crisis is largely responsible for the escalations in recent months. The way forward to a sustainable solution lies in an inclusive, mediated dialogue geared toward institutional reforms and the promotion of local governance, not only in Anglophone regions but also in the whole country.

In the aftermath of September 11,  Scott Appleby, Director of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame,  while underscoring the potential of religious traditions for peacebuilding, observed, “While religious extremists are often integrated into a well-organized movement, armed to the teeth, expertly trained, lavishly financed, ideologically disciplined, and involved in a kind of ‘ecumenical’ collaboration with other violence-prone organizations, the non-violent religious actor is relatively isolated, underfinanced, and unskilled in the techniques of conflict transformation.” In recent years a lot has been said and written on the necessity and strategies of tapping the resources of religious traditions to promote peace in the world, especially in countries plagued by interreligious conflicts.

In the past two months, thousands of Muslims have fled or been displaced from the southern region of the Central African Republic, fearing for their lives in what some voices have warned might turned into a genocide.  One of the episodes of this dramatic and unfortunate situation took place on April 27, 2014, as The Guardian reports, “Heavily armed African and French peacekeepers escorted some of the last remaining Muslims out of Central African Republic‘s volatile capital…bringing out more than 1,300 people who for months had been trapped in their neighbourhood by violent Christian militants.”  The ongoing violence between Seleka[1] and the Anti-Balaka[2] factions in Central African Republic has been extensively and persistently described as interreligious. The first has been associated with Islam and the second with Christianity, leading to the portrayal of the conflict as opposing Muslims to Christians. This sweeping characterization has to be taken with some caution.  Indeed, Furseth and Repstad posit, “In debates over the role of religion in religious conflicts, there is often a tendency to either underestimate religion and reduce all religious conflicts to societal conflicts or overestimate religion and treat it as the dominant cause of the conflict.”  For the case of Central African Republic, I argue that the role of religion should not be overestimated in a conflict that is essentially political.

This excerpt was written by Liesl Louw-Vaudran, an ISS consultant, and was originally posted by the Institute for Security Studies (ISS). The full article can be found here on their website.

The crisis in the Central African Republic (CAR) has left humanitarian organisations, international peacekeepers and observers frantically searching for solutions to stop the conflict. Now, to make matters worse, the Afghan Taliban and the notorious al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) – which, together with its allies, occupied northern Mali in 2012 – have denounced what it describes as the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Muslims in the CAR. AQIM also issued a warning against France for its alleged complicity in the violence, saying the ‘supposed peacekeepers’ have launched a ‘crusade against Islam’ and that France will be punished for doing so. Given that ordinary Muslims in the CAR are clearly being targeted and tens of thousands of Muslims are fleeing the country, should this threat be taken seriously?

Burundi has one of the world’s youngest and poorest populations. With a median age of 17 years, only seven countries have younger populations. The country’s poverty situation has been called “clearly one of the most extreme in the world, with 93% [of Burundians] living below a poverty line of $2 a day,”  and nearly two in three Burundians (61.9%) enduring severe poverty. Although it is known as an overwhelmingly rural-based nation (89% of its population live in rural areas), Burundi’s urban growth rate is among the world’s highest.

Sometimes I take this space, the monthly Director’s Discourse, to look at thematic issues like regional integration or the AGOA renewal, and seldom dwell on a single country situation.   However, this month I am going to do something different and look specifically at the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).  The history is well-known to most Africa UP Close readers, so I won’t focus on that here.  I might recommend as a good reference on the context, history and current situation in the DRC, a wonderful article by Congo expert Jason Stearns.  His insightful and comprehensive piece, “Helping Congo Help Itself,” can be found in Foreign Affairs and was published August 22, 2013.

On that day, 7 May 1999, the Durba goldmine area is provokingly green, and the gravel airstrip looks like a copper road somewhere in DR Congo’s north-eastern province under Ugandan army’s control. A small plane (KingAir) has landed there with three passengers after flying from Kinshasa to Goma, which is controlled by a Congolese movement backed by the Rwandan army. The plane has stopped for refueling  and then will head on to Durba, right in the middle of the “Ugandan influence zone.”