Africa Up Close

The Lake Chad Basin humanitarian crisis has caused huge population displacement and left hundreds of thousands of children trapped behind conflict lines. Photo courtesy of the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs via Flickr Commons.

Climate change and its impact on conflict has gained prominent attention in recent global security discourse. Although there is no mono-causal correlation between climate change and conflict, the impact of environmental change on population displacement and regional conflict cannot be underestimated. In the case of the Lake Chad Basin, decades of depletion of the lake due to climate variabilities have largely contributed to fueling insecurity in riparian communities whose livelihoods depend on the lake. In the 1960s, Lake Chad had an area of more than 26,000km. However, it had shrunk to less than 1,500 km by 1997, and dwindled further to 1,350 km by 2014. Agriculture is the mainstay of the local economy of communities across the Lake Chad Basin, but the drastic depletion of the region’s water has affected crop, livestock, and fish production. The impact of this is evident in the rise of environmental migration, population displacement, poverty, and food insecurity within the region’s communities. This has heightened competition over resources such as water, land, and food, resulting in tension, conflict and intercommunal violence. Beyond this, terrorist groups, especially Boko Haram and the Islamic State West African Province, are exploiting these fault lines to recruit vulnerable youth and strengthen their insurgencies in communities across the countries of the Lake Chad Basin.

 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.

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.

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.

Former President of The Gambia, Yahya Jammeh, speaks at the United Nations General Assembly. (Photo via Flickr Commons)

Introduction: The Launch of a Campaign

On May 16, 2018, a group of Ghanaian civil society organizations (CSOs)[i] launched a campaign requesting the Government of Ghana to seek the extradition of Yahya Jammeh, the former president of The Gambia, to face justice in Ghana for the 2005 massacre of 44 Ghanaian migrants in The Gambia. The campaign, “Jammeh2JusticeGhana,” has the primary objective of persuading the Government of Ghana to extradite Yahya Jammeh’s from Equatorial Guinea in order to prosecute him in Ghana. This campaign is a part of a larger effort to seek accountability for Jammeh’s alleged crimes and human rights violations. The launch of this campaign, hosted by the Ghana Center for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana), follows a wider campaign effort by The Gambia Center for Victims of Human Rights Violations and other local and international human rights organizations[ii] to ensure that Jammeh and members of his regime are brought to trial in a court of competent jurisdiction.

Nigeria’s National Assembly. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.  

The Nigerian Senate, through the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Information, Alhaji Aliyu Sabi Abdullahi, recently announced that it was proposing a law that would seek the death penalty for perpetrators of hate speech. Skeptics thought that the legislative body was again embarking on a familiar, self-serving endeavor to further impunity in the country. Some may laugh at this proposal, but it is very shocking and alarming that such a proposal is being made in a growing democracy like Nigeria, as well as at a time when other countries across the world are making efforts to roll back the use of the death penalty. Merely proposing such legislation speaks volumes to the current state of the Nigerian Senate. Especially in the context of the recent corruption scandal, in which members of the legislature were found illegally pocketing about USD$50,000 that they allotted to themselves monthly, in a country where 65 percent of the population survives on less than one dollar a day amidst pervasive poverty.

Fulani herders and cattle in Nigeria. Photo courtesy of Dr. Mary Gillham Archive Project via Flickr Commons. 

The sporadic and ongoing violent conflicts between herdsmen and farmers in rural communities in Nigeria is a serious threat to human security and development in the country. The conflicts also have a strong potential to spread to other neighboring countries in West Africa, but the international community has remained silent on the possibility of the conflict spreading. On New Year’s Day, Fulani herdsmen killed about 73 people in a farming community in Benue state. The victims included women, children, and young and old residents of the community. An arrest or prosecution has yet to happen, and similar violence has occurred across the country since then. A slow response from the government has led to suspicions in the media that the government is in support of the Fulani militiamen involved in the violence. Furthermore, it is alleged that some of the Fulani militiamen migrated from other countries in West Africa to carry out the attack, due to a shared ethnicity that is present in several other countries across the sub-region.

Mining at the Tarkwa Mine in Ghana. Photo via Wikimedia Commons. 

“Galamsey”[1]

Africa is endowed with numerous natural resources including gold, ore, copper, bauxite, manganese, and timber among others. Formal extractive companies do not offer much employment to local people, pushing them to find employment through illegal mining practices. The influx of small-scale and illegal miners, mostly Chinese to Africa, has worsened the illegal mining activities on the continent with migrant miners abusing mining laws and mining practices. Mining communities in Africa are experiencing numerous detrimental impacts environmentally, socially, and economically from mining. According to a report by Oxfam Australia, mining can negatively affect people by forcing them from their homes and farms and preventing them from accessing clean land and water.[2]

STUCK IN THE SAND: Mauritania’s continued democratic development depends on a few key decisions. A car lodged in the desert in Tunisia. Photo by fjaviernunez, Creative Commons via Pixabay.

Mauritania has reached a pivotal point in its post-2008 coup political transformation, when military officers overthrew the country’s first democratically elected government. The country is situated where the Maghreb states of North Africa meet the Sahel states south of the Sahara. Neither wholly Arab/Berber nor wholly Black West African, its history and culture are deeply entwined with both regions. Outsiders often mistakenly relegate the country to a secondary status; however, if Mauritanian leaders make the right decisions on three important issues, the country can become a democratic development leader in the greater Maghreb-Sahel region, just as it has been a leader on counterterrorism. These three issues are the government’s continued fidelity to Mauritania’s constitution, full government partnership with civil society, and renewal of the country’s institutions by full political participation in fresh elections by all democratically-inclined parties.

The surprise ousting of Blaise Compaore in October 2014 is a testament to the power of political resistance and the democratic will. However, the coup represents only the early stages of a political transition whose outcomes depend largely on the actions of Burkina Faso’s military. These events also raise serious questions about the role of international actors in domestic political transitions, particularly where economic or security interests are involved.