Amilcar Cabra

Exploring the futures of a coming Africa era imposes navigating frightfully debilitating contradictions at many levels of practical and intellectual engagements. As has been made obvious so far, this exploration requires a careful treading in the unravelling of carefully cultivated convenient myths or spins or rationalizations that are strenuously propagated by Africans. The propagators of the spin in Africa narratives are mostly the elite beneficiaries of Africa’s subordinate status, who are determined to make impressions. In this cautious exfoliation of layers of Africa’s myths, the rational praxis forces one into a confrontation with contestations of the negating sharp realities of Africa. It may even entail challenging or in the least probing the very axiomatic understandings of the entrenched notions of the numerous conceptualizations of the facts or factions of Africa.

The main thesis that I submit in this connection rests on four interlinked planks. These are first that Africa is primarily the single most endowed derivative of global value extraction; material and non-material. Second, Africa historically is associated with critically weak capacity for penetration of both its own internal and the general systemic environment. Third, as a result of plank ii, Africa is profoundly weak in the highly Hobbesian global value extraction and appropriation process. Accordingly, flowing from the first three propositions relating to its deficits in the competitive global system of value extraction and value appropriation, Africa is largely pacified, often with the moral acquiescence of factions of its elites, only as the predictable perennial largest recipient of residues of global value disbursement in the form of grants, aid and humanitarian interventions.

Put together, Africa is located along the margins of global relevance. The way forward out of this historic cul de sac, I hazard, is the total repudiation of and, to amend the term of Joseph Schumpeter, constructive destruction of the current status quo: Africa’s internal structural configurations and associated problematic identities and loyalties, mindsets as well as attitudinal orientations; de-validating its pervasive dysfunctional polluted spirituality undermining the essences of its humanity; and finally, recasting Africa’s shackled intellectual firmament that historically has served as an ancillary machinery of ideational and conceptual as well as institutional replications that consolidate Africa’s tangential relevance in world affairs. This holistic constructivist deconstruction and destruction of Africa’s numerous concrete myths and along with compelling creative reconstructions would be integral to the course of replacing current myths with new edifying realities of a new millennium.

All these are preamble to the key question of what factors impact the location and role of Africa in the global system and define its subservient role in its historic and contemporary transactions with other forces, be state or non –state actors in the international system. That is the central theme of the moment that I will now explore. Why are some societies, mainly Africa, which I cite conveniently as a homogenous group only for now, perpetually confined to the bottom of the totem pole of the human hierarchy?

Why is Africa’s role that of a bottom scrapper! What is clear from the pattern of transactions between the elite powers, medium level actors and weak elements in the system is that they are delineated by what Ian Morris has encapsulated as their differentiated capacities to extract energy from the environment. Drawing on the ecological and evolutionary ends of biology, Ian Morris postulates that as life forms, humans and their societies survive because we extract energy from our environment and turn them to more of ourselves. Drawing on this biological paradigm, he observes that humans, like all more intelligent animals, we are curious creatures that are constantly tinkering and wondering.

Thus a second attribute is that humans are just much better at tinkering than other animals. But, finally, he notes that obviously humans are not the same, as some extract more energy from the environment than others; some are more curious, creative, clever or practical than others. For Ian Morris, these three commonsensical observations explain much of the course of history. We can distil that the differentiated capacities to extract resources is the most critical predictor of the location of states and continents in the global system. Africa’s deficiency in resource extraction is the single largest factor in perpetuating its historic subordinate status and subservient role in global affairs.

Olusegun Obasanjo

The responses to the structure of the international system by medium level powers and weak states have varied over the centuries. The cooptation of Africa by the External order has been relatively cost-free but with unlimited dividends for the aggressor. Africa is the best field in the world to gain optimal strategic dividend for the smallest investment. In Africa, the responses to the incursion of the external order span the formal and institutionalized subservience associated with most post-colonial francophone African states, benign complicity as in most Anglophone Africa states, through radical repudiation of the status quo expressed mainly through African liberation movements such as in Algeria in the 1960s, the African National Congress( ANC) of South Africa, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the Pan African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) of Amilcar Cabral.

The range of responses from tepid or outright complicity and collaboration with the invader remains a fatal debilitating factor in entrenching Africa’s current situation in the world. Outside Africa, reactions have been more robust against the intrusion of foreign forces. These have included institutional defiance of the unjust global order witnessed in Iran, Cuba, North Korea and Gaddafi’s Libya. Finally, at the extreme post of reactions, there have been irrational and violent responses purveyed by such terrorist groups such as the Islamic State in the Levant (ISIL), Al Shabab in East Africa and Boko Haram in West Africa. By and large, the African response to the global structure and the systemic injustices has been benign complicity and outright subservience of francophone Africa. It is this deleterious attitude of establishment Africa that has been responsible for the ossification of Africa’s inability to concretize a vision of the futures of an era for Africans and, directly flowing from this, its near irrelevance in the global scheme of things.

A Geo-Political Space Configured to Fail

The underpinnings of the African state and its systems are mortally flawed. Half a century into its fixations and non -evolutionary trajectory of socio-political stagnation, the African state and its inter-state system are in crisis. The crisis is reflected in the permanence of an industry like web of external interventions by state and non-state actors alike devoted to Africa across the total spectrum of human affairs. These interventions range from security, economic, political to humanitarian spheres. The fatal deficiencies of the African state and its state system have spawned the emergence of a global ostensible “do Africa good humanitarian syndrome”. This syndrome obfuscates and rationalizes the real strategic objectives of the global loot machine operating in the continent involved in the extraction of value.

The do Africa good syndrome is a potent complementary instrument of the penetration of a fragmented and fractious Africa for the necessary extractive operations of external operators of the loot machine. It is quintessentially an expression of the soft face of an essentially harsh system that provide succour for the worst victims of the global loot machine at work in all of Africa. Africa’s tenacious fixation with the retention of the fictive inviolability of the many putative sovereignties of its mainly inadequate states is a historic fallacy. This is even more so in an evolutionary climate with a continuing re-evaluation of the continued salience of state sovereignty in the affairs of humankind by more advanced communities.

Again in the course of a transformative agenda to shore up the legitimacy of the state, the Organization of African Union, recognizing its own functional bankruptcy, was transformed into the African Union to generate a new impulse and salience for the transcendental challenge of the futures of an African era. Yet, the African Union and in fact all the sub-regional institutions, ECOWAS, SADC, IGAAD, EADC, in their retention of the axioms and protocols and procedures of the defunct OAU, have paradoxically remained instruments of the old guard and the nemesis of African peoples. The AU serves as a validating instrument of an old Order long de-legitimated by the African people. Rather than serve as the countervailing futuristic force against the anachronistic post-colonial African state, the African Union provides the antiquated drivers of the old order the platform to validate its salience in the calculus of a new Africa. In its internal operations, the AU is a forum for the projection of state-centric putative attempts at regional power play, instead of serving a platform for the distillation of African strategic responses to the historic existential crisis of Africa. Finally, the dearth of depth of the African state and its states system eliminates it as a full participant even in the international liberal environment run on the basis of the soft protocols that protect the principle of equal rights of states with equal opportunities for all. Though like individuals, in liberal climes statuses and roles of states are to be attained, the force of the current disposition of Africa has ascribed to it a marginal role in the international system.

The 1963 reactionary rejection of a visionary initiative to repudiate a balkanized Africa instituted by European powers at the Berlin Conference in 1884 has proven to be a tragic antecedence of the curse of the African state system. The infamous compromise leading to the establishment of a loose organization in the Organization of African Unity consolidated the designs of imperial powers to ring fence a divided Africa in the service of their respective imperial interests. The decision has since haunted Africa. The Casablanca bloc, led by Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, advanced the cause of a federation of all African countries. Other members of the bloc included Algeria, Guinea, Morocco, Egypt, Mali and Libya. Founded in 1961, its members were described as “progressive states”. The Monrovia bloc, led by Leopold Sedar Senghor of Senegal, felt that unity should be achieved gradually through economic cooperation. These men did not, at the instigation of their controllers in France and the United States, support the notion of an African federation. Other conservative states unenthusiastic about an African federation in 1963 were Nigeria, Liberia, and Ethiopia. The conservative bloc included most of the former French colonies. Since then Africa’s geo-political structure has not significantly been altered neither in response to the evolution of the global system nor in reaction to the glaring fact of the inadequacy of current configuration to advance Africa’s interests, especially honing it institutionally to enhance its own penetration and value extraction capacity. The African deleterious mind-set is as firmly entrenched as in 1963.

As a result, the current configuration of the Africa geo-political space housing a myriad of 56 ostensible sovereign states, quasi states and absolutely sheer non –entities has remained an immovable impediment to any meaningful projections of Africa’s interests. The reality is daunting. Only five African states, namely Nigeria, Ethiopia, Egypt , Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Africa each houses more than 5% of Africa’s population. The projected population of these states as at July, 2015 ranged from Nigeria’s 184,264,000, representing 16% of Africa’s population to South Africa’s 55 million people at 4.77% of the continent’s people. 43 per cent of Africa’s population is concentrated in these five states. Twenty-six African states or 38 per cent have a population of less than 5 million. 26 per cent of African states have a population of less than 2 million. 30 or 54% of states and political entities in Africa hold just about or less than 1 per cent of the population of the continent. Nine states representing 16 per cent of states in Africa have a population of less than a million. On the average, when the five major most populous states are put aside, the average population of the African state is just about 12 million. By today’s standards and given the historical context of Africa in the scheme of global affairs, about 40% of African states are highly unable to extract some value in their own local environments and hopelessly out of reckoning in the global competition for extractive value.

Half a century into the so called independence of post-colonial African states and two decades into the post liberation in Southern Africa, the African geo-political landscape is configured to ensure that the continent remains out of relevance in meeting the challenges of the futures of an African era. The internal configuration of Africa has consolidated its irrelevance the global scheme of things. In fact, many of the political non entities are condemned to a permanent dependency status thriving on residues of value disbursement from powerful states to retain their fictive sovereignty. The dependency syndrome is deeply ingrained in the mindsets, such that the loyalties of the helmsmen of these states are more to themselves, their families, cronies, and critically to their metropolitan controllers. Dambisa Moyo advances that over the past 60 years at least $1 trillion of development-related aid has been transferred from rich countries to Africa. This has however not impacted the wellbeing of Africans. He notes that real per-capita income today is lower than it was in the 1970s, and more than 50% of the population, that is over 350 million people, lives on less than a dollar a day. This figure has nearly doubled in two decades. Even after the very aggressive debt-relief campaigns in the 1990s, African countries still pay close to $20 billion in debt repayments per annum, a stark reminder that aid is not free. The dependency syndrome has posed a mortal danger to the integrity of Africa’s half-hearted striving for holistic emancipation.

Conclusion
I want to conclude on a very simple note. The extant construction of Africa is the single most debilitating factor holding Africa back from the futures of its forever postponed modernity. This problematic construction reflects the inability of the leaders of Africa in the immediate post-independence era to surmount the fundamental historic challenge in the post-independence era. This challenge was expressed in fractious structures and institutions of a fragile states system that was bequeathed as legacies of colonialism. The main existential dilemma before the continent in 1963 as new states emerged, often variously directed and controlled by the colonial powers, was clearly defined.

It was whether in forging ahead in the post-independence era, Africa would maintain the fractious and divisive structure of the evolving continental states system that was based on the outcome of the Berlin Conference of 1884 at which the colonial powers partitioned the continent according to their national interests. Or was Africa capable of mobilizing the will to transcend these contrived divisions and build a strong and viable continental state. The failure of an ideo-philosophically divided leadership of the continent to consolidate the colonially designed states system into a one strong and viable continental federation thereby radically realigning the continental political geography has haunted the evolution of Africa since independence. The many African political spaces have now been fully occupied by parasites who preach false gospels to a dispossessed people.

The inability of Africa to transcend the colonial antecedence of its states system has been a major historic impediment. The implication of these failures has been the lack of impetus among the leadership exploiting the system to consolidate the geo-political spaces within the continent into one or only a few very strong, viable, resilient states capable of exercising real sovereignty that could develop a real capacity to relatively autonomously extract value in its own environment and to extend same globally. Such a restructuring would prime Africa into upending the international division of labour that is heavily skewed against it, largely as a result of its deleterious internal socio-political configuration and the current alienation of its peoples.

If the validation of the post- colonial structure of the Africa geopolitical spaces would be seen in terms of its realistic grasp of concrete social and historic realities, the current system has been delegitimized in its failure to respond to the haunting realities of Africa. A consolidated African political space would create a strong continent with a capacity to exponentially transform the circumstances of Africans in the international system. In fact, the consolidation of Africa’s geo-political spaces is the first imperative, moral as well as practical, of African renaissance. Justice for Africa requires the elimination and rectification of morally indefensible self- imposed arbitrary structural disadvantages that serve the interest of only a tiny fraction of its elites.

This struggle for the futures of an African era is the historic obligation we owe future generations. The time to begin this inevitable adventure is now.

A paper presented at the University of Johannesburg on 5 April, 2016. Ademola Araoye, a former Foreign Service Officer, headed the Political, Policy Planning Section and was Chief, Office for the Consolidation of Democratic Governance of the United Nations Mission in Liberia. He is author of Cote d’Ivoire: The Conundrum of a Still Wretched of the Earth. He retired from the service of the United Nations only recently.