Ademola Araoye

Against this background, African states are some of the most unstable in the interstate system. Internal processes of the African state and governance paradigm rest on managing a security dilemma that is pervasive across the system. The political settlements in these post-colonial political entities unravel so fast such that in 2015 80 percent of all UN peacekeepers were deployed in Africa. Over 50 peace operations have been deployed to 18 African countries since 2000. There are 15 UN peacekeeping operations administered by the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping in Africa. More than one hundred thousand uniformed peacekeepers were deployed in Africa in early 2015, twice as many as a decade before. Peacekeepers have deployed to Somalia, the western Sudanese region of Darfur, South Sudan, and Mali. As of May 2015, there were nine UN peacekeeping missions in Africa supported by more than eighty thousand troops and fifteen thousand civilians.

The largest missions are in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Darfur (jointly administered with the AU), South Sudan, and Mali. Africa is the most conflictual continent in the world. In financial terms, the direct and indirect cost of conflicts in Africa since 2000 has been estimated to be nearly $900 billion. The lack of indigenous sources of finance also undermines the AU’s credibility as a leading player in peace and security issues on the continent and reduces its ability to exercise ownership of particular initiatives. 70% of the issues before the Security Council between January and September, 2015 were related to conflict and instability in Africa. These facts indict the conceptualization of the contemporary African state and, more importantly, delegitimize the African states system. The African state is anachronistic in the context of current global realities. The African states system is not working. It owes its life to the international community. The world owes Africa a living.

The examples of conflicts in Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, and Gabon are revealing. I will cite copiously from my book Cote d ‘Ivoire: The Conundrum of a Still Wretched of the Earth. The Ivoirian crisis was simply instigated by France to correct its policy failures in the post Houphouet Boigny era. The Ivorian conflict presented France with a major crisis of its continued political and economic control over Cote d’Ivoire in the post Houphouet Boigny era. The crisis also posed a significant threat to its continued hegemony in West Africa. Or, in the hypothesis of Franck A. Zagbayou, France presented Cote d’Ivoire with a crisis in order to consolidate its control over the country and, related to this, its continued hegemony of the West Africa sub region. The complex of relationships between the francophone African states and France formed by far the most comprehensive set of mechanism for maintaining African states and their rulers, and had no equivalent either among the other colonial powers, or in the clientele networks established by the United States and the Soviet Union. The complex relationship also implies that France is deeply implicated in the evolution of the political process in these countries.

This complexity has been manifest in France’s role in the Ivorian conflict. France is a central, and increasingly, an open player in the crisis, and found itself overtly on the frontline of the Ivorian quagmire. As such any understanding of the Ivorian conflict depends on an awareness of France’s role. For many key French policy hands on Africa, it is the only continent where France is still first. Abandoning it is unthinkable. France needs Africa to persuade itself, and the rest of the world, that it counts for more than a once-imperial, now middle ranking European power. The Ivorian crisis therefore presented a critical test of France’s continuing resolve to sustain its hegemony in Africa.

France’s implication in the evolution of the political process in post Houphouet Boigny Cote d’Ivoire era, which has been dominated by the long crisis of succession that culminated in the Ivorian conflict, is consistent with the general axiom that Africa’s relations with Europe since the sixteenth century has been defined by the constant interaction between the ambition of one against the reaction of the other. In spite of changes of tectonic magnitude in the international system in the post Cold War era as well as the end of apartheid in South Africa that brought to an end the last bastion of direct and open domination of blacks on the continent, French ambition to consolidate its control over francophone Africa and dominate in black Africa has been a recurring theme in its involvement in crisis situations in Africa. Rwandan ambassador to Paris Jacques Bihozagara highlights that French connivance in the 1994 massacres in Rwanda stemmed from concerns about its diminishing influence in Africa.

This ambition remains a major, if not the decisive factor in the appreciation of its role and complicity in the Ivorian crisis. The role of France was against a backdrop of apprehensions about possible intentions of the United States to exploit the crisis in Cote d’Ivoire to undermine its power in the sub-region in less than a decade after its seeming humiliation by the United States over the fate of Sese Seko Mobutu of Zaire. In that episode, the United States unusual direct engagement, in collaboration with Nelson Mandela’s South Africa, was instrumental in finally neutralizing Mobutu out of power.

The removal of Mobutu was against the objection of France that was prepared to intervene militarily in the final battle for Kinshasa to save the dictator. These fears were critical considerations in its policy objectives in the Ivorian conflict. France exploited to the fullest the legitimacy conferred on the deployment of its forces under the mandate of the United Nations operations in that country. It seized the opportunity to strengthen its military presence in Cote d’Ivoire in readiness to use its military might to advance its real goal. This goal was to protect its concrete imperialist interests in Cote d’Ivoire, and retain its status as the first power in black Africa.

To achieve its goal, France mobilized a Houphouetist domestic constituency in Cote d’Ivoire. It strengthened diplomatic relations with its old ally Blaise Compaore and provided Burkina Faso with weapons. It encouraged its traditional friends it had helped to sustain or return to power, including Omar Bongo of Gabon and Sassou Nguesso of the Republic of Congo who had overthrown a democratically elected government and whose return to power through the force of arms was financed by the French company Elf, to join the peace process. Through these moves, France was effectively represented at the sub-regional and continental fora where important decisions were being taken on the way forward. The involvement and close collaboration of the traditional friends of France in Africa with their metropole in the Ivorian peace process ensured that France retained its control over the substantive direction of the Ivorian peace process.

Beyond the rhetoric of seeking a resolution of the conflict, the interests of Cote d’Ivoire were marginalized as many of the intervening actors equated a viable and sustainable resolution of the conflict with the protection of the interests of France and its friends such as Burkina Faso, who all sought to keep Cote d’Ivoire within the francophone family and thus under French control. In this connection, the interests of France converged with those of Burkina Faso and Mali and, in general, the CFA states of West Africa. Cote d’Ivoire contributes 40% of the total financial resources of that economic zone and its continued effective participation in the life of that bloc was critical for the continuation of France’s control of the sub region. The continued existence of that bloc also facilitated French goal of impeding or preventing the evolution of a truly sub regional economic community across colonial and linguistic lines. This line is given greater accentuation under the rule of French conservatives.

With regard to Guinea Bissau, with a population of 1.2 million, the conflict was more about the struggle between France and Portugal to dominate the country. France was seeking to expand its orbit of influence in West Africa by ousting poor Portugal and its very weak peso from control of its traumatized neo-colonial enclave in Guinea Bissau. In this strategic engagement, France had on its side a discredited civilianized military villain in the person of General Bernandino Viera. It was in his interest to invite the French and by implication, its proxy state of Senegal, to protect him. Portugal had an ally in General Ansumane Mane, who was equally notorious for his lack of understanding for the supremacy of democracy and its institution. The two Bissau Guinean protagonists were essentially egged on in their conflict by France and Portugal. Both ended up tragically murdered. One was skinned alive and, the lucky one, General Mane, died in a fusillade of gun shots. Thereafter France and Portugal sought out new local proxies.

In Libya, paradoxically, Muamar Gaddafi suffered the fate of any leader of a small state strenuously steering an independent course by staying clear of entanglements with partisan elite forces in the international system. Big power entanglements has saved Bashir Assad in Syria. The African Union peace initiative in Libya was met with unprecedented contempt by the United States, Great Britain and France, determined to institute a regime change in the largely desert state of 6,344,342 people with an enticing GDP of $29.15 billion USD (2015). In fact, the West conveniently claimed that Libya is an Arab nation in which black Africa had no legitimate stakes.

In the most recent electoral situation in Gabon, with a population 1.73 million and a GDP of $14.34 billion USD (2015), the real contention was who between incumbent Ali Bongo and Jean Ping would best protect French interest by reinstating the Omar Bongo special relationship that enabled France to control the Gabonese sweet economy. In Liberia, with 3.5 million citizens, Charles Taylor courted hot waters in the 1990s, for refusing the United States control of the oil deposits. The post war administration understood this well. It overturned the decision of the Liberian legislature that toyed with the idea of diversifying that strategic sector by seeking to give Russian Gazprom a toe hold. The United States has a virtual monopoly of Liberia’s oil. And Liberians pride their country as little America.

Small African states, indeed the African state system, have proven to be unviable. They are also a danger to Africa’s long term interests. Invariably, they survive as mere appendages to powerful hegemonic state actors. In this they constitute a permanent drag on the integrity of the aspirations of Africa for total emancipation. These liliput state entities, as in the Gambia and Congo Brazzaville, have entrapped a frustrated and traumatized nation. In the Gambia, Yayyah Jammeh whimsically declares the state an Islamic republic. In a small country, where are the creative mavericks to confront a dictator? Peace and stability is the single most important challenge in Africa.

Here it is understood that other things being equal, a large country is better able to protect itself from internal dictatorships, other destructive internal forces and unwholesome external interventions. Imagine the scenario had the North East of Nigeria been a sovereign state under the throes of Boko Haram. In the case of the Gambia, with dwindling resources from tourism from the Scandinavians as a result of increasing assertion of religious fundamentalism by the Gambian establishment, declaring an Islamic state would incentivize the donors from the middle East, including Iran, to bring in more money. This would pose a long term challenge to the maintenance of religious harmony in the sub region. Finally the intensity of the friction generated by passionate partisanship and often disagreeable interaction of political forces are diffused in larger and more complex political entities. It can be murderously intense and destructive of the social fabric in small little enclave states.

The reality is that Africa is currently configured to fail. And this would continue as long as the current strategic layout persists. It is in this context that the current national discourse on restructuring Nigeria should take into consideration the emerged lessons of Africa. The fate of Nigeria is too crucial for the future of Africa for it to be hinged on crass partisanship and primordial emotions. Nigeria’s future should be founded on a rational calculus balancing the national public interest, distinct from elite interest, with the long term continental imperative for holistic emancipation of Africa. In fact the future of Nigeria is too important to be left to fickle Nigerian elites to decide.