By Faisal Roble
The undoing of postcolonial states in Africa started in the 1960s and 1970s. However, the alternative solutions suggested to correct challenges related to statecraft in Africa often led to crises and more disruptions.
The Biafra in Nigeria and the Katanga conflicts in today’s DRC, for example, shed light on the fragility of Africa’s postcolonial states. Some of the grievances that led to conflicts still loom large. No sooner did the Biafra war end than the never-ending conflict along ethnic lines engulfed Africa’s richest country – the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The war that started with the question of Katanga, although it mutated through time, still goes on. Since then, more wars have been fought over statecraft on the continent.
Similar conflicts to those in Biafra and Katanga have clouded the Horn of Africa and the Sudan for several decades. By observing the Nigerian Biafra’s debacle through the lens of what he called “Africa’s Open Sore,” Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian-born Nobel laureate, located the continent’s statecraft challenges in the impacts of colonial legacy and its attendant culture of corruption. He centers the enduring negative legacy inherited from the colonial era.
Colonial partition, for example, dealt an irreparable blow to African statecraft by artificially dividing organic nations. A good case is the Somali condition, where the legacy of the Italian Somaliland’s vs. British Somaliland’s division is wreaking political havoc on the national consciousness of the organic nation of Somalia.
In 1960, when the post-colonial Somali Democratic Republic was created, no one expected that some sections of the former British Somalilanders would instill in their children values that perpetuate the colonial legacy. However, you find such values in abundance in Hargeisa and Burao today. A counter viewpoint, one that seeks to help recast the collapsed state of Somalia, could also be easily observed in SSC-Khaatumo regions. Even the so-called British Somaliland is more fragmented into multiple mini-states
Many factors contribute to Africa’s inability to address issues that induce conflicts; the ethnic divisions imposed on certain organic communities make the Westphalian “nation-state” or sovereign nations with inviolable borders nearly impossible. Divided communities may have citizenship in one country but may feel loyal to another, often neighboring, state. In such a case, and as long as colonial borders that artificially divided communities persist, identity politics will not die, but mushroom across the continent.
What the late Danial Monyihin called Africa’s primordial feelings, i.e., ethnicity, is today a powerful tool for state capture by the elite. A good example is how the Oromo elite captured the formerly Abyssinian state, run in the past by the Tigrian and Amhara groups. There is a new terminology in Ethiopia for ethnic-based state capture – “terangna,” or “someone’s term based on ethnic identity.
In the 1980s, the never-peaceful Horn of Africa exploded due to multiple groups in search of more sub-states, mainly owing to ethnic grievances. Out of the former imperial Abyssinia, for example, came Eritrea. Given the fledgling and tortured federal arrangements in Ethiopia, one could not rule out more sub-states to come out of Ethiopia.
In the 1990s, Eritrea and South Sudan became new “nation-states.” And this could open doors for more conflicts over new state formation. The Tigray region and the Ogaden Somali Regional state, the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF), never denounced their options to form “nation states” independent of Addis Ababa. The former thinks it has given up the right to form its state when it had the chance, that is, after the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) overthrew the central government of Mengistu Haile Mariam. Whether TPLF arguably only suspended its search for its own “nation-state” in exchange for dominating and exploiting the entire Ethiopian Empire. Now that they no longer do so, it is uncertain whether they will seek to fight and form a “nation-state” of their design. The same could be said about the armed wing of the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA).
The 1990s also dawned on Somalia with its version of sub-states. A case in point is Somaliland. The Somaliland “sub-state” case. For over 30 years, it claimed to have seceded from the post-colonial nation-state of Somalia. However, its unilateralism on secession, which is not the route Eritrea and South Sudan took, proved to impede a global acceptance of Somaliland’s declaration of “statehood.” On the contrary, Eritrea and South Sudan adopted a different model in that they both first secured the acceptance of their decision by the home state and then declared secession.
As if that was not enough headache for Somalia, the regional state of Puntland has been flirting with a new concept of “confederation.” The issue of confederation was fairly appraised by Abdelkarim Hassan on the site. However, one wonders whether such a concept is a pathway to creating a separate sub-state for Puntland. If so, the flirtation of confederation is yet another recipe to dismantle the post-colonial state of Somalia created in 1960 out of the reunification of British Somaliland and Italian Somaliland.
Dividing post-colonial African states into sub-states, although they may have legitimate grievances, is not the only tool to address past mistaken social engineering by colonialists. The creation of South Sudan has not been a blessing but a curse for its people.
Barring certain unique cases, crafting mini-states out of existing post-colonial “nation-states” may neither correct ethnic grievances nor address the shortcomings of Africa’s statecraft. If South Sudan did not fare better in its creation of a mini-state out of Sudan, what about Somaliland or, for that matter, Biafra?
For a solution, three pathways may ameliorate the African statecraft challenges:
1) Strengthening Regional associations such as the East African Commission (EAC), the Southern African Development Community (SADC), or the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), and opening borders for the movement of people and commodities will address the divisions imposed on the organic community.
2) The African Union may also expedite the implementation of an open-door policy for the continent’s people to move freely and unite divided ethnic groups without breaking up post-colonial states
3) Africa could aim to transition into a union similar to the EU and integrate its economy.
Faisal Roble
Email: faisalroble19@gmail.com
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Faisal Roble, a writer, political analyst and a former Editor-in-Chief of WardheerNews, is mainly interested in the Horn of Africa region.
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