ANALYSING the rampant armed conflicts in Africa, one will convincingly establish that the scramble for Africa meets its success in a political atmosphere characterized by self-betrayal, greed, grievances, and lack of patriotism. Anti-colonial scholars front an argument that African problems are manufactured in the West. While this argument may be true to a certain extent, I find it far-fetched in Sudan’s current conflict.
Whereas there are tenets in support of the Western effect argument, there is a lot more to explain about Africa’s internal governance, a long-term continent’s crisis since independence.
Following the 1884 ‘Partition of Africa’ deal, colonialists ruled the continent for an average of 60 years until the 1950s when the first nation in Africa attained independence. It is true that during the struggle for independence, there were no proper plans by either colonial governments nor Africans to prepare and organize for governance. Where such preparations were made, they couldn’t go more than five years before independence. This, in one way, incubated neo-colonialism as argued by dependency and anti-colonial proponents.
While such arguments help in shaping the debate, there is a widely despised factor of individual deeds of leaders in the current Sudanese conflict. The two factors ought to be discussed concurrently to maintain a fair debate regarding the self-destruction mission Sudan has embarked on. Whereas the situation might have been bad during colonial rule, there’s literally no undisputed evidence that Africa is currently not worse, save for a few states trying to imitate political independence. Poverty, insecurity, illiteracy, slavery, and intolerance are the most common identities of Africa. This should not be entirely blamed on the West. We have internal problems and unless we address them, we are bound to sink in atrocities.
While power corrupts, in Africa it does absolutely. Leaders tend to be overwhelmed by positions and when they exercise power, they fulfill Kwame Nkrumah’s political mantra of rather self-governance in danger than tranquility in servitude. When Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir exercised his powers against his opponents, he created and empowered a parallel military to execute this duty through persecutions, assassinations, and mass killings like the 2003 Darfur crisis. In this way, he got too obsessed with power to think that he was immortal, he instilled fear and threat among the people to the rank of Field Martial-projecting himself as the most powerful warrior. This problem is common, especially among most post-independence African leaders and it’s the primary genesis for Africa’s political and governance crisis. While foreign powers may also pose a serious threat to Africa’s governance, they only exacerbate the already devastating situation.
As a great African leader, Al-Bashir should have known that forming and supporting militia groups for the purposes of locking his personal grip on power was preparing Sudan for a time bomb. At least they were serving his political interests before they played a vital role in a coup that ended his regime in 2019, a door that opened their access to the mainstream political and military councils of the nation. Today, they are fighting to take over the entire governance of Sudan. It isn’t a democratic but military conflict between two generals, who together served Al-Bashir’s interests, accumulated wealth, and/or positions by unscrupulous and unethical means.
So, how can it be justified that the creation, training, and equipment of the Janjaweed militia groups in the early 2000s who later evolved into the Rapid Support Forces in 2013 as a parallel military organ, and later the mismanagement of politics in Sudan was by the West? It’s clear that where foreign powers come in, ‘we’ have volunteered to create fault lines along which they widen our governance crisis to satisfy their interests. We must fix these fault lines to make it impossible and undesirable for African affairs to be centered on foreign interests. No shortcut!
Charles Tweheyo is a social & political commentator on International Relations.
tweheyocharles@gmail.com
