13 February 2012
The New Division of Africa
By Gwynne Dyer
Sudan was bombing South Sudan again last week, only a couple of months after the two countries split apart. Sudan is mostly Muslim, and South Sudan is predominantly Christian, but the quarrel is about oil, not religion. And yet, it is really about religion too, since the two countries would never have split apart along the current border if not for the religious divide.
Ivory Coast was split along the same Muslim-Christian lines for nine years, although the shooting ended last year and there is an attempt underway to sew the country back together under an elected government. But in Nigeria, Africa’s biggest country by far, the situation is going from bad to worse, with the Islamist terrorists of Boko Haram murdering people all over the country in the name of imposing sharia law on the entire nation.
“The situation we have in our hands is even worse than the civil war that we fought (in 1967-70, which killed between one and three million people),” said President Goodluck Jonathan. That’s a major exaggeration – the current death toll in Nigeria from terrorist attacks and army reprisals is probably only a few hundred a month – but the potential for much greater slaughter is certainly there.
In an interview with Reuters, President Jonathan said: “If (Boko Haram) clearly identify themselves now and say…this is the reason why we are confronting government or this is the reason why we destroyed some innocent people and their properties, why not (talk to them)?” But it’s pointless: he already knows who they are and what they want.
“Boko Haram”, loosely translated, means “Western education is forbidden,” and the organisation’s declared aim is to overthrow the government and impose Islamic law on all of Nigeria. In a 40-minute audio message posted on YouTube two weeks ago, the group’s leader, Abubakar Shekau, threatened that his next step would be to carry out a bombing campaign against Nigeria’s secondary schools and universities.
This is not only vicious; it is also completely loony. There is no way that Boko Haram could conquer the entire country. Only half of Nigerians are Muslims, and they are much poorer than the country’s 80 million Christians. The Christian south is where the oil is, and the ports, and most of the industry, so that’s where most of the money is too. The same pattern is repeated in many other African countries: poor Muslim north; prosperous Christian south.
There was no plan behind this. Islam spread slowly south from North Africa, which was conquered by Arab armies in the 7th century, while Christianity spread rapidly inland once European colonies appeared on the African coast in the last few hundred years. The line where Islam and Christianity meet runs across Africa about 1,100 km (700 mi.) north of the equator (except in Ethiopia, where the Christians have the highlands and the Muslims the lowlands).
In general, the Muslims ended up with the desert and semi-desert regions of Africa because Islam had to make it all the way across the Sahara, while the more fertile and richer regions nearer to the equator and all the way down to South Africa are mainly Christian because the Europeans arrived by sea with much greater economic and military power. But some 350 million Africans live in countries that straddle the Christian-Muslim fault line.
There probably won’t be a full-scale civil war in Nigeria this time around, but Boko Haram is targeting Christians indiscriminately. The Nigerian army, not best known for its discipline and restraint, is almost as indiscriminate in targeting devout but innocent Muslims in the northern states that are home to the terrorist organisation. Christians are already moving out of the north, and Muslims out of the south.
It will get worse in Nigeria, and it is getting bad again in what used to be Sudan, and Ethiopia is an accident just waiting to happen. Even Ivory Coast may not really be out of the woods yet. There is a small but real risk that these conflicts could some day coalesce into a general Muslim-Christian confrontation that would kill millions and convulse all of Africa.
Christianity and Islam have been at war most of the time since Muslim armies conquered half of the then-Christian world, from Syria to Spain, in the 7th and 8th centuries. There was the great Christian counter-attack of the Crusades in the 12th century, the Muslim conquest of Turkey and the Balkans in the 15th and 16th centuries, and the European conquest of almost the entire Muslim world in the 18th-20th centuries.
It is a miserable history, and in some places it is likely to continue for some time to come. But nowhere in sub-Saharan Africa does the frontier between Muslim-majority and Christian-majority areas derive from conquest: these populations are not looking for revenge.
Boko Haram’s style of radical Islamism is an import from somewhere else entirely, and it would be a terrible mistake for large numbers of Muslim Nigerians to embrace it. On the other hand, it will be a terrible mistake if Nigeria doesn’t get a choke chain on its army, whose brutal actions are all too likely to drive Nigerian Muslims in exactly that direction.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 11 and 12. (“Christianity…revenge”)
5 January 2012
The African National Congress at 100
By Gwynne Dyer
“It’s a bittersweet victory,” said William Gumede, a distinguished South African academic, about the hundredth anniversary of the African National Congress (ANC), which opens with a enormous party in Bloemfontein on Sunday. “This is our tipping point. From here things will go downhill. No liberation movement has moved upwards from this point.”
It’s a grim prognosis, but Gumede, author of “Thabo Mbeke and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC,” insists that South Africa is no exception to the rule. “Every African country thought it was exceptional. If you look at the archives of Nigerian papers at the time they got independence (1960), everyone in Nigeria, in Africa and indeed the world over thought they were exceptional. No one wanted to criticise them.” But then it all fell apart.
It has not fallen apart yet in South Africa. Eighteen years after Nigeria got its independence, there had been a terrible civil war, the generals were already ruling the country, and the average income was lower than it had been in late colonial times. Whereas eighteen years after the end of apartheid in South Africa in 1994, it is still a more or less peaceful democracy, and the living standards of the poor have at least not declined.
But maybe that was just because South Africa was fortunate to have an extraordinary generation of leaders: men like Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo who were intelligent, incorruptible and dedicated to democracy. Without them at its head, can the ANC be trusted? A lot of people doubt it.
Mandela chose Thabo Mbeki as his successor because he trusted him to keep the government clean and democratic, but there was already something wrong there. However saintly Mandela was, the way he imposed Mbeki as leader of the ANC, and therefore president of the country, was considerably less than democratic.
Mbeki turned out to be more autocratic than Mandela had hoped, but his overthrow in an internal ANC coup in 2008 was hardly a triumph for democracy either. Of the two men who played the biggest roles in organising that coup, one, Jacob Zuma, is now president of the ANC and the country, while the other, ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema, spends all his days plotting to take his place.
Zuma, a man who has faced multiple charges of corruption and rape, miraculously emerges unscathed from the courts each time, and his co-conspirator in the main corruption case, Shabir Shaik, has just been released from prison for “medical reasons.” Malema, an accomplished demagogue, has built his popularity among the poor black majority on barely disguised racial incitement against whites, mixed-race people and other minorities.
Politics is a tough old game in every country, but there is a systemic problem here: the ANC doesn’t do democracy well. Gumede put his finger on it when he pointed out that the ANC, like other African parties that fought liberation wars, had a military structure. “They tended to centralise; there was not much internal democracy. When they came to power they couldn’t break away from this culture, which undermined internal democratic processes.”
Dozens of heads of state and an estimated 100,000 ordinary South Africans are flocking to Bloemfontein to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the ANC. They honour it because it brought freedom to the black majority in South Africa without destroying the country’s democratic institutions in the process. South Africa still has free elections, free media and a justice system that is free from government influence (most of the time).
But that has been relatively easy up to now. The ANC still enjoys mass support because of its heroic past, so it has won every national election so far without having to break the democratic rules. The question is: what will it do when it can no longer win without breaking the rules?
That day is probably not very many years off. The ANC’s share of the vote has been falling steadily, partly because of its perceived corruption but largely because almost two decades in power will erode the popularity of any political party. The election in 2014 will probably be the last in which it can hope to win a parliamentary majority honestly.
The most important crisis in South Africa’s history will occur when it loses the election after that. Only if the ANC then goes meekly into opposition can we conclude that South Africa really is an exception to the rule that liberation movements don’t do democracy.
The rule doesn’t mean that Africa is doomed eternally to political oppression and corruption. A number of African countries have passed through that long tunnel and emerged on the other end as flawed but generally law-abiding democracies: Kenya, Zambia, and Mozambique, for example. But it would be much better not to go into the tunnel at all.
The ANC will really deserve the admiration of the world if it can leave power without a fight. At the moment, the odds on that happening are no better than even.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 13 and 14. (“The rule…even”)
28 October 2011
The African Population Disaster
By Gwynne Dyer
According to the United Nations, the world’s population will pass the seven billion mark at the end of this month, and there will be much tutting and shaking of heads over its prediction that we will be ten million by the end of the century. But almost nobody will have the temerity to point out that this is almost entirely an African problem.
The United Nations Population Fund’s own numbers tell the story. Africa currently has one-seventh of the world’s people: just over one billion. But during the rest of the century, the UN agency predicts, this single continent will add an extra 2.6 billion people, more than tripling in population, while all the rest of the world adds just half a billion.
If it weren’t for the African population boom, the world’s population would never exceed 7.5 billion. That is still probably twice as many people as the planet’s resources could support comfortably for more than a couple of generations – but birth rates are falling to below replacement level in most places. If that were happening in Africa too, the global population could be headed back down well before 2100.
It isn’t happening in Africa, or at least not nearly fast enough. Nor is the UN naively projecting current birth rates into the indefinite future. It assumes that the current average fertility rate for the African continent of 4.6 children per woman will fall to only three children per woman by 2045, though some countries – Niger, Mali and Uganda, for example – will continue to have higher birth rates.
The problem is that replacement level is 2.2 children per woman. Africa may well reach that level by late in the century, but the population growth will continue for a further 30-40 years, until the last generation from the baby-boom days has grown up and had its own 2.2 children per family. So a total African population of 3.6 billion by the end of the century – a third of the human race – is probably as good as it is going to get.
If African birth-rates do not decline steeply, it could be a great deal worse. If the current rate of African population growth persisted, we would have a global total of fifteen billion people by the end of the century, with about half of them crammed into that single continent. But let’s go with the optimistic assumption that there will be “only” ten billion of us.
What will the African population boom mean for the rest of the world, and for Africa itself? It may be a surprisingly self-contained disaster.
An Africa that more than triples its population during the rest of this century will certainly still be the world’s poorest continent at the end of it. Even the current improvement in economic growth rates in many African countries is largely cancelled out by population growth: few countries are seeing significant rises in per capita income.
If Africans stay poor, then their impact on the rest of the world will be slight. They will not become major consumers of resources imported from elsewhere, because they cannot afford them. Even their impact on the global environment, while not negligible, will be quite limited. It is high-income consumers of energy, manufactured goods and processed foods who really count when it comes to global issues like climate change.
Three hundred million Americans have more effect on the global environment than would three billion Africans living more or less in their present style. Subsistence farmers mostly affect the local environment, even when there are a lot of them. If they degrade their land, pollute their rivers and destroy their forests, the damage they do is mostly to themselves. Urban slum dwellers do even less damage to the global environment.
If no miracle intervenes, the African continent is going to have a very hard time in this century. It is already the only continent to experience recurrent famines, and they will probably get much worse. Civil wars and massacres are already more frequent in Africa than anywhere else, and that too will get worse, because people under great pressure rarely behave well.
What, if anything, can be done about this? Even a big push to make contraception available to the hundred million African women who do not now have easy access to it would not substantially change the outcome at this point. Only a brutally enforced one-child policy like China’s could do that, and it is simply impossible to believe that this could be done in any African state.
Africans have done nothing wrong, nor indeed is their birth-rate higher than those on other continents at various past times. But there is only a limited time available to get the birth-rate down once modern medicine and sanitation have brought the death-rate down.
Grow fast enough economically, and your people will have smaller families as they get more prosperous. Stay poor for too long, and population growth will overwhelm you. For various reasons, none of them their own fault, Africans have stayed poor for too long. Individual countries can still save themselves, and some will, but the continent as a whole probably cannot.
Few Africans will say that because it’s too painful to contemplate, and few outsiders will say it because it is politically incorrect. But a lot of people know it.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 4 and 6. (“It isn’t…rates”; and “If African…us”)
31 January 2010
Africa: The Right to Secede
By Gwynne Dyer
Ban Ki-moon is not the best secretary-general the United Nations ever had, but he has grasped the essential nature of his job. The UN is an organisation made up of sovereign states, and their highest priority is the preservation of their own privileges. It is the trade union of the sovereign states of the world, and Ban is their shop steward. Which is why he said what he did last weekend.
Speaking just before the African Union summit opened in Addis Ababa, the UN secretary-general declared that both the UN and the AU had a big responsibility “to maintain peace in Sudan and make unity attractive.” It is not immediately obvious that “peace” and “unity” are compatible in Sudan, where civil war killed about 2 million people and created 4 million refugees between 1983 and 2005, but Ban was in no doubt about it.
The fighting in Sudan ended in 2005 when the northern-based government and the southern-based rebels signed a Comprehensive Peace Agreement that created a unity government in Khartoum and a separate regional government in the south – and promised the southerners a referendum on secession next year. That promise was what stopped the fighting, and despite many crises and clashes it has held for five years.
Not only that, but the dictator in Khartoum, President (and ex-general) Omar al-Bashir, recently declared yet again that he will respect a southern decision to secede. “The National Congress Party favours unity,” he said in December. “But if the result of the referendum is separation, then we in the NCP will be the first to take note of this decision and to support it.”
So here is this Korean bureaucrat, Ban Ki-moon, urging African countries to back the unity campaign of the regime in Khartoum – a regime whose leader, President Bashir, is under indictment by the International Criminal Court for the massacres carried out by government-backed militias in Darfur.
What’s more, Ban Ki-moon is ultimately in control of the United Nations troops who are stationed in Sudan to guarantee the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. Yet he clearly said which side he backed in the referendum: “We’ll work hard to avoid a possible secession.” Who does this guy think he is?
He knows. He is the shop steward of the Federation of Sovereign States and Allied Trades (also known as the United Nations), and his job is to preserve the rights and privileges of its members. Their most important right, of course, is to keep control of all their territory forever, regardless of the views of the local people.
The African Union is particularly devoted to “preserving the unity” of all its members, because Africa’s borders are particularly arbitrary and irrational. If any of the disparate ethnic groups that are trapped together in country A were allowed to secede, then the demand for similar secessions in countries B to Z would become irresistible, or so the African orthodoxy has it.
“No Secessions” was the paramount rule of the old Organisation of African Unity, and it survived unbroken until Eritrea got its independence from Ethiopia in 1993. That was not an encouraging precedent, since Eritrea and Ethiopia soon ended up at war with each other, and no further secessions have been recognised since then.
But there is another way to look at this, and that is to count the cost of all the wars that have been fought in Africa to prevent secessions. From the Biafran war in Nigeria in the 1960s down through the various secessionist movements in Congo and Ethiopia and on to the breakaway movements in Sudan’s south and west (Darfur) today, at least ten million Africans have been killed. For what?
Nobody except some ruling elites would be worse off if the secessions had been allowed to succeed. The Nigerian elite would have somewhat less money to put into its overseas bank accounts, since the oil money would have stayed in the south-east (Biafra), and a new Biafran ruling elite would have bigger Swiss accounts.
Maybe what remained of Nigeria would have split into a Muslim north and a Yoruba-speaking Christian south-west, since without Biafra the country would have become a Muslim-majority state. So what? Maybe everybody would have been happier that way.
Most people will probably be happier if Sudan does split in the referendum planned for January, 2011. Those in the Muslim, Arabic-speaking north would have co-existed peacefully with the various Christian and animist ethnic groups of the south if they had been left to their own devices. However, the northern ruling elite imposed Islamic law to consolidate its power, and the southern elites responded with appeal to ethnic solidarity.
If the south leaves next year, it will take most of the oil with it. That is why the northern elite fought so hard to save “national unity.”. But the oil still has to go out to the sea through northern territory, so the revenue will still be shared. After two decades of killing, Sudan is broken, and the best solution is independence for the south. Unless Ban Ki-moon and his trade union get their way, in which case the war will resume.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 9, 11 and 12. (“No…then”; and “Nobody…way”)