08 May 2000:`Security in Africa`, paper by Jakkie Cilliers at the Ministerial Conference on Security, Stability, Development and Co-operation in Afric

AFRICAN SECURITY*

Jakkie Cilliers, Executive Director, Institute for Security Studies, South Africa



Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen.

It is an honour and a pleasure for me to be able to address you this morning.

In many respects the dominant theories on security, and indeed those regarding development, reflect the history and experience of Europe and North America. At universities, even those in Africa, we are taught that security is synonymous with the security of the state — generally against external threats. This state-centred understanding of security reflects state development patterns in Europe and North America where, during previous centuries, local leaders established ever-larger territorial communities through the violent conquest of their neighbours. Threats to the ‘state’ were therefore external and largely military. This has often resulted in what has been described as the ‘security dilemma’: what one state justifies as legitimate security actions, others perceive as threatening. The result is a mindset that has permeated almost all thinking on this issue - that stability can only be achieved within a context of a balance of power between states and that it is based on appropriate armed force. Such a balance of power has historically been anchored on military security alliances - well taught to any student of European history. In time balance of power politics became institutionalised as ‘collective security alliance’s such as NATO. At the end of the Second World War this paradigm also informed the United Nations’ understanding of security and remains reflected in the UN Charter to this day.

Present conflicts in Africa and elsewhere underline the reality that security threats often arise, not from outside aggression, but from the unconsolidated nature of the African state, from lack of accountable and good governance and from implementation failure.

In mature and functional political systems, the coercive monopoly of the state provides protection to all citizens, as a basic right. The failure of a state to provide such protection to its citizens in weak African states gives rise to a much more complex ‘security dilemma’. This condition becomes apparent when intermingled or adjacent groups of people start to sense that they have to take care of their own security. Such a belief is often underpinned by longer-serving identification with tribal or ethnic groups that to most Africans represent a much more salient sense of identity than to the artificial boundaries of colonial states. When groups perceive the state not to be capable, or willing, to provide security, or that it serves sectarian or private interests, they will take their own measures for protection or avoid the state. In the process, security becomes privatised, or communised and the state delegitimised.

Much of the challenges that we are gathered here today to discuss are rooted in the nature of state formation in Africa — and lack of state institutionalisation. These are very different from that in the so-called developed world from which we tend to draw our theories, our understanding and therefore often our answers.

Effective colonial rule of much of Africa lasted for a relatively brief historical space of some eighty years. As a result, the modern state structure in Africa imposed on the continent during this period often forms little more than a thin carapace over the largely hidden realms of the informal economy and its companion polity.

It is important to bear in mind that at root the colonial and apartheid state was based on domination and on its ability to impose its hegemony upon the subject peoples and to extract from them the taxes necessary for the maintenance of the colonial state apparatus. Even in those cases where constitutional reforms were introduced to limit the absolute power of the state, this happened only during the immediate approach to independence. Colonial administrations were bound together by a common code of ethics and surety of racial solidarity - an intrusion ruled by a foreign elite banded together under the governor by a code of behaviour, "a set of guardians whose strength lay in the pack".1

While the colonial state was essentially bureaucratic, the post-independence regimes have been ultrapolitical.2 Many African states came to independence through low intensity conflicts waged by liberation movements against colonial powers. Having taken power in this way, the new state incumbents were left highly exposed and vulnerable to challengers from within — sometimes from competitors bent on using these very same methods against them once the unifying solidity of a common enemy disappeared. Rulers also now had to rely on their fellow nationals to maintain law and order, some with political ideas and ambitions of their own. It soon became evident, common to all functionally undifferentiated societies that the closer one was to the centre of the political apparatus, the greater the chances of material reward. As a result, the state in Africa has often been the primary arena for competition, for power, and for influence over the distribution of scarce resources. Writing in the early 1980’s Jackson and Rosberg noted: "What the church was for ambitious men in medieval Europe or the business corporation in nineteenth-and-twentieth century America, the state is today for ambitious Africans with skill and fortune."3

The driving force behind Africa`s second experiment with democracy during the eighties and early nineties came both from ideological conviction and the growing impatience of an ever-bolder public consciousness, and from the related matter of the continent`s prevailing economic crisis. For the first time since independence, domestic support became more important than foreign patrons, and African leaders had to confront the inherent weaknesses of their regimes and to consider sharing power with others. These were uncomfortable times for all this happened at a time of deep and structural economic crisis.

At the very moment when democratisation stimulated the popular demand for better social and welfare services, structural adjustment required that this be denied. In broad terms this played a significant part in further undermining the states claims to legitimacy in the eyes of its own citizens. As the World Bank itself recognised in its 1997 World Development Report, "An institutional vacuum of significant proportions has emerged in many parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, leading to increased crime and an absence of security, affecting investment and growth". Yet it is difficult to see how the Bank’s prescription of higher real wages for the civil service, higher spending on social services and vast investment in personnel development could be sustained at the same time as cutting public sector deficits and rebuilding physical and institutional infrastructure.

By the nineteen nineties the ‘military balance’ between the state and society in Africa had changed profoundly. At independence, one could still argue that most of the post-colonial regimes retained the balance of force through control over the security apparatus and the level of armaments at their unique disposal. At the turn of the century an increased number of African states have atrophied and weapons have spilled over from armed conflicts throughout the region, circulating virtually uncontrolled. This has allowed groups in a number of societies to arm and challenge the incumbent élite while the security agencies themselves, in many instances, have decayed and lost their coherence. As a result, a military victory by any of the various armed forces in a number of countries at war, such as the DR Congo or Sudan, is unlikely to reduce levels of social violence or the trend towards social fragmentation without additional and substantial negotiations and peacebuilding measures. At the same time state control, to the extent that it exists in the form of organised administration and the provision of services, has contracted inward, in many instances reflecting an exclusively urban bias and neglect of the rural populations.

Today the surfeit of arms and lack of control over national territories has resulted in much of Sub-Saharan Africa being characterised not by the state’s monopoly over the instruments of coercion, but by a balance of force between the state and the community. The result, in a highly armed and violent continent, ironically, is the creation of a security vacuum. Within Nairobi, Johannesburg or Luanda security is available to those who can afford it. To Angola, Sierra Leone and Liberia, war came to those countries that had exploitable resources worth fighting for. In all instances vast sections of the population are left to fend for themselves and forced to arm and organise to prevent their exploitation by local warlords, ethnically based politicians or criminals.

Although the end of superpower competition had resulted in a reduction in state-sponsored arms transfers to Africa, the fact that local disputes were less globalised meant that outside powers had less will to impact upon on the conduct, termination and outcome of these conflicts. Local rivalries and antagonisms were given freer rein, being more remote from world centres of power and insignificant in terms of the global system. Africans could no longer rely on outside assistance to end local wars that were no threat to vital foreign interests and are now forced to accept responsibility for peace and security themselves — though at a time when the African state is at its weakest.

The loss of the coherence of the state has also encouraged the emergence of new forms of power relations, notably between the central government and local actors, and of new institutions, such as vigilante groups and private militias. The creation of new economic and financial opportunities has seen the emergence of national and transnational actors who are directly implicated in criminal economic activities such as drug-trafficking, trade in stolen cars, general smuggling, and more. In short, the outsourcing and commercialisation of state functions in unconsolidated states have not proven to be a panacea for the lack of capacity that has characterised the post-colonial state.

For a time external non-state actors, including private military companies, stepped into the void left by the international community, sometimes as proxies, sometimes as independent agents, able to influence local events to their own advantage or that of their paymaster.

In this respect, the privatisation of war and the use of armed forces in neighbouring countries for both national strategic commercial exploitive purposes have become an emerging trend across large swathes of Africa. Sometimes it would appear as if the instruments of sovereignty are employed for personal and private ends rather than in support of national objectives. To some commentators this is evidence of an increase in the competition for scarce resources as populations grow and sustained economic growth remains elusive.

Direct conflict between African states such as that which we see between Ethiopia and Eritrea has, in fact, been a relatively isolated phenomenon. Not so war by proxy. Today any numbers of African countries are involved in indirect confrontations with one another. Often these conflicts are conducted through support to armed opposition parties in neighbouring states, sometimes with a religious or ethnic character, often taking place in a third country, drawing others into the war and expanding the conflict. There are many examples of these activities in the Horn and in Central Africa. In other cases neighbouring countries have involved themselves directly in the internal affairs of others or allowed their territory to be used as a springboard for such involvement. Possibly the most obvious examples today relate to what is happening in central and eastern parts of the DR Congo. Yet in other instances countries have been drawn into conflicts by their difficulty to control their often inhospitable and rugged borders, particularly when international boundaries cut through rather than follow broad ethnic and tribal divides.

During the Cold War regional conflicts were at once internationalised and subsumed within the superpower competition and controlled to avoid escalation into nuclear conflict. In the process the strategic relevance of regions such as Africa was elevated as part of the global chessboard - pawns in a much larger game. At the beginning of the twenty-first century the situation is much changed. Africa has lost its strategic relevance. Apart from humanitarian concerns, only selected areas with exploitable natural resources demand the attention of the larger and more powerful countries.

A blurring in the clear demarcation of roles between sub-regional, regional and international organisations - the UN in particular — has occurred after the end of the Cold War. During the bi-polar era, the division of labour was clear. The UN mounted peacekeeping operations and deployed political missions, while regional organisations concentrated on preventive diplomacy. The proliferation of internal conflicts after the fall of the Berlin Wall has confounded this clear division. Almost as if to mirror this trend, the increase in the number and the nature of the various actors involved in internal conflicts have further complicated the ability of state-centred negotiations and mediation to succeed.

The response of the international community and much of Africa, to the challenge of instability on the continent is generally hostage to the state-centred peacekeeping debate. It is to peacekeeping that commentators turn when looking for solutions to violent crises, crises that are very different to those envisaged at the end of Second World War when the UN Charter was drafted.

Globally a new security paradigm seems to be emerging. This consists of regions accepting co-responsibility and sharing the burden to police themselves and a dilution of the central role that many had hoped that the United Nations would play in this regard. This agenda is primarily, but not exclusively, driven by the United States that is seeking co-option and burden sharing by others in the hegemonic role that the demise of the Soviet Union had thrust upon it. The most recent and arguably the most important indication of this trend is the US drive for NATO to undertake so-called non-Article 5 missions and US support for a greater ‘European defence identity’ as opposed to a transatlantic identity.

A combination of developments — Africa’s peripheral status in a period of global financial instability, Western peacekeeping failure’s in Somalia, Rwanda and in Angola, and the enthusiasm for sub-regional initiatives under the auspices of organisations such as ECOWAS and SADC — have led to successive French, British, American and other initiatives to build African peacekeeping capacities to deal with African emergencies. In this process of obtaining ‘peacekeeping on the cheap’, countries such as Nigeria and Ghana have had to bear a huge burden in financial, diplomatic and political resources. The recent push by the international community in Sierra Leone and MONUC in the DR Congo represent a welcome but tentative return to Africa that holds promise and may, if successfully concluded, indicate a limited re-engagement of Africa. Therefore the importance of ensuring that recent developments in Sierra Leone not derail this tentative re-engagement. But there can be little doubt that the era of ‘lean peacekeeping’ has arrived which will require the ability to ‘make do’ with available resources where peacekeepers are neither impartial nor busy with consensual peacekeeping. These operations will also appear to remain essentially Third World operations within which the role of the developed world is a logistically and financially supportive one. African peacekeepers will have to adapt to these conditions of stringency and efficacy in seeking to deal with complex emergencies and we will have to ensure that the international community does indeed come up with the supportive peacebuilding abilities and developmental engagement that is required by these often intractable problems.

Regional peacekeeping capacity building programs by countries such as the UK, the USA and France are domestically less controversial than the provision of direct assistance to the security agencies of African countries. They provide high donor visibility at limited cost and serve to strengthen the desire for African solutions to African problems. Many African governments will continue to accept such assistance — but sometimes using it for their own, as opposed to the intended purpose as we have seen with a number of ACRI trained battalions. These should not deter Africans from accepting and using offers of training and assistance where appropriate, but doing so on our own terms. Often very little of the assistance provided under these and other packages is really spent in Africa with the vast majority paying for foreign nationals and their companies to consult, teach and leave.

To be fair, the thrust towards the provision of regional stability through indigenous peacekeeping forces in Africa by donor countries does not mean complete abandonment of the continent to its own devices, although Africa is often at the margins of global security concerns. Under a new secretary-general the United Nations is returning to Africa — a strategic reengagement that has taken several years to emerge and reflects, in part, the extent to which the international community has been shamed to re-engage after Rwanda. But we should also accept the limits of the international community in bringing peace to war torn societies in the absence of a common agreement amongst protagonists for an end to violence.

The extent to which African leaders and armed factions are taking control and responsibility for their own destiny in recent years — captured in the phrase ‘African solutions to African problems’ - is as much a product of Africa’s marginalisation as it is of the security challenges that confront the continent. In this process the debate within the continent and elsewhere is enthusiastic about the complementary role that sub-regional organisations can play in the maintenance of peace and security in the various sub-regions and the role that the latter can play in peacekeeping.

Yet regional approaches can only bring limited additional capabilities to bear and the burden to co-ordinate and to collaborate is often onerous. Regional alliances of the willing and able in Africa often do not have the practical means to bring security to the continent without the continued engagement and support of the international community. As part of regional peacekeeping forces, tentative democracies and de facto one-party states also find it difficult to transfer the values of respect for human rights and impartiality to the armed forces of neighbouring countries when they have been unable to inculcate the same within their own borders.

The prospects for sub-regional collaborative security arrangements in Africa is limited, exactly because states remain the basic building blocks and decisional loci of multinational security regimes. The process of state-formation and state building in Africa has, on the whole, not produced consolidated and strong foundation stones for larger security constructs.

It is therefore appropriate to situate the contribution that can be made by organisations such as SADC, IGAD and ECOWAS more within a regional peacebuilding approach where the emphasis is on conflict prevention, good governance and observance of human rights within the respective regions. In this context military confidence and security building measures such as joint training and the like are important. But very often more important work is being done through police co-operation, immigration control and judicial co-operation. Africa should be wary of seeking to stake out roles and tasks for sub-regional organisations that is both unrealistic and relieve the international community from its primary obligation for global peace and security.

In their efforts at wrestling with the challenge of helping Africa to become more secure at domestically affordable political and economic costs, the recipes of donor countries are becoming more varied, useable and realistic. We do, however, need to remain vigilant that these approaches not serve to marginalise global responsibilities. Examples of such initiatives include limited logistic support and financial assistance to help African countries to enforce their own version of stability — often in their own interests — in their backyard. Such support is often enough to assuage domestic political and other opinion that donor countries are ‘doing something’, short of committing own ground forces, and the risks that such an operation could incur. The assistance thus offered is also often inadequate and conditional, constraining the real abilities to re-establish a degree of stability within a reasonable time. Yet the recipe is an important one, and provides a framework for quick reaction, sometimes prior to or in parallel to responses by the Security Council of the United Nations. Unconstrained by all the constraints of global multilateral politics, they provide an additional avenue, still subject to the primary role of the UN, to bring stability where mass violence threatens.

Although perhaps not in the guise of Executive Outcomes, the privatisation of security and even peacekeeping and war in Africa as well as the use of private corporations such as MPRI in so-called security sector reform activities in a country such as Nigeria will continue under present conditions. Africans have little choice but to resort to other forms of security in response to the state’s incapacity to satisfy their most basic requirement, the provision of security. In tandem with the trend towards the outsourcing of development assistance, the pressure to do so will also increase from donors wishing an arms length from engaging the military, yet wishing to engage and help Africa. Often missing from the menu of security sector reform activities by countries such as the US and the UK, is an engagement in capacity building regarding the criminal justice system within countries. The importance of this will become evident below.

Building African peacekeeping capacity and the use of private companies cannot and will not be much more than of symbolic value at a time when the fundamental challenge is that of state building. While such endeavours may help African armed forces to build regional confidence and stability, the need for state-building inevitably means a return to basics — and it is here that Africans need to recapture their own destiny in a concrete manner. Allow me a short footnote here. Although I am using the term ‘state’ this is not the same as government. Given the weak nature of civil society in Africa, political development on the continent cannot occur without also building civil society and allowing room for the development of a free and open discourse. It is therefore of paramount importance that the CSSDCA process, sub-regional and regional organisations such as the OAU provide space for civil society — as indeed is happening here today.

Regional security cannot be divorced from domestic security. Basic stability and law and order must be provided within a country that wishes to provide the same in its neighbourhood. This is arguably the larger and more important challenge given the extent of state collapse in much of Africa. Encouraging undemocratic weak states to assist other undemocratic weak states in the provision of security without an unequivocal and significant involvement of the international community may, over time, have unintended consequences. One such consequence could be to further strengthen external involvement in the affairs of others, while continuing to allow poor countries to expend significant scarce resources on the maintenance of military forces with an essentially non-domestic security orientation.

Since independence, Africa’s military coups have institutionalised forays by the armed forces into the domestic polity and economy. Coups allow military commanders to run both the body politic and economy, hence commercialising the interests of an already politicised officer corps. As a result, the legacy of interest in the domestic economy creates a precedent for further intervention in the body politic that acts as the platform for financial gain in Africa. By way of example, successive military regimes in Nigeria created a commercially inclined military ethos, leading to further intervention in the state administration. To prevent such involvement, Africa’s leaders have often found it necessary to buy off the officer corps by bringing it into patrimonial networks. Such efforts to control the officer corps through patronage inevitably raise the commercial aspirations of the military élite and have often had long term implications for civilian governments. This is a trend that has also come to Southern Africa in recent years.

The transformation from essentially predatory and antiquated security agencies to one’s that can serve Africa’s needs will not be accomplished simply by superimposing western concepts of ‘enlightened’ military professionalism or police reform on Africa. Western concepts of military professionalism imply a perennial search for institutional autonomy that contradicts the notion of tight political control. The latter is in many instances essential for regime survival in the developing world. This is bound to create a high level of tension where foreign training programmes are prescribed as a key component of African security sector reform.

Given the status quo, the major challenge in the proper regulation of Africa`s security agencies lies first and foremost in appropriate role definition — what are these structures for, as opposed to what we were told they were against during the colonial era. There is a cogent need to redefine security in terms that are relevant to Africa and not in accordance with the cold war requirements of the former two superpowers or those of the former colonial countries — and to design and manage accordingly.

Such an approach should be rooted squarely within that of ‘human security’ — an approach that refers to the safety and wellbeing of people, individuals and communities rather than that of government alone. Without it, territorial integrity and state security become hollow shells. As the necessary complement to state security, human security brings people-centred considerations into the core of the elements that constitute a peaceful and stable society. And while there is a growing number of definitions of human security and debates over its conceptual grounding, its people-centred focus remains its most powerful attribute.

Such an approach will also recognise that any focus on the provision of security should include the domestic criminal justice systems, i.e. the police, justice, correctional services and welfare components of governance. Far too much of our attention is focussed on the military — as if the armed forces provide internal security and justice. The security vacuum in much of Africa often has little to do with the armed forces, apart from the fact that they are in a position to blackmail governments into the provision of unjustified large slices of national resources. Poorly trained police, lack of investigative capacity, delayed justice, overcrowded prisons and a retributive approach to crime (as opposed to a restorative penal system) lies at the root of much of Africa’s insecurity. Social science and political activism has also given surprisingly little attention to African police forces, the judiciary or prisons in stark contrast to the large body of literature on the role of the military. The criminal justice system in most African countries still retains its colonial character. Most police forces are run as quasi-military units with an emphasis on order and control rather than justice and crime prevention. They are generally centralised and badly prepared to function as modern police agencies. The syndrome of predatory policing is widespread in Africa and not restricted to war-torn countries where exploitative military practices have long been established. This is an area within which donors are ready and willing, within certain constraints, to contribute meaningfully to the advancement of security.

Finally, Africa has many academic networks and a rich tradition of conflict resolution, even if these practices and methodologies are unfamiliar to most Western analysts. What the continent often appears to lack is a critical mass of applied policy work in the field of security studies and conflict management. Such abilities would open up the debate and serve as an effective civil-society counterbalance to state institutions.

In much of Africa the informal and unregulated has long been much more important than the formal. The so-called ‘second’ or ‘real’ economy in a country such as the DR Congo exceeds, several folds, the size of the formal economy as reflected in GDP figures. This is particularly true in Central and West Africa where the attempts by successive civilian and military governments to gain income through border control, taxes and the like have stimulated the informal economy and provided an incentive to avoid the state. In political-economic terms the massive size of the informal economy reflect a response to the state’s incapacity to satisfy the needs of its people. It can also be interpreted as a political statement, reflecting negatively on the legitimacy of governments and even of state structures. Similarly the degree to which other sources of security are increasingly evident, through warlordism, armed ethnicity, religious separatist tendencies, the resort to private security and the like, imply that state security systems appear to have little to offer its subjects. Without statewide efforts at institutionalisation, by creating room for the inclusion of informal and often illegal activities within the formal — there can be little hope for African states.

Despite the predictions of those who argue that the economic forces of globalisation are eroding the power and even the requirement of the state, strong, efficient and capable states will remain the prerequisite for both stability and democracy in Africa. Concerted state building remains the key pre-condition for regional peace building in Africa. The state remains the keystone upon which the global legal system is built, and it is the cornerstone for democracy. The state also provides the only measure of protection and counter-balance in containing the forces of the free market, which are so heavily titled against the developing world.

One of the key implications of financial globalisation, we are taught, is the requirement for increased discipline of governments to maintain sound and consistent macro-economic and structural policies. For the poor and the weak, globalisation threatens that marginal changes in investment patterns by global standards can spell economic catastrophe, or as President Thabo Mbeki has put it "A marginal portfolio adjustment by the investor can easily amount to a first order event for the recipient. A slight turn by the sleeping elephant, to make itself more comfortable, can result in the complete annihilation of the entire universe of a colony of ants."4 Over time probably only consolidated state-hood can provide Africa with some protection against the fickle international market game. And only an accountable and effective government can provide justice and security for its citizens.

How does Africa respond to this challenge where the mass of its civil service (including the members of its security services and agencies) are poorly paid, not well trained, apparently inefficient and apparently corrupt? Let us turn the question around. Why do civil servants continue to work at jobs when the salaries are often so inadequate as to be below the poverty line? For the majority the primary importance of a job is not the poor wage, but the useful contacts it brings, the access it offers to resources, and its opportunities to allocate scare commodities or to exhort from those lower down the social scale. All of these are also entry points into the informal and ways in which to avoid the state as the broader African citizenry often actively seeks to actively evade civil obligations and to express resistance to the state and to the class which controls it.

African states, individually and collectively, do not have the coercive capacity to enforce stability on the continent in more than the most localised spots. It will be through inclusive dialogue, through talking, negotiating and trust, not through the use of force that we will restore stability and provide security to our people. This requires a commitment to talk, to facilitate and to negotiate — to compromise if necessary and revisit the common perception that the future must necessarily be retribution for the past. This realisation is in stark contrast to the African reality of military interference in the internal affairs of neighbours, while simultaneously insisting politically on the principle of non-interference in domestic affairs.

Today Africa stands as a continent at one of the most critical junctures in its history. Not since the conferences of 1884 and 1885 has the situation seemed so fluid, so fraught with danger, yet also so challenging in terms of the need for vision and wise leadership. While the global community, commentators and analysts are deeply concerned with recent developments in Africa, these are no longer proxy cold war battles fought on behalf of distant powers, or colonial powers providing stability in exchange for political support in multinational fora or to protect captive markets. Africans are fighting the wars in Africa in an environment where, eventually, we must come to terms with our own identity and security - of water finding its own level. Democratic theory presupposes a territorial unit of democracy but the African State often does not have the capacity to ensure security for its citizens or stability beyond its borders.

At the inter-state level the central strategic problem in Africa is not deterrence, as in the Cold War, but reassurance. Unlike deterrence, which relies on strategic interaction between opposing states, the key to reassurance is reliable normative and institutional structures. The appropriate framework for weak countries is that of a comprehensive approach to regional security and stability that emphasises transparency, confidence building mechanisms and co-operative engagement of its neighbours — and that builds on an approach that provides domestic stability first. The challenge is therefore not that of collective defence, but collaborative security. It is to this endeavour that regional capacity building efforts should turn.

The cold war scaffolding that ensured both borders and stability in post-colonial Africa has been removed. As a result African leaders and the African state is involved in a long delayed process of shakeout. Seen in perspective, this development is of strategic and long-term significance in any debate on Africa and provides the real cause of hope for the future of the continent. To capture this moment we need to bridge age-old difference and negotiate towards inclusive settlements. If you want to stop armed conflict you must talk to the persons with the guns.

At present an arc of crisis stretches from Eritrea, through Sudan, Rwanda and the DR Congo to Angola, affecting almost a score of states. Africans must guarantee Africa, but can hardly do so given the weakness of the state and fragility of many countries. Without stability there will only be war, poverty and the continued marginalisation of Africa — and no chance for economic development and growth. Given the nature of the African State and the balance of coercive power between the state and the people of Africa, an end to conflict requires a true commitment to reconciliation and negotiation.

Thank you.

* Thematic paper prepared for the Ministerial Conference on Security, Stability, Development and Co-operation, Abuja, Nigeria, 8-9 May 2000.

Endnotes

  1. D. Austin, Things fall apart, Orbis, Winter 1982, pp 928-929.
  2. Ibid, p 929.
  3. R H Jackson & C G Rosberg, Personal rule in black Africa: Prince, autocrat, prophet, tyrant, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982, p 14.
  4. Opening address of the Ministerial Meeting of the Xll NAM Summit Meeting of Heads of State and Government of the Non-Aligned Movement, Durban, 31 August 1998, in SA Journal of International Affairs, SAIIA, Johannesburg, p. 121
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