We told you what US 'spies' got wrong about Africa; but here's where they were right on the money

Christine Mungai

09 Feb 2015 11:05

You heard about what the Americans were wrong about. But here's where they were right on the money.

 

A FEW weeks ago, we published a story on predictions of Africa in 2015 that US intelligence experts got wrong.

They expected Africa to be marginalised in the global economy, and suggested that democracy had gone as far as it could go on the continent, and that Africa would miss out on major technological advances. They were almost hopelessly wrong.

But they nailed a few. Here But are some of their predictions that were right on the money:

“African countries become more different from each other”.

Africans often get worked up when people outside the continent refer to Africa as if it were a country. However the distinction that it is 54 independent nations and not one massive, monolithic landmass is lost on not just outsiders, but sometimes on Africans themselves.

But after the structural adjustment policies that battered the economies of nearly all of Africa’s countries in the 1980s and 90s, US intelligence experts accurately predicted that the progress trajectories of African countries would begin to drift away from each other, and become more and more different “across any measurable line of performance”, largely as a function of leadership.

Take Ghana and Nigeria, for example. Both countries are former British colonies, were heavily dependent on natural resource exports, and had experienced military coups and instability in the 1970s and 1980s. But Ghana went on to become a relatively well-consolidated democracy, while in Nigeria, even with return to civilian rule in 1999, is still lurching from crisis to crisis.

The same could be said for Rwanda and Burundi, with a similar colonial history. Both inherited a toxic ethno-political system at independence, where massacres and repression culminated in civil war, and, in Rwanda’s case, genocide. But whereas Rwanda had picked up the pieces and made impressive social gains, Burundi is still one of Africa’s worst performers on the Human Development Index.

“Armies outsource security to local militias”.

The experts rightly predicted that in some countries, formal militaries will be marginalised to the extent that they will lose their capacity to secure the peace, and will occasionally “be replaced outright by informal militias that are recruited opportunistically by leaders when there is a threat.”

Such armed civilians will inevitably destabilise their own countries and be an enormous threat to their fellow citizens, the experts said.

This has been the case in the Central African Republic, where the anti-balaka militia was formed to protect locals against raids by the Seleka, the rebel coalition that had seized power in 2013. The anti-balaka militia comprises both ordinary villagers and ex-soldiers.

But in early 2014, the conflict turned decidedly gruesome, with the anti-balaka killing whole villages, as well as brutal attacks and mutilations in retaliation for the Seleka raids– in one particularly grisly incident, an anti-balaka figher ate a murdered man’s leg in a public display of cannibalism in full view of media cameras.

It makes the situation in northeast Nigeria particularly worrying. The Nigerian military has fallen flat on its face in its confrontations with the Boko Haram terror group, and local vigilante groups are now doing the work of fighting off the terrorists.

The militia fighters, known collectively as the Civilian Joint Task Force are government-backed, but are starting to worry residents for their extra-judicial, “do-it-yourself” style of justice, that includes arbitrary roadblocks and lynchings.

In November 2014, reports indicated that one militia member claimed to have decapitated 41 Boko Haram fighters near Biu in Borno state, where witnesses said they saw the fighters carrying the heads of their victims through town on wooden pikes.

“Federalism - in its various forms - will increasingly be adopted in Africa”.

The independence constitutions of most African countries provided for a powerful, authoritarian presidency, which dictators used to dish out the benefits of patronage. After the wave of multiparty politics that swept over Africa in the early 1990s, the next move towards democratic consolidation has been decentralisation of power, to counter the central government’s all-encompassing influence.

In the first decade of the 21st century, several countries in eastern and southern Africa have undertaken constitutional reviews. In Kenya, a new constitution in 2010 with a strong focus on devolving power to the grassroots. Tanzania is working on a constitution review that has hit numerous roadblocks over the federal relationship between of the island of Zanzibar and the mainland.

During the drafting of Zimbabwe’s new constitution that adopted in 2013, there were calls for a devolved or federal nature of government, and although the unity government was maintained, some commentators continue to argue that only federalism will effectively reduce conflict between between the diverse communities within Zimbabwe. No constitutional reform or new power pact in Africa, including Somalia and South Sudan, has not had devolution in some form or the other as part of the package in the last 15 years.

But there are questions as to whether federalism is a comprehensive, or even appropriate, answer to Africa’s problems, the experts argued. Federalism is more likely to succeed if the impetus for conflict is ethnic division that has a strong geographic component.

But if religion is the main driver of division, federalism is less likely to be effective because religious identity is less likely to be geographically defined.

“Everyone will want an African convert.”

This is an unusual one: The US experts rightly predicted that Africa would be at the center of many proselytizing efforts worldwide: the Catholic Church has made Africa a priority while Pentecostal and Evangelical Christian movements were spending “millions of dollars on recruiting large numbers of Africans”, they noted.

Iran has also devoted substantial efforts to fostering its religious and political views in Africa, and Saudi Arabia has spent large amounts of money to export its exclusionary Wahhabi tradition.

The shifting religio-demographic profile complicates the success of federalism, the experts said.

“Religious identity is changing quickly in Africa and will therefore thwart many efforts to draw boundaries around defined communities of believers,“ the experts said.

But at present, the numbers of Christians and Muslims in Africa are about evenly matched, at 400-500 million each.

One study by Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life in 2010 found that the growth of the two religions leaves only about one in 10 people in sub-Saharan African who are neither Muslim nor Christian, the study found. That implies growth cannot continue at the same rate, because there is little evidence of people switching from one faith to the other.

And religion is not just growing in numbers, it’s deepening and radicalising too.

The study found least half of all Christians in sub-Saharan Africa believe Jesus will return to Earth in their lifetime, while nearly one in three Muslims in the region expect to see the re-establishment of the caliphate—Islam’s golden age—before they die.