Africa: Facing Human Security Challenges in the 21st Century

Chapter 6 - Globalization and Challenges of Political Insecurity in Africa

185 Chapter 6 Globalization and Challenges of Political Insecurity in Africa Overview Africa has become associated with conflict, insecurity and human rights atrocities. In the popular imagination and the media, overpopulation, environmental degradation and ethnic hatred dominate accounts of African violence, while in academic and policy-making circles, conflict and insecurity have also come to occupy center stage, with resource-hungry warlords and notions of ‘greed’ and ‘grievance’ playing key explanatory roles. Since the attacks of 9/11, there has also been mounting concern that the continent’s so-called ‘ungoverned spaces’ provide safe havens for terrorists intent on destroying Western civilization. Positing an “insecurity dilemma,” in which national security, defined as regime security by state authorities, becomes pitted against the incompatible demands of ethnic, social, and religious forces, this chapter addresses the problems and prospects for political security in Africa in the 21st century. Introduction Security is a precondition for development. The often cited ‘no development without security, no security without development’ captures this interconnectivity (Dochas 2007). Political security of citizens is therefore a sine qua non for African development. Today authoritarian regimes are being challenged by individuals and movements in search of more democratic forms of governance in Africa. Africans in many countries are showing remarkable persistence in forcing their leaders to comply with popular demands for political pluralism to replace the common one-party regimes. Calls for open and democratic governance, characterized by popular 186 participation, competitive elections, and free flow of information can be heard in many African countries. This new disposition toward democratization in Africa is a consequence of pressures both internal and external to African societies. To be sure, the continent’s declining economic fortunes have made people more skeptical and critical of their governments, with new African thinking prompting individuals to move beyond old taboos. Demands from within African countries are pressing leaders to deliver on their phony promises of economic growth and prosperity they made in order to encourage the acceptance of devastating structural adjustment policies supported by international financial institutions. The new insistence by external aid donors and creditors on good governance also has provided a window of opportunity for African democrats to push for transparency and accountability in their countries. Likewise, the worldwide democratic revolution and its corresponding summons to protect and promote individual human rights have contributed to generate protests like in Egypt where ironically an elected government has been kicked out by a U.S. backed military. For the sake of historical hindsight, in 1947, Winston Churchill said: “Many forms of government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect... Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Churchill’s words were prophetic. Democracy is a difficult and necessarily arduous process. It is about citizens and states organizing through an institutional core in a common effort for societal betterment and justice. We democrats know that our system is not easy; nor has it been perfected. But it is in this very difficulty and imperfection that the strengths of democracy are present. It is in our struggle to maintain the democratic systems some have enjoyed for hundreds of years; it is in our fight to consolidate flourishing new democracies. Indeed, in political gatherings the richness and strengths of the democratic process are evident. 187 Background In the years immediately following the independence of Africa, a widespread discourse of African Socialism, whose proponents included Kwame Nkrumah and Ahmed Sékou Touré, conceived the state as the architect of modernization, through which a new society would be created (Bayart, 1993). Multiple decades later, African states have been unable to gain the trust of their citizens, failing to provide them even with the most basic services. For example, in Rwanda, the entire state structure from the town mayor to the general had been mobilized in view of the genocide in 1994. Even though all examples do not necessarily reach those levels of violence, the African state, in such a case, has proved to be a great obstacle for the initiative of freedom for its own people. Another example is the Democratic Republic of Congo or Cameroon, where the local bureaucracies still impose taxes and issue patents for every possible economic sector, while the central government doesn’t bother to...