Africa must arrest wave of socio-polital terror Muammar Gaddafi
Muammar Gaddafi

Muammar Gaddafi

Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu
An extremely serious tragedy has been occurring in the past 10 years in the Mediterranean Sea as hundreds of Africans drown virtually daily while they try to reach Italy or other European countries.

The situation has worsened since the fall of the Muammar Gaddafi government in 2011 in Libya and the emergence of a bloody chaotic socio-political environment in that country.

Many of those who risk their lives by going to Europe are destitute Libyans; others are displaced, disillusioned and economically desperate people from as far east as Eritrea in the Horn of Africa, and also as far west as Gambia on the continent’s bulge. Some are from the Southern Sudan or the Central African Republic.

They travel across the Sahara Desert, the world’s largest expanse of either sandy, Karoo, thorny or scrubby waterless land utterly unsuitable for human habitation.

Where there is water, it is mostly in lifeless salty swamps. Fresh water swamps are so few and far apart that travellers have died between them together with those renowned four-legged desert ships, camels, beasts of burden capable of withstanding the driest desert conditions for more than a month.

The terrain across which these most unfortunate people travel to get to Libya is unbelievably hostile to human beings. In addition to all those harsh physical geographical conditions, they have to face later almost inevitable death under the waves of the merciless Mediterranean Sea.

Circumstances that make people undertake trips in such risky conditions must be extremely compelling, placing their victims between a very hard place on one side, and a very deep blue sea on the other.

What is Africa doing about this tragedy? We should pose the question most probably in a slightly different form: What can Africa do about this obviously continental tragedy?

With the exception of Liberia, all other African countries are former colonies of either Spain, Portugal, Britain, France, Germany, Belgium or Italy for varying lengths of time, and in one or another colonial form.

To become independent, they each struggled, again to a varying degree, some much longer and more violently than others. Today, the entire continent is independent except the French Territory of the Afars and the Issas which still maintains very strong socio- economic relations with Paris.

Each geographical region of the continent has a grouping the main purpose of which is to promote the area’s economic development in addition to the protection and promotion of the relevant region’s political stability.

Each region’s social services are also of great concern and interest to each grouping as was shown by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) following the outbreak of the Ebola disease recently.

The East African Community (EAC) leadership is currently dealing with the socio-political crisis of Burundi. In our region, we have the Southern African Development Community (Sadc) whose operations are known to every politically, economically and socially literate Southern African.

North Africa comprises Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Sudan, countries that geographically belong to Africa but racially to Asia or to what some geo- demographers call “the Arab world.” These countries are members of the Arab League, an organisation with a trans-continental membership.

Over and above all these African regional groupings is the African Union, a successor organisation to the Organisation of African Unity (OAU).

In addition to all these, each African state has its own government whose first and most important responsibility is to promote and protect the economic, social and political interests and rights of its country’s nationals.

Economic interests and rights are safeguarded by political and social rights. Where these are non- existent, there is no freedom to practise and enjoy one’s economic interests and rights, the basic guarantees for investment, domestic as well as foreign, whether direct or otherwise.

There are, of course, other factors that cause people to leave their home countries for what are viewed as better places to seek sustenance. These factors include extraneous variables such as droughts or floods. Such factors are undoubtedly beyond the control of national governments, especially in view of the fact that they are usually unpredictable.

However, many African governments have not adopted realistic economic policies vis-a-vis their national population annual growth rates. In many African nations, there are population booms but economic slumps.

In such cases, unemployment is bound to drive people abroad, usually to extremely precarious social destinations and uncertain economic destinies. It is very much past the hour for the African continent to have become pro-active with regard to its birth rate as compared to its economic development rate.

Africa should pull a leaf out of the Chinese socio- economic book lest it becomes not only a social and economic burden on European nations, particularly the former colonial powers, but also a laughing stock to other continents.

Some Asian countries such as Kuwait, Israel, Bahrain and Oman are already feeling socio- economic strains because of large numbers of African immigrants and socio-economic refugees. Europe is presently trying to deal with the influx of African destitutes, 441 of whom were rescued from a rickety boat from Libya by an Italian naval ship this very week.

African governments should realise that governing is a very serious undertaking and that it does not begin with making promises and end up with passing resolutions at conference or seminars. It should proceed from promises to resolutions and then implementation, and hence to evaluation.

The continent is literally awash with a wide variety of minerals. If we cannot exploit them because of lack of expertise or capital finance, the obvious thing to do is to invite those with both the expertise and finance to exploit the resources, and in the process create employment for the indigenous people.

The current bloody terrorist attack in Somalia, Nigeria, Cameroun, Libya and elsewhere in Africa are criminal activities that call for urgent continental counter-measures, not just national but continental.

Perpetrators of those attacks are obviously human in appearance but beasts in their hearts. It is necessary for the AU and all regional bodies to declare war on all those who are causing death, fear and alarm in some parts of the continent. They should gather and share intelligence to arrest this wave of politico-religious terror that is sweeping through some African states.

The criminals should be made to understand that gone is the era when religion was propagated by the bullet or the sword. It is now the age of the recognition of human rights when acceptance of Islam, Christianity, Buddhism or whatever is through peaceful, voluntary and open conversion.

  • Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu is a retired, Bulawayo-based journalist. He can be contacted on cell 0734 328 136 or through email. [email protected]

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