Mr Daniel K. Kalinaki
The lightning announcement of a peace deal between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo this week was soon followed by the thunderous report of mining concessions agreed between Washington and Kinshasa. Once upon a time, the transactional self-interest inherent in foreign affairs was nuanced and peppered over by humanitarian or other grandiose ideals.
Those days are gone, perhaps forever in our lifetime. If some hapless lives in some remote jungle in eastern DR Congo are indeed saved by the swooshing of a pen several hundred miles away in Washington D.C., well and good; hallelujah! But this was mainly about minerals, not mankind. And just as well, pragmatists will argue. Pan Africans, on the other hand, will rightly see this as a failure of local agency and the pyrrhic triumph of ego and jingoistic nationalism over mutual self-interest.
The vast wealth buried within Congo's bowels and sticking out of its skin has brought mostly pain and suffering for its people. First came the brutal Belgians under King Leopold who, like a tick, grew fat and ridiculously wealthy by feeding off the Congo while subjecting its people to horrors remarkable for the wickedness of the imaginations that thought them up.
The Belgians, later joined by other Western parasites, left their local askari Mobutu Sese Seko in charge of the plantation while its proceeds continued to be spirited away. Ordinary Congolese were left with a deep fascination for Western haute couture and life that continues to find vibrant yet deeply sad expression in music and art.
Uganda and Rwanda's invasion of Zaire in 1996 had many objectives but it was also an opportunity to, as eventually became cliché, bring African solutions to African problems. Those efforts floundered against the rocks of petty but bloody sibling rivalry which space does not allow us to revisit here.
In the three decades that followed, two broad approaches appeared for frontline states: one was to see Congo as a 'problem' to be solved, either by the installation of a client regime or through supporting local militia to pursue military and political objectives while ensuring access to and control of some of the country's economic surplus.
The other was to see Congo as an opportunity to be pursued by appealing to the self-interest of its people and leaders while building trade and other supporting infrastructure to woo this reluctant giant.
Nudging DRC into the East African Community was the most significant outcome of this approach, but not the only one. Building diplomatic runways with Kinshasa as Kigali and Kampala did were steps in the right direction, as was Uganda's effort, spearheaded by President Museveni, to build roads into eastern DR Congo.
Given the poor state of roads in key parts of Uganda, particularly the capital, Kampala, this was received with understandable opposition, but, as this column has repeatedly argued, it was a correct strategy for both economic and political reasons. There is great upside in trading with Congo, which the roads will facilitate, and countries generally try to get along with their major trading partners.
The US-brokered peace deal will give Washington dibs on key elements of Congo's natural resources, including coltan and rare earths, and is an embarrassing slap in the face for the EAC, the African Union, and some of the African problems stymieing African solutions but it is not fatal.
Congo will also need access to the EAC market and to the coastline on the Indian Ocean, which is closer to its eastern riches than the AtlanticDR Congo is not going to be shifted to the American Midwest and the people of Congo will still need eggs, milk, fish and other products that we produce, and they currently don't. Ocean is.
In effect, the peace deal gives us clarity of which direction to take. America, with its big stick and even bigger schtick, is unlikely to look kindly on any support to local militia in eastern DR Congo.
But it cannot stop us from building roads and railway lines into the country, opening our upcoming airport in western Uganda to Congolese cargo, or jointly developing our cross-border oil fields.
After three decades of overt and covert conflict with our behemoth of a neighbour, it is time to make love, not war, with the Congolese.
Mr Daniel K. Kalinaki is a journalist and poor man’s freedom fighter.
[email protected]; @Kalinaki
