Are African states facing total disintegration?

General David Sejusa believes Africa is in turmoil. The African Union is helpless, at best, and useless at worst. 
Gen Sejusa has a first-rate grasp of matters of statecraft and how to govern society, so he is always worth listening to. But where is the evidence for his sheer pessimism and dire assessment? Depending on how one positions the analytical lens, the evidence is all over.
Ethiopia is trapped in civil war. The two Sudans have two sets of crises both converging of severe state stress and social disharmony. Mozambique has been in trouble, Nigeria is in tumult and seems to get worse by the year. 

Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali and Niger all face insurgencies and jihadists groups challenging the central state. The DR Congo has kept the near permanent status of an absentee state in the east, allowing freedom to militias, armed groups and violent entrepreneurs of different stripes including Uganda’s Allied Democratic Front (ADF) recently blamed for a string of terrorist attacks in and around Uganda’s capital, Kampala. What about the Central Africa Republic? Oh, there is Libya too.

Some years ago I attended a closed-door, high level meeting in Washington DC on the security situation in Africa. The meeting tried to do some forecasting into the future. It had some of the leading western scholars who research and write on Africa. 
We were presented with what I thought was a cynical question: did we think Africa was likely to have more peace or more war in the coming years? We had to vote! The majority voted for the latter. As an African, I felt outraged that leading academics and policymakers were cynically predicting a bleak future for the continent where conflict would reign. I expressed my disquiet. 
Here were are now in 2021 and the group that voted for the prediction that Africa was on course for increased conflict and violence appear to be having the last laugh. No doubt, there have been recent flare-ups in armed violence or return to war after long periods of relative peace.  There is sufficient evidence to paint a portrait of a crumbling Africa, to see tumult and trouble. 

For those who make academic and policy careers out of conflict situations, it is tempting to amplify and trumpet the worsening situation.  But the continent has been here before. Africa arguably has had a worse conflict outlook before than we are experiencing today. At one point, in the 1980s and into the 1990s, the bulk of southern African was engrossed in deadly violence and brutal civil wars, from Angola to Mozambique, Zimbabwe to South Africa and Southwest Africa. 
Most of West Africa either had raging civils wars or incessant military coups, both impregnable sources of instability and insecurity. In East and the Horn, Burundi, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Sudan and Uganda were all dealing with largescale armed violence.

Africa and Africans have enough socioeconomic problems to wrestle with. Conflict and state crises should be the least of our worries. Elites fighting for control of state power, and who draw whole societies into war make focusing on real problems of underdevelopment secondary.  Yet unless the question of state power is settled; until we forge a viable and acceptable governing formula including how to share power and accommodate competing interests, it is impossible to deal with the more demanding and critical questions of improving livelihoods and promoting the wellbeing of African peoples.  Without establishing strong states and effective governing systems, including robust mechanisms for managing differences and disagreements, it is impossible to have order and stability. And where there is no order and stability, we can’t have meaningful economic productivity and social engagements.

All this takes me back to my professional craft as a student of politics and power. What Africa is facing today is nothing new. It is easy to be blown away by the rapid happenings of our times and forget that the world is vast and has a deep history.  What Europe went through for most of the medieval and early modern period is incomparable to Africa’s experiences in our times. Worse, Africa has never had anything close to the deaths and destructions of the two world wars, started and fought by major European powers. This is in no way to downplay to extent and magnitude of the dire situation many African states and societies face today. Rather, it is to argue that Africa and Africans can find their way out of the current disasters and press forward. 

Ultimately, it is up to Africa’s political and state elites to marshal the wisdom for negotiating durable settlements that buttress stable and feasible governing systems. But this is unlikely unless the wider African public exercises agency and exacts pressure on the elites fighting each other over controlling the levers of state power.
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