ANALYSIS: African conflicts barely registered at Munich

The peripheralisation of Africa was again evident at last week’s Munich Security Conference – the world’s premier forum on global security issues. Conflicts dominating world news, such as Ukraine, Venezuela, the Indo-Pacific, and Greenland, monopolised the debate. Africa struggled to be heard.

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“Generally, the focus of the Munich Security Conference is … hard security, military security issues because of the war in Ukraine, and of course the bad transatlantic relationships,” Jakkie Cilliers, Institute for Security Studies (ISS) Board of Trustees Chair and Head of its African Futures unit, told ISS Today. “So that focus has tended to dominate and crowd out space for thinking on other issues.”

Mr Cilliers and ISS Special Projects Head Ottilia Maunganidze have for some years sought to correct this. At a side event co-hosted by ISS and the Hanns Seidel Foundation (HSF), and in other discussions, they helped ensure Sudan’s disastrous civil war and violence in the Sahel gained some attention.

The side event examined how Africa can bolster its own security, given the world’s waning attention to the continent. As HSF Chair Markus Ferber said, given the civil wars, ethnic tensions and conflicts over resources in Sudan, the Sahel and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Africa should be a feature on the MSC’s agenda.

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So too should have been the world’s under-reaction to these events. Mr Ferber noted that foreign assistance is waning, the appetite for peacekeeping is diminishing, and private military companies like Russia’s Wagner are becoming more active, violating human rights, perpetrating ‘industrial-scale’ smuggling and conducting disinformation campaigns across Africa. Not to mention recruiting Africans to fight in Ukraine, often through deception, one could add.

Ms Maunganidze noted that from Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado to Sudan’s El Fasher, the DRC’s Goma to Ethiopia, Libya, Somalia, Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, over 50 armed conflicts were raging in Africa, about 40 per cent of the world’s total, displacing 45 million people. Crime and constrained law enforcement aggravate this instability.

If external assistance were declining, would Africa have to largely secure itself, Maunganidze asked. And how would it do that without hollowing out democracy and diverting money from schools, jobs and healthcare?

Mr Cilliers said the ISS’s short- to medium-term forecast was that Africa would probably remain less stable than any other region. The continent has recently overtaken the Middle East on this measure, mainly because of its young population, high unemployment and low government capacity. These factors meant Africa was unlikely to achieve stability for at least a decade.

The main guarantor of security was a capable state, so consolidating state authority was key. Cilliers stressed that he was not advocating repression. ‘The definition of a state is control over your territory and over the source of violence,’ which many African states did not have. Ironically, he was sharing the stage with DRC foreign minister Thérèse Wagner, whose government has failed to maintain control over much of its eastern reaches.

Mr Cilliers also said Africa had to rethink the role, orientation, training and equipment of the military and police in light of the main threats, which were now internal. So buying corvettes and jet fighters served ‘no purpose.’

And he said the African Union (AU) – that is, Africa’s leaders – was not stepping up to the plate to help fill the gap being left by declining support for peacekeeping. Mr Cilliers noted that the AU had launched a Peace Fund that had collected only $400 million – barely enough to sustain one peacekeeping operation for half a year.

Asked why South Africa had recently announced its withdrawal of military forces from the United Nations (UN) Organisation Stabilisation Mission in the DRC (MONUSCO), Ms Wagner said she understood but regretted the decision. She noted that South Africa’s partnership with the DRC had spanned decades and borne many fruits.

That decision, Ms Wagner said, could not be dissociated from the wider discussion about the effectiveness of multilateralism. She said the past year had been particularly bad for peacekeeping in her country. Twelve – others say 14 – Southern African Development Community and MONUSCO peacekeepers were killed a year ago in eastern DRC by M23 rebels, ‘backed by a neighbouring country’ (Rwanda).

She said the UN Security Council, which had sent peacekeepers to the DRC, had not reacted to this attack. Yet, she added, the DRC had had more traction at the UN Security Council than at the AU Peace and Security Council.

Is China the tiger in the room in this debate? Mr Cilliers told ISS Today that China was at least partly filling the vacuum left by the US in Africa, including in military-to-military and police-to-police collaboration.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, China has recently overtaken Russia as the leading seller of major new arms to Africa. It shows that between 2015 and 2019, Russia supplied a whopping 47 per cent of all major new arms to Africa, and China 16 per cent. But between 2020 and 2024, China overtook Russia, providing 21 per cent, while Russia dropped to 19 per cent.

The reason for Russia’s drop was its focus on supplying its own war against Ukraine, as well as arms sanctions because of that conflict.

“What you had in Munich was the Europeans speaking about their awakening [to their own needs to be more self-sufficient in security] and the challenges that they face, and the Americans saying you’re either with us or against us, and then you have Wang Li, the Chinese foreign minister, defending the global rules-based system. The contrast was absolutely amazing,” Mr Cilliers said.

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“The African view on international relations, of course, is much closer to the Chinese view, because it’s a view of non-interference in the domestic affairs and non-prescription, and leaving the government to do whatever it wants to do.

“Which you and I may not like, and it may mean that dictators get away with it, but that non-interference in internal affairs is how Africa also sees matters.”

Peter Fabricius, Consultant, Institute for Security Studies (ISS) Pretoria

(This article was first published by ISS Today, a Premium Times syndication partner. We have their permission to republish).