The live drama staged in the Oval Office on 28 February between US President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was such that Zelenskyy might never have rehearsed in all his former life as a comedian.
Except that it wasn’t funny. It was unprecedented. You would need to go back 64 years to find anything nearly as nasty as the Trump-Zelenskyy shouting match, with Trump’s deputy, JD Vance, enthusiastically fanning the flames.
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The showdown between John F Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev before the Cuban Missile Crisis was hair-raising, but it wasn’t before a global audience or live TV. Everything else in between, from Richard Nixon’s spats during Watergate to Robert Mugabe’s faceoff with Magaret Thatcher over the Lancaster Agreement, has been child’s play compared with the Trump-Zelenskyy verbal brawl.
Dangerous Enemy, Fatal Friend
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There have been suggestions that Trump and Vance staged it to find an excuse to abandon Ukraine or to extract the best deal possible for the US over minerals rights in Ukraine. Whatever, it was Trump, yet again, being Trump. However, even if that were so, Zelenskyy should have been wiser than to turn a dangerous enemy into a fatal friend.
As he flits across Europe and signals a willingness for another meeting with Trump to patch things up, there are a few unfamiliar lessons he might use to save the day and spare his country from being the meatgrinder it has tragically become.
Africa’s Path
Africa is an unlikely place to look because hardly any country suffered the Soviet Union-style breakup. However, the continent offers several examples of countries digging themselves out of or managing conflicts and potentially devasting wars to which their colonial histories predisposed them.
From Cameroon to Somalia and the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic, several countries on the continent still struggle to find common peaceful existence against a legacy of arbitrary, self-serving partitions created by colonial rule. It’s no less a daunting existential struggle than the one currently confronting Ukraine, a smaller sovereign nation bordering a behemoth like Russia.
For example, for many years, Nigeria and Cameroon, with overlapping colonial boundaries, squabbled over the Bakassi peninsula separating them containing large oil and gas reserves. Nigerians, mainly farmers and fishermen, largely populated the area. The Cameroonian authorities claimed it was bequeathed to them by an Anglo-German treaty in the 20th century.
Beyond David Versus Goliath
The point is not the relative military strength of the combatants – whether or not it was a David vs. Goliath matchup like one between Ukraine and Russia. It’s about preventing a dangerous conflict from escalating into a killing field potentially on the scale that we have seen in Ukraine in the last nearly four years.
After decades of dispute and violent clashes between Nigeria and Cameroon, often with casualties in the border towns separating both countries, tensions began to boil over, with sections of Nigeria calling for an outright war. A war between countries would have had dire consequences for the subregion, yet some interests motivated by ego pressed Nigeria to go to war.
Warring Neighbours
Nigeria took the matter to the International Court of Justice (ICJ). When President Olusegun Obasanjo received information that it would not go well, he braced himself and rallied the public through the media to prepare for the outcome. After the ICJ ruled against Nigeria, some circles favored ignoring the court and going to war for the sake of the Nigerians rooted in Bakassi, and yes, also for the rich mineral deposits there.
To his credit, Obasanjo resisted the pressure to go to war. With a heavy heart, Nigeria cut its losses and turned the chapter on Bakassi, a strip of land which, even if it had won in a battle, might still have been lost in years of endless conflict.
Sudan, one of Africa’s most resource-rich countries, offers a different but valuable example, which litters the continent, of how winning political freedom or winning the battle may not always result in winning peace and prosperity.
Like Putin like al-Bashir?
As dictators go, there’s probably little to separate Omar al-Bashir and Russian President Vladimir Putin. But unlike al-Bashir, who only yielded to a referendum for the secession of South Sudan at gunpoint, Putin has not asked Zelenskyy to return Ukraine to the former Soviet Union – the game that the Sudanese leaders have tried to play by frustrating South Sudan’s production in the oil-rich region of Abyei. Both countries have managed a complicated and fractious co-existence, bringing relative stability to the region.
Whether in Nigeria, Sudan, or the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic, Africa has had many devastating conflicts, with the situation in Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo still dire.
However, compared to its history in the late 1980s and 1990s, the continent has managed relative peace despite internal incompetence and foreign instigations that might have worsened the conflicts. That is what realism teaches.
Hindsight
The Russia-Ukraine war might have been prevented if, in line with the assurances from NATO in the 1990s during talks over German reunification, the Ukrainian president had assured Putin of Ukraine’s neutrality.
That was all Putin asked for: That the US and its allies keep their pledge not to expand eastward or encircle his country. Russia’s pre-emptive seizure of Crimea made it challenging to trust Putin, but Zelenskyy played into his hands by putting all his eggs in the dubious European basket.
Zelenskyy allowed Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden and other NATO leaders in the West to deceive him into believing he would get a carte blanche in the war against Russia. Carte blanches only exist in movies.
African Lessons and the Ukraine War Bill
Africa’s experience teaches a different, nuanced lesson. From the betrayals of Haile Selassie during Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia to the murder of Patrice Lumumba of Congo, the continent learnt the hard way that only fools test the depth of a river with both feet. Unlike his predecessor, Viktor Yanukovych, Zelenskyy was just the fool the West needed.
What has been the cost of the war with Russia? Estimates suggest that about 400,000 Ukrainians, both soldiers and civilians, have been killed in the war, including 12,605 verified civilian deaths reported by the UN.
Also, in contrast to about 450 square kilometres of area captured by Ukrainian soldiers in the Kursk region, Russia controls 19 percent (or 43,749 square miles) of Ukrainian territory, roughly the size of the US state of Virginia. Yet, the future is still dire.
Something Must Give
Putin’s unprovoked aggression against Ukraine and his smash-and-grab are just as detestable as Trump’s pettiness and flippancy. But as petty and detestable as Trump is, he was on point that it would be foolhardy to expect the current war to end without Ukraine giving up anything. Zelenskyy and his backers in Europe must agree that something has to give, and the earlier, the better.
Unlike Africa, which was partitioned by foreign conquest, Europeans have often redrawn the European map by treaty, war, or conquest. Zelenskyy and his backers may kick the can down the road, but that redrawing is about to happen again. Hopefully, Crimea and Eastern Donbas will not be to Ukraine as Alsace and Lorraine were to Germany after World War I, with severe consequences for long-term peace and stability.
The bitter truth, however, is that for this war to end, Zelenskyy must accept that Ukraine will never be the same again. This is the consequence of the comedian’s tragic act.
Azu Ishiekwene is the Editor-in-Chief of LEADERSHIP and author of the new book, Writing for Media and Monetising It.
