Last Wednesday, fighting erupted between forces of Ethiopia’s rebellious Tigray regional state and the army of the federal government in Addis Ababa. A March ceasefire had put a six-month pause to the conflict.
The 16-month-long war was one of the most ferocious and deadly Africa has seen in recent years. In March, as a ceasefire was announced, researchers led by Jan Nyssen of Ghent University in Belgium released a report estimating that as many as 500,000 people had died from direct attacks, starvation and lack of health care.
Yet, here we are again. However, the Addis-Tigray, South Sudan, and eastern DR Congo wars in the eastern Africa sub-region call for a new, uncomfortable look at conflict. The wars have been denounced as immoral, destructive, primitive, savage and criminal.
They are all those things and more. They are also seen as a result of a colossal failure of politics and leadership.
That, too, is correct.
But they are possibly only half the story. Wars in the sub-region, as indeed elsewhere in the world, could also be very successful political enterprises for the perpetrators.
Historically, beyond using war to capture resources for the consumption of a starving fiefdom or for state building and to destroy those who threaten an imperial-minded ruler or nation’s hegemony, it has also been used to order society. Wars are a noble way of killing off one of the most destabilising forces in society — restless, unemployed and often unmarried young men.
Ethiopia overtook Egypt a while back to become Africa’s second-most populous country after Nigeria. As of this month, it is estimated that its population is over 121 million. Ethiopia, though, is plagued by bone-wrenching poverty and unemployment.
There are many clever people running Ethiopia — and the Tigray state government. It’s not believable that they haven’t crunched the numbers and figured out cynically that removing thousands of militant young mouths from the table will solve a regime-threatening supply problem.
We have seen a version of this play out in DR Congo too. Yes, the conflict in eastern DR Congo is complex and driven by many factors, including the interests of its neighbours. But when the world’s largest and most expensive UN peacekeeping force fails to make an impact after nearly 20 years, there is more to the story.
Power in DR Congo has largely been exercised by a western Congo elite, even when the Kabilas from the east were in power.
An unstable eastern DR Congo, weakened by war, with hundreds of thousands of its people dying from conflict-fuelled causes, is good politics for Kinshasa. It removes any resistance to the predatory exploitation of eastern DRC’s embarrassingly abundant mineral wealth.
When the Kinshasa power people sleep at night on their silk bedsheets or sip wine on the balconies of their villas in Brussels and Paris, it’s doubtful they see the eastern DR Congo crisis as a failure. For them, it’s the triumph of a plan.
It is important to recognise this because it is a surer path to resolving these crises.
You don’t appeal to the goodness of the heart of a man who sees war as a strategic form of population control. You talk money, bread, wealth (giving him a mine or oil field), power and bling.
Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. [email protected]
