West Africa: Is the Sub-Region a Peripheral of Coups, Conflicts, Violence and Vengeance?
To the dismay of many, those echoes were however overshadowed by the involvement of the military into politics - therefore becoming a beacon of coups and widespread instability across the entire West African Peninsula.
According to Patrick .J. McGowan, from independence through the year 2004, the sixteen West African States have experienced forty-four successful military led coups, forty three often bloody failed coups, at least eighty-two coup plots, seven civil wars and many other forms of political conflicts. As Richard Jackson further wrote that:
“These coups and conflicts have been a massive humanitarian and developmental disaster for West Africa and its 238 million people: at least 2 million dead during and after the Biafran War, at least 200,000 in the first Liberian civil war, and more than 100,000 in the Sierra-Leone civil wars, with millions more international refugees and internally displaced persons resulting from these conflicts.”
These violent coups and conflicts raise the questions: What has gone wrong in West Africa? What should be done to improve the regions volatile situation?
A careful analysis of the nature of violent conflicts in West Africa shows that the regions linkage to the modern world economic system is one major contributing factor to widespread violent conflicts since independence. Contemporary scholars such as Immanuel Wallerstein and Christopher Chase-Dunn for example contends that peripheral state weakness and poverty are the major structural causes for the regions cycle of widespread political instability.
Taking a careful analysis of the single capitalist world –economy as a major characteristic of the modern world economy, West Africa has become vulnerable to several global actors: actors that largely want to exert influence and control over the regions vast mineral resources. The past civil wars of Sierra-Leone and Liberia are such conflicts were the struggle for power was used as the bases, when it was in fact the struggle for mineral resources such as diamonds that were the fundamental driving force largely responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.
Actors from India, China, South Africa and Eastern Europe were known to have played critical and crucial roles . During these entire crises, both rebel and government forces received financial, military and other forms of assistance from such actors around the world. The discovery by the United Nations of a network of criminal gangs buying and transporting illicit diamond from the conflicts in Sierra-Leone and Liberia in 1996 for example, not only froze assets , but also imposed a travel ban on specific West African nationals. The Former Liberian President Charles Taylor, today faces some charges in relation to that unfortunate situation.
The impact of the peripheral single capitalist economic system on all the Sixteen West African States further created class structures across communities of the sub-region. Such class structures paved the way for competition over power. In the words of Robert Guest, ‘because political office is a quick route to wealth in Africa, People fight for it.’ This is the simple reason why it is almost too impossible to “construct multi-ethnic hegemonic blocs comprising businesses and political elites along withal vibrant civil society that provides the foundation for a strong state.” (P. McGowan, 2001).
The aforementioned reasoning explains why politicians, warlords and military men continues to fight for control of the State machinery along the peripheral boundaries of West Africa. It also provides an explanation of how these class structures contributed to the widespread violence caused by the quest of over coming the hazards of poverty. Others argued that such state weaknesses explains why autocratic political leadership prevails in the sub-region.
Contemporary Scholars such as Mansur Olson and Arthur Goldsmith for example, have convincingly argued that violent conflicts and institutional weakness in the peripheral states of West Africa created an environment of autocratic political leaders, who choose short term gains rather than longer-term development. This is how the rational choice perspective, as argued by modern scholars of conflict resolution, have contributed towards poverty and the milking of the regions resources by a privilege few. This explains why some West African leaders are corrupt and reluctant to stay in power. As Olson wrote:
“Many autocrats…. have had short time horizons: the examples of confiscations, repudiated loans, debased coinages, and inflated currencies perpetrated by monarchs and dictators over the course of history are almost counting.”
Olson and Goldsmith further argued that, such autocrats were poor leaders who behaved in corrupt, nepotistic, and rent seeking fashion that further weakened the political economies of the states they autocratically rule. Such autocrats could be found in The Gambia, where the military-turned elected-autocratic President Jammeh, successfully transformed himself into both a leading Gambian business entrepreneur and one of Africa’s richest Heads of States; Burkina Fasso, where President Blaise Campaore murdered his own comrade to become another rich African elected autocrat; Guinea-Conakry, where ailing President Conte, has successfully transformed himself into another African elected autocrat and one of Guinea’s Successful millionaire business tycoon.
Socio-economically, poor leadership and governance has emboldened poverty across the sub-region. The proportion of national populations that are estimated to be living below the international poverty line with incomes less than $2 per day remains to be extremely high. As Patrick McGowan wrote:
“The region remains very underdeveloped, arguably the least developed region in the world; it is the periphery of the periphery with a per capita income less than 15 percent of the world’s average. Under such dismal economic conditions , democratization and political instability must remain problematic and open to renewed military interventions and conflicts.”
A quick analysis of the Human Development Index (HDI) of West African States shows that poverty, underdevelopment and appalling economic conditions are the fundamental driving force behind the vehicle of political instability. At the very least, they create the conditions whereby politics is transformed into a vicious competition for scare resources in which elite corruption, nepotism, rent seeking, and coups become the norm.( Jackson, 2001).
With poverty levels still at records high, West Africa’s Coups, Conflicts, Violence and Vengeance have still not become history, but a growing potential for a continuation of the cycle. The Mauritanian Coups of 2005, and Aug 2008, the 2002, 2004 and 2006 alleged coup attempts in the Gambia, Guinea- Conakry’s 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 military mutiny’s,Guinea-Bissau’s violent internal conflicts between 1999- 2005, and the November 23rd , 2008 coup attempt, and the intermittent eruption of crisis in the Southern Senegalese province of Casamance, are living testaments to the continuation of West Africa’s potential cycle of peripheral violent political instability.
What must therefore be done to improve the regions volatile situation? This is the very good question that many analysts continue to grapple with.
Responding to the aforementioned question requires an understanding that unless neo-liberal economic structures are effectively used to contain poverty, underdevelopment, dictatorship and autocracy, West Africa will continue to be a periphery of coups, conflicts, violence and vengeance. As McGowan Wrote:
“Ending coups and conflicts in West Africa will require a political-economy approach to development in which market-oriented economies with a vibrant capital financial institution domination( this does not exclude participation, however) can get on with the job of capital accumulation and poverty reduction and in which political leaders seek legitimate profits as well as power by establishing and maintaining strong property rights regime, the rule of law and democracy.”
These are the political realities that West African leaders and youths in particular must come to terms with. The presence of “incompetent predatory regimes in which class relations are relations of power and not relations of production,” will continue to pose daunting challenges. However, with commitment, sacrifice and vibrant civil societies, institutions and mechanisms could be nurtured to change West Africa’s volatile peripheral reality.
Should west African leaders and youths be cognizant of the aforementioned daunting realities? Yes we should, we can, and only time will tell.
The author is an independent researcher, analyst and consultant. He also produces The Sword of Truth at http://www.sofawarrior.blog.com/.He could be reached by email at binneh@senegambianews.com or bsm235@nyu.edu.
