Olusegun Obasanjo
This gathering couldn’t have come at a better time than now, when the world at large, and Africa in particular, is grappling with threats to peace and security in so many forms, degrees and dimensions. Let me attempt our theme for discussion as put in a question form: “What are the issues and circumstances that hinder peace and security and what needs to be done to curb them for sustained peace and security?”
I started my public life and career as a soldier and the first theatre of operation for me was Belgian Congo or Congo Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) where I was shipped to because of the ensuing conflict in that country even as my nation was preparing for Independence. I recalled that while on that UN peacekeeping mission, many peacekeepers, including Nigeria’s Lt. Ezugbana, paid the supreme price over a needless war of attrition. The DRC has not enjoyed durable peace and security since then.
By the last decade of the last millennium, my sub-region, West Africa, was the very epitome of conflict with Liberia and Sierra Leone as hot spots. In Liberia, an estimated 250,000 people died and Charles Taylor felt no scruples about the several hundreds of thousands wounded and displaced. Taylor didn’t leave the casualties to his country alone, he veered into neighbouring Sierra Leone and started stoking insurrection by actively aiding the Revolutionary United Front led by Foday Sankoh. By August 2003, when I was starting my second term as President of Nigeria and AU Chair, we offered a deal to Taylor to resign and be granted asylum in Nigeria. That move brought back peace to Liberia and Sierra Leone. I became a butt of criticism after the long arms of international law caught up with Taylor in my country but I am proud of that kind of diplomacy that successfully terminated wars. Presidents Thabo Mbeki, Chissano, John Kuffour were fellow travellers with me in the venture.
You will, no doubt, agree that the return of President (Fradique de) Menezes to power, and the restoration of democracy in the Democratic Republic of Sao Tome and Principe, was a remarkable achievement for our foreign policy in 2003. The reaction to the military adventurers, the process of negotiation as well as my presence in Gabon and the DRSTP to ensure an end to the military action, had certainly sent a strong signal to military officers contemplating extra-constitutional means to subvert democratically elected governments.
A couple of years ago, I led the African Union and the United Nations Human Rights Council on Peace Mission on the South Sudan Conflict. Like most conflicts, violence was triggered by a rift between President Salva Kiir and Riek Machar, and quickly degenerated into an ethnic conflict, particularly between two major ethnic groups, the Dinka and the Nuer, culminating into a very, very bad situation. The new country with great promise is still entangled in the conflict that could go the way of Rwanda.
When the crisis that left Guinea Bissau without a government for 37 days broke out, President Muhammadu Buhari along with ECOWAS leaders enlisted me to stabilise the situation. While interfacing with the dramatis personae of the conflict, President of Guinea Bissau, Jose Mario Bavz, and Prime Minister Correia, we discovered that elements of human hubris were at work. For harmony to reign in that country, we discovered the inevitability of power sharing as envisaged by authors of the Guinea-Bissau constitution which splits the executive arm of government into the Presidency, the National Assembly and the Premiership.
We can go on and on. I have seen that the dynamics of power and human beings insatiable urge to superintend others and disregard their feelings are at the heart of instability and conflicts in countries around Africa.
Back home in Nigeria, beside the 30-month Civil War between 1967 and 1970, which I had the good fortune of ending and collecting the instrument of surrender from the rebels, as we called them, on behalf of the Nigerian Government, we have had several cases of internecine conflicts like in most African countries. They are caused by poor leadership, inequity, real and perceived injustice and conscienceless pursuit of power.
At the most microscopic or micro-level, anywhere in Africa, conflicts are a product of power struggle or squabbles with some mindless power elite taking more than a fair share of what is due to all, and thus, undermining the weaker elements in their midst and domains. Whether it is on the settler/indigenes crises in Jos Plateau or the Modakeke/Ife or even the Umuleri/Aguleri in my native Nigeria or elsewhere in Africa, the stories are the same with strands of difference only on who tells the story. I participated and resolved two of those conflicts mentioned above which have been raging for over a century.
We, as leaders, can cast back our minds and replicate in our different socio-cultural and political or economic settings and see if power sharing and unfair-minded leadership with selfishness and lack of adequate consideration do not rank high in why Africans have turned to bearing arms against fellow compatriots in needless conflicts and wars when socio-economic development and inclusion should have been our priority.
The question that should agitate the mind of anybody with a modicum of humanity is if we all desire peace and security, why is it difficult for people to embrace peace and why is security elusive in almost all parts of the globe and in less quantity and quality in Africa? Another question is, do people just mouth security without understanding the concepts, precepts, practice and desiderata for it?
For me, peace signifies a situation of harmony and concord. Or put in another word, it is a state of tranquillity. In effect, peace is opposed to organised disequilibrium. It presupposes absence of low or high level conflicts, violence of any kind, including conventional/unconventional or prosecution of hot or cold war. It may refer to an internal state (of mind or of nations) or to external relations. In effect, peace then, is the absence of war and more.
In an organised society, it represents not just the presence of rule of law but law and order reigning supreme. Security, in the non-commercial sense, can be likened to a guarantee offered in exchange for loans; the state of feeling safe, stable, and free from fear or anxiety whether for individuals or groups, classes or nations.
No nation can yet claim absolute security because a peaceful and secure country should not have ingrained in the people’s psyche the fear of violations of their persons and properties by either criminals and/or organised state apparatuses in pursuit of extortions or other humiliating experiences that many of our people are subjected to in the hands of rogue or failing states.
Intellectually-minded people have traditionally considered peace to mean the absence of war but as we can see, it is a narrow prescription for a world that is in a permanent state of tension in the hands of powerful nations, people, elements and circumstances. No hungry man is at peace. That is why we now have terms like food insecurity. No man at the mercy of weather or whose home or farm is being devastated by flood, tsunami, sand dunes, desertification or pestilence can claim to be at peace. This is why we have environmental crisis. I saw the true situation and devastation in Sierra Leone yesterday where at least 1000 were swept into death by flood and mudslide.
Peace and war may have been binary oppositions before, but, we now have intermediaries to these nebulous characterisations of how they appear. In terms of international relations, peace may have been construed to mean absence of states engaging in open confrontations with one another. The concept, I think is more vast, tenuous and crafty in its manifestations. I say this because national security and national defence are thus contradictory since we need the instruments of war (military) to pursue peace!
To be concluded
Excerpt of a speech delivered by President Obasanjo at the 2017 African Leadership Forum in Johannesburg, South Africa, August 24-25, 2017
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