Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi was a Libyan revolutionary, politician and political theorist who ruled Libya from 1969 until his killing in 2011 by rebel forces. PHOTO/WIKIPEDIA.
By MORRIS ODHIAMBO
I want to revisit today one of my favourite themes: African security and its importance to Pan Africanism. In my lecture series titled “Discussions on Pan Africanism, Regional Integration and Security” (part of my academic work).
I underscored the nexus between these three critical issues that will determine the future of the African continent. (In addition, I have already argued elsewhere that Africa’s regional integration process has followed a neo-liberal script, which accounts for some of its internal contradictions).
This conversation is particularly important at a time when there is a new scramble for African resources (Dambisa Moyo: “Winner Takes All” and other sources). It is the desire to extract resources from Africa that led to the integration of the continent into the global capitalist system in the first place. This means the place of Africa in the global capitalist system is not about to change.
Any kind of nationalism (whether at the level of the nation-state or continental nationalism, i.e. Pan Africanism, Pan Arabism, etc) is a threat to the interests of global capital. That is why any African leader, from Nkrumah to Magufuli who exemplified nationalism, became an instant threat to global capital domination and had to be eliminated or thrown out of power.
Sometime in the early 2000s, Joseph Stiglitz explained to us the real reason behind the deployment of military across the world by the big powers. It is meant to secure their investments in those countries and their full control of resources. However, such deployment is usually explained (and camouflaged) in terms of mutually beneficial bilateral security arrangements.
The deployment of the military as a safeguard for foreign capital can be traced back to the Cold War. It is interesting that when the British Empire was facing collapse, US policy-makers encouraged the British to abandon their “possessions” abroad; reasoning that the era of physically occupying other people’s territories was over.
At that point, colonialism was transformed into neo-colonialism, and the US gave itself the historical role of providing the military might to safeguard the neo-colonial phase of imperialism.
Thomas Isidore Noël Sankara was a Burkinabè military officer, Marxist revolutionary and Pan-Africanist who served as President of Burkina Faso from his coup in 1983 to his assassination in 1987. He is viewed by supporters as a charismatic and iconic figure of the revolution. PHOTO/WIKIPEDIA
The security pacts between Europe and the US are partly about securing this “international order”. Other coercive means have also been used to prop up and safeguard global capital. John Perkins, “Confessions of an Economic Hitman”, is a good source here.
In one of his viral videos, Julius Malema decrees the presence of the US military in Botswana. He points out that if the US intends to invade South Africa, it will do so in a matter of minutes courtesy of that military base! In other words, if the interests of global capitalism are threatened the US has the option of deploying to its defense.
My point today is that those who profess Pan Africanism have failed to take these issues seriously. Kwame Nkrumah and Ali Mazrui are perhaps the only two people who had the foresight to see the nexus between security and Pan Africanism in the 1960s.
In his Pax Africana, Mazrui called for the formation of a continental army and the nuclear armament of Africa to act as a security buffer between the East and the West in the context of the Cold War.
Beyond that he was convinced that outsourcing security (several African countries, faced with military coups had already called for help from their former colonizers, thus ceding their security and aiding the entrenchment of neo-colonialism) would impede the progress of Pan Africanism.
The question is: in the apparent failure of Africa’s collective security (through the African Peace and Security Architecture) what answer do Pan Africanists have to the threat posed by foreign military bases to the progress of Pan Africanism?
