Leading the race for credibility is the suggestion that well armed Tuareg rebels forced out of Libya by the NATO led/supported/imposed regime change created stirred an already boiling pot to the extent of intensifying further the dissatisfaction of Malian forces with their government’s handling of a rebel crisis that is not exactly a recent problem.  It also appears that most irritating to many is that Mali’s status as a fine example of democracy succeeding in Africa is no more.  While the return of battle hardened Tuaregs cannot be overlooked in the search for answers, I have always had issues with what appears to be the default setting that points the finger at the western nations every time there is a wobble in Africa.  Indeed, once I started considering the Mali coup, some interesting and potentially significant facts started jumping out of the whole conundrum.

I refuse to believe that others do not see, as I do, the worrying tendency for junior officers, as in Captains and the odd Lieutenant, to swap command of their platoons for high political office/power.  Indeed, it was this month twenty years ago that Sierra Leone’s Acting-Captain Strasser sat in the State House and promised to save the country from, among other things, the ravages of a rebellion led by a man who was supported by another man he allegedly met in Libya. Given the Tuareg rebels in Mali were apparently armed in/by the Gaddafi regime, thoughts of a common denominator started buzzing inside my head?  There seemingly is also a strong rank dimension to the issue of the more recent destabilisations in West Africa.

It might not be fashionable to mention some of the names associated with problem but the search for answers is not a matter for the popularity cat walk.   As much as he might be praised for turning Ghana around, J J Rawlings was a Flight Lieutenant, the Air Force equivalent of the Army’s Captain, when he first took over things in his country.  Burkina Faso’s “Che Guevara” of Africa, Thomas Sankara was also a Captain whose Libya-backed revolution Capt Blaise Compaore decided needed “rectifying”.  Guinea more recently had Capt Camara who hung around for about a year while Jammeh of Gambia has found all sorts of means including the acquisition of supernatural and healing powers to perpetuate his rule.  There has to be a reason for junior officers’ urge to extract themselves from the exciting business of platoon commanding in order to take responsibilities they have no training for and are, more often than not, extremely ill-prepared for.  I have often wondered about the tendency of officers in Africa to become increasingly disengaged from the business of proper soldiering and losing touch with their “boys” as they move up the rank structure.  In effect, the business of war fighting or troop management gets left to as low a rank of officer as is possible which probably gets these Captains and Lieutenants thinking above their stations and doing so in a fairly uncontrolled and unrestricted environment.  While I cannot claim knowledge of exactly how it all panned out in Mali, I found it shockingly unbelievable that significant elements of the Sierra Leone military effort against the Revolutionary United Front recovered themselves from the war front, redeployed to Freetown and wet on to throw out a government with such ease.  There was either a spectacular failure of command, control and communication or negligence of duty of the gravest kind by senior commanders.

Another uncomfortable reality that comes out of the Mali situation not so long after the Kenya 2007 election fix, Guinea’s post Lansana Conteh debacle, the Ivory Coasts election palaver, or even the continuing complicity of Sudan in the Darfur crisis is the powerlessness and near irrelevance of the regional and sub-regional African Union (AU) and Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).  Mr Kabaki opted to revisit the Kenyan constitution rather than the conduct of the elections and now we have just had a treasonous cabal negotiate immunity from punishment in order to go back to where they should have stayed in the first place.  While I might, to an extent, subscribe to the idea that there is no such thing as a good war, I struggle deeply with the other side of that coin which suggests there is no such thing as a bad peace.  There seems to be a roll over and die approach to peace finding and building that to my mind sends exactly the opposite signal to what should be going out.  Little wonder then that when there is an attempt at sabre rattling as was done with the Gbagbo-Ouattara stand-off in Ivory Coast, Gbagbo took no heed as he knew there was not even the will to extract the sword from its sheath.  Oh, and on Guinea, Capt Camara’s early surrender of power was probably more to do with the fright the attempt on his life caused than on the many visits from regional negotiators.  I guess my frustration with the ineffectiveness of the AU and ECOWAS is somewhat fuelled by the knowledge that the period jamborees of these bodies as they seek to project relevance has been responsible for the economic messes that have in turn sowed the seeds for much of the turmoil in some of the member states.

I must now make reference to that beautiful coined but woefully absent concept of “African solutions for African problems”.  I refer to this because I hear much talk about the need for NATO to do something and criticisms of the organization as a whole and of some of its members, especially former colonial power France, for staying out of the Mali mess.  It seems the default setting of blaming “The West” for all that goes wrong sits side-by-side with believing only “The West” can sort out problems on the continent.  West Africa has a regional super power in the continent’s most populous nation.  Unfortunately, there might be significant distraction in Nigeria caused by the recent concentration of minds on the upsurge in Boko Haram acts of terror around that country.  Oddly, the Nigerian difficulties with religious extremism have apparently failed to arouse noticeable concern around the continent which suggests little appreciation for the notion that your neighbour’s issues are somehow yours too.  Then again, there is the further matter of the standing with and for each other come what may conduct of the continent’s business that begs for explanations on how they expect problem makers to behave differently.

I cannot finish without pointing out a reality that could have had some bearing on the Mali problem.  Firstly, this landlocked country is surrounded by seven countries that have not exactly been fighting to be first in the queue of examples of stable democracies.  The one exception is Senegal who unfortunately recently had an octogenarian trying to do one of those fixes on a constitution in order to cling on to power.  The others tell quite a sorry tale of brutal people doing what they want with seemingly tacit approval from their peers in the rest of the continent.  The one that gets my goat the most is the chap from Burkina Faso who struts around with the respectability and acceptance thrown at him by the continent’s organisations and leaders despite his organising of the murder of friends, colleagues and opponents before going on to manipulate plebiscites in his country.  There is also the not so minor matter of his friendship with Muammar Gaddafi which the audit trail of how relationships were built between the not very nice rebel leaders in Sierra Leone and Liberia leads to.

This might appear much waffle about not a lot to some while others will disagree to varying extents with some of my assertions.  Whether I have succeeded in doing so or not, the intention was to get a closer look at what has happened, examine what has been allowed to continue, and finally to ask whether the search for answers and solutions go wrong before they even start.  My view is that the absence of morale courage among Africa’s leaders to stand up and call things what they are has been the source of much of the disservice to much of Africa and her people.  How many have the morale authority to do so is another question but I refuse to believe they are all bad men.