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STUTTGART, Allemagne - Le 20 janvier 2010, Moeletsi Mbeki d’Afrique du Sud évoque les questions de sécurité dans la région sub-saharienne dans le cadre de la série de conférences du commandant du Commandement militaire des États-Unis d’Amérique pour l’Afrique (U.S. AFRICOM) à Kelley Barracks, Stuttgart, Allemagne. Environ cent cinquante membres du personnel de l’AFRICOM et de la communauté ont assisté au séminaire. Mbeki est président adjoint de l’Institut des affaires internationales sud-africain, centre de recherche indépendant basé à l’Université du Witwatersrand à Johannesburg. (Photo Vince Crawley, Commandement militaire des États-Unis d’Amérique pour l’Afrique)

STUTTGART, Germany, 

Jan 20, 2010 — Nearly 150 U.S. Africa Command staff and community members gathered at the Kelley Theatre January 20, 2010, to listen to well-known guest speaker and author, Moeletsi Mbeki, discuss security and development issues across Sub-Saharan Africa.

The event was part of the U.S. AFRICOM Commander's Speakers Series, which invites visitors with diverse viewpoints to share ideas and thoughts. Mbeki, a political economist and the deputy chairman of the South African Institute of International Affairs at the University of the Witwatersrand, is the younger brother of former South African President Thabo Mbeki. He has also written articles about the political and economic situation in South Africa, as well as regional and Africa-wide issues. Mbeki stressed that he was expressing his own views.

For more on the event, visit http://www.africom.mil/getArticle.asp?art=3912&lang=.

The prepared remarks are available at http://www.africom.mil/getArticle.asp?art=3914&lang=0.

The complete transcript of Mbeki's presentation is available below:


PAUL SAXTON: (In progress) -- the command's Speakers Program. General Ward is sorry that he can't be here, but he's on his way to the airport to fly off for a presentation he's giving later this afternoon.

They gave me an obligatory, sort of, bio of our speaker, and it's actually fairly short, in a way, but it could be three, four, five, six pages long. He is a distinguished journalist who won one of the more prestigious journalism prizes in the United States -- a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard. He's written a number of books, articles.

He is the vice president of a major think tank, which is the South African Institute for International Affairs. He's also on the executive board of IIS in London. He's a critic, an entrepreneur, a businessman. There's almost nothing that he hasn't done, that I've seen over the last couple of days, including his company is the producer of the famous Big Brother program -- a reality show in South Africa, in Nigeria and other places. And he has more ideas than -- on what people should do, what people shouldn't do, how to communicate -- than many people that I've seen. So it's a great pleasure for me to introduce Mr. Moeletsi Mbeki from South Africa.

(Applause.)

MOELETSI MBEKI: Thank you very much, Paul. Thank you for that introduction. It's really a pleasure for me to visit the U.S. African Command. It caused a lot of debate in South Africa. Denunciations, even.

But I have been blessedly surprised that I wasn't greeted by machine gun nests when I came into this -- (laughter) -- which is what I was expecting to find when I got into the base. And I found everybody quite normal, just like every South African I deal with. So it's a pleasure for me to be here, to have been invited by General Ward to come and be one of the speakers in this program.

I have met the general, so I'm not too upset he's not here. We had a very extensive -- had two meetings, actually, had extensive discussions about the issues of Africa. Unfortunately, I have seen your president addressing American soldiers on television, and he didn't read a speech, but I don't trust myself to be like him and speak off the cuff. So I will burden you by reading a speech so that I don't get everything all mixed up.

Before I start, I should just point out that we in South Africa have had a great deal of support from the American people in the problems we had in recent years with what was called apartheid. In fact, one of the main reasons why we had a relatively peaceful solution to the problem of apartheid in South Africa was because of two events that happened in the '80s. One, the American banks refused to rollover the loans to South Africa to the then-apartheid government, and demanded payment.

The second reason was Congress passed, by a huge majority, a law called the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act. And it was these two actions that forced the apartheid government to the negotiating table, which is eventually why we were able to find a solution to South Africa's problem without what many people thought and what many of us thought was going to be a horrendous blood bath. So we are very grateful to the American people -- the U.S. -- for the support that we received on this issue.

Now, the times have changed, so the challenges facing both the United States and us in South Africa are different from the apartheid situation. We -- I was explaining that, to one of my hosts, that actually, economically, anyway, the United States and South Africa are in very similar positions in the world. The United States has about 5 percent of the world's population, but produces about a quarter of the world's gross domestic product.

The same applies to South Africa. We have 5.5 percent of the African population and we produce about 23 percent of Africa's gross domestic product. So there, we do have similar challenges because, with the size of our economies relative to our neighbors', we are the largest -- we are now becoming the largest foreign investor in sub-Saharan Africa. And as a country, we've overtaken France and we've overtaken the United Kingdom -- the traditional foreign investors. We've overtaken the United States.

Actually, it's the oil companies that are bigger investors from South Africa in sub-Saharan Africa. The United States, of course, is a very big investor in the rest of the world. So we have similar challenges in respect of what goes on in Africa and you are very largely -- your country is very largely invested, not only in South Africa, but in countries like Angola and Nigeria and so on. So the questions of peace in Africa are really of immediate interest to your country, but they are of very immediate interest to my own country. So now let me start with my speech.

I must say that I was once reprimanded by a friend in London who said that if I read this speech, he was going to fall asleep -- (laughter) -- but in view of the complexity of the topic I have been given, I think that is the only way that I can deliver my opinion on it. But I'm hoping that we will have time for a discussion afterwards, in which case the speechmaking will be out of the way.

BEGINS TO READ FROM PREPARED REMARKS

Security and Development in sub-Saharan Africa: Looking to the Future

Africa's colonial legacy

The challenge facing Sub-Saharan Africa is not State building as many analysts believe. The immediate challenge most of Africa faces is society building.

Building a viable, sustainable and stable society requires the establishment and development of legitimate, socially hegemonic group or groups that can then build a viable state. This was what European colonial powers failed to do in Sub-Saharan Africa before they departed in the mid- 1950s to early 1960s. Instead they left behind a semblance of a state which had no social anchors. This was what led to Africa's instability during the last half a century. This instability continues to this day in many countries despite a few signs of hope, in a handful of countries.

The most important factor in the creation of a stable capitalist society is the rise of a property owning class that controls extensive assets. On its own, this class of property owners is not sufficient to create a stable society because in order to develop the assets of these property owners and make them profitable, the owners require the technical and managerial skills of professional and artisan classes, generally referred to as the middle class. The bargaining power of this middle class also acts as a restraining influence on the political power of the large property owners.

This power balance at the existential level culminates in the emergence of the state that is established by these social formations to codify their relationship into a stable order.

European colonial powers failed to develop their African colonies along the lines described above. Instead they founded what I call pseudo-states that were stable only as long as the colonial powers controlled them. Once the colonial powers departed, these pseudo-states became a focus for conflict among the various rudimentary elites that had emerged amongst the indigenous peoples during colonialism. These new elites fought amongst themselves for control of tax revenues and other privileges associated with access to power in these pseudo-states.

In the final analysis, it was this intra-elite competition that accounted for Africa's endemic political instability during the last 50 years.

Without the re-construction of the underlying societies of the former colonies, this instability can go on literally for centuries as we have seen for example in the case of Liberia, Sierra Leone and of course Haiti.

I will now try to trace the broader and deeper sources of Africa's instability which even predate colonialism.

Slave Trade
The African continent has been in turmoil for half a millennium since Europeans started to settle in the New World in the 16th century. It was African slaves who contributed to make the Europeans' plantations and mines in the New World a profitable business. Export of African slaves to the New World was accompanied by slave exports also to Egypt and West Asia (Arabia). It was estimated that between 1500 and the end of the 19th century 18 million Africans were sold into slavery.

Slavery was so extensive it touched virtually every part of sub-Saharan Africa. The only part of Africa which was not impacted upon by the slave trade was the small region south of the Limpopo River. This is the territory which now constitutes the Republic of South Africa.

The slave trade brought about enormous social, political and demographic instability to Africa. According to one expert the population of sub-Saharan Africa in 1850 would have been double what it was in 1700. The population of sub-Saharan Africa in 1850 was roughly 50 million. If there had not been the slave trade it is estimated that this population would have been 100 million.

Colonialism, Liberation and Cold War

The end of the slave trade in the 19th century was soon followed by the colonisation of the continent, this time driven by the European powers' desire to exploit Africa's vast natural resources. European powers at a conference held in Berlin in 1884-85 set down the ground rules on how to partition Africa amongst themselves. This triggered a second phase of instability in Africa starting with resistance to colonisation and forced labour and culminating in struggles for independence after the Second World War.

The end of the Second World War brought into existence another global phenomenon that was to play an important role in the continued destabilisation of African societies and of sub-Saharan Africa. The Cold War which started in the 1940s engulfed the entire world in the competition for spheres of influence and control between the western capitalist powers led by the United States and the communist powers led by the Soviet Union.

Once again Africa was caught in this whirlwind where these two camps vied with each other to control the newly independent countries or to stop them from aligning themselves with their adversaries. Some of the most well documented interventions in independent Africa were those by the United States government which connived in the assassination of Congolese nationalist leader, Patrice Lumumba in 1961; the overthrow of the government of Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana in 1966 and in the attempt to destroy the Angolan government of Agostinho Neto and his party in the 1970s and 80s.

Intra-State Conflicts

African states as we know them today were not created by Africans. With a few exceptions, such as Egypt, Ethiopia, Liberia and perhaps South Africa, African states were created by European imperial powers at the Berlin Conference. Africans did not gain control of these foreign-created states until recently, in the 1960s.

African states therefore suffer from a number of important handicaps. They suffer from weak allegiance by their citizens to these states and vice versa. This explains why African countries during the past 50 years have been centres of many conflicts, in particular civil wars, inter-tribal wars, violent communal conflicts and pogroms, wars of secession, and more recently in the Great Lakes region of central Africa, attempts at genocide. These great conflicts have been accompanied by vast population movements in and out of different national boundaries. Africa, not surprisingly, is host to the largest number of refugees and internally displaced persons in the world.

Secondly, because these states have only recently been captured by African rulers, African elites therefore perceive sovereignty as a valuable economic asset because it enables them to enrich themselves. This further exacerbates the weak allegiance of the populous towards these states as the process of elite self-enrichment undermines the ability of these states to deliver services to the general population.

An important aspect of conflicts in Africa, unlike conflicts of the past in Europe, has been the almost complete absence of inter-state wars in Africa. In the case of Europe fear of devastating inter-state wars was one of the driving forces behind the strengthening of the state. This is not the case in Africa. During the past 50 years there has been only two inter-state wars among African countries. These were the war between Tanzania and Uganda in the 1970s and the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea in the 1990s. The latter war could in fact be considered to have been the continuation of the secessionist war of Eritrean rebels from Ethiopia.

Inter-state wars have been an important factor in nation building, especially in Europe. Conflicts between states, which pose a threat to all citizens, irrespective of race, tribe, class, religious affiliation and so on, give rise to a number of unintended consequences.

Firstly, they strengthen the hold of the ruling class, and of the state it controls, over the general population, which, faced with an external threat, is compelled to surrender more and more of its autonomy to the state and its agents as a way of strengthening national defence and limiting dissension. This gives the rule of the rulers legitimacy, as they are seen as defenders of all the people.

Secondly, the state is forced to become better organised in order to raise and equip its armed forces while at the same time maintaining or even increasing production to sustain both the war efforts and the civilian population.

Thirdly, inter-state wars compel the dominant ruling faction(s) to make concessions to more marginalised factions in order to build a united front with which to confront the foreign enemy. Inter-state wars thus contribute to reducing or moderating various forms of discrimination against minorities.

By contrast, the intra-state conflicts that characterise Africa have resulted in the fragmentation of societies into warring factions and parties, and have made even more tenuous the already fragile allegiance of large sections of the population to the state and to those who control the state. Far from the state emerging strengthened from intra-state conflicts, it is weakened by them. A large number of its technocrats are killed or exiled and many institutions are ruined -- permeated with corruption and manned by un-qualified and under-qualified personnel.

Development and the Modern African State

This brings us to an important fact about why states have proved to be largely ineffectual in promoting Africa's development process. States in Europe and Asia evolved over centuries and a great deal of experimentation went into establishing them. The result was a Europe consisting of uni-ethnic states managed by a professional class of officials governed by complex rules and regulations designed to combat favouritism and other centrifugal forces.

These laws enabled the state machinery to appear open and accessible and therefore to be operating fairly and in the interests of all members of society, with no segment of that society excluded from holding a position in the state machinery.

All these features helped to legitimate the European state in the eyes of most of its citizens. For the state to retain its legitimacy it therefore had to promote economic development which led to rising standards of living of the population. This is not the case in most of sub-Saharan Africa.

It is sometimes argued that most African countries are small, poor, landlocked, under-developed and therefore lack domestic markets. To compensate for these shortcomings, the argument goes, it is necessary that African countries eliminate barriers to trade amongst themselves. Through this route, African countries will be able to develop enterprises with the requisite economies of scale to make them competitive in the world markets, it is said.

The experience of Europe however shows that this argument is flawed. If we take the example of relatively small European countries -- Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium -- these countries developed world-class companies long before European integration became reality. Some of the large multinational corporations developed in these small countries easily come to mind: Electrolux, Volvo, Saab, Nestle, Philips, Unilever, Royal Dutch/Shell, Carling, Interbrew, Heineken, ABB, Ericsson, Nokia, Norsk Hydro, Roche, Maersk, UBS, ABN-AMRO to name but a few.

The examples listed above demonstrate that it is not the size of a country's population that determines whether a country industrialises or not. It is rather a country's skills pool and its control over its economic, social and security policies that, in the final analysis, determines whether a country industrialises or not.

Results of Instability

An important factor that determines whether a country develops or not is its ability to generate a meaningful economic surplus on one hand and on the other hand its ability to direct a large part of that surplus to productive investment rather than merely to private consumption. As a result of Africa's endemic instability, a large part of sub-Saharan Africa's surplus leaves the continent.

One of the most disgraceful but under-reported scandals in Africa is the extent to which African elites export capital from the continent. According to the United Nations, nearly 40% of Africa's private wealth is kept outside Africa compared to only 3% of South Asia's private wealth and 6% of East Asia's. The small economic surplus that remains, goes to finance elite consumption and to pay for the running of the largely unaccountable state.

Capital flight is both a result and a driver of Africa's lack of security. Another important driver of Africa's insecurity is the brain drain. Flight of skills undermines economic growth as we have seen by draining out technicians and other personnel needed to maintain social and physical infrastructure which makes development possible.

These factors feed on each other to drive the replay of what is now happening to sub-Saharan Africa where people are leaving the continent in droves.
Role of force

In this paper I have tried to show the deep roots of Africa's security and development crises. I hope that I have been able to persuade you that the problems of security in Africa are not easily amenable to solution by military means especially by foreigners. Interventions by foreign powers have been tried many times since the 1960s to no lasting effect. There is no better illustration of this truth than the Democratic Republic of the Congo which has been unstable -- and therefore getting poorer - since the assassination of Lumumba 48 years ago.

As in all human affairs, the use of force in the right social context does produce solutions. There is no better illustration of this fact than the history of the United States. During the last two and a half centuries, your country has had three revolutions -- the war of independence; the civil war; and the civil rights revolution. All these major moments in the history of the United States entailed the use of force by the protagonists. After everyone of these convulsions your country came out more stable and secure than it was before which is why the US is the world leader, economically and militarily, that it is today.

Notwithstanding what I have said about the undesirability of focusing on the military option to solve Africa's challenges, use of force to solve Africa's problems must however not be ruled out. This is why in my view the creation of the African Command by the US government was an important initiative.

Africom however must not just confine itself to working with African governments only. It must also engage with non-state actors in its effort to assist in re-constructing societies which, I have argued, is a pre-condition to achieving long term security in Africa. Clearly we have a long road ahead of us, so we need to pace ourselves accordingly.


END SPEECH


EXCERPTS OF QUESTION AND ANSWER
(Full question-and-answer session was on Chatham House rules for uninhibited discussion).

Q: My question goes back to an early comment about building the social anchors that help support the development of nation states. By what means do you see that being accomplished?

MR. MBEKI: In a way, it is the heart of the problems that we are all faced with. One of the major issues is developing the education system in Africa. The education system -- Africa is the only continent where we are seeing a decline in school enrollment, for example, over the last decade. So this is one of the processes that needs to be reversed.

The other is the problem of capital flight. We need to provide incentives for the few Africans who have the money -- and there are not many of them -- to invest their money in Africa instead of taking their money to Swiss bank accounts and to Riggs Bank in Washington. ...

So we have to find a solution to stop these processes. So the question of creating an environment of stability whereby the owners of capital feel that they can keep their capital in Africa, they can reinvest their capital in Africa. These are all the building blocks that need to happen. However, the issue of security, again, remains very, very critical because where people feel that there is no security, then they will not put their savings in an insecure environment.

So it is a very broad tapestry that we all have to work with in order to try and achieve this social anchor -- to establish the social anchor that we are all looking for. I don't know if that answers it.

Q: You gave examples of countries, despite their size, were successful. And that is true and I agree with you on that. But given -- that was then. But now with the globalization, the emerging of markets, the rising of China and India, how do you see individual African nations competing on the world market without combining either economically, socially to compete on the world market?

MR. MBEKI: Despite what I said about what has happened in Europe, I agree with you that we cannot replicate in Africa what happened in Europe because the Europeans had 300 years head start relative to the rest of us in Africa and in Asia. So they could do many things, which we can't do now.

Really in Africa, the African governments have a program of regional integration. We have, I think, five regions in Africa -- Southern Africa, East Africa, Central Africa, the Maghreb and West Africa -- where regional economic communities are supposed to be established.

My own view is that we need to go beyond creating common markets. We need to actually reintegrate African countries in view of the fact that the competition that the large Asian countries have now entered the world market. Before India, China, Russia and so on were not major players in the world economy. They were closed economies.

So for Africa to be able to keep up, to be competitive, we have to also build our countries up. For example, in southern Africa, the green patch that you see in Southern Africa, those countries belong to a customs union and that customs union has been in existence for 100 years. It was actually created by the British in 1910.

Now, what we should be doing is create a political union amongst those countries, so that they have a common parliament and they get closer and closer towards being a single country. Now, if we did that and then we can incorporate other countries into such a union, then you will begin to get towards countries that are middle-sized countries, which, say, 80 to 100 million people. Then you are beginning to have countries that are sizable that can then compete.

But what is important about especially southern Africa, but most of Africa, is that we have a massive comparative advantage because we have huge metal deposits. So the deposits of metals in southern Africa, which stretches from the Democratic Republic of the Congo right down to South Africa. That area is incredibly well-endowed with metals, with gold, diamonds, platinum, copper, every metal you can think of. That should become the world's engineering workshop because of the endowment. But in order to do that, we have to first integrate those countries and secondly, to build up the skill level of the population. So those are the dynamics that need to happen in Africa.


Q: You said that building the social anchors and the social fabric is one of the areas that is required throughout all of sub-Saharan Africa. In many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, you have, you know, the HIV/AIDS problem. And how has that impacted the evolvement of the social fabric and what more can be done to overcome the devastation brought by AIDS?

MR. MBEKI: Well, HIV/AIDS, as you know, is a massive, massive threat, especially in southern Africa. But underlying in my view, anyway, one of the major underlying reasons for the spread of HIV/AIDS in southern Africa is the mining industry. The mining industry in southern Africa was built on migrant labor; i.e. the mine owners said you leave your family in the village and you come and work for us for nine or 12 months and then you go back to the village.

The consequence of this has been that the mining industry in southern Africa has become a massive incubator for infectious diseases, especially sexually transmitted diseases, but also diseases like tuberculosis, all sorts of infectious diseases.

So these are some of the dynamics that are making it very difficult to control the spread of HIV/AIDS, because we have hundreds of thousands of men living in single-sex hostels thousands of miles away from their families. And then they contract STDs in this environment and then they take it back to the villages.

Q: Africa Command does a number of activities and efforts across the continent, including training of partner nation military forces, joint exercises with these different partner nations, humanitarian activities, a whole variety of different things, in addition to more traditional military activities. If you were the commander here, what would you tell us to prioritize? What would you tell us to focus the bulk of our effort and time doing?

MR. MBEKI: The question -- Fortunately I am not the commander. (Laughter.) You can relax.

The first thing that I would drive home is what I said about African countries. The African countries are becoming more and more different.

So I think the program, for example, like the one, which I came under, the Speaker's Program, actually needs to be broadened more and more, so that it covers more and more countries. There is more and more relationships between AFRICOM and research institutions in as many countries as have research institutions because really the challenges facing different countries are very, very different.

So the challenge, I think, for AFRICOM is being able to acquire more and more information about the individual countries in Africa and to understand the nature of the differences between African countries. Having said that, of course, there is still most African militaries -- I think most people in Africa, a big part of the citizens see the army as having either directly a predatory role or potentially a predatory role.

So trying to get the militaries in Africa out of that mode is a very, very critical factor.

But it is becoming more and more important to try and understand, especially the unique characteristics of the large African countries because they are the ones who have an influence in their region -- countries like South Africa, Angola, DRC, Kenya, Nigeria, Ethiopia...Egypt. These are countries with some kind of a regional reach.

So to come back to your question, if I were the head of AFRICOM, I would look at the -- I would identify the critical countries in Africa that have regional influence, which can influence their neighbors and then try and find a way to stabilize those countries, so that they can exercise hopefully a more positive influence on their neighbors, which will then mean that AFRICOM itself doesn't have to be involved in each and every country. We have 54 countries in Africa. You can't possibly be involved in all 54 countries. So you have to identify the countries, which make a difference to other countries. I don't know if that answered it.

MR. SAXTON: Well, I think Mr. Mbeki has been extremely generous with his team. He has given us all a lot to think about. And I would like to thank you again on behalf of General Ward for a fascinating presentation today. (Applause.)

(END)