Troubling news from Africa

Dan Simpson

Now there are pirates to the west and unrest in the south

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

By Dan Simpson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Africa appears to be in the process of throwing up two new alarming problems, one of them piracy on the west coast, to add to that already rampant on the east coast, and generational fracturing within South Africa's ruling party.

A third disturbing problem is that the approach to Africa by the administration of President Barack Obama is becoming increasingly dominated by the U.S. military, in the form of the U.S. Africa Command, created in 2008 during the administration of former President George W. Bush.

AFRICOM's latest maneuver, undoubtedly part of an effort to prevent Defense Department budget cuts in upcoming cost-trimming exercises, has been the claim of its commander, Gen. Carter F. Ham, that al-Qaida seeks to coordinate its efforts in Africa. Gen. Ham's contention is at variance with analysis of other observers. They see the pieces of al-Qaida acting increasingly independently of each other.

Gen. Ham says that the Shabab in Somalia in East Africa, Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb in North Africa and Boko Haram in Nigeria present a threat to the United States as they work to coordinate their activities. He cited no evidence to support his contention.

A quick glance at the map to see the distances between the three organizations' areas of operation, the different characters of their memberships and their greatly varying objectives make Mr. Ham's claim, at best, in need of documentation and, at worst, an indication that he is making his own Africa policy, independent of the rest of the U.S. government.

The piracy problem off the west coast of Africa revealed itself most recently in the hijacking this month of a Cyprus-flagged vessel that was transferring Nigerian oil to a Norwegian-flagged vessel in the Gulf of Guinea off the coast of the small West African state of Benin. It was reported by the International Maritime Bureau as the 19th act of piracy in the gulf this year, as opposed to none last year. Thus, it is a new problem.

Some 10 countries on Africa's west coast, including Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and Nigeria, export significant quantities of oil, so the risk of more piracy there is high.

Piracy on Africa's east coast, in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean, has run nearly out of control in recent years, in spite of the deployment of naval vessels from the United States and many other countries. The reasons are, first, the huge area to be patrolled and, second, the fact that Somalia, which extends 1,700 miles along the coast, has not had a functioning government since 1991.

There is a similarly large area to patrol in the Atlantic Ocean off West Africa, but the governments along the coast are more or less functioning, even though most of them have meager if any naval forces. Sketchy law and order in Nigeria is the major issue at the moment.

The Nigerian government has a hard time controlling what happens to its own oil on its own territory, particularly in the Niger River delta where there is serious resistance to central government authority. Its efforts to rein in this problem on land may be one reason for the rise in piracy off West Africa.

Given the number of West African oil-producing states that have a large stake in secure passage of their oil, it seems reasonable to expect them to work together on the problem, even if that means contracting with foreign mercenary firms to patrol the area.

The U.S. Navy should in no case become involved. A large number of American and other nations' ships have been unable to end or even reduce east coast piracy much. Such deployments are very expensive and the United States cannot afford them at this point. Secondly, African oil-producing nations have the resources to tackle the problem without U.S. involvement.

There might be a temptation on the part of some Americans -- including the Defense Department -- to see the U.S. Navy today as somehow like the British Navy in the 18th and 19th centuries as it tried to suppress the Atlantic slave trade. This isn't that. It's protection of oil, with no humanitarian aspect.

We also should get over any idea that we are the British Empire of our times. Think, $15 trillion in national debt. Think, government divided to the point of impotence. Think, rusted American bridges, potholed roads and understaffed schools.

The other new and troubling African problem is that increasingly sharp battles are under way inside South Africa's governing party, the African National Congress.

Since the advent of majority rule in South Africa in 1994, the ANC has until recently maintained power by retaining the distinction between the country's whites and Africans, correctly contrasting the old apartheid days and the new majority-rule epoch. Recent scrapping between Julius Malema, the head of the ANC youth wing, a Sotho-speaker, and South African President Jacob Zuma, a Zulu, in which Mr. Malema has gotten into trouble for appearing to urge violence against the still-economically privileged white minority, raises the specter of increasing antagonism against whites and splits among South Africa's black majority.

These are disquieting developments in what has been a fairly clean model of transition to majority rule in a key country that remains the locomotive that pulls the economic train in sub-Saharan Africa.

Dan Simpson, a former U.S. ambassador, is a Post-Gazette associate editor (dsimpson@post-gazette.com, 412 263-1976).

First published on September 21, 2011 at 12:00 am

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