East Africa in 2050: Nations will die, new borders will emerge – by Charles Onyango-Obbo
East Africa in 2050: Nations will die, new borders will emerge–By Charles Onyango-Obbo
Source: December 18, 2011, East African
The wider East African region is special – and even notorious – in Africa. In the past 18 years it has produced more new or wanna-be-new nations than all of Africa combined. In 1993 Ethiopia and Eritrea agreed a mutual and happy divorce. The good vibes didn’t last; they became bitter enemies and fought after it happened.
In 1991, after the Siad Barre regime was overthrown, Somalia plunged into chaos. A few years later Puntland hived itself off as a semi-independent nation. Somaliland too jumped ship. Unlike Puntland, which is open to joining a future, peaceful Somalia federation or confederation, Somaliland is determined to be independent.In February this year, South Sudan voted by nearly 100 per cent to secede from Sudan, and in July formally became Africa’s newest country. That is four major border remakes in less than 20 years. How many new countries have arisen in the rest of Africa as a result of a break-up of existing countries (Saharawi Republic doesn’t count)? ZERO!! Precisely because secessionist and breakaway demons roam the wider East Africa, the feeling is that over the next 20 to 50 years, we shall see more nations breaking up or being swallowed as others grow.
For anyone interested in the future borders of what is sometimes called the Greater Horn of Eastern Africa (GHEA) – comprising Eritrea, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Sudan, South Sudan, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda and DR Congo – two studies are recommended. The first is a popular piece of work “Fluid Borders: Integration, Federation, and Fragmentation”, by the Society for International Development (SID) which was published in its journal Greater Horn of Eastern Africa Outlook (November 2010).
The second was by one of Africa’s leading border experts, Wafula Okumu, who now works with the African Union’s Border Programme. His “Resources and borders disputes in Eastern Africa”, published in the July 2010 issue of the Journal of Eastern African Studies is a fascinating look at how Africa’s borders were made. Okumu argues that contrary to the dominant view, not all colonial borders were arbitrarily drawn. There was a lot of logic to the madness. Colonial powers, according to Okumu, drew borders on the basis of some cold logic; to secure known mineral wealth, and to control rivers and lakes – one reason why natural features became border makers.
Secondly, he argues, after the British were routed in the Second Anglo-Boer war, they studied the reasons for their defeat and reached the kind of conclusion African generals and politicians wouldn’t – they lost because of the poor quality and lack of detailed maps for the British military. They formed the Colonial Survey Committee to draw up maps of Africa – and the exercise was largely done by the military. “To the military, a map of features could be more important than a detailed and accurate demarcation of a boundary,” he writes. But one of the most eye-popping gems in the articles, is the citation that, “For all of Africa, only 200,000 square miles of territory had been surveyed in detail by 1914, when some 3.8 million square miles remained unexplored by Europeans.”
I’ll dwell on two of the many implications that can be drawn from this. First, because the focus of colonial borders was more on dividing up mineral and natural resources, it can be expected that future border conflicts in Africa – as both the GHEA Outlook and Okumu note – will come from disputes over resources. Secondly, because most African borders were based on a military and resource logic, not much social engineering went into them. We can confidently predict, therefore, that a future cultural remake of our borders is inevitable.
There is, for example, talk among Luo revivalist nationalists in northern Uganda, northeast DR Congo, South Sudan (and indeed Kenya) of the re-creation of a greater Lado Republic (in 1912 the Lado Enclave stretched from Sudan to a large part of northern Uganda). This would see bits of northern and northeastern Uganda and South Sudan forming a big Luo nation.
In Rwanda during the war that eventually ended after the 1994 genocide, in which over one million people were killed, at one point there were Tutsi hardline purists in the rebel Rwanda Patriotic Front who were pushing for a “two-state” solution; a Tutsi one in the east, where they would never have to endure torment by the majority Hutu, and a Hutu one in the rest of the country. The idea was eventually discredited. In Kenya, apart from the Somali secessionists in the northeast, in more recent times a secessionist movement has emerged in the Coast. This would be a kind of Swahili-Arab East African Republic that, according to some of its militant advocates, would include Zanzibar Island – which would swim away from mainland Tanzania.
There was a time when Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni was wont to talk about an East and Central African mega state built on the basis of “Bantu commonality”.
One country that must be lucky to still be in one piece is DR Congo. Ten years ago there was a real fear that the vast and rich, but thinly and badly governed country, would be carved up into at least three. One, to the southeast, would be a Rwanda dominion, probably controlled by the Banyamulenge. The other to the east would be run by a Ugandan puppet regime. And the West would be left to the dominant Kinshasa elite.
On the other hand, closer home, Tanzania is thought by some observers to have become “too big” for the ruling Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM) to manage – or that the country can be managed easily, but CCM has become too unimaginative for the task. And that as its hold on power slips in the year to come, Tanzania could be vulnerable. All these and more scenarios could still come true. However, the exact forces that could determine this are likely to play out from what we can foresee today.
We think borders are likely to be remade out of a dire need to survive. Countries threatened with extinction because they have run out of water or energy, will have little choice but to attack those that have a lot of it – and secure future supplies through conquest.
The GHEA Outlook and Okumu did not, for understandable reasons, examine what countries that achieve technological superiority might do to turn it to their advantage. Some GHEA countries might fail as states, while others will succeed as powerful democracies, redistributing power and conferring the ability to redraw borders on the successful ones. Within the next 30 to 50 years, East Africa borders could be very different.
What is the full range of these creative but disruptive forces that might redesign the region, and what might the new borders that will grow out of the process look like? Here are possible scenarios
SCENARIO 1: THE WATER POWERS
The first force driving border changes could be water and fuel. Virtually all the countries in the region, except Tanzania, face serious water stress in the next few years. Kenya is the most stressed: each Kenyan only has 636 cubic metres of water a year, compared with 1,270 cubic metres in Uganda and 2,035 in Tanzania. As a rule of thumb, hydrologists consider 2,000 cubic metres per person per year as the point when a country is considered “water-stressed”, and 1,000 cubic metres as when the situation is critical, and a country is “water-scarce”. So Kenya is “finished”. Water scarcity is likely to hit Uganda by 2035, and water stress will hit the country even earlier, by the year 2020. At the present rate of deforestation, it is predicted that Uganda is likely to be importing fuel wood by 2020. Nairobi water demand stands at 750,000 cubic metres a day against a supply capacity of 530,000 cubic metres. It is projected that the daily demand in 2020 will stand at 1.6 million cubic metres and climb to 2.2 million cubic metres by 2030. So Nairobi City could collapse. In this scenario, the most successful countries will be the water-rich ones or those that have been smart at environmental management: In this scenario, Rwanda and a resurgent DR Congo could eat up Uganda; and Tanzania will become the regional superpower, swallowing most of Kenya. South Sudan will take a chunk of Kenyan and Ethiopian territory.
SCENARIO 2: THE DEMOCRACY POWERS
The future of most East African nations is uncertain, because the political elite have not arrived at a long-term deal on power sharing and enshrined it in a constitution. As a result, the regimes in Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania, South Sudan and Ethiopia all today still need to call out the army or special forces to beat back the opposition. The only country, paradoxically, that has solved this problem is Kenya. It is the only nation in the sub region where, in the past two years, the power class has worked itself into a position where it can hold power through trickery, patronage, and sweet-talking without bringing out the army. In July this year, Kenya’s government became the first in Africa — and one of the first in the world — to be completely data open. It has a level of openness on government data that is higher than the US’s. If it can leverage all these into political dividends and the other nations don’t sort themselves out quickly, it is easy to see Kenya becoming a Democracy Top Dog and swallowing half of South Sudan, most of Uganda, and a chunk of Tanzania to become a mind-bogglingly expanded nation.
SCENARIO 3: THE RESOURCE POWERS (ENERGY & MINERALS)
When it comes to resources, Kenya does badly, as do Rwanda and Burundi, and Somalia. Rwanda’s main resource is natural gas, with 56 billion cubic metres of natural gas reserves. The resource king in the region is DRC. According to a recent report by Africa Business, the country has $24 trillion worth of untapped mineral deposits, which is equivalent to the GDP of Europe and the United States combined. The DRC has the world’s largest reserves of cobalt and significant quantities of the world’s diamonds, gold and copper. This makes the DRC potentially the richest country in the world. Then there is Tanzania. It has gold reserves of 45 million ounces, and is currently the third-largest gold producer in Africa. A recent geological survey revealed 209 million tonnes of nickel reserves, 50.9 million carats of diamond, and 103 million tonnes of iron ore, as well as 6.5 billion cubic metres of natural gas. Uganda is oil rich, with 1.5 billion barrels of oil reserves. South Sudan too has 3.5 billion – 5 billion barrels of oil reserves.
In this scenario, Tanzania will ingest Burundi, Uganda and DRC would eat Rwanda for lunch, and Kenya would all but disappear, being carved up between Uganda, Tanzania, and South Sudan. Ethiopia would, largely, remain intact.
SCENARIO 4: THE TECHNOLOGY POWERS
Despite lack of natural resources, a country can rise to power through innovation and becoming a leader in science and industry (as Japan teaches us). In East Africa today, the two nations investing heavily in technology innovation are Kenya and Rwanda. Kenya is now dubbed “the Silicon Savannah”.
Rwanda is also investing in IT education, and public health care like no other East African nation. Kenya’s private sector medical industry is years ahead of its peers. Kenya’s innovative capacity is ranked an impressive 52nd globally [third in Africa after Tunisia at 49th and South Africa at 51st], with high company spending on R&D and good scientific research institutions that collaborate well with the business sector in research activities (Global Competitiveness Report 2011/12, Word Economic Forum). The Global Competitiveness Report also showed Kenya with the second highest number of utility patents (i.e. patents for innovation) granted in sub-Saharan Africa, and fifth in Africa if you include Tunisia, Egypt and Algeria, at 0.02 patents per million of the population, which translates into 800,000 patents.
Kenyan operator Safaricom became the first-ever telecom company to create a mass mobile-banking service, setting industry standards now being copied from California to Kabul. By May of this year, Ushahidi, a crowd-sourcing platform developed in Nairobi in early 2008, which is free to download, had been used 14,000 times in 128 countries to map everything from last year’s earthquake in Haiti to this year’s Japanese tsunami and the Arab Spring.
If technology, innovation and the development of the health industry are the future, then Kenya and Rwanda will chew up Uganda, and Rwanda will gobble up Burundi and a large swathe of eastern DRC. A large part of Tanzania, and South Sudan would become Kenya territory. Interestingly, this is probably the only scenario where Somalia survives. It’s a fairly innovative country in communications, so it will survive. It will be reunited with Somaliland and Puntland, and take in the Somali/Ogaden of Ethiopia.
SCENARIO 5: THE ENERGY-AND-FOOD-HUNGRY MILITARY POWERS
The next group of winners could be countries that reasonably stabilise their internal politics, grow their economies and build strong militaries, but have no food and energy to run on. These countries will take account of the rich ones that have resources, but are disorganised, have weak militaries, and chaotic politics.
In this scenario, Rwanda will thrive. Uganda might just get by, but not enough to grow out much. Burundi might survive. Kenya, whose real military strength, it emerges, has been grossly underestimated from what we are learning from its Somalia campaign and with an interesting new political order, will thrive as well as Rwanda. Ethiopia too will do quite well. There are questions about Tanzania in this picture, as there are about South Sudan, and Somalia is a write off. So, Rwanda will expand and absorb DR Congo and its resources. Burundi too will expand considerably into the DR Congo and parts of Tanzania. There will be a small portion of DRC left that Uganda will pick up. Uganda will also pick up a little of South Sudan, but most of it will go Ethiopia and Kenya. Kenya and Ethiopia will divvy up Somalia. Kenya might get a little bite of Tanzania. Whatever the case, Tanzania will shrink.