The Horn Of Africa States: The Obsession With Guns – OpEd
The quest for peace and tranquility in the Horn of Africa States region is an elusive proposition. It is a region where men of politics only measure themselves against other politicians in the region on how many of their people, they can kill through the wars they initiate for ego-related matters and for false histories they invent and create.
Every leader that comes to power in one of the countries of the region generally carries on arrival, a message that he or she will reform the governance process in that jurisdiction for the better, wherein the people will reap economic and political dividends, but ends up, soon after, regressing the reform process they have professed and promised and ends mostly hurting the peace and stability of the country they rule and the region.
The death toll in the region caused by the regimes of the region counts into the millions over the past four decades, continuing, and they are not yet satisfied that the horrors they have caused is enough. They must always find excuses and impossible missions to pacify the region only to cause more trouble. They bring in emergency protocols to allow them mow and cull more people in the countries they rule, and these are mostly their own citizens, although they may attack other countries and kill other peoples in the process.
They create security apparatuses, ill-trained and inhuman soldiers, who kill and torture citizens only to cause more dislike and hatred for the regimes of the region. They do not solve the political issues in their countries through consensual processes, compromising on issues to satisfy the whole and not fringe and loud, often ethnically based, political groups. Like onion, ethnicity does not stop at one level, it can be peeled through more layers and layers, until no layer is left of the complete onion.
Eventually the leaders of the region end becoming dictators who do not want to give up the power they were given to by the people for fear they would be punished for the miseries, the many extra-judicial killings and violent human rights violations, they have committed on the basis of ethnicity. They do not even see their citizens as citizens but only as the other enemy tribe or clan. They become so insecure as to fear even their shadows and all their previous friends, who mostly end up in dungeons or dead or run away and migrate to other distant countries.
It is how the politicians of the region have failed. It is why they have become obsessed with guns and soldiering wrongly, sending many of the region’s youthful populations to fight and kill each other within the countries and now even with other countries of the region as the Ethiopian Administration seems to be in preparation for, through an illegal MoU it signed with one of the regions of Somalia or as happened earlier between Ethiopia and Eritrea or between Eritrea and Djibouti, or in Ethiopia’s illegal quest for an outlet to a sea. It is not satisfied with its lot, just like its previous leaders including Menelik II, the small king from Shoa, who is the source and creator of this current troubled Ethiopia.
They keep begging bigger powers for guns and guns and guns. One could study the histories of Menelik II or his contemporary Yohannes of Tigray. The same goes for Haile Selassie and Mohamed Siyad Barre of Somalia, or Mengistu Haile Mariam or later ones like Melles Zenawi or the current Abiy Ahmed.
They keep asking and begging other powers for guns and weapons to kill their own people or others, and there are always willing parties, which provide the weapons they hunger for. In the past those suppliers of the guns were mostly Europeans, like Arthur Rimbaud, the Frenchman, who helped Menelik II capture Harar from its Somali owners, but lately they even include the Chinese and Arabs, in the GCC countries, and others who have disrupted the lives and lovies of the region through the provision of those arms and weapons to these mad politicians.
The politicians of the region not only fail in working with the opposition parties in their countries but strive to wipe them out of the screen. Every country in the world has opposition parties. They are often referred to as shadow governments. The systems of governance apparently seems to be unable to accommodate alternative ideas in the Horn of Africa states region. The ruling parties in the region fail to see that discussions with opposition parties and accommodating them, would not only offer a learning process for them to know what is in the other camp, but also pacify the negativity in both parties (rulers and ruled) in the process of running a country and government.
They recall the dictators that passed through the Horn of Africa landscape from kings, sultans to military dictators and perhaps believe it is the only way to govern populations, not knowing they are seeding similar ill-conceived ideas and bad governance styles in younger people who may grow to replace them in the future.. They have not learned that this is the twenty first century and that information today is out in the open, and that cheating and manipulating information can only last for a spec of a moment but not continuously.
Information is today in the clouds and a leader cannot hide when his/her back and more is clear to everyone, even school children. It is where it is necessary for the region’s leadership to pause and re-evaluate their situations. A balanced and reasonable discussion of matters with opposition parties even if they are ethnically based is important.
No ethnic group owns the state in the Horn of Africa. It must be shared equitably. Wilwal, an ancient Somali leader left a wisdom that says, there is no better way to deal with another person except on the basis of brotherhood sisterhood for that matter.
Centralizing power in the hands of a few or a ruling party give no incentives for other parties to engage themselves within the governing system of any country in the region. This would create more grievances and more disruptions in the region.
When there is no balance in the systems of governance and when all the parties are not satisfied with the fruits of the administration, opposition parties will generally put more pressure on the ruling parties, and this often benefits external parties who would put more pressures on the regimes of the region.
It is often said that governance is not an easy matter even at the best of times and it is even worse when the rulers themselves become the source of the troubles of governance in their countries, which seems to be the landmark of rulers in the Horn of Africa States. There is no need for expressions repeated by the current ruler of Ethiopia to ask for “Which way to the sea?” as Nuruddin Farah, the eminent Somali author, put it as the title of his essay of 1978 on the same matter.
The seas are plenty and around and Ethiopia could have easy commercial access to those seas once the country accepts its lot under international law as a landlocked country. It cannot be carrying its weight this way or that, threatening others in the vicinity on the false belief it is stronger. It is how empires disintegrate in the long run.
A regional platform of an integrated economic system should be the best way for all the SEED countries of the region to work together instead of warring against each other. They should abandon this obsession with guns and wars, which do not benefit the region. Despite its enormous wealth in resources including its geostrategic location, the Horn of Africa States remains one of the poorest if not the poorest regions of the world. Food for thought for the current rulers of the SEED countries!