Failed states? Kill ’em all, let God sort them out

 

By Charles Onyango-Obbo

After my column last week, in which I wept about how the insanity in South Sudan, Central African Republic and elsewhere is again giving Africa a bad name, I ran into an unblinking man who asked me a surprising question.

“You, Charles,” he started, “you think that South Sudan, Somalia, and Central African Republic should be saved and are important. Are they, and might the continent not be better off if they died?

“If South Sudan or Somalia disappeared, the people there might suffer terribly, yes, but Africa and the world will not stop,” he argued. “They will just soldier along, grow richer, and some people who could make magic in South Sudan and Somalia might just along and pick up the pieces.

“Go and read over the past 2,000 years how many countries have disappeared in the world, but aren’t we landing machines on Mars? Aren’t human beings living longer? Isn’t the number of billionaires in the world multiplying every year?”

I felt like hating the guy. Not because he was heartless, but because the facts supported the inconvenient argument he was making.

I did a quick search and sure enough, landed on a website that laid it all out. There was Austria-Hungary, an empire that collapsed at the end of World War I. Bengal was an independent kingdom from 1338-1539, now it is part of Bangladesh and India. Gran Colombia included what is now Colombia, Panama, Venezuela, and Ecuador from 1819-1830. It ceased to exist when Venezuela and Ecuador seceded.

So he was right on that one. He also said that it is unreasonable to expect that all countries will, or should prosper. “For every Singapore, you need a Mongolia to balance out nature,” he said.

I guess if one looks at the world as one collective, not individual nations, and peoples, that view begins to make some sense.

Though Africa, as we are tired of hearing, is the world’s richest continent in terms of resources in the ground, it is the continent that least exploits those resources

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Until China and emerging market economies that are hungry for natural resources to power their growth came along, most of the stuff just lay dormant in the soil as many countries in Africa lived on food aid.

If Africa had been very rich and voraciously exploited its natural resources over the past 50 years, perhaps there would be nothing left for China today. And possibly America would have been in a mess because China wouldn’t be rich enough to bail it out.

Looked at this way, Africa’s misery of previous decades was good for human progress. Hopefully our turn to feed off the fat of the world will also come one day.

Also, a rightwinger might argue that if the billions of dollars spent on peacekeeping in the Democratic Republic of Congo every year, and the billions that have gone into the African Union mission in Somalia, Amisom, had been invested wisely in education, infrastructure, job creating, research and development, and so forth, in Africa, the continent would be richer.

I doubt there is any influential person out there with the courage to make the call for Somalia or South Sudan’s death.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is Nation Media Group’s executive editor for Africa & Digital Media. E-mail: cobbo@ke.nationmedia.com. Twitter: @cobbo3