14 September 2006
Posted to the web 14 September 2006

Reason Wafawarova
Harare

THE United Nations, a successor to the short lived League Of Nations which collapsed in 1939 after 20 years of mixed fortunes, is an International Body of states known in Africa more for the prestige that comes from working with it than fulfilling its mandate.

The UN's seemingly positive side is its image as a prestigious organisation from which academics, consultants, civic activists and security forces take turns to milk the big white cow at every given opportunity.

Indeed the UN is widely condemned as a western created and western manipulated organisation by many non western communities, especially the Middle East, Asia and Latin America at the moment.

The UN is roughly ten years older than independent Africa and one would have thought that the organisation is inherently mature enough to solve African problems. Here is an organisation that was formed in 1945 under heavy criticism from parts of the British community who saw it is a tool designed by the Americans to end colonial empire in general and to destroy the British Empire in general. Indeed the colonial empires collapsed from the North of Africa in the early fifties going down to South Africa in 1994 but what has the United Nations done for independent Africa?

There are five major points why the UN has largely been found wanting in fulfilling its role and mandate in Africa. This mandate is well enshrined and articulated in the much-heralded UN Charter, where issues like security, fundamental human rights, sovereignty, self-determination, fair trade and global social welfare are clearly spelt out. For the five factors to be discussed in this article, the UN has largely relegated African affairs to the Any Other Business section of its agenda in a disgustingly habitual way.

The neglect is most apparent in matters related to security where African conflicts have been left unabated for generations with the UN either playing the bystander role or pretending to be coming up with resolutions. It has to be acknowledged that there are some UN agencies like WHO, UNICEF, WFP and the likes UNAIDS which have fared relatively well.

However, the political and security arms of the UN have a terrible history in countries like Angola, Mozambique, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Sudan, The Congo, Cote d'Ivoire and Western Sahara.

The indecisiveness and indifference often exhibited by the UN in the matters mentioned is largely a result of opinion shapers in the west who have used the media and the charity industry to portray Africa as a hopeless continent of disease, poverty and conflict. We are basically treated like the dictionary and case study of backwardness and suffering. Political opinions are pushed home by shocking the world with astonishing pictures of poverty and disease while charity funds are raised in the same manner.

The obvious unintended consequences of this is the prejudice and the stereotyping that does not only affect the general world but even the so called international civil servants manning the UN offices, that including the successive Secretary Generals. An ordinary person from any of the developed countries commands an average image of an Africa characterised by massive jungles full of wild animals and wild fruits. Their idea of people from Africa is that of illiterate and filthy poverty stricken hunters, peasants and nomads. I have been in one of the so called first world countries for two years now and many times I am asked how long I have been in this country and I get showered with praises for having mastered so much English in such a short time. Those who congratulate me have no idea that there are universities in Africa and that there are schools just as competitive as anywhere else in the world.

While poverty does exist the skewed message that has been sent out into world opinion is not only unreal but inadvertently damaging that it is so much contributory to the lagging behind of the African continent.

With all these negative images about Africa, sadly sometimes promoted some of our own African donor mongers, there is very little to expect when issues like Darfur, Somalia, Northern Uganda or Liberia are put up for discussion at the UN Security Council. Assuming that those representing the permanant five at the Secutity Council have an idea of what Africa is based on, their academic qualifications is a gross overstatement given that 80 percent of American legislators and members of cabinet do not have passports and about 50 percent of them have not travelled outside their respective states in their lives.

Those meant to solve the African challenges and problems cannot in the least comprehend the nature of problems they are dealing with and this is why they are indecisive or in many of the times they take a decision its often either a wrong one or a disastrous one. Principally, one cannot solve a problem they do not understand and it is a fact that when the UN decided to send peacekeepers to the Congo they did not have the countries map, the same thing for Rwanda and for the US's ill-timed military intervention in Somalia in 1993.

The second factor which has crippled the UN in dealing with African conflicts and problems is the Cold War proxy wars and battles where the Soviet Union largely backed sitting governments in Africa while the Americans sponsored rebels, dissidents, warmongers, warlords and military coup plotters. The western endeavour to fight the spread of socialism and communism often meant facilitating undemocratic rule propping up the likes of Zaire's Mobutu Sese Seko, Uganda's Idi Amin, Mozambique's Alfonso Dhlakama and the successive military regimes in Nigeria. It goes without saying that the UN was in all these cases arm-twisted to recognise and legitimise these regimes as witnessed by the British influence on the recognition of the clownish Idi Amin who came to power at the expense of Milton Obote, thanks to a British organised summit in Asia where the coup was correctly "prophesied" by the then British prime minister.

The third factor is the historical one. The UN and the rest of the world should just remember that Africa has social, political and economic imbalances resulting from 400 years of brutal slavery where 100 million people were either killed or stolen and displaced. That followed by a hundred years of colonial looting and exploitation has left an extremely hard to repair damage. It is this imbalance which has created a platform for most of the problems in Africa but the average westerner would love to tell themselves that African leaders are inherently corrupt, incompetent, primitive, unaccountable and totalitarian. Such imagination reigns supreme in the public opinion on Africa and it is this biased guess on the causes of problems in Africa which leads to the UN and its implementing partners getting it all very wrong.

The UN pretends they are not aware of the problems caused by those four ancient Europeans who drew up borders running through villages in the 18th century creating what we call African states today. They do not see how this is a factor in Biafra, Eritrea and Ethiopia where perennial border fights have been the order of the day.

The UN has this one size fit all approach to development, much adopted by the World Bank and the IMF as well, an approach that takes no recognition that African states are hardly any older than fifty years and some of them like Zimbabwe, South Africa and Namibia are less than thirty years. Instead of supporting these countries in developmental issues the UN gets entangled in the unipolar political machinations of the Americans and all they do is sit and discuss American identified rogue states, dictators, tyrants and human rights abusers. Zimbabwe has often been referred to the UN Security Council ahead of the DRC, Uganda and Sudan, countries with known and declared armed conflicts, just because its policies "pose an unusual threat to the US foreign policy" as Condolleeza Rice and George W Bush would put it.

How is the UN expected to solve African problems when their priorities are so mixed up?

The fourth and very important factor is that the UN has not progressed and adopted to its new mandate of a World Body, having primarily been formed to address the conflicts and challenges of an old world made of empires and their territories and colonies. The UN remains western-centred and engineered in scope and character despite the fact that it now has 192 members, all but 61 of them having come on board after the world body's formation. The UN Charter is the only known piece of legislation in the world today which can not be amended, thanks to those old five beneficiaries of the post World War 11 victors' justice, a form of justice that has seen the World subjected to skewed rule of the veto power for the past 61 years.

Lastly, the UN has failed to prove its power over individual foreign economic interests by its member states. American interests over DRC's diamonds have caused bloodshed, so has the interest in Angola's oil and diamonds, so has been the case with Liberia's diamonds, Nigeria's oil, Sudan's oil and even Libya's oil. In all these cases the UN has often developed cold feet in coming up with conclusive resolutions, many times because they are not keen to offend the mighty Americans.

This has happened outside Africa as well but it is high time we Africans start to measure up to the fact and consequence of living with an unreformed United Nations.