An article in the Oct. 3 issue of
The Economist summed up the sad state of affairs Africa has once
again cast itself in by saying simply, “four conflicts at the heart
of Africa could suck in all their neighbours.”
Nearly a third of Africa’s 42 countries
are involved in an international or civil war and another 13 have sent
troops to fight in the various wars on the continent. The four wars The
Economist cites as particularly troubling include Ethiopia’s war with
Eritrea; Senegal’s dispatching of troops to Guinea-Bissau and South Africa’s
sending of its army into Lesotho; and the ongoing conflict among the nations
bordering on the Congo.
In addition, several regional conflicts
that had appeared to simmer down are on the edge of exploding again. Congo
and Sudan are cooperating now against Uganda. Angola supplied troops to
go into Congo in part to support an offensive against UNITA rebels, whose
end result has been to create whose end result might be to create an alliance
between UNITA and Congolese rebels. And the nation with one of the longest
running armed conflicts in the world, Sudan, seems about to intensify
its civil war. The government recently closed schools and universities
calling for a national mobilization of armed forces.
Once again Africa’s biggest problems
is not its population but that its governments that are more interested
in fighting each other rather than trying to find a solution to that continent’s
many problems.