At the Extraordinary Summit of the Heads of State and Government of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) held in Mozambique on June 23, 2021, the regional body endorsed a decision to deploy a SADC Standby Force mission to the Republic of Mozambique, by October this year.
On 24th May 2021, news broke of yet another coup d’état in Mali, the third in the last decade following the 2012 and 2020 military takeovers. The ‘palace’ coup sees Col Assimi Goïta, yet again, seizing power in Mali and detaining transitional President Bah Ndaw and Prime Minister Moctar Ouane, after accusing them of failing in their duties and trying to sabotage Mali’s transition to democracy.
At the UN Security Council and in other forums in Africa and Europe, diplomats are debating different options for increasing international support to the G5 Sahel Force. The aim is to enhance its operational capacity and effectiveness to restore stability in the Sahel. Despite the presence of the UN Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA), the Group of Five Sahel (G5 Sahel) Force, as well as French and European Union missions, the security situation in the Sahel has significantly deteriorated over the last few years.
The Group of Five for the Sahel, commonly known as the G5 SAHEL was created in 2014 by the governments of Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger as a platform to collectively address the development and security challenges confronting them. When carefully analysed, one can see some similarities between Cabo Delgado’s growing challenges with violent extremism and the case of the Sahel.
COVID-19 has had a significant impact on border communities in the Chipinge district in south-east Zimbabwe, which shares borders with Mozambique and South Africa. The borders are the lifeline of the Chipinge communities, and the efforts of the three governments to regulate the movement of people from either side of the borders, to prevent the spread of COVID-19, have negatively affected the economic and social interactions of the border communities. One unfortunate side-effect is that these measures have increased the space for illicit trade and organised crime along the borders as people try to earn a living and interact, in spite of the COVID-19 restrictions.
The contributions at the 14th Extra-Ordinary Summit on Silencing the Guns served to reaffirm the commitment of the current leadership of the continent to the moral and political duty given to us by our forebears to achieve an Africa free of conflict. The summit was able to answer some critical questions on the actions we must now take to advance this responsibility, including in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the first week of December 2020, two key meetings were held that will impact significantly on the coming year’s peace and security agenda in Africa. The first was the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) High-Level Debate on the cooperation between the UN and regional and sub-regional organisations. The second noteworthy meeting was the African Union’s (AU) 14th Extraordinary Session on Silencing the Guns in Africa. While held separately, both meetings have informed and will direct the priorities and activities of peace actors across the African continent. The departure point dictating the synergies between the two meetings is how to leverage the partnerships among the UN, AU and regional and sub-regional organisations to silence the guns in Africa. This multi-stakeholder approach offered through institutional cooperation to silence the guns is increasingly important in a context where COVID-19 has acted as a force multiplier in several existing conflicts on the continent.
The African Union Heads of State and Government had marked the year 2020 with the theme “Silencing the Guns: Creating Conducive Conditions for Africa’s Development”. As a flagship project of Agenda 2063, Silencing the Guns by 2020 was adopted in 2013 during the Organisation of African Unity/African Union 50th Commemorative Anniversary Summit of African Heads of State. The vision of the 2013 Solemn Declaration was to achieve the goal of a conflict-free Africa, to make peace a reality for all our people and to rid the continent of wars and civil conflicts.
Tensions between the Ethiopian government and regional government of Tigray came to a head on 3–4 November, after the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) attacked a federal government position in Mekelle, Tigray’s capital. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed responded immediately with air strikes and ground attacks. While the underlying causes of the conflict relate to competing visions over the nature of the Ethiopian state, the immediate cause of the fighting was the National Election Board of Ethiopia’s (NEBE) decision in March to indefinitely postpone the elections that were scheduled for August 2020, due to COVID-19.
A blended approach to stabilisation is emerging in Africa. It is characterised by a response to crisis-affected settings, which combines the predominance and sometimes necessary means of hard-security interventions and soft-security measures associated with political and development responses. The Lake Chad Basin experience represents a model that could create prospects for enduring stability in the region. It could also resonate in other parts of Africa, especially in the Horn, where there is a growing policy debate by the African Union (AU) and partners for reimagining regional and international support to the security environment in Somalia and the region.