Africans failing their people but focused on Israel

It has become clear to me over the years that governments from my continent display little respect for the lives of their fellow black people. In many of the mismanaged failing states on the African continent, vast populations live in extreme poverty, remain unprotected from diseases, have little to no access to adequate health services as well as hygienic water sources, and seem cursed in having an uncaring leadership as defenceless citizens are slaughtered like chickens.

While sickening, it has struck me as particularly strange how some of these incompetent governments will meddle in the Israel-Hamas conflict while neglecting the welfare of their own people.

South Africa, which dragged Israel to the United Nations’ International Court of Justice (ICJ), is the most unequal country in the world. About 75 to 85 people are violently murdered daily, and most victims are black. South Africa has the highest unemployment rate – 33% – in the world, and most of those young people are black. According to the World Bank in 2020, 50.5% of the population lived in poverty while 25% – almost 14 million people – experienced food poverty.

South Africa has major domestic problems that pose a threat to national security. It’s a ticking time-bomb that could explode at any moment. It should be a given that the newly elected incoming government should prioritise the plight of its destitute black people before interfering in affairs a continent away that are of no strategic benefit to the larger population of the country.

A country’s foreign policy should be an assertion of its national self-interest and be to the benefit of its domestic situation. A sober person should ask how many millions the ICJ case cost the South African government, how it served the nation domestically, and what effect the exercise had on bringing an end to the war between Israel and Hamas.

To make matters worse, we have a continental body, the African Union (AU), headquartered in Ethiopia, which has no regard for Africa and its people. We have a bloody war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which according to the Council on Foreign Relations, has claimed the lives of more than six million black people since 1996. Daily, black people continue to kill each other in the eastern DRC, but the AU appears unwilling to deliver a clarion call to end the bloodshed.

The 2020-2023 war between Eritrea and Ethiopia claimed more than 700 000 lives and has resulted in continued war crimes in the north of Ethiopia. Here again, the AU (and the UN) hasn’t taken action. Maybe this is because this war didn’t trend in the mainstream media. The AU should be the voice of the powerless on the continent, but has emerged as a paper tiger. It’s becoming irrelevant to many Africans because it doesn’t advance their interests.

In the words of Mozambican human rights activist Adriano Nuvunga, “Today, the African Union is an organisation that primarily represents the interests of the powerful. It’s toothless and ineffective, and it repeatedly proves itself incapable of ensuring prosperity, security, and peace for all Africans.”

I’m dragging the toothless AU into this discussion because the chairperson of the AU Commission, former Chad Prime Minister Moussa Faki Mahamat, constantly uses all available platforms to condemn Israel.

When is he going to prioritise the welfare of black people on his own continent?

If he’s so passionate about international human rights, why does Mahamat ignore the horror playing out in Haiti, where fellow black people who are descendants of Africans are slaughtering each other? Why is he so obsessed with Israel when black people are dying in their thousands in the Caribbean? What’s extra special about Israel that diverts his attention from any concern about the lives of the descendants of Africa?

Mr Mahamat, are African lives so cheap to you?

According to media reports, about 15 000 Sudanese – also African – have been killed, while more than 30 000 have been badly injured since the start of the civil war in 2023, but the AU has done absolutely nothing to quell the volatile situation there. The World Food Programme has recently alerted the world that Sudan is now facing unprecedented levels of starvation. We should be asking whether starvation has been used as a weapon of war.

Africa needs to defend and protect the lives of Africans in the continent. We have enough problems to preoccupy our minds rather than finding ourselves trapped in conflicts elsewhere in the world. African countries need to unite and co-operate to combat war, violent murder, terrorism, poverty, inequality, water insecurity, human and drug trafficking, and unemployment among the youth and women.

I’m reminded of the spirit of awakening across Africa in the early 1960s, captured in the words of Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, at the Organisation of African Unity founding on 25 May 1963. Nkrumah said, “We must now unite or perish.”

The policies pursued show little evidence of adhering to that spirit.

• Kenneth Mokgatlhe is pursuing a Master of Arts in African Studies, African sustainable communities programme, at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. He’s a political writer, analyst, and researcher.
• Article courtesy of Lay of the Land (layoftheland.online).