Ukraine: the view from Africa
by Anne-Cécile Robert
The UN
General Assembly’s 2 March 2022 resolution condemning Russia’s invasion
of Ukraine and calling for the immediate withdrawal of its troops was
adopted by a large majority (141 votes out of 193). However, the voting
breakdown stunned Western governments: 17 of the 35 countries that
abstained – and one that voted against – were African, and eight African
countries did not vote at all. Africa is the part of the world most
divided in its reaction to the war and the most reluctant to condemn
Russia.
The West, leading the campaign to isolate Russia at the UN, has done all it can to rally the hesitant or recalcitrant. Senegal’s president Macky Sall says his country ‘hasn’t been pressured as such, but has received requests from partners who are friendly with the EU and US. Many other [African] countries have come under friendly pressure to vote one way or the other’ (1). The African Union has not commented or even discussed the unlikely possibility of its 54 member states adopting a common stance.
European commentators’ simplistic explanation was that some African countries must be under Russian control. Political scientist Thierry Vircoulon believes that while Russia is not a major trading partner of African countries, it is benefiting from aggressive efforts to re-establish footholds in the region, especially in security: ‘Between 2016 and 2020 Russia supplied 30% of arms purchased by sub-Saharan countries; and since 2017 it has signed military cooperation agreements with 20 such countries, compared with only seven between 2010 and 2017.’
Further, the Russian private military contractor Wagner Group has propped up fragile regimes such as those of Mali and the Central African Republic (CAR) (2). Vircoulon explains that ‘this strong state security presence gives the Kremlin privileged access to African governments and even allows it to control those that are particularly weak, as in the CAR’ (3).
No one wants to anger Russia
These considerations are clearly a factor in Africa’s choices. African diplomats readily (but anonymously) admit their own political leaders would think twice before angering Russia, which is a nuclear power, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, and able to influence intracontinental relations – for instance, through South Africa, a fellow member of the BRICS group (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa).
Sticking with friends and protecting one’s interests is not unusual: France has been accused of cultivating relations with countries that have little respect for human rights, such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and selling them arms and fighter planes. Gilles Yabi, a political scientist from Benin, says European commentators’ surprise ‘reflects their mistaken perception that Africa is unable to form its own opinion about world events’ (4).
Africa’s divided reactions to the Ukraine war are typical of a new, less predictable, geopolitics of flexible, ad hoc alliances, with each country practising ‘transactional diplomacy’. The example of the non-aligned movement in the 1950s is sometimes used to justify a neutrality that may seem anachronistic, but during the cold war it enabled countries to set themselves apart from the two imperialist blocs. Today’s challenge is to take a position on a serious violation of the UN charter by a permanent member of the Security Council.
This seems to have come as a shock to the West. Yabi says, ‘Since the second world war, the world has largely been defined by the Western powers, militarily, diplomatically and economically. This attitude to Russia can be explained partly by a desire to avoid dependence on a single superpower – particularly the US – or on European countries with a colonial past.’
The emerging world order offers African countries more options, and now they want freedom to choose their own partners. These changes coincide with the coming to power of new generations who no longer value links to the colonial past, and feel free to pick their alliances. Timbuktu Institute regional director Bakary Sambe says, ‘That’s the key factor: in Africa today, we are seeing the combined effects of increasingly uninhibited elites and demanding populations looking for ways to get ahead in international relations’ (5).
West must beg for favours
This places the West in the unaccustomed position of having to beg for favours. On a visit to Dakar in October 2022, French minister of state for development, Francophonie and foreign partnerships Chrysoula Zacharopoulou naively called for African solidarity with Europe in the face of Russian aggression, which she described, in the presence of African heads of state, as ‘an existential threat to [Europe’s] stability and integrity’.
As the International Crisis Group’s president Comfort Ero notes, African governments have a deep sense of injustice and feel the West is showing ‘partiality’ (6). The liberties the West took with the UN charter over Kosovo (1999) and Iraq (2003), and the way France, the UK and the US exceeded the Security Council’s mandate to NATO on Libya (2011), are still talked about. As Niger’s president Mohamed Bazoum told the UN in 2022, ousting Muammar Gaddafi had dramatic consequences in the Sahel, notably the spread of jihadism.
The enormity of Russia’s actions has not diminished African countries’ desire to express their resentment, which is also fuelled by the rest of the world’s continued failure to help them face huge, often existential, challenges. Last September Macky Sall, speaking on behalf of the African Union, of which Senegal had taken over the rotating presidency in February, urged the UN Security Council to treat all threats to international peace and security the same – including in Africa; Niger’s President Bazoum was worried by ‘major failings’ in the global response to terrorism, which is destabilising entire countries in the Sahel.
Kenyan president William Ruto condemned multilateralism’s failure to tackle the threats and challenges affecting Africa, including ‘climate change, the food crisis, terrorism, cyber [security], armed conflict and the Covid-19 pandemic’, as well as drought, debt and the digital divide. Ero adds that Africans ‘are aware that Europe has taken in Ukrainian refugees while rejecting Asians, Arabs and Africans, and conscious of the bias it has shown in the distribution of Covid vaccines and handling of financial issues’. And Yabi points out that ‘climate change is a bigger problem for Africa than war in Ukraine.’
Responses to the Ukraine war
Even so, the threat of a food crisis has brought home to Africa its historical vulnerability to events far away. The supply chain problems experienced during the pandemic are becoming entrenched in the case of cereals. The African Union’s response was to visit Moscow to plead with Vladimir Putin to allow shipments via the Black Sea to resume. Congolese political analyst Cyr Makosso believes ‘it’s time for Africans to learn the lessons of this crisis between Russia and Ukraine, and end their food dependency by agreeing to share stocks of imported products at sub-regional group level, while promoting traditional fertilising practices and supporting the growing of local crops, whose long neglect has benefited only the agrochemical industry’ (7).
African positions are not devoid of theatrics and demagogy. Many heads of state denouncing the injustices Africa faces are docile agents of international policies that expose their countries to the vagaries of the global economy and predation by multinationals. They administer the free-trade prescriptions of financial institutions whose remedies impoverish their countries, and welcome Western military advisors and security firms. And they do not always show solidarity.
In 2011 a number of regional powers (notably Nigeria) supported Security Council resolution 1973, which authorised NATO to intervene in Libya, disregarding the African Union’s attempts to mediate. Senegalese political scientist Aziz Salmone Fall, founder of the Group for Research and Initiative for the Liberation of Africa (GRILA), regrets the African left’s failure to take advantage of international events to pursue the uncoupling of Africa from the capitalist world order, as advocated by the late Egyptian economist Samir Amin.
Nonetheless, diplomatic initiatives – including visits by France’s president Emmanuel Macron, German chancellor Olaf Scholtz, US secretary of state Antony Blinken and Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, and a second US-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington in December – signal a renewed interest in Africa. Some African commentators see potential for development and self-assertion. Sambe says, ‘In the present circumstances, which could for once benefit us, Africa is changing, at least in the popular perception, from being a known quantity, or of little consequence, to being a more advantageous area, whose influence and weight could determine the international balance of power.’
There are growing calls for a readjustment of the international balance of power by giving the African Union a permanent seat at the G20 or the UN Security Council. ‘If the rest of the world, and Europe in particular, wants to build an equitable relationship with Africa, now is the time,’ Touré says. ‘Today we have a whole array of potential partners, which was not the case 15-20 years ago … The world has changed but the traditional powers don’t seem to realise it, or are realising it very slowly. We need a paradigm change’ (8). One sign that there’s still a long way to go is that while most Western leaders now accept that the Security Council should be expanded, all voted against the General Assembly’s 14 December 2022 resolution calling for a new international economic order, even though it was adopted with the support of 123 member states.