Keeping It Real: History has begun...again

                              The Future We Thought Was Coming

Being a father to three young children, my wife and I spend a fair amount of time discussing how we should prepare them for the world they will live in. What skills and education will they need to have a successful career? What sports should they play to keep healthy and be well rounded individuals? What books should they read to expand their knowledge and develop enquiring minds? How do we protect them from the negative influences of the ultra-liberal LGBTQ+ movement? How do we pass on our religious values in an increasingly non-religious world?

We and most parent’s make similar assumptions about the present and future world that our kids will live in. We assume it will be a high-technology, low manual labour, stable and generally prosperous. AI, coding, entrepreneurship, automation, robotics, financial services, a globalized work environment - that's a word soup from the future we thought was coming.

End of History

The present that you and I grew up in was the result of a World Order created by the exhausted belligerents of World War Two. It was designed to ‘End History’ i.e. end the increasingly violent European wars of rivalry that had dragged more and more of the world in with each iteration.

The United Nation’s with a global mandate ranging from peace & security to arts & history was to be the vehicle to achieve this grand agenda. That grand agenda was to end war, suffering, poverty, brutality, human misery - the ill's that have plagued man since the dawn of civilization. The grand agenda was to ‘end history’ as we have known it. 

It was successful, in Europe at least and it created mechanisms for resolving conflicts (or at least managing them) in the rest of the world. 

As a bonus, the greatest period of prosperity in human history (for most parts of the world) was ushered in by Globalization. Simultaneously, mechanisms to end economic misery through the Millennium Development Goals and the Sustainable Development Goals, charted a path out of mass human suffering for the poorest nations.

The ‘End of History’ was realistically in sight. Or so we believed.

Decaying World Order

The partial success of the current World Order has been undermined by a few weaknesses. The most important of these has been it’s inability to evolve to the changing world it has created. It has failed to meet the challenges and expectations that came with the independence of African states, the surge in economic growth of the Asian Tigers and China, hasn't successfully navigated the fall of the Soviet Union and didn't anticipate the politically destabilizing effects of the de-industrialization of the United States and Europe.

The current World Order is a victim of its own success. It is not quite broken but, rather, is flawed. There was never a strong enough incentive to justify its overhaul. And so, it has staggered on, gradually losing its grip on a changing world.

Seismic Changes

The first major sign of trouble for the current World Order was the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and subsequent Great Recession. The early unilateral actions of the United States to stem the crisis, caught the highly integrated economies of Europe completely off guard. For the first time since the advent of this World Order, the major world power that under wrote it all, chose to act alone. This was a warning of things to come.

Perhaps the most striking and seismic evidence of the decay of the current World Order (that is premised on multilateralism) was the each-man-for-himself approach that every major power took to securing vaccines when COVID-19 exploded into a pandemic in 2020. National interest trumped a coordinated multilateral approach. Venerated institutions of the current multilateral World Order were left sidelined, ridiculed and outright boycotted as nations scrambled in a mad panic not see since the Great Depression a century earlier. 

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, it should have been clear to all that multilateralism, globalization and the post-World War Two Order was the proverbial dead man walking.

The final seismic quake that signaled to us that a new phase of history is beginning was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It was a return to the kind of conflict that the whole post-WW2 order was created to prevent. Believing itself cornered, Russia had returned to 19th century style war to secure its interests. The complete inability of multilateral institutions to address and prevent a conflict that had been brewing, simmering and threatening to boil over for twenty years proved their obsolescence beyond doubt.

Bringing it Home

Between 2002 and about 2018 it seemed to the whole world that Africa could emerge from the legacy of colonialism, the destabilizing effects of the cold war, ethnic strife and political instability. Unprecedented economic growth across the continent, fueled optimism, drove down poverty, raised incomes and stabilized conflicts. It had the effect of lulling us into a false sense of security and optimism about the future.

But this decade and a half of prosperity, merely papered over the cracks of fundamental weaknesses in many African states. The prosperity was fueled primarily by a resource hungry China, in turn driven by Western consumerism, riding a wave of global free trade. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the West became spooked by the behemoth that China had become and started to ‘de-risk and decouple’, China matured as a lender, closing the money taps and ending the wave of prosperity.

The old fissures have re-emerged, and the continent is slipping back to its old weaknesses. The coup-d'etat is back in fashion, military fatigue clad strongmen have wrested power across the Sahel. Their comeback is fueled by ineffective governance that has seen states teeter on the verge of collapse. Jihadi extremists and ethnic conflict threaten to tear these countries apart. The Military strongman-jihadi belt of Mali, Niger, Burkina faso, Chad (to a slightly lesser extent Nigeria) now threatens to link up with the quagmire that is Libya and the cauldron that is Sudan. Ethiopia is in fragile ceasefire after the Tigray war but now threatening conflict with Eritrea and Somalia. The fragile political stalemate in South Sudan seems set to boil over and there is an all-out war in eastern DRC involving Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi and SADC token force.

The continent is burning and the pillars of the multilateral world order, the UN, AU, ECOWAS, EGAD, EAC and SADC have failed to prevent, resolve or manage these conflicts. The risk of contagion is high as aging strongmen in Uganda and Rwanda may not be around much longer to keep the lid on their traditionally unstable countries. Simultaneously, their armies' expansionist adventures in the eastern DRC threaten to draw in other regional players as they did twenty-five years ago.

Alarmingly, the Africa of the 1970’s, 80’s and 90’s is back and there are no solutions in sight.

Where do we go from here?

Regional War, civil war, ethno-religious conflict are just on the horizon for most of Africa. Destruction of infrastructure, reduced trade, greater & deeper poverty and general human misery will be the fruits of the failing global order. A continent in flux will be the story of the 2020’s, 30’s and maybe 40’s. 

With this in mind, how should we prepare as individuals, families and communities? Will more practical, old school life skills be needed more than high-tech techno-utopia skills we thought we needed? Should we be teaching our kids a second regional language? A second international language? How to farm? Bush survival skills?

What should we demand of our politicians and policy makers? Should petty, regional and ethnic politics occupy them so much? Should we be demanding greater defense spending and a more effective army and AirForce (over the crony-stuffed, politically reliable but military inept ones we have)? Should we be demanding greater self-sufficiency in food and basic industry?

The answer’s may not yet be clear to us, but what must be clearly understood and accepted is that the world we have known is over. Change is coming and we cannot be sure about what form it will take and what it will mean for us.