This is one of the most important issues of our time.

As the Congo erupts once more, future generations may find our blindness to a clear and apparent evil in our time just as incomprehensible as we found the silence of the beneficiaries of Apartheid, and further back, the connivance of millions during the three hundred years of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

With more than twenty major wars since 1960, Africa, from Biafra, through Rwanda, has suffered more from conflict than any other continent. The cycle of conflict and war is doubly tragic because there is little sense in building schools and bridges if your neighbours - or the rebels in their jungles - are building arsenals. In large areas of Africa, reconciliation by dialogue has fallen out of fashion, no thanks to the higher profile of armaments, to the tens of millions of weapons - from pistols to landmines - on streets and farms across the continent. In many territories, generations have grown up against a backdrop of war.

We must now recognise that in countries with weakened institutions, where arms are stockpiled they will eventually be used, and development is impossible in the midst of private and public stockpiles of arms.

RPGs or Wheat?
We need to invest in seeds and tractors rather than RPGs and Kalashnikovs. The shipment of armaments from Europe to Africa was one component of the triangular trade in slaves that survived the abrogation of slavery. Back in the day, the supply of European arms was critical to the harvesting of African slaves. The intervening centuries since the end of slave trade have not much improved the morality of supplying lethal arms to short-sighted brigands who prey on their own communities.

The overall proportion of GDP officially spent by some African governments on the military is worrying. Angola, for instance, spent 2.4% of its 2005 GDP on Education and 5.7% on Defence and military expenditure. Eritrea on the other hand, spent 2.4% of its GDP on Education and 6.3% on Defence. This compares with Japan which spent 3.5% of its GDP on education and .8% on military expenditure. Even the US, with the largest military in the world, barely spends 4% of GDP on Defence, compared with 5.3 on education. (CIA World Factbook figures)

The billions of dollars officially spent by African governments on armaments is on top of the funds lost to endemic arms sector corruption and the African resources invested by rebel groups in black market transactions (war diamonds for instance).

These figures are a scandal in the context of Africa’s overall problems: the fact that the list of 25 countries with the highest death rates in the world is solidly African; as is the list of countries with the highest infant mortality, or lowest life expectancy, or least literate citizens, or the highest number of AIDS deaths  — to stop at just five indices.

False Security
The great tragedy is that the bleeding of vital resources from education, health and infrastructure into armaments creates more civil unrest, and the weapons purchased by governments frequently end up in the hands of rebels and warring factions - the 2002 Ivorian conflict is a case in point where disloyal soldiers simply opened up the government’s arsenal to start their mutiny. In this sense, large arsenals actually worsen the security of the relevant countries, while increasing their levels of national debt. Of course this is not a peculiarly African problem: the $600 billion so far spent in the latest Gulf war did not exactly bring security to Iraqi streets.

If the annual spend on arms is halved across the African continent and across all the sides to the perennial conflicts, and the savings applied to health, education and infrastructure for a start, Africawill see improvements in the life opportunities of millions. In many cases all that is necessary for communities to feed themselves is for them to be allowed to plant and harvest in peace. If the world can keep their bombs at home, they can keep their food aid as well.

Action Plans
Concerted action needs to be taken regionally to

• reduce the proportion of GDP invested in armaments.
• eliminate the black market and surreptitious flows of armaments into the continent.
• invest substantially in community mediation, infrastructure, and employment generation in regions reclaimed from conflict.

In all this, the African Union and its members must step up to take responsibility and ownership of the process of ridding Africa of the heritage of arms. In five centuries, the force of arms has proved an underwhelming defence by African nations against non-African invaders. In this century, armaments play a local and regional role as ethnic, local and national tensions are stoked and fed for selfish purposes. We must act regionally to actively buy back and decommission arms caches. At continental level, we must stanch the haemorrhage of wealth into the industry of death, create robust reconciliatory structures, collegiate governance and peacekeeping that is ribbed with the moral courage to intervene meaningfully in outrages like the Rwandan genocide.

The role of the West is to pursue those that run illicit arms into Africa from their shores with the same rigour that they would pursue them, were the arms destined for armed riots on the streets of London or Paris or insurrection in the inner cities of New York or Berlin.

It is necessary to invest substantially in ridding the African countryside of armaments. It is important that no part of the continent remains aloof to this problem. For decades, Ivory Coast was the regional exception to the rule of West African turmoil, but the season of war and conflict arrived and the years of progress and development were swept away. Even where hostilities do not actually break out within the borders of a country, war is traumatic for both refugees and host communities alike; witness South Africa's recent xenophobic riots. The UNHCR currently reports over 5 million refugees and internally displaced people in Africa.

Crying Blood
My poem, Crying Blood, presents an alien angel’s perspective on Judgment Day, but we do not need to believe in angels to empathise with the millions locked in cycles of suffering. Uganda’s war has raged for two decades, as has Somalia’s. In Sudan, in Angola, every day, in another forgotten thicket in Africa, another shell will blow up a community, replacing the very ordinary dreams of a very ordinary family with another extraordinary nightmare. It is time to link the iniquity of the arms industry to the crying blood on the ground.

No mistake, Africans and their governments bear prime responsibility for the situation. At their best, they are acting: the West African moratorium on the import, export and manufacture of small arms was the first regional moratorium in the world, and it has now evolved into a convention. Eleven East African countries signed the signal Nairobi Protocol on Small Arms and Light Weapons… but at their worst, they can also be venal accomplices to the arms industry. Yet, in all cases, the dead and dying are the powerless victims, so it is also time for all of us to recognise the hypocrisy of countries that ships cluster bombs to Africa in the spring and food aid in the summer, sometimes on the same ships. We must reach beyond the remote control switch that turns off the inconvenient news to call time on this madness, now.

There is of course no landscape in the world, no market square, that can be improved by a bomb. The Arms Issue is not an exclusively African one. It is only the crushing coincidences recounted here that make the status quo on the continent peculiarly obscene.

What can we do?

• We all can support the worldwide Arms Trade Treaty and press governments to do so;
• All governments can legislate a moratorium against the sale of arms to areas of conflict;
• African Governments can push for a convention prohibiting the purchase, sale and manufacture of small arms;
• African Governments can sign a moratorium paring defence spending down to 1% of GDP or less;
• African Governments can actively fund community mediations, to employ people in peacemaking rather than war;
• Companies and individuals can disinvest in the arms industry generally and support global efforts to regulate and administer the sector;
• Arms exporting countries can update legislation to enable arms brokers who circumvent sanctions to be effectively prosecuted.

Do add your name to this online appeal, and send this on.


In Addition,

• If you are African, take every opportunity to remind your government that you would rather your taxes bought tractors than tanks ;
• If your country is an arms manufacturer and exporter, ask your MP how many bombs have been shipped to Africa in your name - or how many genocide victims have been chalked up on your conscience.

Do join the campaign today. It is the right thing to do.

Chuma

— and welcome to my website