African Solutions to African Borderland Challenges
By Dr Wafula Okumu
Executive Director of the Borders Institute (TBI)
The approximately 90,000 kilometres of 104 boundaries that separate and define African countries were all drawn by Europeans. While lumping together communities with a history of inter-ethnic hostilities in 54 colonies, these boundaries also divided over 200 ethnic communities and placed them in dilemmas of allegiance.
While colonial boundaries had specific purpose of serving the interests of the seven European countries that shared Africa, the meaning and purposes of post-colonial boundaries have yet to be commonly understood, Africanised, reaffirmed and maintained to serve Africa’s best interests. This and governance of African borders must be fixed. Here’s why and how.
Borders: Bridges or Battlelines?
In a critically acclaimed poem, “Mending Walls,” Robert Frost describes how human relations are shaped by boundaries. The poem is about two neighbours who meet every year to repair the boundary wall dividing their properties. One of the neighbours is sceptical of this tradition as he sees no need for a walled boundary on their lands that only have apples and pine trees and no livestock to contain. While he believes a boundary should not exist simply for the sake of existing, his neighbour is convinced that it is crucial to maintaining their relationship and unequivocally insists “Good fences make good neighbours.”
In this poem, we learn that a primary purpose of a boundary is to set limits of our interactions while also serving as a point of our contact. While marking the limits of neighbours’ lands, boundaries enhance their friendliness and good neighbourliness by preventing disputes. Borders are places where people are divided by lines but also united by lifestyle and traditions.
A border is fluid and permissive but also barricading and walling to keep out “others.” International borders determine relations between states, usually by promoting inter-state commerce. In doing this, a state can secure its economic security through collection of custom duty and by curbing smuggling activities. Carrying out these functions can cause tensions and conflicts if borders are not clearly or properly defined, marked and managed. Ultimately, borders are expressions of the nature of relations between individuals and countries: positive or negative, friendly or unfriendly, inclusive or exclusive, unifying or separating.
Borders are facets of human life as they affect us in innumerable and profound ways: the kinds of food we eat, the language we speak, the songs we sing, the ideas taught in our schools, the books and newspapers we read, the kind of money we use, what and how we are taxed, the markets we buy or sell our goods, the goods we import, the national cultures we identify with, the armies we serve in, the land we defend and die for, the nature of our economic security and lifestyles, our nationalities, and even how sound we sleep (that is, if our borders are safe).
Borders between nation-states are endowed with resources and opportunities but also inhabited by the marginalised, excluded and impoverished. They are far-flung from the centre and the edge of the nations but also locations where cultures interact and points of contact of two or more states. A border can be a contact zone of peace or conflict depending on the nature of relations of elites in the capitals. Borders are not in competition with the capitals or with the nation–states but rather their extensions.
Insecurity on African borders
Border insecurity in Africa is largely attributed to poorly managed borderlands due to absence of offices, understaffed, unmotivated and ill-trained border management personnel, and lack of facilities and proper accommodation. The personnel also lack communication capabilities and transport to patrol difficult border terrains with numerous illegal border crossing points. It is also not possible or easy to manage a border that is unclearly marked. Other contributing factors to border insecurity includes alienation of local communities and lack of border governance strategies or policies. Compounding these challenges is the high-level of corruption among some border management officials coopted into criminal syndicates operating in borderlands.
All these factors have several implications. Borders are vulnerable to infiltration by criminal syndicates, rebel and terrorist activities and hostile local communities. National security is threatened when terrorists freely move their radical ideas and weapons across permeable borders and when traffickers float the markets with contrabands that ruin local markets. In certain cases, intervention measures taken to address border challenges such as insecurities have led to inter-state disputes and conflicts with far-reaching ramifications.
African borderlands, like those in other regions, are seen and treated as ungoverned spaces that threaten and undermine national sovereignties. Concisely, national securities of most African countries are threatened by cross-border crimes such as human trafficking, human, contraband smuggling, drug, ivory smuggling, terrorist activities, cross-border cattle rustling, auto-theft, piracy, cybercrimes and counterfeited luxury goods.
Responses to border insecurities
When faced with security threats from or on borders, governments can respond with knee-jerk reactions to mollify an incident or robustly with effective measures that contain and eliminate the insecurities in the long-term. There are several ways African states can effectively respond to threats to their sovereignties emanating from the borderlands.
First, it should be understood that borders per se, do not threaten or undermine national securities. It is only when they are mismanaged or neglected that they are vulnerable to criminal activities and become havens for syndicates, rebels and terrorists that undermine national security.
Second, several measures must be carried out to pre-empt or contain threats crossing or emanating from our borders. Such measures range from assigning distinctive meaning, purposes and functions to borders, clearly defining, marking and maintaining them, and designing policies and strategies that include sensitising locals, building the capacities of border management personnel and proactively addressing issues that may undermine peaceful coexistence of the nation-states sharing common boundaries.
In assigning meaning and purpose, we must determine whether we want borders to be bridges or barriers to peaceful coexistence between neighbouring nation-states, soft or hard borders, and sources of national prosperity or national insecurity. When designing intervention measures to border insecurities, we must be guided by comprehensive assessments of the borderlands, include all stakeholders and avoid band-aid solutions borrowed from other countries and regions. The understanding of African borderland challenges must be understood through African paradigms, which must also guide generation of African solutions. Certainly, Africa has solutions to its borderland challenges and need not rely on outsiders to effectively address them.