AfricaFocus Bulletin
June 9, 2022 (2022-06-09)
(Reposted from sources cited below)
Editor's Note
“An end to this terrible war based on dialogue must be the international community’s highest priority. Support to the
people of Ukraine must be matched by efforts to advance Russian/Ukrainian negotiations, European security dialogue,
and wider risk-reduction measures to prevent nuclear escalation.” - The Elders, May 25, 2022
The war in Ukraine, and above all its continued mutual escalation as a proxy war between the United States and Russia,
is a painful reminder that wars in Europe are still a threat to the entire planet. This is not only because of their
direct economic consequences. It is also this war, featuring white people as the major protagonists and visible
victims, has diverted media and political attention from existential issues for Africa and the entire world.
Among the most critical of these is the steadily approaching climate apocalypse, as this year´s global summit on climate, to be held in Egypt in early November is approaching while the world is hardly paying attention. Listen to Kenyan activist Elizabeth Wahuti at last year´s COP26 in Glasgow.
This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains (1) an essay by Donna Katzin and me, published in Foreign Policy in Focus, on the
continued urgency of action on climate, (2) an essay by me, published by Responsible Statecraft,
on the war in Ukraine through an African lens, and (3) a short report by Graça Machel of the Elders on their latest
meeting.
Because it is critical that attention on this war does not crowd out other wars and other issues, I also include just
below a short set of links to recent articles focused on African and global issues.
https://prospect.org/coronavirus/saving-lives-globally-vs-defending-pharma-profits/
More than a year after Joe Biden announced his support for a waiver of intellectual-property rules to supply cheap
vaccines to most of the world’s people, the process remains blocked. The European Union is still siding with the drug
companies, and the U.S. has not followed through on Biden’s pledge. The issue comes to a head next week in Geneva.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01525-1
Covering 10% of the world’s hydropower reservoirs with ‘floatovoltaics’ would install as much electrical capacity as
is currently available for fossil-fuel power plants. But the environmental and social impacts must be assessed.
Media, politicians, and policymakers tend to focus on the most visible issues.
The attention the war in Ukraine has received in the first half of 2022, for example, is unrivaled in the United
States at least since the shock of 9/11 in 2001. The war has been highly visible because of the capacity to obtain
compelling photographs and videos, which can be shared quickly through social media — and also, perhaps, because the
featured protagonists, victims, and voices in this European war are white, in contrast to past and present wars in
Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America.
The gut-wrenching suffering in Ukraine deserves coverage, context, and resolution. But meanwhile, other global issues
— pandemics, rising economic inequality, the climate crisis, and more — have faded into the background.
The backsliding on climate action is a clear example of the damage done.
Big Oil Profits While Washington Stays on Autopilot
By this spring, fossil fuel companies were celebrating massive increases in profits, while Congress was approving $47 billion in new spending for Ukraine, the largest U.S. aid package to a single country in decades. Political will in Washington to stop production of fossil fuels and invest in renewable energy, already weak, had evaporated as time to avoid a climate apocalypse continued to run out.
Meanwhile, the rise in fuel and food prices caused by the war is being felt most intensely in developing regions such
as Africa. This has come on top of preexisting shocks from the continent’s own wars (fueled by outside actors
including the United States, France, Russia, and others), from illicit financial flows draining the continent of its
wealth, and from the deadly toll of climate-caused disasters already taking lives and destroying livelihoods.
As of late May, both the Biden administration and Congress seem to be committed to “winning” the war in Europe instead
of encouraging negotiated solutions. As the November election approaches, on the eve of the next climate summit
scheduled for Egypt, funding global climate commitments to Africa and the world for recovery from climate damages and
investment in a sustainable future can hardly compete with eagerness to fund a wider war.
The obstacles to action were already formidable.
Lobbyists from fossil fuel industries could count on strategically placed Senator Joe Manchin, the coal industry oligarch unapologetic about his own conflicts of interest. Highly publicized pledges for “net-zero” goals from giant corporations and other institutions, including fossil-fuel companies themselves, were most often filled with enough loopholes to make them virtually meaningless. Demands for rich countries to provide compensatory funding for climate damage to the most vulnerable countries won lip service but not funding at global conferences.
On April 4. 2022, the final Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Synthesis Report was released, concluding that “In the scenarios we assessed, limiting warming to around 1.5°C (2.7°F) requires global greenhouse gas emissions to peak before 2025 at the latest, and be reduced by 43% by 2030. However, it gained relatively little media attention. Obstruction by the fossil fuel industry was a central theme of the report. But it was excluded at the last minute from the “Summary for Policymakers.”
“Fossil fuel interests are now cynically using the war in Ukraine to try to lock in a high carbon future,” Guterres tweeted. “A shift to renewables is crucial to mending our broken global energy mix and offering hope to millions suffering climate impacts today.”
In May, the World Meteorological Organization predicted that “there is a 50:50 chance of the annual average global temperature temporarily reaching 1.5 °C above the pre-industrial level for at least one of the years” from 2022 to 2026. Yet few national governments, apart from the small island states that can easily envision their entire countries being sunk beneath the oceans, have adequate incentives to act with the urgency demanded by the scientific facts.
And a new exposé in The Guardian revealed that “the dozen biggest oil companies are on track to spend $103 million a day for the rest of the decade exploiting new fields of oil and gas that cannot be burned if global heating is to be limited to well under 2C.”
Fortunately, many climate activists are recognizing that, as in a host of other crises, it is both necessary and
possible to focus on more immediate targets — from state and local governments to fossil-fuel giants that can be
confronted with disinvestment as well as physical blockages of pipelines and other climate-destroying projects. Such
actions, if multiplied around the world, have the potential for their own cumulative impact as well as for catalyzing
action by national governments.
Examples of such initiatives abound even though they may not be featured in global headlines.
In Oregon, a lawsuit filed by 21 young plaintiffs in 2015 to establish a federal, constitutional right to a livable planet is still making its way through appeal courts, despite opposition first by the Trump administration and then by the Biden administration. If the case is successful, any federal policies that enable more fossil fuel development could be challenged as unconstitutional.
Elsewhere, a campaign by South African traditional communities and environmentalists to halt fossil fuel exploration off the Eastern Cape’s Wild Coast won an indictment against Shell Oil. Moreover, a host of practical and creative energy-saving solutions are coming from architects, visual artists, and textile designers.
The delegates there, including representatives of governments and fossil-fuel companies themselves, clapped politely. But the future, noted Wahuti, the founder of a local tree-planting organization, would depend on those who themselves felt the impact of climate-caused drought on their communities.
“People power is what is going to make the real and huge difference in the world today,” she told the delegates. “It must if there is to be a tomorrow.”
The war in Ukraine through an African lens
From the ‘with us or against us’ frame to the disproportionate fallout of the commodities crisis, these countries are non-aligned for a reason.
Africans are also not insensitive to the highly visible suffering of Ukrainian civilians caught up in the war.
But the reluctance of African governments to vote for Western resolutions at the United Nations, or take sides with
Washington and its policy of military escalation, should not be seen as support for the Russian invasion or for
Vladimir Putin.
Yet both the Biden administration and Congress continue to demand that African leaders take sides. On April 27, for example, the House of Representatives passed the “Countering Malign Russian Activities in Africa Act”by a margin of 415 to 9. The bill essentially mandates a new Cold War in Africa, including action against African governments that “facilitate the evasion of United States sanctions against Russia.”
The debate about causes and responsibility for the war in Ukraine will undoubtedly continue. Some in Africa, as elsewhere around the world, may resist Washington’s demands to take sides because they approve of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Governments in a few African countries, notably Mali and the Central African Republic, may do so because of Russian military support they have been receiving since the Wagner Group joined the host of French, U.S., and international agencies providing training and “advice” to African security forces.
But many, if not most, give more substantive reasons.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, called on both Russia and Ukraine to prioritize negotiation, citing South Africa’s own difficult history of negotiations to end apartheid, in which he played a central role. A South African columnist in the Nairobi-based newspaper The Elephant called for “rebooting the non-aligned movement.” A Ugandan columnist in the same paper denounced the war as a return to the European norm after the decades of peace since World War II. And a Nigerian intelligence analyst argued that it was not in Nigeria’s interest to get involved in this geopolitical conflict.
Such concerns are consistent with wisdom gained from African experience with other wars. They should not be taken
lightly. Here are a few such lessons gleaned from African history.
As President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania commented in the late 1990s, wars waged by big powers, hot or cold, have not
been good for Africans.
In a short interview with an Indian journalist, which came as the Clinton administration appeared to be ramping up a new post-Soviet Cold War, Nyerere repeated his oft-cited adage that “when elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.” This applies to wars driven by European powers and white settlers on both sides of the Atlantic, from the wars of conquest in the 19th century to two World Wars and the first Cold War. Leaders such as Nyerere, and Mozambique’s Eduardo Mondlane and Samora Machel were resolute in defending non-alignment and the right to choose their own friends, whether the demand for allegiance came from Washington, Moscow, or Beijing.
Peacemaking is essential. Wars must eventually end, and negotiation is essential even with those who have committed atrocities.
As Africans know, the causes of war and who was the aggressor or who committed the worst atrocities can be debated endlessly among historians, active participants, and innocent civilians and victims and their descendants for generations.
But Africans also know from experience, the vast majority of those involved in wars want peace and the freedom to go about their lives. Peacemaking is not an exact science, to say the least. But the reality is that it can only happen by de-escalation and dialogue, not by adding fuel to the flames by outsiders pouring in weapons and urging the combatants to fight it out until one wins.
Who is involved in a war is not always visible from photographs or eyewitness reports of the battles.
In 1968, I was in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, working as one of the non-Mozambican teachers in the secondary school of
the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO), the movement then fighting a guerrilla war for independence from Portugal
with the support of Tanzania and other African countries. Western expatriates I met elsewhere in the city were saying
they knew on “good authority” which foreign countries were behind turmoil within the movement that preceded the
assassination of that liberation movement’s founding president Eduardo Mondlane in February 1969.
In an emergency meeting, movement security chief Joaquim Chissano (later President of Mozambique) advised the small
group of foreign teachers at the school, including volunteers from the United States and Sweden as well as others
seconded by the governments of India, Czechoslovakia, and the German Democratic Republic, to “never believe rumors.”
That caution is even more critical in the age of social media as both information and disinformation propagate around
the world at Internet speed. This is particularly true of Ukraine, in which the disinformation wars have been well
rehearsed by all parties since the first Cold War ended in the early 1990s.
For Africans, the war in Ukraine is a painful reminder that Western foreign policy priorities, in part as reflected by mainstream Western media outlets, are still shaped primarily by racial bias and geopolitical rivalries rather than the urgent global issues that face Africa and the world.
For Africans, as well as others who have lived in Africa or worked on African issues, the disproportionate attention given to this war featuring white people, compared to more deadly ongoing wars in Africa, is a sad repeat of biases that were pervasive during the first Cold War.
Although news attention to Ukraine dropped significantly in April and May, it was still much more prominent in news in the United States than comparable conflicts in Africa or elsewhere in the Global South, according to Google Trends. Statistics on civilian casualties are hard to verify in any war. But the human toll of each of the wars in Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the West African Sahel almost certainly matches or exceeds the toll in the more closely watched war in Ukraine.
Whether then or now, the issue is not only Western failures on Africa-specific topics, such as the refusal to welcome refugees from wars in Africa in contrast to the way in the way Ukrainian refugees have been treated. Africans also correctly see themselves as leading defenders of global multinational institutions and advocates for collective action in addressing global threats from which their continent is the first to feel the pain.
Africans focused on world affairs, less blinded by the Washington-insider tilt towards the Biden administration’s hawkish foreign policy than pundits in the West, should be emulated rather than scorned for their critical analysis of yet another “white people’s war” in Europe. As Hippolyte Fofack, director of the Africa Export-Import Bank, warned in a blog post last month, African development depends on “regional ownership of its security,” rather than being drawn into a new Cold War.
Graça Machel reflects on The Elders' May board meeting in South Africa, The Elders' meeting with South Africa's President Ramaphosa, the urgent need for a just transition to address the climate crisis, and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
We are at a critical juncture in human history. How our leaders act now will determine the state of our shared world
for generations to come.
One man who understood such responsibility was our founder and my late husband, Nelson Mandela. When he brought the
Elders together in 2007 he tasked us, a small group of global leaders, to use our experience and collective voice to
champion peace, justice, and human rights worldwide. Last month, we returned to our spiritual home of South Africa to
mark our fifteenth year, celebrate the life of our dearly missed first chair Desmond Tutu, and conduct our bi-annual
Elders Board Meeting.
The challenges we discussed were grave: the climate crisis, the inequality of the pandemic recovery and the risks of
future pandemics, conflict and atrocity in Ukraine and elsewhere. But we also recalled the strength of our dear friend
Arch, whose great wisdom, moral clarity, and ability to remind us of our common humanity is deeply missed but
continues to guide us.
I went on to meetings with South Africa’s President Ramaphosain Pretoria alongside my fellow Elders, Mary Robinson and Gro Harlem Brundtland. Our productive discussions with the President reiterated the need for finance from the Global North, promised at COP26 in Glasgow, to fund a just energy transition in South Africa. We also discussed the ongoing inequity of COVID-19 vaccine supply in the developing world and the importance of South Africa’s National Health Insurance reforms.
Ahead of the meeting we had the opportunity to spend time with members of the Presidential Climate Commission, a group
of inspiring civil society leaders who are fighting for a fair society and climate justice. Their commitment to a just
transition to renewables in South Africa - one that that does not abandon fossil fuel workers and their affected
communities - reminds us of the passion and commitment of ordinary people for change, and the desire to get it right.
Such strength of purpose must also be shown by rich-world partner countries who promised South Africa $8.5 billion to
fund such initiatives at COP26. This money is needed now, and in full: no dilution, no equivocation.
This need for a people-centred approach to the climate crisis was also emphasised by Mary Robinson and Ban Ki-moon at the Sustainable Energy for All Forum in Kigali, Rwanda, ahead of The Elders’ gathering in Cape Town, and in subsequent media interviews by Mary Robinson the following week.
During our board discussions and at our meeting with President Ramaphosa, we also spoke at length about the conflict
in Ukraine. As well as the devastation endured by the Ukrainian people directly, across the world over 260 million
people unconnected to the conflict are facing extreme hunger and poverty due to the impact of war on global food and
energy prices. This is compounding existing inequalities and the COVID-19 crisis.
We are all impacted by this war and world leaders cannot sit on the fence: Russia’s aggression must be condemned. The war must be brought to an end and peace restored. The Elders reaffirmed this in a Cape Town Statement: all efforts must be made by global leaders to ensure accountability and justice and to bring peace, not escalation, to this terrible conflict.
In the face of persistent injustice and violence across the world, it can be easy to fall into despair. But looking
away is not in the spirit of Madiba, or Arch, or the people fighting for change in their communities and countries
right now. We can all help to forge a better world if we raise our voices and demand action. Many of the problems we
face today are human-made, but humans can be the solution too. The power is with us.
Thank you for your continued support,
Graça Machel
AfricaFocus Bulletin is an independent electronic publication
providing reposted commentary and analysis on African issues, with
a particular focus on U.S. and international policies. AfricaFocus
Bulletin is edited by William Minter. For an archive of previous Bulletins,
see http://www.africafocus.org,
Current links to books on AfricaFocus go to the non-profit bookshop.org, which supports independent bookshores and also provides commissions to affiliates such as AfricaFocus.
AfricaFocus Bulletin can be reached at africafocus@igc.org. Please
write to this address to suggest material for inclusion. For more
information about reposted material, please contact directly the
original source mentioned. To subscribe to receive future bulletins by email,
click here.
