YACOOB ABBA OMAR: Pretoria should take up the cudgels against mercenaries in Africa

Over the past 12 months there have been eight attempted coups in Africa, five of them successfully removing leaders from power.

This trend comes after we had seen significant strides in transiting towards democracy. Guinea’s first truly democratic elections were held in 2010 and mass protests in Burkina Faso in 2014 ended Blaise Compaoré’s 27-year reign. From 2017 to 2019 protesters toppled dictators in Algeria, Gambia, Zimbabwe and Sudan. In March 2021, for the first time in its history, Niger transferred power from one democratically elected leader to another.

What is causing this recent “epidemic of coups d’état”, as UN secretary-general António Guterres calls it, and what should our response be as South Africans? Two issues are at play here.

First, institutions in recently established democracies are still fragile, with coups often occurring in their first two years. Second, Abdul Zanya Salifu of the University of Calgary has referred to the “fetishisation of elections”, where an election timetable is imposed and rigidly adhered to, instead of equally focusing on elements such as creating social cohesion, human rights or a free press.

In some cases foreign states have been implicated in instigating coups, especially through mercenaries, colloquially referred to as “private military and security contractors” (PMSC). One such was Executive Outcomes, founded by Eeben Barlow, which had deep roots in the apartheid security establishment. Russia’s Wagner Group, created in 2014, is reportedly involved in Ukraine with the Russian invaders and has in the past been linked to Syria, Libya, Central African Republic, Sudan, Mali and Mozambique.

According to Sorcha MacLeod, chair of the UN working group on mercenaries, when such groups are involved, “The conflict is prolonged, involves heavy weaponry, civilians are impacted in a substantial way, human rights violations and war crimes increase substantially, and there’s no access to justice for victims”. Their involvement usually erodes the potential of political solutions.

But mercenaries are not the only foreign bodies in Africa. Hippolyte Fofack of the Brookings Institute think-tank points out that “across all continents Africa now has the largest number of foreign countries carrying out military operations on its soil — no fewer than 13, with at least 47 foreign outposts”.

Helmoed Romer-Heitman has in these pages decried the steady decline in SA’s military and security capacity, calling it a situation of “lots of bark but very little bite, and very soon no bite at all”. Harsh as this judgment may sound, given the reduction in the defence budget in favour of other priorities what are the options now available to SA?

SA has been bravely trying to meet its moral obligations on the continent, as was seen in Bangui, Central African Republic, where 15 soldiers were killed in 2013, and in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the UN peacekeeping force Monusco was led by Lt-Gen Derrick Mgwebi from SA.

Apart from meeting these obligations, SA should also pick up the cudgels against the mercenaries. The international response has been poor, with the UN’s 1989 convention on mercenaries adopted and ratified by only a quarter of member states and none of the permanent members of the UN Security Council.

In 1977 the Organisation of African Unity (now the AU) adopted what is still the only regional instrument, the Convention for the Elimination of Mercenaries. More recently came Swiss-led voluntary initiatives — the 2008 Montreux Document on PMSCs and the 2010 International Code of Conduct.

Efforts by the continent to “silence the guns” by 2030 with its limited resources have prompted even louder calls for the better resourced parts of the world and multilateral institutions to enter into partnerships for peace with the various structures of the AU. As foreign relations and co-operation minister Naledi Pandor put it, “we must come to the realisation that conflict has no boundaries. Its impact reverberates across the globe and thus it is in all our interests to ensure a safe and prosperous world”.

• Abba Omar is director of operations at the Mapungubwe Institute.