LETTER: Banditry is dissolving Africa’s colonial borders

I read Michael Schmidt’s article on insurgency in Nigeria with interest (“Banditry threatens to tear Nigeria apart”, August 2).

This appears to be a trend throughout Africa, where the collapse of central and regional governments through a combination of corruption, incompetence and waste has led to dysfunctional and violent societies, with the governments losing control. 

The candidates are legion — indeed, if one looks at the map of Sub-Saharan Africa one would be hard-pressed to find more than a few relatively stable states. Even SA is on that slippery slope. 

It would appear that the old absurd and hopelessly porous borders of the colonially created countries are dissolving, as they bear no resemblance to the reality of the actual ethnic groups living there, any more than the Sykes-Picot borders do in the Middle East. 

When you see a straight line as a border it makes you think. I would suggest that the result is that these fictional states, while they exist in theory, will eventually cease to exist in reality and will continue — as they have done in a number of cases, to consist of a few large towns (the word city would be too flattering) where the elite live in ghettos of affluence, surrounded by squatter camps of the poorest of the poor.

The elite flourish on the rewards of extractive industries such as oil and various minerals. The rural population will probably revert to the old ways of war, pestilence and famine. It is a perfect habitat for unscrupulous foreigners to plunder, as has tragically been the case for so many decades. 

Aubrey Wynne-Jones
Parkview

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