Yesterday's release of a report by the highly regarded international aid organization Oxfam spelled out in detail how wars and insurgencies have cost African countries $18 billion a year since 1990. It compels us to pay attention, especially when the preface is by Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the president of Liberia, a country that knows only too well the costs of civil war.
The report makes sober reading. The money lost could have been spent on treating HIV and AIDS in Africa. Alternatively it is enough to meet the continent’s education, water and sanitation requirements. It is the same as the amount of international aid it receives annually. It could have built thousands of schools, universities, hospitals, roads and sanitation projects, all of which Africa sorely needs.
The report’s conclusions are convincing: There needs to be an international arms trade treaty, controlling who sells arms to whom. It makes sense. It is bizarre that there are international treaties preventing the fishing of whales and the trade in endangered species, pollution and many more — but nothing on arms sales. It is a hole that has to be plugged; otherwise arms will continue to fall into the wrong hands.
It is, however, wrong to leap to the conclusion that Africa spends too much on arms, which is the spin put on the report by some commentators. There is, in fact, an argument that not enough is being spent on arming the forces that can play a public safety role in Africa. Most African countries (other than South Africa, Nigeria, Ethiopia and the North African states) spend relatively little on their armed forces. They lack the money.
Uganda, for example, is coming to the end of a vicious little civil war in the north that has been going on for years and which has devastated the area. It spends 2.2 percent of its GDP on the military, about the same as Portugal — but Portugal is less than half its size and Portuguese GDP is four times Uganda’s. If Uganda had spent what Portugal spends in real terms, it would have had a far more effective army and, as a result, probably no civil war. The argument can be extended elsewhere. Would there have been a civil war in Sierra Leone or Liberia if the forces of law and order there had been bigger and better?
An arms trade treaty, controlling who sells what to whom, is long overdue. But Africa still needs legitimate security forces. In a perfect world, perhaps, there is no need of armies, policemen or guns. But in a perfect world there are no terrorists, criminals, warlords, militias or insurgents.
The fact is that we do not live in a perfect world. No matter how peaceful and well-organized a country, it needs an up-to-date police force and army to ensure peace and stability.
As Iraq has proven, the minute there is no army or police force, the thugs and the warlords move in, using the vacuum to carve out their own power bases. Nature abhors a vacuum, and that goes for politics too.
