East Africa in 2050: Nations will die, new borders will emerge
The East African (Dec. 18,2011) The wider East African region is special – and even notorious – in Africa. In the past 18 years it has produced more new or wanna-be-new nations than all of Africa combined. In 1993 Ethiopia and Eritrea agreed a mutual and happy divorce. The good vibes didn’t last; they became bitter enemies and fought after it happened.
In 1991, after the Siad Barre regime was overthrown, Somalia plunged into chaos. A few years later Puntland hived itself off as a semi-independent nation. Somaliland too jumped ship. Unlike Puntland, which is open to joining a future, peaceful Somalia federation or confederation, Somaliland is determined to be independent.
In February this year, South Sudan voted by nearly 100 per cent to secede from Sudan, and in July formally became Africa’s newest country. That is four major border remakes in less than 20 years. How many new countries have arisen in the rest of Africa as a result of a break-up of existing countries (Saharawi Republic doesn’t count)? ZERO!! Precisely because secessionist and breakaway demons roam the wider East Africa, the feeling is that over the next 20 to 50 years, we shall see more nations breaking up or being swallowed as others grow.
For anyone interested in the future borders of what is sometimes called the Greater Horn of Eastern Africa (GHEA) – comprising Eritrea, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Sudan, South Sudan, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda and DR Congo – two studies are recommended. The first is a popular piece of work “Fluid Borders: Integration, Federation, and Fragmentation”, by the Society for International Development (SID) which was published in its journal Greater Horn of Eastern Africa Outlook (November 2010).
The second was by one of Africa’s leading border experts, Wafula Okumu, who now works with the African Union’s Border Programme. His “Resources and borders disputes in Eastern Africa”, published in the July 2010 issue of the Journal of Eastern African Studies is a fascinating look at how Africa’s borders were made. Okumu argues that contrary to the dominant view, not all colonial borders were arbitrarily drawn. There was a lot of logic to the madness. Colonial powers, according to Okumu, drew borders on the basis of some cold logic; to secure known mineral wealth, and to control rivers and lakes – one reason why natural features became border makers.
Secondly, he argues, after the British were routed in the Second Anglo-Boer war, they studied the reasons for their defeat and reached the kind of conclusion African generals and politicians wouldn’t – they lost because of the poor quality and lack of detailed maps for the British military. They formed the Colonial Survey Committee to draw up maps of Africa – and the exercise was largely done by the military. “To the military, a map of features could be more important than a detailed and accurate demarcation of a boundary,” he writes. But one of the most eye-popping gems in the articles, is the citation that, “For all of Africa, only 200,000 square miles of territory had been surveyed in detail by 1914, when some 3.8 million square miles remained unexplored by Europeans.”
