The Key to Making Peace in Africa

Fighting Corruption Can Help End Conflict

Remarkably, there is currently no coordinated strategy to disrupt the illicit siphoning of money by leaders and their foreign business partners. For leaders, giving up power almost certainly means losing access to their spoils, and it might even mean facing prosecution. Every year, billions of aid dollars pour into Africa: taxpayers and donors around the world fund peacekeeping forces, state-building programs, humanitarian assistance, elections, and peace processes. But none of this support has been able to keep corrupt leaders and their network of beneficiaries from stealing billions of dollars.

Every year, billions of aid dollars pour into Africa: taxpayers and donors around the world fund peacekeeping forces, state-building programs, humanitarian assistance, elections, and peace processes. But none of this support has been able to keep corrupt leaders and their network of beneficiaries from stealing billions of dollars.

This is the fatal flaw of peacemaking in Africa: those supporting mediation lack the leverage necessary to stop corrupt figures from using their forces to bomb, burn, imprison, silence, torture, starve, impoverish, kill, and rape to maintain or gain power. South Sudanese peace talks, for example, are currently stuck because Kiir and his allies have rejected any notion of sharing power with the rebels, since such an arrangement would require giving up their exclusive grip on the crudely-constructed looting machine masquerading as a government.

Where the Soldiers Are Scarier Than the Crocodiles

“When the soldiers come, we go into the water up to our necks and hide, with only our noses out of the water,” a displaced villager

.. “Even if you die in the water, it’s better to be killed by snakes or crocodiles than by soldiers,” she said.

.. Aid workers and journalists are under attack, with armed men breaking into a Catholic compound and raping a 67-year-old American nun.

.. Multiply this family’s tragedy by millions and you get a window into the catastrophe faced by South Sudan, already one of the world’s poorest nations. Even before the civil war started two years ago, a girl was much more likely to grow up to die in childbirth than to finish high school.

.. All sides in this civil war have engaged in atrocities, and it has unfortunately taken on an ethnic dimension.

.. A new United Nations report suggests that government-affiliated soldiers were allowed to rape women in lieu of wages ..

.. it would help to have an arms embargo and sanctions aimed at the assets of individuals on each side of the civil war: Make leaders pay a price for intransigence, instead of profiting from it. “Go after their assets,” advises John Prendergast of the Enough Project, an anti-genocide group. “Stinging financial pressure that targets the top leaders on both sides will impact calculations more than anything else.”

.. when a government that we helped put in place is regarded by citizens as more dangerous than hungry crocodiles, then surely we can try a little harder.