by Tim Marshall
Despite having fought five wars with Israel, the country Egypt is most likely to come into conflict with next is Ethiopia, and the issue is the Nile. Two of the continent’s oldest countries, with the largest armies, may come to blows over the region’s major source of water.
The Blue Nile, which begins in Ethiopia, and the White Nile meet in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, before flowing through the Nubian Desert and into Egypt. By this point the majority of the water is from the Blue Nile.
Ethiopia is sometimes called ‘Africa’s water tower’ due to its high elevation and has more than twenty dams fed by the rainfall in its highlands. In 2011 Addis Ababa announced a joint project with China to build a massive hydroelectric project on the Blue Nile near the Sudanese border called the Grand Renaissance Dam, scheduled to be finished by 2020. The dam will be used to create electricity, and the flow to Egypt should continue; but in theory the dam could also hold a year’s worth of water, and completion of the project would give Ethiopia the potential to hold the water for its own use, thus drastically reducing the flow into Egypt.
As things stand Egypt has a more powerful military, but that is slowly changing, and Ethiopia, a country of 96 million people, is a growing power. Cairo knows this, and also that once the dam is built, destroying it would create a flooding catastrophe in both Ethiopia and Sudan. However, at the moment it does not have a casus belli to strike before completion, and despite the fact that a Cabinet minister was recently caught on microphone recommending bombing, the next few years are more likely to see intense negotiations, with Egypt wanting cast-iron guarantees that the flow will never be stopped. Water wars are considered to be among the coming conflicts this century and this is one to watch.
Another hotly contested liquid is oil.
Nigeria is sub-Saharan Africa’s largest producer of oil, and all of this high-quality oil is in the south. Nigerians in the north complain that the profits from that oil are not shared equitably across the country’s regions. This in turn exacerbates the ethnic and religious tensions between the peoples from the Nigerian delta and those in the north-east.
By size, population and natural resources, Nigeria is West Africa’s most powerful country. It is the continent’s most populous nation, with 177 million people, which with its size and natural resources makes it the leading regional power. It is formed from the territories of several ancient kingdoms which the British brought together as an administrative area. In 1898 they drew up a ‘British Protectorate on the River Niger’ which in turn became Nigeria.
It may now be an independent regional powerhouse, but its people and resources have been mismanaged for decades. In colonial times the British preferred to stay in the south-western area along the coast. Their ‘civilising’ mission rarely extended to the highlands of the centre, nor up to the Muslim populations in the north, and this half of the country remains less developed than the south. Much of the money made from oil is spent paying off the movers and shakers in Nigeria’s complex tribal system. The onshore oil industry in the delta is also being threatened by the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, a fancy name for a group which does operate in a region devastated by the oil industry, but which uses it as a cover for terrorism and extortion. The kidnapping of foreign oil workers is making it a less and less attractive place to do business. The offshore oilfields are mostly free of this activity and that is where the investment is heading.
The Islamist group Boko Haram, which wants to establish a caliphate in the Muslim areas, has used the sense of injustice engendered by underdevelopment to gain ground in the north. Boko Haram fighters are usually ethnic Kanuris from the north-east. They rarely operate outside of their home territory, not even venturing west to the Hausa region, and certainly not way down south to the coastal areas. This means that when the Nigerian military come looking for them Boko Haram are operating on home ground. Much of the local population will not co-operate with the military, either for fear of reprisal or due to a shared resentment of the south.
The territory taken by Boko Haram does not yet endanger the existence of the state of Nigeria. The group does not even pose a threat to the capital Abuja, despite it being situated halfway up the country; but they do pose a daily threat to people in the north and they damage Nigeria’s reputation abroad as a place to do business.
Most of the villages they have captured are on the Mandara mountain range, which backs onto Cameroon. This means the national army is operating a long way from its bases, and cannot surround a Boko Haram force. Cameroon’s government does not welcome Boko Haram, but the countryside gives the fighters space to retreat to if required. The situation will not burn itself out for several years, during which time Boko Haram will try to form alliances with the jihadists up north in the Sahel region.
The Americans and French have tracked the problem for several years and now operate surveillance drones in response to the growing threat of violence projecting out of the Sahel/ Sahara region and connecting with northern Nigeria. The Americans use several bases, including the one in Djibouti which is part of the US Africa Command, set up in 2007, and the French have access to concrete in various countries in what they call ‘Francophone Africa’.
The dangers of the threat spreading across several countries has been a wake-up call. Nigeria, Cameroon and Chad are all now involved militarily and co-ordinating with the Americans and French.
Further south, down the Atlantic coast, is sub-Saharan Africa’s second-largest oil producer – Angola. The former Portuguese colony is one of the African nation states with natural geographical borders. It is framed by the Atlantic Ocean to the west, by jungle to the north and desert to the south, while the eastern regions are sparsely populated rugged land which acts as a buffer zone with the DRC and Zambia.
The majority of the 22 million-strong population live in the western half, which is well watered and can sustain agriculture; and off the coast in the west lie most of Angola’s oilfields. The rigs out in the Atlantic are mostly owned by American companies, but over half of the output ends up in China. This makes Angola (dependent on the ebb and flow of sales) second only to Saudi Arabia as the biggest supplier of crude oil to the Middle Kingdom.
Angola is another country familiar with conflict. Its war for independence ended in 1975 when the Portuguese gave up, but it instantly morphed into a civil war between tribes disguised as a civil war over ideology. Russia and Cuba supported the ‘socialists’, the USA and apartheid South Africa backed the ‘rebels’. Most of the socialists of the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) were from the Mbundu tribe, while the opposition rebel fighters were mostly from two other main tribes, the Bakongo and the Ovimbundu. Their political disguise was as the FNLA (National Liberation Front of Angola) and UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola). Many of the civil wars of the 1960s and 1970s followed this template: if Russia backed a particular side, that side would suddenly remember that it had socialist principles while its opponents would become anti-Communist.
The Mbundu had the geographical but not the numerical advantage. They held the capital, Luanda, had access to the oilfields and the main river, the Kwanza, and were backed by countries which could supply them with Russian arms and Cuban soldiers. They prevailed in 2002 and their top echelons immediately undermined their own somewhat questionable socialist credentials by joining the long list of colonial and African leaders who enriched themselves at the expense of the people.
This sorry history of domestic and foreign exploitation continues in the twenty-first century.
As we’ve seen, the Chinese are everywhere, they mean business and they are now every bit as involved across the continent as the Europeans and Americans. About a third of China’s oil imports come from Africa, which – along with the precious metals to be found in many African countries – means they have arrived, and will stay. European and American oil companies and big multinationals are still far more heavily involved in Africa, but China is quic
kly catching up. For example, in Liberia it is seeking iron ore, in the DRC and Zambia it’s mining copper and, also in the DRC, cobalt. It has already helped to develop the Kenyan port of Mombasa and is now embarking on more huge projects just as Kenya’s oil assets are beginning to become commercially viable.
China’s state-owned China Road and Bridge Corporation is building a $14 billion rail project to connect Mombasa to the capital city of Nairobi. Analysts say the time taken for goods to travel between the two cities will be reduced from thirty-six hours to eight hours, with a corresponding cut of 60 per cent in transport costs. There are even plans to link Nairobi up to South Sudan, and across to Uganda and Rwanda. Kenya intends, with Chinese help, to be the economic powerhouse of the eastern seaboard.
Over the southern border Tanzania is trying a rival bid to become East Africa’s leader and has concluded billions of dollars’ worth of deals with the Chinese on infrastructure projects. It has also signed a joint agreement with China and an Omani construction company to overhaul and extend the port of Bagamoyo, as the main port in Dar es Salaam is severely congested. It is planned that Bagamoyo will be able to handle 20 million cargo containers a year, which will make it the biggest port in Africa. Tanzania also has good transport links in the ‘Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania’ and is connecting down into the fifteen-nation Southern African Development Community. This in turn links into the North– South Corridor, which connects the port of Durban to the copper regions of the DRC and Zambia with spurs linking the port of Dar es Salaam to Durban and Malawi.
Despite this, Tanzania looks as if it will be the second-tier power along the east coast. Kenya’s economy is the powerhouse in the five-nation East African Community, accounting for about 40 per cent of the region’s GDP. It may have less arable land than Tanzania, but it uses what it has much more efficiently. Its industrial system is also more efficient, as is its system of getting goods to market – both domestic and international. If it can maintain political stability it looks destined to remain the dominant regional power in the near to medium term.
China’s presence also stretches into Niger, with the Chinese National Petroleum Corporation investing in the small oilfield in the Ténéré fields in the centre of the country. And Chinese investment in Angola over the past decade exceeds $8 billion and is growing every year. The Chinese Railway Engineering Corporation (CREC) has already spent almost $2 billion modernising the Benguela railway line which links the DRC to the Angolan port of Lobito on the Atlantic coast 800 miles away. This way come the cobalt, copper and manganese with which Katanga Province in the DRC is cursed and blessed.
In Luanda CREC is constructing a new international airport, and around the capital huge apartment blocks built to the Chinese model have sprung up to house some of the estimated 150,000–200,000 Chinese workers now in the country. Thousands of these workers are also trained in military skills and could provide a ready-made militia if China so required.
What Beijing wants in Angola is what it wants everywhere: the materials with which to make its products, and political stability to ensure the flow of those materials and products. So if President José Eduardo dos Santos, who has been in charge for thirty-six years, decided to pay Mariah Carey $1 million to sing at his birthday party in 2013, that’s his affair. And if the Mbundu, to which dos Santos belongs, continue to dominate, that is theirs.
Chinese involvement is an attractive proposition for many African governments. Beijing and the big Chinese companies don’t ask difficult questions about human rights, they don’t demand economic reform or even suggest that certain African leaders stop stealing their countries’ wealth as the IMF or World Bank might. For example, China is Sudan’s biggest trading partner, which goes some way to explaining why China consistently protects Sudan at the UN Security Council and continued to back its President Omar al-Bashir even when there was an arrest warrant out for him issued by the International Criminal Court. Western criticism of this gets short shrift in Beijing, however; it is regarded as simply another power play aimed at stopping China doing business, and hypocrisy given the West’s history in Africa.
All the Chinese want is the oil, the minerals, the precious metals and the markets. This is an equitable government-to-government relationship, but we will see increasing tension between local populations and the Chinese workforces often brought in to assist the big projects. This in turn may draw Beijing more into the local politics, and require it to have some sort of minor military presence in various countries.
South Africa is China’s largest trading partner in Africa. The two countries have a long political and economic history and are well placed to work together. Hundreds of Chinese companies, both state owned and private, now operate in Durban, Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town and Port Elizabeth.
South Africa’s economy is ranked second-biggest on the continent behind Nigeria. It is certainly the powerhouse in the south in terms of its economy (three times the size of Angola’s), military and population (53 million). South Africa is more developed than many African nations, thanks to its location at the very southern tip of the continent with access to two oceans, its natural wealth of gold, silver and coal and a climate and land that allow for large-scale food production.
Because it is located so far south, and the coastal plain quickly rises into high land, South Africa is one of the very few African countries that do not suffer from the curse of malaria, as mosquitoes find it difficult to breed there. This allowed the European colonialists to push into its interior much further and faster than in the malaria-riddled tropics, settle, and begin small-scale industrial activity which grew into what is now southern Africa’s biggest economy.
For most of Southern Africa, doing business with the outside world means doing business with Pretoria, Bloemfontein and Cape Town.
South Africa has used its natural wealth and location to tie its neighbours into its transport system, meaning there is a two-way rail and road conveyer belt stretching from the ports in East London, Cape Town, Port Elizabeth and Durban stretching north through Zimbabwe, Botswana, Zambia, Malawi and Tanzania, reaching even into Katanga Province of the DRC and eastward into Mozambique. The new Chinese-built railway from Katanga to the Angolan coast has been laid to challenge this dominance and might take some traffic from the DRC, but South Africa looks destined to maintain its advantages.
During the apartheid years the ANC (African National Congress) backed Angola’s MPLA in its fight against Portuguese colonisation. However, the passion of a shared struggle is turning into a cooler relationship now that each party controls its respective country and competes at a regional level. Angola has a long way to go to catch up with South Africa. This will not be a military confrontation: South Africa’s dominance is near-total. It has large, well-equipped armed forces comprising about 100,000 personnel, dozens of fighter jets and attack helicopters, as well as several modern submarines and frigates.
In the days of the British Empire, controlling South Africa meant controlling the Cape of Good Hope and thus the sea lanes between the Atlantic and Indian oceans. Modern navies can venture much further out from the southern African coastline if they wish to pass by, but the Cape is still a commanding piece of real estate on the world map and South Africa is a commanding presence in the whole of the bottom third of the continent.
There is a new scramble for Africa in this century, but this time it is two-pronged. There are the well-publicised outside interests, and meddling, in the competition for resources, but there is also the ‘scramble within’, and South Africa intends to scramble fastest and furthest.
It dominates the fifteen-nation Southern African Development Community (SADC) and has managed to gain a permanent place at the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region, of which it is not even a member. The SADC is rivalled by the East African Community (EAC) comprising Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda and Tanzania. The latter is also a member of the SADC and the other EAC members take a dim view of i
ts flirtation with South Africa. For its part South Africa appears to view Tanzania as its vehicle for gaining greater influence in the Great Lakes region and beyond.
The South African National Defence Force has a brigade in the DRC officially under the command of the UN, but it was sent there by its political masters to ensure that South Africa is not left out from the spoils of war in that mineral-rich country. This has brought it into competition with Uganda, Burundi and Rwanda, which have their own ideas about who should be in charge in the DRC.
The Africa of the past was given no choice – its geography shaped it – and then the Europeans engineered most of today’s borders. Now, with its booming populations and developing mega-cities, it has no choice but to embrace the modern globalised world to which it is so connected. In this, despite all the problems we have seen, it is making huge strides.
The same rivers that hampered trade are now harnessed for hydroelectric power. From the earth that struggled to sustain large-scale food production come minerals and oil, making some countries rich even if little of the wealth reaches the people. Nevertheless, in most, but not all, countries poverty has fallen as healthcare and education levels have risen. Many countries are English-speaking, which in an English-language-dominated global economy is an advantage, and the continent has seen economic growth over most of the past decade.
On the downside, economic growth in many countries is dependent on global prices for minerals and energy. Countries whose national budgets are predicated on receiving $100 dollars per barrel of oil, for example, have little to fall back on when prices drop to $80 or $60. Manufacturing output levels are close to where they were in the 1970s. Corruption remains rampant across the continent, and as well as the few ‘hot’ conflicts (Somalia, Nigeria, Sudan, for example) there are several more that are merely frozen.