Friday, September 11, 2009

The African Civil Wars


Behind every civil war,there exists its story---the personalities,the social impact,the events that triggered it...and so on. A bird's eye view at Africa reveals the fact that countries with low income and going through economic decline and completely dependent on the natural resources are at the easy prey to a civil war.
Indeed i would like to point out social factors like inequality ,having a majority of ethnical groups and dissatisfaction among people towards govt.(may be due to the existing corruption and negligence) that prepares a well-settled ground for a civil war.
At the time when many nations and continents across the world moved onto public-goods export(exporting finished goods made from the raw materials) from their natural resource,Africa still was stuck with its natural resource without making efforts enough to move onto goods manufacture.
Resources generate rents(profits). Profits trigger a contest for their control.This leads to corruption and a large share of those profits flow through the channel of govt. agencies,who maintain an ignorant view towards the people.This creates indifferences and inequality among the people of the society ( I suppose Nigeria's context can be explained by this view) .
Ignorance peeping out from the govt. side without much respect for the concerns of the people is also due to the rents collected.

There are some geographic factors like the uneven distribution of resources in the area ,which creates secessionist moves and hence privatize those resources.The people who live in these rich areas claims themselves as the sole owner and repudiate any intervention. Most of the times this credo brings lots of violence and disharmony.
These secessionists wage out war with their govt. and for this they need finance of arms and ammunitions. The most easy route to plunge into is the privatized export(an illegal one) they carry out in return for arms (Sierra Leone was such an example) .

One more factor that increases the risk of civil war is the ignorance of non-resource means of trade and economy.Non-resource means starvs and so does the population associated with them.Although natural resources bring in great rents,their volatility in the prices can't be connived. A disbalanced economical phase owing to shrinkage and expansion in the context of volatility creates a trend of low income and poor growth rate.

But i am totally disfavoring the fact that rents and revenues played bad. It was the revenue that
took Botswana onto the path of economic growth. It is really unfortunate that Sierra Leone could not well managed the revenues from the diamonds--and slipped to the bottom of Human Development Index (HDI).

It is the political set-up and not few sociopaths that decides the economical governance of the resources and which further decides the fate of the nation.

I need to focus onto the things which should be done to make things easier :---

1. People should scrutinize the govt. in gaining even distribution of profits.
2. Ignoring ethnical differences,Africans have to generate collective efforts.
3. International community has to get the back of Africans in making them find a stage where they well scrutinize profits disapproving all disloyalities.

You can suggest some more possible options,they are welcomed.

4 comments:

  1. good waiting for some more about our country

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  2. definitely i will have those in my upcoming blogs...

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  3. Seu blog é muito bom,Saurav
    Parabéns
    Eu desejo que voce consiga realizar os seus sonhos
    Tudo de bom

    ReplyDelete
  4. Obrigado Jessy para aplaudir o meu blog.
    Eu espero que você aprecie o meu blogs próximos

    ReplyDelete