From the vagaries of recurrent droughts in the arid scrublands of north-western and north-central Africa, to the toxic brand of Wahhabi Islamist militias mushrooming across the region’s weak States, the Sahel with its rapidly exploding and indigent multi-ethnic populations represents a clear and present danger, not just to the continent, but to Europe and the world as a whole.
Within the region that spans 10 countries of sub-Saharan Africa from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea, of particular concern are a clutch of four landlocked Francophone countries — Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger and Chad — where population growth rates remain so high that an approximate doubling in the number of people is projected every 20 years.
The paradigm parallel
It is this “uncontrolled demography combined with extremely weak economic bases; unacceptable poverty and lack of jobs for youths” that French development economist Serge Michailof cites as the paradigm parallel between the French-speaking Sahel and Afghanistan in his thought provoking and brilliantly researched tome Africanistan — Development or Jihad .
I must admit that at first glance the book with its black and white cover illustration of a masked man holding an assault rifle in his hands, and a title like “Africanistan” made me wary. Was this going to be another Islamophobic trope masked as a book on the future of Africa?
But once you dive in, this is a page turner on a par with the latest bestselling crime fiction: for the breadth and depth of detail on the problems besetting these countries, the roots of their genesis and the refreshingly ideology-free prescriptions that, if implemented with genuine commitment and financial backing, may yet help ward off an impending threat to the free world as we all know it.
What Michailof brings to bear is his five-decades-long experience as a development practitioner in theatres ranging from Latin America and South Asia to North Africa.
As he pertinently observes, policymakers worldwide love easy binaries.
And so it is that from having once been dubbed the ‘hopeless continent’, Africa has in recent times been seen as a hot new investment destination that has attracted billions of dollars in global capital.
The people factor
In a recent opinion piece titled ‘The case for Africa as the next investment destination’ in the Arab News , Hafed Al-Ghwell, a non-resident senior fellow with the Foreign Policy Institute at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, wrote, “Africa’s true potential is not just bound in the abundance of commodities or mineral resources from its soils: It’s in its people and geography.”
It is exactly this ‘people’ factor that runs right through Michailof’s book as a powerful leitmotif.
Using the collapse of security in Mali in 2013 (when a “few-hundred” heavily armed jihadists overran key towns forcing the government in Bamako to seek urgent military intervention by France) as an inflection point, Michailof asserts that the deteriorating security situation in the Francophone Sahel and neighbouring areas like Boko Haram-dominated northern Nigeria ought to serve as an urgent wake-up call to all.
He sees Africa as a powder keg, where demography is the powder and unemployment the detonator. With the population in sub-Saharan Africa alone projected to grow to at least about 1.8 billion by 2050, roughly one-and-a-half times that of China at that time, and the number of working age youth set to be thrice that of the Asian giant’s, Michailof sees all the ingredients for an Afghanistan-like descent into anarchy.
Role of the West
Over four well laid out parts, the author sets up his premise that sub-Saharan Africa is the place where the ‘end of euphoria’ has begun, goes on to portray the particular fragility that has placed several of these States in the ‘eye of the storm’ and details the lessons that the Sahel can draw from Afghanistan. The fourth part explores what can be done. And here Michailof is unsparing in his criticism of the West’s failures in Afghanistan, whether it be on the security front or in the political and social spheres.
Fascinatingly, he also lends full flow to his training as an anthropologist as he frequently makes astute observations on the complex dynamics that drive human interactions — from the growing conflicts between the nomadic and pastoral ethnic Fulani and the local agrarian communities, to the Malian Tuaregs who had fled a crippling drought and persecution in their home country in 1985 and ended up as refugees in makeshift camps made of cardboard and plastic sheets in the suburbs of Niamey, the capital of Niger.
A poignant comment by Michailof’s Tuareg interpreter Amar: “Once, we were lords...” leaves both the author and the reader with a searing and indelible memory. In another place, he quotes the then President of Niger Seyni Kountche commenting on the fragility of his country, surrounded as it was by local conflicts: “Poor Niger, with its terrible neigbours! If we were at the cinema, we’d have exchanged seats.”
To any one even remotely interested in Africa, economics, and the current migrant crisis that is pushing Europe’s politics increasingly into the arms of the xenophobic far right, Michailof’s book is a compelling must read.
Africanistan — Development or Jihad ; Serge Michailof, Oxford University Press, ₹795.
