Africa's Borders

G. Pascal Zachary writes :

The problem of course is that Congo, as a political entity, is an illusion. The country is too large, diverse and riven by durable differences to be managed from a single center. It is time to explore a truly federalized Congo that might over the next 10 to 20 years peacefully “devolve” into a several nation-states. Eastern Congo would be especially well-served by “devolution,” since the region – today the least stable in the current Congo – has natural economic, social and geographic links to neighboring Uganda and Rwanda. If Scotland can engage in a process of “devolution” from Britain, why cannot eastern Congo engage in the same process? Colonial maps cannot forever burden the serious and expensive efforts to develop regional integration, whether in East Africa or the sub-Saharan generally. The double-standard – whereby European countries can split themselves apart based on democratic processes but African countries are eternally bound by the borders of their former European masters — ought to end. That European governments often quickly oppose any talk of redrawing African are examples of both hypocrisy and stupidity. European governments spend billions of dollars holding together unwieldy African countries and in the end sustain only the fiction of real sovereignty. The Congo is perhaps the best example of this. Congolese elections, which cost European donors a hefty sum, accomplished the little more than to highlight the folly of holding this vast territory together under a single political rubric. Maintaining the fiction of the Congo, in short, is dangerous and ultimately futile.