The AU's continental gamble on South Sudan

The Africa Union is all set to get its 54th member state. This is not an occasion of unalloyed happiness.

The understandable pride of AU leaders at ending more than half a century of civil war in the Sudan by its likely partition — the deciding referendum closes on Saturday — will be tinged with foreboding.

They know that with this redrawing of the map they are opening a colonial era Pandora’s box that until now they had sworn to keep shut at any cost. The evil genie being let loose is the arbitrary, often illogical, nature of Africa’s national borders as they were decreed by the competing imperial powers during the 19th century scramble to divvy up the continent.

These new nations were whimsical European creations, cutting with scant regard across clans, tribes, ethnicities, cultures and religions. The AU’s predecessor, the Organisation of Africa Unity, had during the independence era declared these borders immutable, for the simple reason that to throw them open to revision would be conceivably to launch half a dozen wars.

The division in the Sudan is between the Muslim, politically dominant north and a Christian and animist, oil-rich south. The post colonial conflict between the two regions, which displaced four million people and cost 2,4-million lives, is part of a bitter history that originated hundreds of years earlier during the exploitation by the northern Arab slave traders of African slaves from the south.

But as Sudanese-born philanthropist Mo Ibrahim, whose eponymous foundation sponsors an annual African award for good statesmanship, points out, the imminent split has implications for the whole continent. “The fault lines that have divided [Sudan] as a people extend from Eritrea to Nigeria. If Sudan starts to crumble, the shock waves will spread,” he wrote in Tanzania’s Citizen.

The likely South Sudan secession will be the first time that a colonial boundary will be broken to form something entirely new. (Eritrea existed as a separate state before it was federated and subsequently broke away from Ethiopia.)

Potentially the AU is setting a precedent that will fuel insurrectionist fires all over the continent, including in the Sudan’s risibly named neighbour, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The DRC — one of the world’s richest countries but with one of the world’s poorest populations — is a a hodge-podge of warring ethnicities and the resulting conflict has claimed an estimated 5,4-million lives, as well as regularly washing across the DRC’s meaningless borders into neighbouring states.

Aside from ongoing rebellions in Angola’s Cabinda area, in Senegal and in Ethiopia, there are separatist aspirations alive also in Algeria, Cameroon, Morocco, Somalia, Rwanda, Niger, Côte d’Ivoire, the Darfur region of the fracturing Sudan, and even in Zimbabwe. There is also Nigeria, another vast, splintered and oll-rich nation where secessionist tendencies that boiled over but suppressed in the 1960s Biafran war are never far from the surface.

The support of the AU for a secessionist solution to the Sudanese conflict rests on the simple assumption that it can be made to work. And if the result of this partition is a peaceful modus vivendi between the two previously warring regions, it is a template that the AU conceivably will consider applying elsewhere.

In that sense, the Sudan gamble is an indication of Africa’s increasing self-confidence. That the AU was willing to jettison its own inherited precepts and to convince an autocratic regime — headed by a China-backed president charged with genocide by the International Criminal Court — to seek such a radical solution, speaks of a welcome pragmatism and is a change from its usual hand-flapping ineffectuality.

The South Sudan experiment has continental implications. If it succeeds and presages a more robust and interventionist role for the AU, that is good news for Africa.