Nearly 150 U.S. Africa Command staff and community members gathered at the Kelley Theatre January 20, 2010, to listen to well-known guest speaker and author, Moeletsi Mbeki, discuss security and development issues across Sub-Saharan Africa. The event was part of the U.S. AFRICOM Commander's Speakers Series, which invites visitors with diverse viewpoints to share ideas and thoughts. Mbeki, a political economist and the deputy chairman of the South African Institute of International Affairs at the University of the Witwatersrand, is the younger brother of former South African President Thabo Mbeki. He has also written articles about the political and economic situation in South Africa, as well as regional and Africa-wide issues. Mbeki stressed that he was expressing his own views. Mbeki began his talk by explaining the history of insecurity in Africa, starting with its colonial roots. Africa's colonial legacy and Slave Trade "The challenge facing Sub-Saharan Africa is not state-building as many analysts believe," said Mbeki. "The immediate challenge most of Africa faces is society building." Building a sustainable and stable society requires socially groups that can then build a viable state, he explained. European colonial powers left behind a semblance of states, which often had no social anchors, what Mbeki said led to Africa's instability during the last half a century and continues today in many countries. Although colonialism has roots in Africa's instability, causes also tie back to before this period. "The African continent has been in turmoil for half a millennium since Europeans started to settle in the New World in the 16th century." An estimated 18 million Africans were sold into slavery. It was so extensive it touched nearly every part of sub-Saharan Africa, he said. Slave trade is what Mbeki said brought about a large part of social, political and demographic instability to Africa. Colonialism, Liberation and Cold War The end of the slave trade in the 19th century, the second phase of instability in Africa started with resistance to colonisation and forced labour, said Mbeki. "The end of the Second World War brought into existence another global phenomenon that was to play an important role in the continued destabilisation of African societies and of sub-Saharan Africa." African countries were the attention of western capitalist powers led by the United States and the communist powers led by the Soviet Union who competed to control the newly independent countries or to stop them from aligning themselves with their adversaries, Mbeki said. In his talk, he outlined documented U.S. activities during the Cold War era that contributed to African instability. Intra-State Conflicts "African states as we know them today were not created by Africans," stated Mbeki. African states bear many burdens because they didn't have ownership in creating their own states, according to Mbeki. "They suffer from weak allegiance by their citizens to these states and vice versa," he said. "This explains why African countries during the past 50 years have been centers of many conflicts, in particular civil wars, inter-tribal wars, violent communal conflicts and pogroms, wars of secession, and more recently in the Great Lakes region of central Africa, attempts at genocide. These great conflicts have been accompanied by vast population movements in and out of different national boundaries. Africa, not surprisingly, is host to the largest number of refugees and internally displaced persons in the world." Mbeki also explained that Africa has been almost completely absent of inter-state wars - an important factor in nation building. "[Inter-state wars] strengthen the hold of the ruling class, and of the state it controls, over the general population, which, faced with an external threat, is compelled to surrender more and more of its autonomy to the state and its agents as a way of strengthening national defence and limiting dissension. This gives the rule of the rulers legitimacy, as they are seen as defenders of all the people." Such conflicts force the state to become better organised in order to raise and equip its armed forces while at the same time maintaining or even increasing production to sustain both the war efforts and the civilian population, explained Mbeki. "Inter-state wars also compel the dominant ruling faction(s) to make concessions to more marginalised factions in order to build a united front with which to confront the foreign enemy. Inter-state wars thus contribute to reducing or moderating various forms of discrimination against minorities." Development and the Modern African State Mbeki told the audience it is sometimes argued that most African countries are small, poor, landlocked, under-developed and therefore lack domestic markets. And, to compensate for these shortcomings, the argument is that it is necessary for African countries to remove barriers to trade amongst themselves. By this, African countries will be able to develop enterprises with the requisite economies of scale to make them competitive in the world markets, it is said. However, Mbeki said he believes it is not the size of a country's population that determines whether a country industrialises or not, rather a country's pool of skills and its control over its economic, social and security policies that, in the final analysis, determines whether a country industrialises or not. Results of Instability "An important factor that determines whether a country develops or not is its ability to generate a meaningful economic surplus on one hand and on the other hand its ability to direct a large part of that surplus to productive investment rather than merely to private consumption," said Mbeki. Due to Africa's endemic instability, a large part of sub-Saharan Africa's economic surplus leaves the continent. The small amount remaining goes to finance elite consumption and to pay for the running of the largely unaccountable state, according to Mbeki. "Capital flight is both a result and a driver of Africa's lack of security. Another important driver of Africa's insecurity is the brain drain. Flight of skills undermines economic growth as we have seen by draining out technicians and other personnel needed to maintain social and physical infrastructure which makes development possible." Mbeki told the audience he hoped he was able to convince them that the security problems in African aren't easily fixed by military means. However, he does believe the security sector can play a meaningful role in Africa. "That is why in my view the creation of the African Command by the U.S. government was an important initiative," Mbeki said. For the complete transcript of Mbeki's presentation, visit http://www.africom.mil/getArticle.asp?art=3913&lang=0.

The prepared remarks are available at http://www.africom.mil/getArticle.asp?art=3914&lang=0.