Burundi and the Comoros: A time for SADC to show its mettle

The Hutus and Tutsis appear to be a quarrelsome lot.  In Rwanda the cousin tribes engineered a world famous genocide that wiped a million people in nine months. Just 270 days my people! This translates to an average of 3700 killings per day! If anybody runs any ranch that slaughters and sells 3700 carcasses per day, it will surely be listed in red hot ink in the Export Processing Zone register.

Europe is today made of Spaniards, the French, the English, the Italians, the Polish, the Norwegians, etc.  These people are characteristic for their long flowing hair, thin faces and lips, blue eyes and pink skins. There is nothing much that differentiates their appearances. Their differences come in nationality but what unites them is that they are Europeans. In Norway, the locals there never have a homogenous origin but they are united by the common identity of being Norwegians.

Nations are made through conquest. Conquerors do not consider races, tribes or colour when conquering tracts of land to establish their kingdoms. Nationalists consider what the tract of land targeted offers in terms of natural resources. This explains why most borders in African countries have tribes and individual families spilling between and among two or more borders.

The word tribe is a creation of colonialists who wanted to decimate the African populations into manageable segments that are easy to divide and rule. Africans are identified through the totem system which was developed by charismatic men who lured many women into polygamous marriages where one huge family was established and identified by an animal by which a poem was developed and recited to thank and encourage him in his industrious exploits. The same totem was also used for divination and communication with the ancestral spirits, which are an important conduit for communicating with God the creator. These practices are still being practiced today in Africa alongside Christianity and other religions.

The practice of using the ‘good' spirits of departed ancestors for communicating with God is a ubiquitous African tradition which unites the continent. Regardless of the totemic differences, the Africans were a united people who confronted their problems as a single unit until the arrival of colonial domination. It is the colonist's hand that saw wide craters in the African polity where there were only filmy shadows of negligible differences. It is these cosmetic differences which the colonialists put an expansive wedge between them in order to estrange them and unfortunately the African has fallen for this.
 
If there are tribes in Africa, why are there no tribes in Europe? Tribal fault-lines have decimated Africa while the enemy watches from a safe distance. The apartheid government of South Africa thrived under this system.

The Comoros has premiered twenty coups (and failed attempts) on its soil, most of which were bloody. The competition for power among the tribes is not doing the country any good be it politically or economically; a country that lacks a university in this 21st Century! The country's poorly democratic showing has negated the country's development in various other spheres of development.

Both the Comoros and Burundi, among the smallest and poorest of African countries, suffer from self inflicted isolation from renowned legends of poor governance. The two appear to be desperate for friendship after emerging from their bush politics. But from their outlook, it appears the two SADC friends-in-waiting are not ripe enough to relinquish state sponsored political delinquency.  The SADC grouping has a golden opportunity to demand higher stakes from its current membership through the bidding of these two aspiring members.
The SADC has since its formation wielded useful influence in containing potentially rogue states, much to the advantage of peace and stability. If anything, the SADC leads as the most stable region on the African continent.  

Burundi, a country with a history of ethnic eruption and internal mistrust which was not done any good favour by the controversial and unconstitutional third term in office by incumbent president Pierre Nkurunziza, falls short of the basic CV expected of SADC member states. The country is approaching the SADC with dirty hands and the grouping would definitely not be in any good stead to accept it into its fold given the already present democratic crises in the DRC, trouble in Mozambique and the al Shabaab threat.

The Comoros, a predominantly Islamic country would find itself very lonely in the SADC where Islam is very little and has rather a negative image from the al Shabaab insurgency in Somalia. While it wouldn't be prudent to base regional multilateral relations on religion, the Comoros must up its politics and economics in order to reach the SADC bar while at the same time providing a bankable guarantee to help contain Islam related terrorism in the region and beyond.

The regional bloc must take its time and play hard to get so that the countries' two bureaucracies scale up their efforts on good governance. The biggest beneficiaries in this bid will be the citizens of the two respective countries.

Burundi must never repeat the Hutu-Tutsi ethnic hostilities which claimed 200 thousand lives. The two warring tribes must be persuaded (sometimes with sanctions) to learn to bury their cosmetic differences for the sake of peace and development in the great lakes region. Their hostilities have cost Africa an excess of a million human resources whose output could have led the continent to a better future.

The SADC has been presented with a golden opportunity (which it must wield to the fullest advantage) through the application for membership by the pair to prove itself as a firm and useful club of progressive democratic nations.