The rumble in Africa

When India decided three-and-a-half years ago to open 18 new diplomatic missions in Africa, the continent was full of promise. Democracy appeared to have acquired a firm footing, several internecine conflicts had been ended, Africa’s economy was at last being tapped and the Modi government was keen to expand and diversify its involvement on this new frontier.

By last week, however, the promise appeared to have been laid waste. The African spring seemed to have given way to a harsh winter in many countries on the vast continent and any quick return to normalcy may be a pious hope. Of all the recent reversals of progress in Africa, the most serious is in Ethiopia, the ancient land of the Queen of Sheba, with which India has had relations since antiquity.

Diplomatic discretion paid dividends for India. But unless constitutional order is restored, plans to enhance trade and investments will remain just that — plans.

If Ethiopia’s capital of Addis Ababa falls to a rebel coalition of nine anti-government groups formed last week, Indians have much to lose. According to the Oakland Institute of California, which speaks for indigenous people and small farmers globally, Indian farming companies have acquired over 6,28,012 hectares of land in Ethiopia. They were planning more similar acquisitions. The government in Addis Ababa has set apart 11.5 million hectares of arable land for foreigners to invest in farming, according to the Ethiopian Investment Commission, which is mandated to take decisions in the matter.

If the country falls apart in the violence which escalated in recent months, these large land deals could become unstuck. Future Indian investments, in which the Export-Import Bank of India’s involvement was envisaged, are not likely to materialise. Ethiopia is not the only African country where stability and peace are under renewed threats, although it is drawing maximum attention because of its history, profile and strategic location. The African Union headquarters is in Addis Ababa, for example.

Sudan’s brittle experiment with democracy, which began in April 2019, ended a fortnight ago when the country’s entire Cabinet and political leaders were arrested by the military in a coup. The takeover appears to have dashed hopes that a popular uprising, which ousted Islamist President Omar Al-Bashir, who ruled Sudan with an iron fist for nearly three decades, would usher in a new dawn.

Sudan was Africa’s largest country in land area until 2011, when a part of it seceded and became South Sudan. Five per cent of Sudan’s population, the pastoral Hamitic people, claims to be from India: they are believed to have migrated to what is now Sudan 5,000 years ago, when the Indus Valley Civilisation had links with Africa’s Nilotic Civilisation. India invested heavily in Sudan’s oil resources in the last decade, notwithstanding endemic conflicts there. ONGC Videsh, the international arm of the government-owned oil and gas exploration company, invested as much as $2.3 billion in productive blocks in undivided Sudan, making it one of India’s biggest overseas investments.

India entered into a rare collaboration with China in hydrocarbons in South Sudan. Along with CNPC of China, Petronas of Malaysia and Sudapet of Sudan, ONGC Videsh created a consortium for energy exploration in three blocks in South Sudan. India’s participating interest in the consortium was 25 per cent. Like many conflicts in Africa, civil war in South Sudan was ended in 2018 through an agreement between the government and opposition rebels. It helped restore oil production to pre-war levels by last year and India’s hydrocarbon investments in South Sudan appear safe for the moment.

Diplomatic discretion paid dividends for India. Not only did India not take sides in Sudan’s long civil wars, but also India was one of the first countries to recognise independent South Sudan. A consulate was opened in Juba, South Sudan’s capital, in 2007, four years before the region’s secession from the mother country. Such foresight enabled New Delhi to upgrade the facility into an embassy soon after South Sudan’s independence.

Minister of State for External Affairs V Muraleedharan’s marathon visits to Africa can be interpreted in two ways. It enables South Block, seat of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), to make on-the-spot assessments of the situation on a continent, where India has lately made huge diplomatic and financial investments. A less charitable explanation could be that Muraleedharan was blind-sided into making these visits by those who advised him to undertake them without anticipating big changes in his host countries.

He was in Khartoum only six days before Sudan’s military seized power. Almost everyone he met in Sudan is now in jail. ‘It was agreed to hold the fourth India-Sudan Joint Ministerial Committee at an early date to give further impetus to our bilateral relationship,’ the MEA said. ‘There is a mutual desire to further enhance bilateral trade and investments between India and Sudan.’ All such plans are now in a shambles unless last week’s intervention by the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, succeeds in restoring constitutional order.

Muraleedharan went to Juba from Khartoum. His visit to South Sudan earned India a lot of goodwill from soft power. In a country with sparse health facilities at the time of a pandemic, a hospital of the UN Mission in South Sudan is run by doctors from the Indian Army. It was only appropriate that a day after returning home from Juba, Muraleedharan addressed the India-Africa Higher Education and Skill Development Summit.

Last week, US President Joe Biden initiated preliminary steps to demonstrate that Africa needs to return to universal norms of civility and constitutionalism if countries which violate them are to continue receiving US support. Biden cut off Ethiopia, Guinea and Mali from being beneficiaries under the US-African Growth and Opportunity Act. Guinea has been accused by the international community of suppressing political pluralism and Mali of gross violations of human rights.

The UNHRC voted to appoint a UN monitor for Sudan and it has demonstrated that rights violations in Ethiopia will be acted upon. India will have to take note of the depressing changes in Africa and go slow on its earlier decisions to deepen engagement with troubled countries on the continent.