The one who talks to you like he hates you, likes you, and the one who talks to you like he likes you, hates you.”

So goes a proverb from western Uganda that the United States and Nato may do well to reflect on, as they walk with the AU even deeper into the quagmire that is Somalia today. What have they been told?

In an interview that appeared on a Somali news website Garowe Online, Johnny Carson, number two in the US foreign ministry, in charge of Africa, emphasised the US view that is imperative that the AU continue and even build up its military presence in the war-torn country, and how the US would maintain its material support for the expedition, but would like to see more international security participation.

This comes in tandem with the appropriately robust language that came out of the recently concluded African Union summit in Kampala.

Terrorism was condemned, and amid pledges of greater troop commitments, the Al Shabaab were put on notice that their time was up.

This more muscular strain of pan-Africanism is relatively new phenomenon as far as the crisis in Somalia — which has been in turmoil since 1991— is concerned.

And a casual observer would not be blamed for wondering why it has become such a “must-do” matter now in a way that it never was during earlier low points of the crisis, such as in the period of rampaging secular warlords, one of whom — the infamous General Farah Aideed — instead received a standing ovation at a 1994 Pan African Movement conference in Kampala.

Being just south of the world’s oil highway through which up to 20,000 ships pass annually, Somalia is not helped by its location as any instability it faces is seen first as a threat to that trade.

Somali lives, it seems, come a distant second in terms of priorities.

The motives for Big Power intervention are therefore clear enough.

It is the AU’s motives that are a lot less understandable, despite the many declarations: Is it to prop up a state that clearly does not want to be propped up? Is it to prevent the emergence of homegrown states according to the needs of the locals (such as the unrecognised Somaliland)? Is it part of the war on terror?

However understood, the AU intervention is likely only to indefinitely postpone political progress that would enable Somalis (as either one or many countries) to begin re-asserting control over their economic resources, as it is premised on keeping them locked in a state that the British and Italians built on top of them a century ago.

Oil is only truly valuable when there exist economies thirsty for it. As the premier oil-based economy in the world, the US naturally takes a keen interest in those areas of the world where oil is produced and through which it is transported.

That being the case, the United States will remain in need of real friends in those regions whose instability can affect the flow of its lifeblood.

This would require allies prepared to tell it the truth about the impact of its armed presence — be it by proxy or not — in the region’s conflicts, especially in Somalia, where past US support to Siad Barre’s nightmare has not been entirely forgotten.

The Americans’ real challenge will be to avoid finding themselves beholden to regimes that seek to wed themselves to its interests for the purpose of prolonging their own survival, which comes with the risk of eventually creating new Somalias in their own territories.

A true friend will tell you what you need to know, as opposed to what you may wish to hear, and the US needs to be told that regimes that do not practice constitutional rule at home have no ability to export it to Somalia, as you cannot export what you do not have.

Unfortunately, the voices driving the African Union’s Somalia policy — such as Uganda’s — are the very regimes in question.

They cannot honestly discuss the relative merits of an orderly Czech-like break-up, since the essential ingredients that led to the collapse of Somalia are present in the fiefdoms of all the European-founded African states that they head.

If they were normal governments of normal countries, the African Union would have come up with a more coherent and consistent position on the question of how best to help the people of the former Somalia, instead of promoting the fetishism of colonial boundaries.

It is such intellectual cowardice that has led to the ridiculous spectacle of Ugandan soldiers dying in an attempt to impose a “federal” government on Somalia, having returned from shooting Ugandans dead for demanding actual federalism back home.

It is this absence of an organic, logical policy rooted in a coherent worldview that best demonstrates the extent to which there is no real link between pan-Africanism and the Amisom mission, and the extent to which therefore the mission will exist for reasons quite divorced from legitimate African aspirations.

What is left is to see how long it will take for the Western powers to realise just how comical their hope that AU dictatorships will bring constitutional democracy to Somalia makes them look.

What they should accept is the fact that Africa is moving from the failed, unmanageable post-colonial polities, as the transition to “post-post-colonial” political arrangements gathers pace on the continent.

Whether it will be a peaceful, managed process, or a violent and chaotic one, depends on decisions they make now.

As western Ugandans also say: “Beware of time, as it holds all the answers.”

Kalundi Serumaga is a political and cultural activist based in Kampala

KALUNDI SERUMAGA
Time holds all the answers – even to Somalia and the colonial project

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