SA: Mbeki: Public lecture by the former President of South Africa, on Africa – war and peace, Pretoria (16/09/2010) (2024)

With your permission I would like to address you today as citizens of Africa, on the important issue of war and peace in Africa.

I know that all of us present here are citizens of particular countries and, quite correctly, are proud of that citizenship, which gives each one of us our sense of identity.

For this reason, for instance, we are happy to state that - we are Proudly South African!

However I am certain that all of us know that every individual, and therefore each one of us, is characterised by an amalgam of identities, rather than only one.

I would therefore like to argue that our identity as citizens of the individual states which make up the African continent also gives us the possibility and the obligation consciously to consider and identify ourselves not merely as South Africans, or Zambians, or Ethiopians or Egyptians, but also, significantly, as Africans.

As citizens of our individual countries we carry particular obligations towards these countries. However, consistent with what I have just said, I am convinced that as Africans, we also carry particular obligations towards our continent - Africa.

Repeatedly, over the years, we have made the statement that as Africans we share a common destiny, from Cape Agulhas, the southernmost point in Africa, to the Mediterranean where it washes the Tunisian shores at Ras ben Sakka, the northernmost edge of our Continent.

We have therefore argued that we owe it to ourselves to do everything that needs to be done to ensure that we act together as Africans to determine that shared destiny.
It is possible that some might have taken this statement about a shared African destiny as amounting to nothing more than a rhetorical flourish, a statement designed merely to evoke a warm but passing ovation, but destined to be forgotten immediately thereafter.

However I would still like to insist that the statement is made that as Africans we share a common destiny not for purposes of encouraging ephemeral applause, but because it describes a reality we cannot avoid.

Take for instance what is happening with regard to the composition of the South African population.

Ever since the beginning of the modern mining industry in our country in the 19th century, South Africa has attracted workers from as far afield as Malawi and Angola. This process has continued to this day, driven by factors other than the attraction of migrant workers to the mines.

These processes have resulted in many Africans from the rest of our Continent settling in South Africa, who are now integrated among the population as South Africans.

For many decades, old urban settlements such as Alexandra Township in Johannesburg, have hosted permanent residents from such countries as Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe.

One estimate says that in 2009 there were between 1.6 and 2 million foreigners resident in South Africa, of whom 1 to 1.5 million had come from Zimbabwe.

(University of the Witwatersrand: Forced Migration Studies Programme, June 2010.)

I suspect that this estimate is wrong by a wide margin. For instance, I would like to believe that it grossly underestimates the numbers of Malawians and Mozambicans who have settled in South Africa over a number of decades.

(For its part, the 2001 Statistics South Africa Population Census said there were only 463 000 people who said they were not South African citizens.)
I must hasten to add that I do not want to pick a fight with StatsSA and our country's demographers, which I would most certainly lose.

However I would like to make bold to say that the composition of our population is most likely to change in significant ways in the foreseeable future, because of inward migration especially from the rest of our Continent.

Already a significant part of our population is made up of people who originated from such African countries as Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Congo, Angola, Rwanda, Nigeria, Somalia, Ethiopia, Senegal, Guinea and others, to say nothing of those who come from our immediate neighbourhood of Lesotho and Swaziland.

These, like migrants everywhere else in the world, have come to our country because of push and pull factors which I am certain will continue to bring new arrivals to South Africa.

Like many of us present here, I have been puzzled and deeply troubled that our people, who have lived at peace in our country with other Africans, for many decades, could suddenly and out of the blue be consumed by sentiments which, among others, result in violent attacks on the other Africans in our midst.

To this day I remain convinced that the overwhelming majority of the masses of our people is not xenophobic. I remain convinced that the millions of our people continue to be inspired by the deeply entrenched tradition in our culture of ubuntu, that all visitors and travellers should be welcomed as honoured guests, and treated as such.

And yet I cannot deny the fact that within the last three years we have seen actions against other Africans that are alien to our very being and the essence of our understanding of what it means to be a human being.

Others better qualified than I will still have to explain what happened that has resulted in the communication of the false message to other Africans and other fellow human beings, that in our hearts and minds we harbour anti-human sentiments such as those of xenophobia.

In this context I would also like to say that I am immensely proud that the overwhelming majority of our people refused to participate in the attacks that have taken place against other Africans, who happened not to have been born in our country.

The question remains to be answered - who constituted the small minority which decided to visit violence against our honoured guests, making false and bigoted claims that they committed acts of criminal violence against fellow Africans ostensibly to protect the interests of an overwhelming majority which has never, through an entire century and more, sought to distance itself from the rest of its African kith and kin!

It is self-evident that given the objective reality to which we have referred, of the transformation of South Africa into a "melting pot", because of continuing migration of other Africans into our country, as well as other nationalities, we will do well consciously to engage the masses of our people about this reality, guided at all times by our age old cultural precepts that umuntu ngumuntu ngabanye and that unyawo ulunampumlo.

None of us can be fully human if we do not respect and depend on the humanity of the next human being, regardless of their geographic origin or other distinguishing feature.

Neither can we forget the advice of the ancestors that our feet will lead us to other lands, where we would expect that those who would see us as foreigners would, as we would in our country, receive and care for us as their honoured guests.

The moral of the story I am trying to tell is that inevitably these population movements will continue to underline the correctness of the statement that as Africans we share a common destiny, and therefore that what happens in South Africa will impact on the rest of our Continent, in much the same way that what happens in the rest of Africa will impact on our country as well.

In the end, what all this means is that we have no choice but to accept that we have to identify and define ourselves as Africans.

We must therefore understand that whatever our distinct nationalities, as defined by the contemporary state boundaries, we owe various obligations to our Continent, as citizens of Africa.

I have spoken as I have to introduce the subject of my address today, this being the critically important issue of - War and Peace in Africa.

This year, 2010, at least 17 African countries celebrate their 50th anniversary of independence. Understandably, this has generated much discussion about what this independence has meant for the peoples of Africa.

Among other things this discussion has served to focus particular attention on the reality that inter alia, these years of independence have been characterised by repeated incidents of violent conflict within and between our independent states.

This has made it necessary that as we conduct a retrospective about our Continent, we must address the question - what should Africa do to transform itself into a Continent of Peace, free at last from the threat and reality of military coups d'etat, civil and interstate wars.

A week ago I participated at the 2010 Global Policy Forum held in the ancient Russian city of Yaroslavl.

One of the matters the Forum addressed was the important issue of Regional Security, within the context of achieving the vital goal of peace throughout the world.

The sole African delegate at this Forum, I was struck by comments that were made that:

1. the Regional Security that had to be achieved would have to cover the area of the world - "from Vancouver to Vladivostok" - i.e. encompassing North America, Europe and Russia up to its Pacific coast in the Far East; and,

2. this Regional Security would and should be realised through agreements that would be concluded between the Russian Federation and the United States, and between the Russian Federation and NATO.
This discourse communicated the message to me that:

1. the issue of African Regional Security stood the danger of being considered peripheral to the goal of achieving global peace; and,

2. this Regional Security could and would be considered achievable outside of and without reference to the United Nations and especially the United Nations Security Council.

When I had the possibility to address the Forum, I elected to speak to the issue of importance to us as Africans, of the role of the United Nations Security Council in Africa's continuing struggle to transform itself into a Continent of peace, stability and security for the peoples of Africa.

I am not a lawyer, but this I know that international law, as represented by the Charter of the United Nations, prescribes that the United Nations Security Council has primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security, and indeed that this is the principal task of the Council.

It was therefore remarkable that the delegates gathered at the 2010 Global Policy Forum in Yaroslavl could discuss the critical matter of Regional Security in the area from Vancouver to Vladivostok with virtually no reference to the role of the United Nations in this regard.

The UN Charter says:

"We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and for these ends...(we are determined) to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours, and to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest...and therefore that the Purposes of the United Nations are:

"To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace..."

I suspect that all of us present here are too young to have consciously experienced the ravages of the Second World War. However we have access to various written and audio-visual records which tell the story of the all-round cost of this enormous and deadly military contest.

These records tell the sombre story that between 60 and 70 million people died directly as a result of this conflict, including 25 million citizens of the Soviet Union and 6 million Jews. No war up to that time, and since then, had and has claimed so many human lives.

To this day it is extremely painful to watch the documentaries of the slaughter that took place and the cinematic films which sought to capture the essence of the immense tragedy visited on humanity by that war.

Those among us who have been exposed to that reality of a few decades ago could not have avoided to utter the words even softly - never again, and never again!

That sentiment will have been reinforced by what we came to learn about other human tragedies resulting from war, such as those that occurred in Vietnam, in Algeria, in Rwanda, in the Congo, in Sudan and in Iraq.

It was therefore understandable that the leaders of the day during the 1940s, especially those who led the anti-Nazi Alliance, should have set as a principal goal of the post-war period the achievement of the goal of global peace.

This is what inspired the vision in favour of peace, as contained in the excerpts of the UN Charter we have quoted.

Before the United Nations Organisation was established in 1945, two of its architects, US President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, spoke repeatedly about the imperative to secure and guarantee peace in the world.

To emphasise the importance of the issue of peace, and with your permission, I would like to quote some of the statements of these war leaders, and the documents they signed, precisely to make the point that those who had directly experienced the consequences of the rage of war, who had ordered millions to go to battle, understood in very stark terms the value of peace, and therefore the imperative to respect the sanctity of human life.

In his famous 6 January, 1941 Four Freedoms Address, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt said:

"The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of aggression against any neighbour - anywhere in the world."

For his part, when he addressed a Joint Session of the US Congress on December 26, 1941, Winston Churchill said:

"Twice in a single generation the catastrophe of world war has fallen upon us; twice in our lifetime has the long arm of fate reached across the ocean to bring the United States into the forefront of the battle. If we had kept together after the last War, if we had taken common measures for our safety, this renewal of the curse need never have fallen upon us.

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"Do we not owe it to ourselves, to our children, to mankind tormented, to make sure that these catastrophes shall not engulf us for the third time?...Duty and prudence alike command first that the germ-centres of hatred and revenge should be constantly and vigilantly surveyed and treated in good time, and, secondly, that an adequate organisation should be set up to make sure that the pestilence can be controlled at its earliest beginnings before it spreads and rages throughout the entire earth."

These two leaders expressed these sentiments in the historic document, the Atlantic Charter, which they issued on August 14, 1941, which laid the basis both for the establishment of the United Nations and the adoption of the UN Charter.

In the Atlantic Charter they said that "after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny, they hope to see established a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries, and which will afford assurance that all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want...(and that) "they believe that all of the nations of the world, for realistic as well as spiritual reasons, must come to the abandonment of the use of force."

Of particular relevance to us as South Africans we must recall that the then President of the ANC, Dr A.B. Xuma, convened a high-level Panel of our leaders to consider the Atlantic Charter. This Panel produced the document, The Africans' Claims, which the ANC adopted at its annual conference in December 1943.

On the issue of peace, The Africans' Claims said:

"Africans are in full agreement with the war aim of destroying Nazi tyranny, but they desire to see all forms of racial domination in all lands, including the Allied countries, completely destroyed. Only in this way, they firmly believe, shall there be established peace which will afford to all peoples and races the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries, and which will afford the assurance that all men in all lands shall live out their lives in freedom from fear, want and oppression."

Towards the end of the Second World War, the principal leaders of the anti-Nazi Alliance, Joseph Stalin, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, met in Yalta in the Soviet Union.

In their February 11, 1945 Joint Statement after their meeting, these leaders said:

"We are resolved upon the earliest possible establishment with our allies of a general international organisation to maintain peace and security. We believe that this is essential, both to prevent aggression and to remove the political, economic, and social causes of war through the close and continuing collaboration of all peace-loving peoples...

"Our meeting here in the Crimea has reaffirmed our common determination to maintain and strengthen in the peace to come that unity of purpose and of action which has made victory possible and certain for the United Nations in this war. We believe that this is a sacred obligation which our Governments owe to our peoples and to all the peoples of the world."

When Roosevelt addressed the US Congress on March 1, 1945 to report on the outcomes of the Yalta Conference, he said:

"The structure of world peace cannot be the work of one man, or one party, or one Nation. It cannot be just an American peace, or a British peace, or a Russian, a French, or a Chinese peace. It cannot be a peace of large Nations- or of small Nations. It must be a peace which rests on the cooperative effort of the whole world...

"Twenty-five years ago, American fighting men looked to the statesmen of the world to finish the work of peace for which they fought and suffered. We failed them then. We cannot fail them again, and expect the world again to survive.

"The Crimea Conference was a successful effort by the three leading Nations to find a common ground for peace. It ought to spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries - and have always failed.

"We propose to substitute for all these, a universal organisation in which all peace-loving Nations will finally have a chance to join."

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And thus was the United Nations established and the UN Charter adopted, which prescribed as a matter of international law that the United Nations Security Council has primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security.

Everything I have said makes the important point that one of the historic determinations made by the world anti-Nazi coalition, even as the Second World War was raging, was that at its end a new global body would be formed to replace the defunct League of Nations, charged with the principal task to guarantee international peace and security.

As Winston Churchill had put it, it was imperative that "an adequate organisation should be set up to make sure that the pestilence (of war) can be controlled at its earliest beginnings before it spreads and rages throughout the entire earth."
From all this you will understand that Africa would expect that the United Nations Security Council would play an important role in helping the Continent to address its challenges of peace and security.

However it is my considered view that the Security Council has disappointed African expectations in this regard. As a result, as an eminent AU-UN Panel said:

"There is a growing anomalous and undesirable trend in which organisations lacking the necessary capabilities have been left to bear the brunt in terms of providing the international community's initial response (to regional wars and conflicts), while others more capable have not engaged. This inversion of responsibility is generating a trend of benign neglect in which interests rather than capabilities prevail."

(See below.)

I will return to this matter later, concerning how Africa should respond to this unfortunate and cruel reality.

As we all know, I am afraid that during the last fifty years and a little more, independent Africa has suffered from a considerable amount of instability, including various instances of destructive wars.

(You will of course understand that here I am not referring to the wars of liberation waged to end the system of colonialism and white minority rule.)

As we studied one paper on the issue of African conflicts, we could identify at least 25 major inter and intra-state violent conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa during the 45-year-period 1960 - 2005.

(See: Conflict Trends in Africa, M.G. Marshall.)

In his 2010 monograph, Security and Stability in Africa: A Development Approach, Clarence J. Bouchat says:

"Since their independence, Sub-Saharan countries have endured over 80 successful and 108 failed coup attempts, accounting for 44 percent of the world's total. The worst example of violence is the Democratic Republic of Congo's intra- and interstate fighting, which since 1996 has claimed 5.4 million lives, making it the bloodiest conflict since World War II."

Further, he says that in 2005 there were 7.5 million African refugees out of a worldwide total of 9.2 million.

Similarly, a report by Oxfam International and others, published in 2007 says that between 1990 and 2005 violent conflicts in Africa cost the continent US $300 billion, an amount equivalent to all the international aid received by Sub-Saharan Africa in the same period.

To summarise the challenge facing our Continent, in 2008 the African Union-United Nations Panel we have cited said:

"There is still no peace in many parts of Africa. From the Horn to the Great Lakes to West Africa, conflict is endemic. New threats continue to undermine political stability...

"The cost of conflict manifests itself in the deaths of millions. In addition, general insecurity inhibits economic development as well as creating an enormous financial burden for the international community. Associated problems of destruction of infrastructure, environmental threats, displacement, disease and injury mean that the aftermath of conflict is more damaging and long lasting than the conflict itself.

"While this is not exclusively an African problem, it is in Africa that it is felt most acutely. It is also in Africa that the number and scale of the issues mean that they do not necessarily attract the attention that they deserve."

(Report of the AU-UN Panel on modalities for support to African union peacekeeping operations: 2008.)

The gravity of the African challenge of peace and security is illustrated by the fact that in 2008 seventy-five percent (75%) of all UN peacekeepers were deployed in Africa, costing the UN budget more than US $5 billion.

And yet, and as I have said, precisely because the challenge of peace and security in Africa has not necessarily attracted the attention it deserves, the Security Council has disappointed African expectations in this regard.

In this context, I would like to mention four examples, without elaboration, which represent the reality that:

• the United Nations did not deploy the forces which were required, which could have stopped the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, which resulted in a million people slaughtered in ninety days;

• on the basis that it can only deploy forces for peacekeeping, it placed these in Sudan after a protracted conflict which had claimed millions of lives;

• it has so far declined to dispatch forces to Somalia despite the fact that among other things, the interminable conflict in the southern part of this country constitutes an obvious threat to international peace and security; and,

• again in Burundi it deployed peacekeepers after hundreds of thousands of people had been killed and many more displaced.

In the latter case of Burundi, as a result of this benign neglect, to use the words of the AU-UN Panel, to finance the operation to bring peace to this country, and until the UN authorised the necessary deployment, the African Union had to rely on resources contributed among others by the Governments of South Africa and the United Kingdom as well as the European Union, rather than the UN Peacekeeping fund.

From all the foregoing it is clear that Africa will have to redouble its own efforts to respond to the challenge of transforming ours into a Continent of Peace. By word and deed we have to show the same determination to achieve this goal as was demonstrated by the Allies when they sought to address the issue of international security and peace after the Second World War.

In this regard one of the first things we will have to do is to strengthen the Peace and Security Architecture of the African Union, which includes the AU Commission, the Peace and Security Council, the African Standby Force, the Panel of the Wise and the Continental Early Warning System.
One of the things we will have to do is to undertake an honest assessment of the functioning of these institutions with a view to their improvement to ensure that they respond adequately and in a timely fashion to Africa's peace and security challenges.

In this context we must continue to address the important issue of the funding of the conflict prevention, peacemaking, peacekeeping and peace building activities of the African Union.

Unfortunately the financial mechanisms proposed by the AU-UN Panel to which we have referred were not accepted. This happened despite the patent reality known to everybody, that the very same poverty which lay at the base of many of the African conflicts, makes it impossible for Africa to generate the required financial and material resources adequately to address our Continent's peace and security challenges.

I believe that this matter should be revisited, especially in the context of Chapter VIII of the UN Charter, which authorises regional agencies, such as the African Union, to act to promote international peace and security under the auspices of the UN, which the AU has done and is doing.

Surely the world body, the United Nations, should take into account the financial and other resource implications of Chapter VIII. If this is not done, it will negate the purposes spelt out in this Chapter and, as the AU-UN Panel said correctly, impose on "organisations lacking the necessary capabilities (the task) to bear the brunt in terms of providing the international community's initial response (to conflict and war), while others more capable have not engaged."

This also underlines the importance of the proper structuring of the relations between the AU and the UN. The AU-UN Panel addressed this matter extensively and I believe correctly. We do not have time to comment on this issue to any great extent.

Suffice it for us to cite part of what the Panel said, that "the Panel recognises the primacy of the United Nations Security Council for matters of peace and security, and its recommendations are designed to reinforce that principle through developing a sustainable African Union capacity that can complement the Council's work...A shared strategic vision is essential if the United Nations and the African Union are to exercise their respective advantages..."

It is also vitally important that in its work to transform Africa into a Continent at peace with itself, the African Union will have to pay particular attention to the two related matters of the early warning of impending conflict and addressing the root causes of each and every conflict it strives to prevent or resolve.

In part this task is complicated by the issue of the sovereignty of each one of our countries, which gives all of us the leeway to resist what we might consider to be unjustified and unacceptable external interference in our internal affairs.

The fact of the matter however is that preventive interventions to stop the outbreak of costly conflicts, and interventions to address the root causes of conflicts where these have occurred, requires that the AU makes a conscious effort to understand and address matters which each of our countries might consider to be their sovereign and exclusive preserve.

Fortunately, by acceding to the African Peer Review Mechanism, the majority of African countries have accepted that their African peers have a right and duty to assess internal developments in each of our countries and make such recommendations as they may deem appropriate.

We have to build on this advance, specifically to address the urgent issue of achieving just and lasting peace in Africa.

Challenging as this might be, it is possible to draw some conclusions about the root causes of the conflicts that have afflicted our Continent.

Broadly, we can say that many of these conflicts occur because of:

• a scramble for and mal-distribution of resources;

• concentration of political power in the hands of a political elite which abuses its power to accumulate wealth for itself and particular factions of the population, marginalising important sections of that population ;

• use of repressive measures by this elite to maintain itself in power;

• the absence of the processes and institutions which would enable the people freely to express their views, up to and including the possibility freely to elect governments of their choice; and,

• persisting imbalances in the distribution of global power and wealth.

In many instances therefore the matter turns on the related challenges:

• to build a political economy that focuses on equitable sharing of wealth and opportunity and development for all;

• to promote social and national cohesion based on a sustained struggle against discrimination and inequality on grounds of race, ethnicity, gender, religious belief or geographic dispersal; and,

• to establish and sustain a system of accountable governance.

The issues of ethnicity and corruption are very much part of the narrative about what causes conflict and instability in Africa.

In this regard let me offer you interesting comments made by the African scholar, Kwesi Kwaa Prah, who said in his 2004 paper addressing "African Wars and Ethnic Conflicts - Rebuilding Failed States":

"It is misleading, as is often the case, to suggest that mass society in Africa is fundamentally prone to tribalism even when the rules of the game of modern politics forbid such practices.

"The case rather is that, in the competition for resources, under conditions of steadily diminishing availability of resources, rival elites employ ethnic sentiments as mobilising instruments to gain power, control and access to resources and resource management. Such realities are aggravated by the expanding poverty in African societies. It is for these same reasons that corruption has become such a pandemic problem in African societies.

"Anyang' Nyong'o has suggested that, "I do not think that what is really ruining Africa's chances for development is simply corruption. Corruption is the end result of a trait that is pathological in the culture of the ruling elite. It begins with the endemic
impulse to want to escape poverty through the use of political power and the exhibition of a culture of richness that must be displayed in ostentation and consumption. The more ostentatious one becomes, the more one wants to improve on the artefacts of ostentation .... This propels a never-ending consumer culture that, of necessity, must misappropriate public goods and misuse public power." (Nyong'o.2002.101)"

If Kwesi Kwaa Prah and Anyang' Nyong'o are correct, this will indicate the contention and possible acrimony that would inevitably attach to the very necessary effort of the African Union to address the root causes of conflict in Africa, precisely to achieve the objective of transforming ours into a Continent of Peace.

When we speak of the Renaissance of Africa, surely this must include the achievement of this objective of transforming ours into a Continent of Peace, in much the same way that it was not possible to visualise a new world order after the Second World War without guarantees about international peace and security.

The world community of nations failed to achieve this objective because of an unjust world balance of power, which obliged the peoples of Africa to take up arms to achieve their liberation, and imposed on the world and the peoples concerned the Vietnam and 2003 Iraq wars, among others.

Through the African Union, the peoples of Africa have made the firm and unequivocal statement that the exercise of power on our Continent should not be allowed to perpetuate violent conflict and war in Africa.

In this regard, through legal instruments approved by our elected Parliaments, the African states have also bound themselves to involve the African masses not only in the struggle to make Africa a Continent of Peace, but also in the historic effort to achieve the rebirth of Africa.

The seminal Constitutive Act of the African Union says that we, African governments, shall be "Guided by our common vision of a united and strong Africa and by the need to build a partnership between governments and all segments of civil society, in particular women, youth and the private sector, in order to strengthen solidarity and cohesion among our peoples..."

The Protocol establishing the Peace and Security Council of the African Union confirmed this vitally important principle of the African people taking responsibility for their destiny where it says, "The Peace and Security Council shall encourage non-governmental organisations, community-based and other civil society organizations, particularly women's organisations, to participate actively in the efforts aimed at promoting peace, security and stability in Africa. When required, such organisations may be invited to address the Peace and Security Council."

Accordingly, the last point I would like to make about what we must do to transform Africa into a Continent of Peace is that we need to organise, mobilise and unite in an All-Africa People's Movement for Peace, to fight to achieve the objective that no power whatsoever, whether from within or from outside of Africa, will impose on the African masses the scourge of violent conflict and war.

I am pleased to say that the women of Africa, primary victims of savage African wars, have already demonstrated what needs to be done and can be done to mobilise the people to act as conscious architects of the peace of Africa.

As Africans we do not need anybody to educate us about the anti-human consequences of the destructive fury of war.

We have seen too many dead bodies littering the African landscape. We have seen too many displaced Africans travelling long distances, including crossing national borders, driven by fear of death at the hands of fellow Africans. We have seen enough of death and destruction to inspire us to stand up at last and say in unity - enough is enough!

For years we have listened to our artists, such as Zao of Congo Brazzaville, who, in his moving song, Ancien Combattant, urged all of us to combine and fight for peace, inspired by the reality that as Africans we share a common destiny.

As the African masses, including all of us gathered here today at Tshwane University of Technology, we must internalise in our minds the fundamental understanding that the African Renaissance is about our all-round emancipation and that in this regard, we must become our own liberators, among others to guarantee for ourselves freedom from tyranny, freedom from want and freedom from fear.

As we engage in the historic effort to achieve these freedoms as inalienable elements of the African Renaissance, we must sustain the humane perspective inherent in all African cultures, that we are one to the other our brothers' and sisters' keepers!

Thank you for your attention.