Silencing Africa's Guns Remain an Elusive Dream

Zamikhaya Maseti

The Thabo Mbeki Foundation convened a Peace and Security Dialogue from September 3 to 6, 2025, in the serene surroundings of Magaliesberg. For nearly half a week, hearts and minds from across the Continent gathered in reflective intensity. The dialogue was not ceremonial; it was surgical, cutting into the deep tissue of Africa’s unfinished questions. 

But it was the session on the Eastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) that dislodged something in me. A visceral unseating. My heart, long nestled in its biological comfort, seemed to shift, as if unwilling to stay still in the face of such testimony. Those voices did not read; they remembered. They remembered with clarity, with pain, with an honesty so searing it tore through the thin veil of diplomatic decorum.

They spoke of identity killings, not as theory, but as trauma. Of targeted erasures, where your surname could become your death sentence. These were not stories; they were lived histories, told by those who carried them like scar tissue across borders and generations. In the DRC, identity is not merely a social marker; it is the axis around which the political universe spins. It is contested, racialised, manipulated, and deeply etched into the fragile DNA of the body politic.

Yet even in the heat of that emotional reckoning, another session pressed harder against the intellect, the one dealing with the Sahel region. It demanded more than empathy; it required interpretation. The Sahel is not simply a war zone; it is a region where ecological collapse, poverty, ideological radicalisation, and foreign military entanglement converge like fault lines before an earthquake. The crisis there is not episodic. It is structural. It asks us not just “what is happening?” but “what has failed?”

But the most disturbing of all, perhaps because of its geographical proximity and spiritual nearness to us as South Africans, was the situation in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique. Here, violence is not a headline; it is a neighbour. The insurgency unfolding in Northern Mozambique is not simply a threat to national sovereignty; it is a mirror reflecting our own vulnerabilities.

Cabo Delgado forces us to confront uncomfortable truths, that we cannot call ourselves regional actors while we ignore fires on our doorstep. That Pan-Africanism cannot be sung in song and stifled in policy. That solidarity is not symbolic; it must be strategic, material, and constant.

The TMF Dialogue was, without question, an eye-opener. But that phrase feels almost too light, too polite, for what truly happened in those days beneath the skies of Magaliesburg. What occurred was not just revelation, it was exposure. A lifting of veils. A peeling back of the diplomatic wallpaper to reveal the cracks and rust in the architecture of peace and security on the African Continent.

What emerged with glaring clarity was this: Africa is not necessarily short of agreements, declarations, protocols, and frameworks. We are drowning in them. But what is scarcer than rain in a dry season is implementation, respect, commitment, and integrity.

The dialogue revealed, sometimes through direct testimony, sometimes through studied silence, that there exists a total disregard for peace and security agreements, many of them birthed in Addis Ababa, midwifed in Sun City, nursed in Dakar. But the ink dries, and the guns keep firing. The accords are signed, but the people continue to flee.

At the heart of it all, and this must be said without fear or embellishment, is the entrenched, overlapping matrix of economic and commercial interests, especially those of actors from the global North. Their presence is never neutral. 

Their corporations, security contractors, mining conglomerates, and geopolitical emissaries orbit the very conflicts they claim to de-escalate. They speak of democracy while funding dictators. They fund peacebuilding while profiteering from war. They speak of African futures while investing in African chaos. This is not a theory. It is a political economy of conflict, and it is central to understanding the African crisis.

And therein lies the great challenge confronting the African Union’s Agenda 2063, a blueprint born in hope, driven by vision, but weighed down by political inertia and structural dependency.

But how can we speak of “silencing the guns when we are still manufacturing the noise? When we allow foreign powers to station troops on our soil, not as guests, but as governors of regional strategy? When do we allow multinational firms to bleed our resources dry while financing the very instability that justifies their continued presence?

Agenda 2063, noble as it is, will remain a paper document unless it is matched with Continental political will, Continental ownership of security frameworks, and the dismantling of Neo-colonial entanglements that compromise our sovereignty at every turn.

Evidently, the guns are not silenced in Africa. They are spitting fire, and they are claiming the lives of ordinary people, villagers, women, children, and youth who have never known the luxury of peace. The AU’s Agenda 2063 will stumble in its strategic intent to silence the guns, notwithstanding laudable successes in the area of economic continental reintegration, especially with the establishment of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), a significant achievement in a continent historically fractured by colonial trade routes. 

But peace is the precondition for prosperity. Without peace and stability in the DRC, the economic backbone of the entire African continent will continue to tremble. Without silence in the Sahel, trade routes will become escape routes. Without peace in Cabo Delgado, there will be no development worth defending.

Thus, the outcome of the TMF Peace and Security Dialogue must find expression in the work of the African Union.  It must shape and repurpose Agenda 2063’s peace and security pillar, the very foundation upon which Africa’s developmental future must be premised and anchored.

The AU must begin to find a better way of confronting the unfolding political economy of the Sahel region, where the emergence of popular military regimes has become both a symptom and a verdict on the dismal failure of Post-Colonial democracies.

In Burkina Faso, Captain Ibrahim Traoré has emerged not simply as a Soldier but as a symbolic reanimation of Thomas Sankara. His posture echoes Sankara’s revolutionary fervour. He is, in many ways, reviving a legacy that was assassinated long before it was realised. And in this region, there has been a total onslaught against French Neo-Colonialism. 

France, once the uninvited architect of Francophone Africa’s Post-Colonial fate, is now in full retreat. Economic contracts that once enslaved the people of Burkina Faso have been declared null and void, set aside, dismantled in the name of sovereignty. And yet, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, we are still waiting. Waiting for leaders who will emulate the vision of Patrice Lumumba, a vision he was never allowed to implement.

* Zamikhaya Maseti is a Political Economy Analyst and holds a Magister Philosophae (M.Phil) in South African Politics and Political Economy from Nelson Mandela University.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL, Independent Media or The African.