Tackling the Challenges of Postcrisis Reconstruction in Africa: Lessons from the Field
| Author | John O. Kakonge |
| Published date | 01 September 2014 |
| Date | 01 September 2014 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12137 |
Tackling the Challenges of Postcrisis
Reconstruction in Africa: Lessons from the
Field
John O. Kakonge
Kenya Ambassador / Permanent Representative to the UN Office in Geneva and
World Trade Organization
As more and more of its countries emerge from periods of crisis, the issue of postcrisis reconstruction in Africa is gain-
ing increasing prominence on the international agenda. The passage from crisis to stability and progress is a time-con-
suming and potentially open-ended process. During my career, I worked in two postcrisis African countries –Rwanda
and Liberia –and I was also concerned indirectly with conflict situations in other countries. In this article I set out some
personal reflections on what I consider to be the key challenges facing governments and civil society in their efforts to
deal with the effects and scars of crisis and civil disruption.
In my view, seven factors have a direct bearing on the pace of rebuilding and recovery.
1. Building trust
The issue of trust is critical. It takes great effort to per-
suade opposing parties to trust each other, largely
because many of the people and entities involved have
a vested interest in, and benefit from, the settlement of
a conflict. They may discourage or even threaten their
leaders or chief negotiators, insisting that they yield no
ground until they have obtained at least part of what
they want. These are not ordinary diplomatic negotia-
tions: they take place among individuals and groups that
previously had been violently hostile to each other.
When a mediator is involved, the parties involved must
have full confidence in the mediator if agreement is to
be reached. In intractable conflicts, the role of a mediator
can be decisive. Thus, before President Mandela signed
an accord in January 1991 with Chief Buthelezi on bring-
ing the Inkatha Freedom Party into the Government of
National Unity, thereby ending a bitter and bloody feud
in South Africa, several attempts at mediation had been
mounted and had failed. Then, against all expectations, a
virtually unknown Kenyan professor Washington Okumu
was the catalyst for the desired reconciliation. As recalled
by Dowden (1994), the Kenyan professor succeeded
where Kissinger and Carrington had failed because he
had met Mandela in 1962 before he was jailed and had
known Chief Buthelezi for twenty years, so he was some-
one whom they could both trust. For a mediator to instil
trust, it is important that neither side is made to feel that
it has ended up on the losing side.
2. Managing expectations: returnees, internally
displaced people and ex-combatants
In postcrisis countries, one of the fundamental challenges
for a new government is providing for returning refugees
and resettling internally displaced persons. The usual sce-
nario is for a donors’meeting to be organized by the
international community to raise funds for the govern-
ment’s reconstruction programme. These meetings are
primarily concerned with the resettlement of the dis-
placed population, if possible in their original homes. The
major international powers usually base the scale of their
assistance on the strategic importance of the country in
question: on occasion, donor meetings have raised mil-
lions, even billions, of dollars.
In the case of Liberia, however, the funds raised in 1998
were not commensurate with the needs of a country that
had suffered a brutal and devastating civil war. The Liberi-
an returnees and internally displaced persons were left
destitute. The war had destroyed much of an already
decayed infrastructure and the already arduous task of
resettling people in their former homes was further com-
plicated by the fact that so many villages had been burnt
to the ground. In addition, although the ex-combatants
had expected to be integrated into the national army, this
was impossible because they lacked the necessary train-
ing and, more importantly, there was no funding for this
activity. According to the United Nations (2000), the
needs of a significant proportion of the demobilized com-
batants and war-wounded population in Liberia have
Global Policy (2014) 5:3 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12137 ©2014 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 5 . Issue 3 . September 2014 377
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