The East African Region is seeing an emergence in disputes related to land border demarcation after a mechanized group of Uganda People’s Defense Forces invaded Pogee Village in Eastern Equatoria State of South Sudan and launched a military offensive.
The incident, which killed two members of the South Sudan People’s Defense Forces, followed months of a diplomatic tension between Uganda and Rwanda over the ownership of Gatuna Border Post shared by the two countries.
After multiple reports that both sides were threatening to destabilize the other by supporting rebellious groups and ill-treatment of citizens, the border was closed in February 2019 without hope of addressing the rift until July when Presidents from the two countries met in Angola and at Gatuna Border Post days later.
Nothing would create a common ground for the two besides the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding which commits both parties to free incarcerated citizens, retreat from funding bandits and establish a commission to monitor the implementation of the pact.
While that agreement is holding, Uganda has shifted the goal posts, this time, to South Sudan, and the he recent cross-border attack by the UPDF against the South Sudan People’s Defense Forces is an attestation.
On a separate but border land-related phenomenon, a group of 200 armed South Sudanese herders from Eastern Equatoria crossed into Turkana County of Kenya and displaced Kenyan pastoralists, prompting a call for the Kenya Defense Forces intervention.
At the heart of these trans-boundary disputes, stand colonial boundary-making errors, undefined and unmarked borders, poor management, bad governance, and drastic population bulge, according to Wafula Okumu, a researcher from the Institute of Security Studies in South African capital Pretoria.
The academic says the merging inter-state tensions within the region are also being propelled by growing discoveries of resources, or rumours of existence, of natural resources on borders or in borderlands.
“These disputes are mainly over territorial claims, and are most frequently caused by the lack of clearly defined and marked boundaries, the availability of trans-boundary resources, and security-related matters,” Okumu wrote in a document titled Resources and Border Disputes in Eastern Africa.
Boundary-making in Eastern Africa was a very deliberate and elaborate process. The current borders in the region were cartographic feats of the colonial powers like Belgium, Germany, Great Britain, Italy and Portugal, whose main objective was to enhance their respective imperial interests.
The borders of the region are a reflection of how these interests played out between 1885 and 1925, more than a decade after the Berlin Conference. The Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda borders, for instance, reflect the British obsession to control the source of the Nile and the colonial intrigues to gain access to the mineral wealth of the present eastern DRC.
Imperialism in a physical form has long gone; but their legacy lives on, and the East African post-colonial regimes bear the brunt. What is the remedy?
To date, there are no properly established functioning regional mechanisms to address borderland conflicts. It is about time. That member states must strengthen their governance structures for leaders to wisely use resources for the benefit of the populace is not an option but a mandate.
The African Union, Inter-governmental Authority on Development, and the East African Community have waited for far too long to build and strengthen their capacities to handle trans-boundary disputes within the region; that time has arrived.