This is a ‘quick and dirty’ take on the fast-moving Saharan crisis unfolding in Africa’s northwest. It appears that in the cut-and-thrust of the French intervention to roll back Islamist insurgents in northern Mali and the hostage crisis in Algeria, that virtually all commentaries on the security vacuum in trans-Saharan Africa have missed the point as they missed it in Libya. It boils down to two words: Western Sahara. This is the long and the short of it as far as post-Qaddafi regional instability is concerned and for all interested parties, not the least the African Union (AU) but also the West. The current crisis should propel the unresolved Western Sahara stalemate to the top of the international security agenda as it relates to Africa, Europe and the Mediterranean.

It is one that underlines the geostrategic spatial interdependencies between Africa and Europe to the detriment of Africa’s continental sovereignty which, by the way, is a hell of a lot more important than the sovereignty of either Mali or Algeria – or for that matter, the Western Sahara. Obviously there is a lot more to this multidimensional predicament than the Western Sahara. But, as in how the AU ended up marginalized in the Libyan crisis and is already virtually marginalized on Mali, what this all means for the AU bears repeating over and over again: its northern regional pillar, the Arab Maghreb Union (UMA), is non-existent.

It has been rendered dysfunctional by the continuing stalemate between Algeria, Morocco and the Sahrawi Republic over the future of the Western Sahara. Ergo, this means that regional cooperation in the entire Maghreb is virtually non-existent whether in terms of economic integration or in coordinating on security challenges.

This not only affects the North African Maghreb. It also affects the northern borderlands of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) which is struggling to mobilize a force to retake Mali’s Tuareg north thereby lessening the vulnerability of northern Nigeria under pressure from Boko Harum. Overall, the magnitude of this crisis (as with others in the Central African Republic, eastern DRC, the Somali region, the two Sudans) is one more reminder of the fallacy of the nation-state as a sovereign entity in the interdependent but colonially fragmented landscape called Africa.

The Mali-Algeria crisis package underlines a number of challenges for Africa and the international community that need urgently to inform policies, priorities and strategies.

Written by Francis A. Kornegay, SAFPI