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Which Country Will Be Africa’s First Great Power?

Which Country Will Be Africa’s First Great Power?

In terms of the two countries traditionally thought of as having the “right stuff” to be potential great powers in Africa, South Africa is probably the one furthest along.

South Africa boasts Africa’s largest and most diversified economy. It has for some time been the continent’s leading economy and is recognized as such by the international financial system, which lumps in South Africa with Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRICS) as “emerging” economies to watch and invest in.

Second, as befitting a relatively advanced middle-income country, South Africa has a strong, well-trained military and the country has demonstrated a command of the high technology necessary for great power status. South Africa under the apartheid regime secretly built, and then dismantled under the democratic stewardship of Nelson Mandela, a nuclear weapons program that had succeeded in producing several atomic bombs.

Third, despite the disquiet over corruption in the ruling African National Congress, democracy in South Africa seems stable enough to continue over the long haul and there are no serious ethnic-based resistance movements challenging the South African state. This relative stability is also reflected in the country’s courts and its feisty press. All in all, South Africa has all the right ingredients for great power status.

A major obstacle, however, stands in the way. South Africa, while being powerful for an African state, is relatively isolated from the rest of the continent. This matters because a great power has to be willing and able to make its influence felt, and Pretoria’s geographic isolation means doing so is difficult – both materially and politically. Much as geography allowed the U.S. to escape Europe’s many problems for more than 100 years, South Africa’s geographic position allows it to ignore events further north if it does not wish to become involved.

The ability to hide in this way can become a self-fulfilling prophecy since effective hiding could lead to few resources being used to influence events further afield. If this happens, South Africa could become “Europeanized” – rich and powerful, but far away and without the means to influence events even if it wanted to. South Africa, blessed by geography, could therefore eventually become trapped by it.

What about Nigeria, the other commonly considered potential great power of Africa? Nigeria is rich like South Africa but its wealth is far more dependent upon a single commodity – oil – than is South Africa’s. Nigeria, however, is growing and could potentially overtake South Africa as the continent’s largest economy in the coming years.

Nigeria also has a huge population and a central location in the heart of West Africa. This means Nigeria has the potential manpower and geographic opportunity to intervene in the affairs of its much smaller neighbors. Indeed, it has already done so on multiple occasions, and as the West African giant increases its heft in terms of wealth and military effectiveness, West Africa and the Gulf of Guinea could become a de facto Nigerian sphere of influence much as the Gulf of Mexico is effectively an American lake today.

Unlike South Africa which, despite its problems, seems stable and legitimate in the eyes of most of its people, Nigeria’s cobbled-together territory is a post-colonial mishmash of hundreds of ethnicities and linguistic groups. Nigeria has gone through periodic bouts of dictatorship and constitutional reorganization, not to mention a bloody civil war in the 1960s over inclusion of Biafra into the Nigerian state and a debilitating insurgency in its Niger Delta region today, precisely due to its polyglot makeup. Until Nigeria can demonstrate that it can keep the peace honestly and effectively within its own borders it is unlikely that Nigeria will be catapulted into the ranks of the great powers soon.

So, if South Africa is potentially too distant from the center of action and Nigeria too unstable, what other contenders could fill the role of Africa’s first great power? Africa’s geography suggests that the Horn region could provide the strategic space necessary for a great power to develop if one of the countries there became dominant enough to outshine its immediate neighbors. Of the countries that could be considered natural candidates for an East African Great Power only two – Ethiopia and Kenya – could conceivably have the right combination of population, economic heft, and geographic position necessary.

Ethiopia, of course, is a huge, ancient country that once ruled much of East Africa as an imperial state. It was the only African society to really effectively resist colonialism and while it currently is poor, weak, lacks access to the sea, and has lost territory from ethnic rebellions, it remains big enough to remain a contender for power in the region and, as such, has received significant military assistance from the U.S. Ethiopia’s importance was even recognized by the former Soviet Union, which dropped its former ally, Somalia, like a hot potato when a socialist revolution in Ethiopia offered the chance for an ideological alliance with Addis Ababa.

Still, Ethiopia, too, has many obstacles to overcome before it can hope to re-establish itself as East Africa’s dominant power. Kenya may therefore be a better bet for a number of reasons. First, it is East Africa’s largest economy and its capital, Nairobi, is a regional commercial hub of some importance. While still mostly agricultural, Kenya has a growing industrial base that provides some diversification away from commodity production. It also has a fairly large population – some 43 million – which gives it the weight necessary to strive for great power status.

Kenya, however, also has issues as ethnic clashes there in 2007 have undermined political stability. Further violence has mostly been avoided due to the adroit maneuvering of domestic political players and the watchful eyes of outsiders, but the possibility remains that Kenya could devolve into political violence and ethnic strife if current power-sharing agreements fail. Kenya, like Nigeria, could therefore fail to live up to its great power potential due to an inability to adequately govern itself.

The days when Pretoria and Abuja are considered the equals of Beijing or Moscow are a long way off, but the laws of geopolitics grind away surely, if slowly. As African states emerge from the chaos and conflict of the first several decades after independence to become strong, independent actors, those smart enough to look ahead can already see who the big players of tomorrow are likely to be.