The biggest risk with foreign armies walking into another country for whatever purpose including peace keeping is that over time owing to unplanned long-term commitment they end up losing sight of the exact objectives why they arrived there in the first place.
In the military lexicon, this is called mission creep.
It is often a result of overstaying. But it can also be a result of zeal.
Or arriving only to find that conditions on the ground are much more different and more complex than intelligence would have briefed the army.
Too often the intelligence underestimates the resolve of the enemy.
In Afghanistan the Americans arrived there first to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden. When that did not happen soon enough, they shifted towards nation building, strengthening institutions and even rebuilding the Afghan army.
According to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Lemogang Kwape, the Botswana Defence Force will be in Mozambique for three months, subject to result of an evaluation by the commander in chief.
That is where the rub is.
The BDF mission in Mozambique should be short and targeted.
The goals should be explicitly clear to the field commanders so that there is no second-guessing.
A shorter mission would avoid unintended consequences like civilian casualties.
Such casualties could complicate relations on the ground between the BDF and people on whose interests they are there to assist.
This means that BDF should have a strong communications team – not only to link it with local populations, but to also help manage perceptions that could easily degenerate into narratives that could cast the BDF as an invading force.
The BDF is in Mozambique to help fight violent extremism that has taken hold in the Cabo Delgado province of that country.
They are there together with South Africans who according to president Cyril Ramaphosa will eventually deploy a total of 1500 men and women.
South African government estimates that their mission will cost the country R1 billion.
Make no mistake, Mozambique assignment will be difficult not least because there is a whole array of actors involved, but also because the president of Mozambique Filipe Nyusi only grudgingly accepted SADC assistance after he was literally arm-twisted into it.
SADC ability to deploy such a force is not only suspect but highly questionable.
For Botswana specifically, the whole undertaking is akin to punching above one’s weight given the state of the economy.
Mozambique government has a lot of intelligence on the Cabo Delgado province and on the enemy – will it be sufficiently shared with arriving forces like the BDF and SANDF? The jury is still out.
Mozambique president had preferred Rwanda, who were the first to arrive and who are there effectively at the behest of France.
France, through its energy flagship, Total, has invested heavily on natural gas development near Afungi. The project, estimated at a cost of $20 billion is Africa’s single largest project.
Deploying so many armies with varying levels of capabilities and even war preparedness is not an easy feat.
There are other hurdles the forces arriving in Mozambique will face.
The BDF and other forces will not find themselves being welcomed as liberators.
There is a lot of popular discontent in Cabo Delgado.
Much of the troubles bedeviling the province – poverty, exclusion, disempowerment and general hopelessness – are a result of failed political decisions by the political elite of Mozambique staying in the comfort and relative calm far away in Maputo.
It is difficult to see how BDF or any force for that matter can remedy that in three months.
Security will only come back to Cabo Delgado if development happens. These two should run concurrently.
There are structural issues in Cabo Delgado that can only be addressed not by soldiers but by addressed by politicians. The province is terribly under-developed.
A militarized response alone cannot resolve these no matter how long it lasts.
Thus civil society and NGOs have a big role to play in resolving this conflict. And this should from early on form a big component in the strategy of the BDF and others, or else their efforts and presence there will end in vain.
SADC should acknowledge that Cabo Delgado problem is largely a result of failed political policies, and should force the government in Maputo to commit more resources in human investment in that province.
The history of Cabo Delgado shows that over the years, the country’s elite benefited immensely and even unfairly from the province’s natural resources especially through mining concessions.
In Cabo Delgado province there are major towns like Mocimboa da Praia that are effectively being run and governed by the terrorists.
This alone says a lot about the capacity of Mozambique government and also about the country. It borders on a failed state.
The government’s reach and its capacity to influence events in Cabo Delgado are at best tenuous and at worst non-existent.
This is a government that the BDF and others are trying to prop up at a time when as a country we are unable to meet our own key national priorities. It is difficult to start to think of just how the government of Mozambique will even start to appreciate the immense sacrifices that Botswana is making on its behalf when the same government does not care about its own people.
There is a real possibility of the whole Cabo Delgado mission degenerating into an endless war very much like the United States’ forever war in Afghanistan.
For the people of Cabo Delgado, the Government of Mozambique is simply guilty of neglect.
That government has irresponsibly failed to give the people of Cabo Delgado education, security, health, jobs and economic inclusion.
In short, the government has failed to give its own people hope. Popular frustration often breeds resentment, then disillusion and at worse violence.
And an absence of hope is the single biggest recruiter for terrorists in Cabo Delgado.
The SADC deployment will be an exercise in futility unless Mozambique government honours its obligations to its citizens and does what governments are supposed to do.
For terrorism and extreme violence to go away in Cabo Delgado, prosperity for citizens must come first.
Across the world in areas where people have hope emanating from economic prosperity and inclusion it is almost impossible for ideologies of terrorism to set in. Prosperous people often do not give in to influences of violent ideologies.
Alienation breeds circumstances as we see them in Cabo Delgado.
And no country is immune. Not even Botswana.
