Hon Speaker, the discussions that have been taking place in the AU for a number of years now have been on the need to establish a standby force. I think that at some point a decision was taken that we should start with the regions. So, many regions have established their standby forces. I think they are at the level of a brigade. Even the SADC has been working on that. This follows on a need. As you know, Africa has these challenges, and we need to have a standby force. This has been so for a number of years.
The reality is that problems that have needed military intervention have been occurring on the continent while this debate has been going on. However, in the meantime there has been the establishment of these regional standby forces as a process, a process that has in a sense been developing at a particular level. African countries are saying that, while we have been discussing this matter and trying to find ways and means of dealing with it, there have been problems out there. As you know, the recent ones have been in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali, the Central African Republic, and so on. While this matter has been debated and discussed, the Somalia issue has been a problem for many years. So, whatever discussion we were having about the African Standby Force, it was not helping to deal with the concrete reality of where the challenges were.
Being aware of all this and that the process was going on, just before the last summit started the chiefs of the army, as well as the ministers of defence, met in Addis Ababa as part of the preparation to present a paper that was supposed to be adopted during the summit. They felt, however, that that paper was not good enough and they had to go back and work on it. This was a few weeks before the summit. This meant that the summit was not going to be able to address this issue and take a decision.
The problem is what you do in the meantime, because the problems are there. In fact, as we arrived in Addis Ababa, Niger, in addition to Mali, was attacked - its most important and sensitive installation! And we are still discussing the matter - we are not taking a decision. That is the reality. I'm leaving aside the other reasons why these countries are being destabilised in the manner in which they have been destabilised. The question that confronted the African Union was: What do we do? Whilst we were sitting there, we couldn't take a decision, for example, to send a standby force to Niger. We couldn't. Much as we would theoretically have wanted to do so, we couldn't.
When Mali was being attacked, the Economic Community of West African States, Ecowas, of which Mali is a member, met 10 times trying to discuss what to do, precisely because there is no capacity of this nature, the rapid response. They were not able to do anything. In 10 meetings they couldn't produce a single soldier to go and deal with the situation. That's the reality. That situation continued until the former colonial country, France, came in to save the government.
A question that African leaders were asking themselves was this: Until when will we stand and look on while Africa is being destabilised? Some of the leaders were saying that we were attacked through the process of the colonisation of Africa all over, bit by bit, and were colonised. We could be faced with the same thing to undermine Africa now. Should we stand still until we all disappear? These were the questions that leaders were faced with. Leaders then said that whilst people were working on the ideal kind of standby force for Africa, we should have something that can deal with this.
I must also mention the following point. The resources of the continent so far are being paid for by other people's taxpayers - those of Europe - and not by Africans. They have a nice name that they are called by, but I can't remember the name. It's called friends something. They give donations to the continent. They put conditions on their giving of the money. If you want to use their money, they ask what it is to be used for. If they don't like what you are using it for, they say they are sorry, they cannot help there. Therefore, Africa remains helpless. In fact, Libya is a case in point. Part of the reason the AU could not go there was the fact that the donor said it couldn't use its money there. They wanted to give themselves time to bomb Libya out of existence.
The question that has been asked by the leaders is: Until when will this be? Also, we cannot depend on other people's money. Therefore, when the call was made by the AU Commission, a number of countries said that we needed something so that we could defend ourselves and we needed volunteers. Many countries volunteered and said that they were volunteering. In other words, these countries were not going to depend on the donor money. If there was a problem they would be able to move swiftly and finance their actions. If we don't do so ourselves, it will be financed by the taxpayers from across the seas and they will control us forever. Do we want to continue being controlled by other people, or do we want to be independent and stand on our own?
These are countries that said - although not everybody - that we can participate as a joint force in order to move away from the debate that has been going on for years and to deal with the concrete issue of what we can do. So there are a number of countries that have said that they are ready to come together and put their efforts together, so that whenever there is a problem on this continent we can move.
This is partly because there is a suspicion that there is an agenda of using soldiers in many ways. In the past coups d'tat used to be conducted by soldiers. The African Union took the position that this was not allowed - unconstitutional changes could not be allowed. They've changed. What used to be called mutiny is no longer mutiny. They say they are dissatisfied. They call themselves rebels. Those rebels become ...