This is one of the most important issues of our time.

As the DR Congo erupts again, future generations may find our blindness to a clear and apparent evil in our time just as incomprehensible as we found the silence of the beneficiaries of apartheid, and further back, the connivance of millions during the three hundred years of the slave trade.

The cycle of conflict and war is doubly tragic because there is little sense in building schools and bridges if your neighbours – or the rebels in their jungles – are building arsenals. In large areas of Africa, reconciliation by dialogue has fallen noticeably out of fashion, thanks in no small part to the higher profile of armaments and to the tens of millions of weapons – from pistols to landmines – on streets and farms across the continent. In many territories, generations have grown up against a backdrop of war.

We must now recognise that in countries with weakened institutions, where arms are stockpiled they will eventually be used, and development is impossible in the face of such private and public stockpiles.

We need to invest in seeds and tractors rather than Kalashnikovs and RPGs. The shipment of armaments from Europe to Africa was one component of the triangular trade in slaves that survived the abrogation of slavery. Back in those days, the supply of European arms was critical to the harvesting of African slaves. The intervening centuries subsequent to the end of slavery have not much improved the morally dubious practice of supplying lethal arms to short-sighted brigands preying on their own communities.

The overall proportion of GDP officially spent by particular African governments on the military is worrying. According to CIA World Factbook figures, Angola, for instance, spent a mere 2.4% of its 2005 GDP on education but 5.7% on defence and military expenditure. Eritrea, for its part, spent 2.4% of its GDP on education and 6.3% on defence. This contrasts markedly with Japan, which spent 3.5% of its GDP on education and 0.8% on military expenditure. Even the US, with the largest military in the world, barely spends 4% of GDP on Defence, compared with 5.3% on education. What is more, the billions of dollars officially spent by African governments on armaments comes on top both of funds lost to endemic corruption in the arms sector and the resources invested by rebel groups in black market transactions (in war diamonds, for instance).

These figures are a scandal and are part of Africa's overall problems: the fact that the list of 25 countries with the highest death rates in the world is solidly African, as is the list of countries with the highest infant mortality, lowest life expectancy, smallest proportion of literate citizens, or highest number of HIV/AIDS-related deaths, to stop at five indices.

The great tragedy is that the bleeding of vital resources from education, health and infrastructure into armaments creates more civil unrest, and the weapons purchased by governments frequently end up in the hands of rebels and warring factions. The 2002 Ivorian conflict is a case in point, where disloyal soldiers simply opened up the government's arsenal to start their mutiny. In this sense, large arsenals actually worsen the security of the relevant countries, while increasing their levels of national debt. Of course this is not a peculiarly African problem: the $600 billion so far spent in the latest Gulf war did not exactly bring security to Iraqi streets.

If the annual spend on arms is halved across Africa and by all sides in the continent’s perennial conflicts, and the savings applied to health, education and infrastructure for a start, Africa will see improvements in the opportunities of millions. In many cases all that is necessary for communities to feed themselves is for them to be allowed to plant and harvest in peace. In many cases, if countries around the world could keep their bombs at home, they could keep their food aid as well.

This strategy requires concerted action to be taken regionally to:
- Reduce the proportion of GDP invested in armaments
- Eliminate the black market and surreptitious flows of armaments into the continent
- Invest substantially in community mediation, infrastructure, and employment generation in regions recovering from conflict.

For this to take root, the African Union and its members must step up to take responsibility and ownership of the process of ridding Africa of the heritage of arms. In five centuries, the force of arms has proved an overwhelmingly ineffectual defence by African nations against non-African invaders. In the 21st century, armaments play a largely local and regional role as ethnic, local and national tensions are stoked and fed for selfish purposes. We must act regionally to actively buy back and decommission arms caches, create robust reconciliatory structures and networks, and strengthen regional peacekeeping in which the role of armed intervention is increasingly reduced.

The role of the West is to pursue those running illicit arms into Africa from their shores with the same rigour that they would pursue them were the arms destined for armed riots on the streets of London or Paris or insurrection in the inner cities of New York or Berlin.

It is necessary to invest substantially in ridding the African countryside of armaments. It is important that no part of the continent remains aloof to this problem. For decades, Ivory Coast was the regional exception to the rule of west African turmoil, but a season of war and conflict arrived and years of progress were swept away. Even where hostilities do not actually break out within the borders of a country, war is traumatic for both refugees and host communities alike: witness South Africa's recent xenophobic riots. The UNHCR (office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) currently reports over 5 million refugees and internally displaced people in Africa.

My poem, Crying Blood, presents the perspective of an angel on Judgment Day, but we do not need a religious persuasion to empathise with the millions locked in cycles of suffering. Uganda's war has raged on for two decades, as has Somalia's. In Sudan, in Angola, everyday, in another forgotten thicket in Africa, another shell will blow up a community, replacing the very ordinary dreams of a very ordinary family with another extraordinary nightmare. It is time to link the iniquity of the arms industry to the crying blood on the ground.

Make no mistake, Africans and their governments bear primary responsibility for the situation. At their best, they are acting: the west African moratorium on the import, export and manufacture of small arms was the first regional moratorium in the world, and it has now evolved into a convention. Eleven east African countries signed the signal Nairobi Protocol on Small Arms and Light Weapons. But at their worst, they can also be venal accomplices to the arms industry. Yet, in all cases, the dead and dying are the powerless victims, so it is also time for all of us to recognise the hypocrisy of countries that ship cluster bombs to Africa in the spring and food aid in the summer, sometimes on the same ships. We must reach beyond the remote control switch that turns off the inconvenient news to call time on this madness, right now.

There is of course no landscape in the world, no market square, that can be improved by a bomb. The arms issue is not an exclusively African one. It is only the crushing coincidences recounted here that make the status quo on the continent peculiarly obscene. There are simple steps to take:

- Everyone can support the worldwide Arms Trade Treaty and impress on their governments that they do so too
- African Governments can sign a convention prohibiting the purchase, sale and manufacture of small arms
- African Governments can sign a moratorium committing them to bring defence spending down to 1.5% of GDP or less
- African Governments can actively fund community mediations, to employ people in peacemaking rather than war
- All governments can legislate a moratorium against the sale of arms to areas of conflict
- Companies and individuals can cease investing in the arms industry generally and can support global efforts to regulate and administer the sector
- Arms exporting countries can update legislation to enable arms brokers who circumvent sanctions to be prosecuted.

If you are African, tell your government you'd rather your taxes bought tractors than tanks. If you are a citizen of an arms manufacturing state, ask your MP how many bombs have been shipped to Africa in your name.

Do join the campaign today. It is the right thing to do.

* Chuma Nwokolo is a writer and advocate from Jos, Nigeria.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/