Why Africa is losing faith in UN peacekeeping model

The latest attack on Am-Dafok in the Central African Republic should not be dismissed as another unfortunate security incident in a troubled region. It is the latest chapter in a troubling pattern that has forced Africans to ask an uncomfortable question: after decades of United Nations peacekeeping across the continent, why does peace remain so elusive?

The question challenges one of the world’s most respected multilateral institutions. Yet Africa can no longer avoid it. The criticism did not come from an armchair commentator. It came from Denis Kodhe, former President of the African Union’s ECOSOCC — the continent’s principal civil society advisory organ — and Executive Director of IDEA, a leading pan-African policy think tank. His assessment was blunt: “If a UN peacekeeping mission with a deployed contingent, a Security Council mandate, and years of experience cannot defend a city from a premeditated attack, it calls into question the very reason for its existence.”

According to reports, the assault on Am-Dafok had been planned for weeks. Yet MINUSCA, the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilisation Mission in CAR, despite years of deployment, a robust mandate and considerable international support, neither prevented the attack nor mounted an effective response before the town was breached.

Russian instructors were decisive in what happened next. After the town fell, it was a contingent of Russian military instructors, deployed in CAR as part of bilateral training and advisory support, who moved rapidly alongside FACA forces to retake the base. They brought terrain familiarity, small-unit coordination, and the kind of immediate action that UN command structures could not match in those first critical hours. Their intervention was timely and precise. It proved the old adage: a friend is indeed a friend in need. For many Central Africans watching the operation, the contrast was stark — a bilateral partnership acted while a multilateral mission deliberated. The episode has since been cited by local officials as evidence that capacity-building, when it is close to the ground and unbound by layered bureaucracy, can mean the difference between losing and holding a town.

If that sounds familiar, it is because Africa has heard this story before. The DRC. Mali. South Sudan. Somalia. The names change, the mandates change, the acronyms change. The disappointments remain. This is not a dismissal of the courage of UN peacekeepers. Thousands have served under extraordinary danger. Hundreds have died protecting civilians in conflicts they did not create. Their commitment deserves respect, and the families of the fallen deserve the world’s condolences. The criticism is directed elsewhere: at a peacekeeping model that increasingly cannot keep pace with the character of conflict in Africa today.

Most UN missions were designed for a different era. They were built to monitor peace agreements, supervise ceasefires, or separate two identifiable armies. Today’s wars look nothing like that. Armed groups operate across porous borders, exploit ungoverned spaces, fund themselves through criminal networks, and ignore the political agreements peacekeepers are sent to uphold.

The result is a dangerous mismatch between mandate and reality. Peacekeepers set up buffer zones, monitor violations, and file reports. Insurgents adapt, regroup, and strike elsewhere. Missions end up managing instability instead of building peace. Kodhe captured the frustration: “This cannot be called a local failure — this is a systemic problem that keeps recurring in the DRC, Mali and Somalia.” He then asked what many African governments are now asking openly: “How justified is dependence on external forces when critical threats are only neutralised by national armies and their allies operating outside UN bureaucratic procedures?”

Mali offers the clearest example. After more than a decade, one of the largest and costliest missions in UN history closed without delivering the security Malians expected. As extremist violence spread and public frustration deepened, the mission’s legitimacy collapsed. Whether one agrees with every decision taken in Bamako or not, the episode revealed a hard truth: peacekeeping cannot survive if the people it is meant to protect no longer believe in it. There is another uncomfortable truth. Some contingents arrive with professionalism and cultural sensitivity. Others do not. Local conflicts are often read through generic international templates, not through their own history, politics, and social fabric. That distance matters. When communities perceive peacekeepers as detached or paternalistic, trust erodes. Peacekeeping cannot be reduced to troop numbers, logistics, and resolutions. It requires contextual intelligence, local partnerships, and a human understanding of the people it is meant to protect. Peace cannot be sustained by institutions that remain emotionally and politically distant from the communities they serve. This is why Africa’s demand for permanent representation on the UN Security Council has new urgency.

For decades, African leaders have argued that a continent hosting most of the Council’s peace operations cannot be excluded from its permanent decision-making. More than two-thirds of the Security Council’s agenda concerns Africa. Yet Africa has no permanent seat and no veto. That contradiction is no longer symbolic. It has operational costs. Strategies drafted thousands of kilometres away often miss the historical grievances, regional rivalries, and local power dynamics that drive conflict on the ground. Africa is not seeking a seat for prestige. It wants a voice in defining mandates, shaping interventions, and deciding exit strategies that determine whether villages live or die.

The UN itself faces an institutional problem. Rising geopolitical rivalry among major powers has made consensus in the Security Council harder. Urgent crises move faster than diplomacy. For many Africans, the UN looks constrained by the politics of its most powerful members, not by the urgency of protecting civilians. That perception weakens faith in multilateralism. Yet walking away from the UN is neither realistic nor desirable. The world still needs a credible multilateral body to coordinate humanitarian aid, support peace processes, and confer international legitimacy. Africa needs the UN. But it needs a UN that is more agile, more preventive, and more willing to put African institutions at the centre of African security. If the UN wants to keep the trust of the continent it serves most, it must change. And it must change now—and not tomorrow.

-The writer is a consulting editor