African leaders have been challenged to wean themselves off the feeding bottle of dependency on foreign aid by harnessing the rich mineral and human resources in the continent to debuted homegrown solutions to intractable violence through funding media education and cybersecurity projects, national and regional borderline intelligence gathering, developing credible narratives, and counter-messaging content, and ensuring smooth bilateral cooperation.
The President of the Canadian Association of African Studies (CAAS), Mohamed Sesay, made this call during the 2025 Annual Conference, which was held at the University of Toronto, Scarborough, Canada, from 3 to 6 June 2025. According to Sesay “this year’s conference provides scholars, policy-shapers, and community members a forum to collectively generate ideas aimed at constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing Africa from multiple and intersecting perspectives.” He lamented that “while Africa has experienced more than six decades of independence from European colonialism, even if this short period of time, its transformative agenda remains constrained by a postcolonial condition and mentality.”
Sesay also decried that “Whereas its youthful population, resilient people, and vast natural resources remain a source of hope, the realisation of this expectation for many continues to be armed by colonial-era governance structures, greedy and selfish leaders, armed conflicts and violence, and growing inequality.” Lamenting further, the scholar who is a Professor at York University said, “with former colonial powers maintaining undue influence over many African governments, foreign companies continuing extractive and exploitative practices, and new rising powers like China forging ties that disproportionately benefit them and client regimes, neocolonial relations have persisted.”
However, the expert was optimistic that the “conference is a timely and critical forum for rethinking and reimagining the transformation of Africa within local, regional, and global contexts.” The hybrid conference which had Damilola Adebayo as chair featured 130 events which include conventional academic sessions, lunch-and-learn professional development sessions, movie screenings, stage performances, and plenary lectures which drew about 500 participants made up of academics, public intellectuals, professionals, and community members from across Canada and 60 other countries including Kenya, Ghana and Nigeria as well as online participants.
In his presentation titled, “Afro-Multinational Strategic Communication as a catalyst for reducing religiously motivated violence in Africa: Perspectives from Nigeria and Kenya,” the writer content-analysed Nigeria’s 2017 Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (P-CVE) and Kenya’s 2016 National Strategy to Counter Violent Extremism (NSCVE). The paper compared the countering violent extremism document between the West African and East African nations and noted that while that of Nigeria emphasis the whole-of-government and the whole-of-society approaches through online and information and communication technology engagements and public enlightenment messaging or campaigns, the Kenya variant rejects violent extremism in the religious, economic and social realms.
At the event which had the theme “Making, Unmaking and Remarking Africa,” I stated that the policy came at the heels of a hydra-headed insurgency that has been ravaging northern Nigeria for over 2 decades without abating. I stressed that since Al-Shabaab has carried out deadly attacks in Somalia, Mozambique, Uganda, Tanzania, and Kenya, the Kenyan government launched a counterinsurgency document which seeks to woo the citizenry towards being security conscious and reporting suspicious persons and movements.
Making the point at the “peace building and postcolonial conflict resolution” session, I identified missing links in Nigeria’s countering violent extremism framework such as lack of afro-multidimensional strategic communication despite 29 inferences to communication and called for applying local strategic communication solutions that wins hearts and minds through national, regional and continental levels. I emphasised the need for re-evaluating the extant framework because of its lack of public diplomacy in terms of references to dialogue, which appear only six times, town hall meetings, which were captured once, and the whole-of-government and whole-of-society mechanisms, since it suggests that the government is separate from society.
The presentation underlined that the document did not fully amplify local voices and specific consequences for politicians who default in implementing the policy. On the lope-holes in Kenya’s policy, the paper disclosed that it lacks emphasis on the role of communication as the word appears only eight times, little emphasis on dialogue which was only highlighted twice, and no mention of town hall meetings, and specified consequences for politicians who are supposed to drive to implement the framework. The 4-day epoch-making event was jointly sponsored by York University, the Canadian Journal of African Studies, the Continental African Diaspora Scholars Network-Canada, and the Kenyan High Commission in Ottawa.
Justine John Dyikuk, a Catholic priest, is a PhD Candidate at the University of Strathclyde Glasgow, United Kingdom, Lecturer of Mass Communication at, the University of Jos-Nigeria and Senior Fellow, International Religious Freedom Policy, Religious Freedom Institute (RFI), Washington DC.
