What the private sector needs to build long-lasting peace

I’d never been to Colombia, and I didn’t imagine I would ever be likely to set foot there. But a few weeks ago, out of the blue, I received an invitation to speak at a conference in Medellin on how the private sector could become more involved with building peace in that post-conflict country.

It was Victor Odundo Owuor, a senior research associate with the One Earth Future (OEF) Foundation who’d recommended me, we having been together in Nairobi in 2014 at the launch of The Role of Kenya’s Private Sector in Peace building: The Case of the 2013 Election Cycle, a report funded by OEF.

The Foundation works on creating a more peaceful world – hence its interest in how Kenya Private Sector Alliance (Kepsa) has been increasingly engaged in this domain.

Indeed, our private sector leaders have now accumulated over a dozen years of experience in working with politicians and others to promote national cohesiveness, going back to the time of the mediation over the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the National Alliance of the Rainbow Coalition (Narc) and the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in 2004.

As for OEF, among its projects has been an initiative to wipe out piracy around Somalia, and in 2015 it launched PASO Colombia (Paz Sostenible para Colombia – Sustainable Peace in Colombia).

PASO’s activities are focused on Antioquia and Valle del Cauca, departments (equivalent to our counties) where conflict has been a particular challenge, and it has offices in their capitals, Medellin and Cali respectively.

In conjunction with the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, the EAFIT Business School and Proantioquia (a sub-national Kepsa/Chamber-like organisation), PASO organised the conference to which I had been invited and where I shared the Kenya private sector experience in peace-building.

I was very impressed by the First World sophistication and international exposure of Colombia’s business and civil society leaders, academics and others who attended the event, and not least by their frank admission that until now they haven’t been that heavily focused on their potential contribution to the peace-building process.

As a former mayor of Cali put it to me, they have been more like the chicken than the pig in breakfast’s eggs and bacon. (While the chicken is merely involved, the pig is fully committed).

Colombia’s recent history is infinitely more turbulent than Kenya’s. For since 1964 the government has had to handle the insurgency mounted by the left-wing FARC guerillas, who have been busy with extortion, kidnapping, illegal mining and not least the drug trade.

FARC developed as a result of the huge gap between rich and poor that has been so evident throughout Latin America.

But for the last three and a half years FARC leaders have been sitting with government representatives at peace talks in Havana, Cuba, and with the signing of a ceasefire last week it looks as though a final agreement is in sight at last.

Having said that though there is realistic acceptance that, as another speaker at the conference put it, signatures on a document merely bring Colombians to the end of the beginning of building a sustainable peace, not the beginning of the end.

The imminent challenge is that the hardline conservative opposition, under former President Alvaro Uribe, is dead against the emerging agreement and will urge Colombians to vote against the likely referendum to ratify it.

Inevitably, they want to prevent President Juan Manuel Santos from gaining goodwill from a triumphant signing, and the justification for their antagonism is that the peace deal will bring impunity (through “transitional justice”) for convicted war criminals.

Of equal concern to them — and in fairness to businesspeople too — is that the FARC will convert itself into a well-funded political party, as a result of which it could succeed in a future election and take Colombia down the extremist path adopted by Venezuela’s Socialist regime in recent years.

So what should the private sector do to exert a stronger influence on the situation? How can it convince Colombians that compromises must be made all round if the country is to heal and prosper?

Neither the left nor the right, poor or rich, the government or the opposition, must be overambitious, and for this the private sector must speak with one strong unified voice, I kept emphasising.

As of now multiple voices are heard, some expressing similar views, others not. In some regions the private sector is more conservative, elsewhere more liberal; and unlike in Kenya, private sector associations at sub-national level have not managed to come together at the national level.

In Colombia as here there is a Chamber of Commerce, with sub-national branches, and there are other umbrella bodies too, each with their own voice.

I told the Colombians about the genesis of Kepsa in 2003, when it was the new Narc government that insisted we get our act together as one unified body.

Unity, impartiality

I also shared with them how, thanks to our unity, our impartiality and our behind-the-scenes way of working, we were able to form a close partnership with Kenya’s religious leaders – one that has persisted until today – and with other elements of civil society, so as to be of at least some positive influence.

The other advice I offered was that they need to come up with a clear picture of a Colombia that enjoys shared prosperity for its people, and with a private sector agenda to support such a vision.

Not least, I stated strongly that this requires business leaders of low ego and great negotiating and facilitating skills, interested only in the long-term future of their country.

Not without justification those I was with focused very much on the risks and the challenges that Colombia is facing — as is the way with human nature.

So there as here if the country is to fulfill its extraordinary potential, leaders must emerge who also know how to do better at inspiring their people to envision and inhabit more positive scenarios.