With Muammar Gaddafi’s 40-year grip on power in Libya looking increasingly likely to end, RNW’s correspondent in Africa Bram Posthumus weighs up the mixed heritage the Libyan colonel will leave behind in Africa.

It is a brand new city centre. At its heart is a monumental square dominated by a giant futuristic conference centre. Drive through the place and admire the vast open plazas, the long wide boulevards, the shiny new buildings and hotels - not forgetting the presidential palace.

And here is another city but this time the picture could not be more different. The single long boulevard connecting the centre to the suburbs is dark. There has been no light here for years. Buildings are riddled with bullet holes; houses are hollow shells – but wait: there is washing hanging from the lines. Could it be that people actually live in these ruins? Yes, they do. They have nowhere else to go.

Build and invest
Both these places carry the signature of the embattled Libyan leader colonel Muammar Gaddafi. The first: Ouga 2000, a futuristic new satellite city on the outskirts of the capital of Burkina Faso, co-financed for his friend President Blaise Compaoré. Libya is swimming in oil money and Gaddafi has set up Laaico (Libyan Arab African Investment Company) to build and invest. Which is what Libyan money does in two dozen African countries : telecoms in Niger, mining in the DRC, agriculture in Ethiopia and hotels, lots of hotels, in Accra, Dar es Salaam, Brazzaville, Kigali, Libreville, Ouagadougou...

Training for revolution
The second: Monrovia, Liberia, a decade ago. But it could also be Freetown in Sierra Leone, or N’Djamena in Chad. The destruction in Monrovia was almost total, the handiwork of an armed militia loyal to the man who was now president: Charles Taylor and his National Patriotic Front for Liberia. Its fighters were trained in Libya at al-Mathab al-Thauriya al-Alamiya: World Revolutionary Headquarters. A place the writer and Africa scholar Stephen Ellis once memorably called “the Harvard and Yale of a whole generation of African revolutionaries”. Other “graduates” included Foday Sankoh from Sierra Leone, whose Revolutionary United Front wreaked havoc in that country and Laurent Désiré Kabila, the gold smuggler from the DR Congo who launched a successful attack on Kinshasa in 1997 and turned out to be no better than Mobutu, the dictator he replaced. His son is currently in charge.

Violent meddling
Gaddafi’s violent meddling in Africa began almost immediately after he seized power in a coup in 1969 and the country that bore the brunt of his interference was Chad. In 1971 he began occupying the Aozou strip, in northern Chad, reportedly rich in uranium. He met with armed resistance prompting him to send his army further south. His soldiers briefly occupied the capital N’Djamena, after a highly destructive city war. Libya’s military actions in Chad only ended when he was humiliatingly defeated in 1986-1987, by Hissène Habré, a US and French-backed warlord who went on to become yet another one of Chad’s bloody dictators.

Paying proxies
The wars in Chad predictably spilled over into Sudan and particularly the neighbouring province of Darfur. This time, the Libyan army did not directly interfere but started arming proxy militias as far back as the early 1980s. The Darfur crisis hit the headlines when war broke out in 2003, but its origins are much older and continue to carry Gaddafi’s signature, even now. Arming proxies has since become Gaddafi’s preferred meddling method with Libyan money supporting armed insurgencies in a number of African countries including Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Mercenaries
There have been reports of Libyan protesters allegedly being killed by African mercenaries. Their presence has dangerous repercussions for other African migrants. Two of them, from Senegal, told a Dakar newspaper that they could not leave their homes for fear of being shot at or captured. They think they could be mistaken for mercenaries. If so, they would be the latest casualties of Gaddafi’s mixed but ultimately toxic African heritage. A heritage that will last long after he has gone.