A slower urbanisation in Africa?
Africa Research Institute recently highlighted the widespread exaggeration – whether through wishful thinking, group think, sheer laziness or whatever – of the “rapid urbanisation” phenomenon in most of Africa. For example it turns out the Kibera so-called slum in Nairobi has a population of less than a quarter million, rather than the 700,000 – 1 million so often reported; and Lagos has 10m rather than 15m; and so on.
The ARI reports that this slower-than-desired-by-many urbanisation rate is largely because of the lack of jobs and other economic pull factors in the city.
I would argue – and have done so elsewhere – that the slow rate of migration to the cities is equally the result of the lack of economic transformation policies in the countryside of so many African countries. The problem – if it is one – is that political leaders are often loth to implement the kind of land tenure and other changes which would encourage the formation of large, commercially viable farms; because to do so would lose them votes among the peasantry which they would find hard to replace among the more skeptical urban classes. Thus peasant farmers remain on their land, undisplaced by the more commmercial forms of agriculture which most governments say they want. Thus not only is there an insufficient pull factor, but also an insufficient push factor towards the cities.
But this may be a blessing in disguise, despite slowing down the projected rate of ecnomic growth. Because large unplanned cities with poor governance and security have already shown they are breeding grounds for gangs, for criminality and endemic violence.
Alpha Condé became president of the Republic of Guinea almost a year ago, after a tense and difficult – at times violent – election. As such he is the first president in Guinea’s history who can claim to have won office in a more or less fairly contested open ballot. A man who had been imprisoned in earlier times for his opposition to government, he perhaps had more reasons than most for wanting to implement major changes in the governance of a country from which he’d lived in exile for years.
Ambitions and progress
President Condé’s election manifesto included a number of major ambitions. He campaigned on the promise of a national truth and reconciliation commission along the lines of the South African model. He campaigned to eliminate corruption and renegotiate poorly drawn government contracts, including those with mining companies which he said were not beneficial to Guinea. He campaigned on the basis that he would keep the army in its barracks, and implement security sector reform. And he would take urgent measures to improve the ailing economy, and thus people’s income and standard of living.
At the heart of his populist campaign was the idea that he would restore the republican institutions of a state which had been hollowed out by previous increasingly kleptocratic administrations. This restoration of the state is presumably what was behind the claim he made during his investiture that “Guinea is back!”. And he must also have had in mind the constitutional requirement that he organise legislative elections within six months of taking office, i.e. by May 2011.
President Condé has made progress. A forensic review of government contracts has led to many being annulled or renegotiated. Mining company Rio Tinto has agreed to pay $700m as part of a renegotiated agreement regarding its vast Simandou iron ore project. A number of civil servants and others have agreed to refund monies to which audits have shown they were not entitled. A large number of opposition militants recently arrested in connection with street protests are being dealt with through judicial process, rather than arbitrarily as under previous regimes. He has managed to keep the army in its barracks – partly by doubling their salaries as one of his first acts in office. (In evidence of the army’s loyalty, at least for now, an attack on his residence by a number of soldiers in July this year was repulsed by the military.) For the first time in years, the government has managed to bring the budget more or less under central control, doing away with the previous system in which separate ministries operated as fiefdoms, raising and spending funds each in its own way.
A difficult impasse
But the situation in Guinea is now tense, and outcomes uncertain. After almost a year in office, the government has lost momentum. The parliamentary elections have not yet been held as required. The electoral commission has announced they will be held by the end of the year, but this seems virtually impossible given the lack of preparation. In any case the government and opposition are engaged in a Mexican stand-off over some of the technical details of the election, and neither seems ready to make the first move towards compromise – even though the government needs to hold the election to turn aid taps back on and reinforce its legitimacy, while the opposition needs the election to provide political space within which to hold the executive to account, modify proposed legislation and contribute to policy dialogue. According to the constitution, the National Transitional Council (CNT) fulfils the role of parliament until the elections are held, but the CNT has lost its voice, is quite easy – as a transitional body nearing the end of its life – for the government to ignore, and its members have grown weary of pushing against an immovable force.
While the task of bringing its budget under control is impressive, according to International Crisis Group it has had the unintended impact of depressing the economy; which has in any case been chronically underperforming for years. The government has tried to counter this by intervening in the market for rice, but this throwback to an earlier era of state intervention has not surprisingly failed to work; meanwhile prices continue to rise – for example a 20% or higher increase in petrol is reportedly pending. So Guineans are feeling less well-disposed towards the government than the latter would like as it heads towards a parliamentary election.
The absence so far of parliament is indicative of the absence of the institutions of state in general. These institutions – such as they existed – have been hollowed out over the years. Previous governments have ruled through patronage networks, top-down commands and repression, rather than formal state institutions and the rule of law. Meanwhile civil society – while ever-present in terms of the plethora of NGOs – has not conspicuously acted as a counterweight, instead too frequently serving as a launch platform for political opportunism by individuals leading and working in NGOs.
In the absence of state institutions and a vibrant civil society, ethnicity has come to play an increasingly important role in political discourse. Guinea is often described as being made up of four ethnic blocs: Peul, Soussou, Malinke, and the various smaller groups in and from the Forestière Region taken together. Whatever else one might wish to say in criticism of the Sékou Touré (1958-1984) and Conté (1984 – 2008) regimes, both their strident Guinean nationalism and widespread systems of patronage militated against the tendency to pit one ethnic group against the other. While each played the ethnic card at times for tactical reasons, it was not a core component of their systems of rule; meanwhile French has genuinely been seen and used as the national language, thus avoiding the dominance of any one of the local languages in public life. (This is ironic, given the bitterness and anger with which Guineans rejected France’s offer of continued tutelage at independence).
Over the past few years, as an ailing President Conté lost his grip and – after his death – a succession of military governments held power while promising to hand it over to an elected civilian government, ethnicity has come to play an increasingly important role in the political discourse. This can be ascribed to at least four factors. First, Guineans have little experience of how to “do multiparty politics”, which have been to all intents and purposes disallowed since independence. Second, the country is in such dire straits economically that there is little room for the kind of nuanced policy differences which in other circumstances might differentiate rival political parties and create an ideological attraction to party members or voters. Three, in the absence of other institutions, people naturally fall back on those that do exist, within their ethnic or language communities. And finally, the years of repression have undermined trust between and among Guineans. The end result is that people have tended to fall back on their ethnic identity and networks, and the presidential election showed this very clearly, with the “Soussou vote” switching en masse to join Apha Condé’s “Malinke vote” in the second round, narrowly beating Cellou Dalein Diallo who had polled most votes in the first round and whose overwhelmingly Peul supporters expecting “their turn in power” felt robbed by the (to them) unexpected result.
Ethnicity has rather swiftly become the lens through which practically everything is being viewed and interpreted, whether accurately or not. Thus every political appointment or government contract is being described by commentators – both intellectuals and the man in the street – in terms of the beneficiary’s ethnic identity. In an infamous recent incident, the National Mediator – a constitutionally mandated position – has stated publicly that the Peuls should stick to commerce and stay out of politics. In this situation, even the President’s protestations of being ethnically blind – indeed, he claimed when he came to office that he would appoint on the basis of merit alone – make it seem to some as though “he doth protest too much”.
Room for manoeuvre
So has the man who came to office claiming to change the face of Guinean politics been captured by the very politics he wants to change? It seems he has, and what other scenario could one have expected?
It is widely believed that he has been unable to organise parliamentary elections on time most likely because he knows he has little chance of winning an outright majority in parliament for his RPG party, thus he needs to play for time in order to court additional parties to his standard. The longer the delay, the worse the economy becomes, and thus the less votes he can probably expect to win. Thus the obvious way to court additional votes is to woo the “Soussou vote” again; and the obvious way the system offers him to do this is through patronage. In other words, a return to the politics he avowedly wants to change.
Meanwhile he still faces the challenge of what to do about the army, which has been in and around power for so long that its role is deeply entrenched in the political economy. Meanwhile military costs are thought to represent an unsustainable 35% of the government budget, which seems way too high in a country not massively exposed to external threats. The July assassination attempt was presumably an indicator of how difficult it will be to maintain control of an unwilling military. Keeping the army onside while piloting a major reform of the security sector will be hard – and thus can only be pushed through by a strong governing coaliton. In the likely absence of such a coalition built through democratic means, the government will once again be forced to rely on patronage – and in current circumstances that may well mean a patronage linked to ethnicity.
Meanwhile the patronage machine is what kept previous governments from having tight budgets, and from providing reliable services to the Guinean people. So there is a real risk that if the president does fall back on patronage as a political tactic, it will undermine his ability to meet his own goals.
Key amongst those goals at the time of his election was national reconciliation, to heal the harms done over the past half-century, and especially those done by or on behalf of the state. But since Condé came to office he appears to have distanced himself progressively from the idea of a South African style Truth and Reconciliation Commission on which he campaigned. Perhaps this is to avoid upsetting the relationships he needs with those who were involved in previous regimes. Again, tactics seem to be undermining his ability to achieve the changes he had in mind when elected.
The point of this blog post is not to claim the inevitability of failure. Guineans currently have before them the best window of opportunity for progressive change in many a long year; and they must continue to try and seize it with both hands. Any government anywhere needs to row back on some of the promises it made to get elected. But a realist looking at Guinea surely cannot do so without noting the irony of a situation in which the new and apparently progressive president is so hampered in the implementation of reforms which he has longed for – during several decades in opposition, in prison and in exile – by the very system he wishes to improve. He seems compelled to use the very same levers of power which he was wont to denounce in previous times; and in so doing may end up contributing to a deepening of the pernicious and dangerous tendency to the ethnicisation of Guinea’s political economy. On this last point, the political risk is exacerbated even further by the danger that manipulation of ethnicity and the narrative of exclusion can so easily slip across international borders and destabilise neighbouring states.
I guess the conclusion of this over-long blog post is that changes will probably come more slowly in Guinea than some would like; that whoever is leading and promoting those changes has to do so within the political economy in which he came to office; and that Guineans should take care to avoid using ethnicity for tactical political reasons, lest it blow up in their faces.
Peace tomorrow, repression today?
A post by Madeleine Bunting on the Guardian’s PovertyMatters blog today explores the political fragility of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), with reference to a recent Human Rights Watch briefing. Bunting is right to draw attention to the risks linked to the coming elections in the DRC, and she shows very clearly how difficult it will be to build peace there until many of those who currently benefit most from and control the political economy are either removed from power, or can themselves see more peaceful ways to maintain their positions of power.
Bunting then moves on to discuss the difficult fact that two of the states most supported by the British government in East Africa, while making good progress in terms of health, education and livelihood outcomes, are also highly repressive: she refers to Rwanda and Ethiopia.
If the UK along with other donors is bankrolling and providing technical support to the regimes in Kigali and Addis Ababa, then it follows that the UK can claim some of the credit for their good development outcomes: better health, more educated children, higher household incomes, and so on. But if so, surely it also follows that it has to shoulder some of the responsibility for the harm which they do: for their human rights abuses.
It’s also logical that the UK and other donors to such regimes must be both aware of and – to some degree – accept the nature of governance there. A governance based largely on patronage and the one-party state. Surely in some respects this means that the UK taxpayer bears some share of responsibility for any resulting harm in Rwanda or Ethiopia?
To some, this is a clear case of bad donorship: they see it as out-and-out wrong for UK taxpayers to support regimes which are clearly undemocratic, and which also reputedly practise torture and in which opposition activists have died or disappeared in murky circumstances.
But as I have explored in other blog posts on this site, things are not so cut and dried. The difficulty for British aid officials and politicians is that we simply do not know the way Ethiopia and Rwanda – much less the DRC – will evolve over the coming years. We can, yes, look back at the UK’s own history, and try to figure out how it traversed that difficult terrain between feudalism and the democratic and accountable governance enjoyed by British people today, under which human rights are largely respected and the ruling regime operates within the rule of law. There are indeed many lessons there, and a fuller exploration can best be found in the wonderful book Violence and Social Orders by North, Wallis and Weingast. But that story shows us that human progress made under repressive regimes is an important step towards the kind of peaceful and prosperous future which we might wish for Rwandans and Ethiopians. So how do we know if Ethiopia and Rwanda are on “the right” path towards peace and prosperity, under their own repressive regimes, or if we are simply supporting and reinforcing an unacceptable status quo in which repression and patronage will continue to trump human rights and good governance?
While we cannot predict the future path these countries will take, that doesn’t mean we should pull the plug on our support; but nor does it mean we should simply close our eyes to the problem. Surely we need to have a more open discussion about these difficult aspects of providing aid to countries which we hope – but cannot guarantee – are moving in a democratic direction.
Bunting has done us a service with her statement that it is “worrying … how aid has been used extensively in both Ethiopia and Rwanda to develop repressive states”, because she raises this as a concern full of nuance, without a clear and easy resolution, and thus deserving of continued and broad debate in the institutions of the donor nations, in this case the UK: parliament, the media and civil society. It’s complicated, so we need to explore it in discussion and debate.
Those of us who support overseas aid are still by and large too scared to have this debate out in the open, for fear that the Daily Mail will seize on our nuanced questions and turn them into a crude but clear argument to “stop supporting African dictators”. But if activitists in places like Ethiopia and Rwanda are courageous enough to stand up against repressive regimes, surely we can find the courage and the wit to stand up to the Daily Mail?
Five dilemmas faced by peacebuilders
The international debate and discussion about peacebuilding has moved on tremendously since Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s 1992 speech in which he invigorated the debate and gave new coinage to the idea of international peacebuilding. Today there is a remarkable degree of consensus among those with an interest in the subject which can perhaps be very loosely summarised around a few key elements:
- Peace is not just the absence of violence, but also the presence of functional relationships within society, and between the people and a responsive and responsible state
- Institutions that mediate relationships within and between societies, and which enshrine and reinforce certain kinds of values and norms, are critical to maintaining peace
- Peace is not static: societies and states continue to evolve, as do the relations between societies and between states. Therefore the institutions need to be adequate both to deal with the resulting stresses, and to adapt themselves, to keep up with these changes
- Peacebuilding, development, statebuilding – these and other jargon words and phrases are all different facets or ways of describing what is essentially human progress, i.e. the evolution of how we as humans live together and try to fulfil our individual and collective aspirations without harming one another. Thus “development” can no longer be defined in purely technical or narrowly sectoral terms
- While the institutions which mediate inter-state and international relations are legitimately the domain of international agencies, the task and challenge of building peaceful states and societies within a specific polity is the domain of the people of that country. Outsiders can have a legitimate role, but whatever their desire, this is normally limited to a supporting role. Nevertheless, this does not mean they have no influence at all, so they must use it with all due care.
I was at a conference organised by the German development agency Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) today in Königstein near Frankfurt, where we discussed these issues. It was a wide-ranging and rich discussion, which for me highlighted five dilemmas that peacebuilders face.
- Reconciling our desire for fast progress, concrete results – success! – with what we know about the process of building peace, which is that it takes generations, is extremely non-linear, is incremental and subject to repeated setbacks and changes of direction outside anyone’s easy control. In this, we have to hold fast and avoid the temptation – and resist the impatient demands of donor agencies working on 5-year electoral cycles and the need to “show results” to satisfy aid sceptics – to pick strategies and interventions because they are measurable, rather than because they are the right things to do. As Andrew Natsios the ex-Administrator of USAID said in his 2007 Center for Global Development paper The Clash of the Counter-bureaucracy and Development, “ those development programs that are most easily and precisely measured are the least transformational, and those that are most transformational are the least measurable”.
- Avoid confusing the ends with the means. Development programming (or peacebuilding, call it what you will) is really an attempt to predict and influence the future; i.e. to influence the course of what will one day be looked at as history. So if we have the arrogance – literally, since we are arrogating to ourselves this role – to try and do this, we must at least learn lessons from actual history. Societies in which universal human rights are relatively widely respected today did not get here by focusing on universal human rights: instead their respect of universal human rights was an unintended consequence of earlier actions. So in the UK for example, it is a result among other things of the efforts of mediaeval barons to limit the powers of the king over them and their families and clients – not over the common people who made up 90% of society and who did as they were told. Similarly, historians tell us that the emergence of shareholder-owned companies was an indirect result of the rise of Protestantism in Western Europe. But nobody supporting Martin Luther in the 16th century did so with that distant outcome in mind. So those of us who wish to promote the broad ownership of capital within fragile societies as a force for peace and stability may need to focus our short-term efforts on what might be interim steps along the way (the means) rather than on the end itself, which might come later. Changes in fragile and conflict-affected societies will only happen if they are seen as being in the interests of the currently powerful, so tactically we need to identify on a case by case basis what such incremental changes might be, with an eye on the later changes they just might make possible, rather than pushing too quickly for outcomes still out of reach – for improved forms of governance, perhaps, which may be resisted and rejected.
- Making an omelette without breaking eggs. History also shows us that progress is often accompanied by – or emerges from – violence. Looking at my own country’s history (the UK), parliament emerged as a way to limit the power of the king to go to war; and the Bill of Rights emerged as a protection for the in-power elite after decades of unrest, coups and revolutions. I am obviously not suggesting that we use violence in support of change, as a tool of peacebuilding or development. But the liberal western-oriented institutions promoting development and peace around the world do need to develop a greater appetite for risk, and a greater tolerance for the instability and sometimes violence which accompanies change.
- Reconciling the need to promote jobs and wider participation in the economy to reinforce peace, with the orthodoxy of “sustainable development”. It is increasingly clear – and the influential 2011 World Development Report is very persuasive on this – that one of the keys to stability and development in post-conflict contexts is to ensure that as many people as possible, and especially young men, are decently employed or otherwise legitimately involved in some other way in the economy. “Idle hands do the devil’s work” seems trite, but it contains more than a kernel of truth. What this means in places like Afghanistan or Sierra Leone is the creation of hundreds of thousands – perhaps millions – of jobs in short order. But neither Afghanistan’s nor Sierra Leone’s economy is likely to be up to this sustainably in the timeframe we are talking about. Therein lies the dilemma: should international agencies go against their own avowed orthodoxy of sustainable economic development, and wait for the jobs to be created “sustainably” – likely to take decades and risk being prevented by a resurgence of violence by the devil’s idle hands – or invest over a long period of time – perhaps 25 years – in subsidising “unsustainable” jobs as tool for building peace?
- Finally, the big one: what do we do with all the development institutions which are no longer – according to the broadly agreed demands of peacebuilding and development agencies as summarised at the start of this article – fit for purpose? We all know that people working for international development and peacebuilding organisations (donors, multilaterals, NGOs – myself included…) are like hammers looking for nails: when we analyse a given context we are looking for reasons to justify our presence, and reasons to justify the kinds of things we tend to do. Whatever else we see, we will certainly find nails. But the consensus I referred to above is very different indeed from the previous consensus, which shaped most of the international organisations active today. Can they really change to suit this new purpose, or will most of them go through the motions of changing but actually stick pretty closely to the mission and approaches they have grown up with, and know how to do – “old wine in new bottles”, in Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart’s memorable phrase? It would only be human if they do the latter. Some big decisions will be needed by risk-taking politicians and organisations’ leaders if the international organisations are to embrace the mission implied by the 2011 WDR, and become much more political and less technical in their orientation, way of working and in the kinds of results they aim to achieve.
How donors take account of the World Development Report
In earlier blog posts I have referred to the challenges for international organisations including donors working in conflict affected contexts, and how well these were articulated in the 2011 World Development Report. It is good to see at least one donor taking this seriously: DFID included the following text as part of a recent procurement tender. A good step, and an example for others to follow, perhaps?
“Key lessons from 2011 World Development Report
- Donors need to be realistic about what their support to peacebuilding and governance can achieve.
- Change takes time. Creating legitimate institutions that can prevent repeated violence is a slow process which takes at least a generation.
- Asking fragile states to move forward too quickly, even with very desirable steps, risks creating pressures that collapse what little capability has been created.
- Reforms need to be carefully sequenced and carried out through systematic and gradual action.
- When trying to influence institutional transformation in complex conflict settings, perfection should not be the enemy of progress—pragmatic, “best-fit” approaches adapted to local conditions should be used to address immediate challenges.
- A focus on developing legitimate institutions does not mean converging on Western institutions.
- Governments and donors should keep an open mind on how institutions will develop, and be ready to respond flexibly to opportunities for reform as they arise.
- The absence of easily recognisable formal state institutions should not be equated with an absence of institutions altogether. Coexistence and interaction between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ institutions have been key in balancing internal and external demands for legitimacy [….] and represent significant progress in governance.Innovative approaches managing and assessing risk need to be adopted; which allow for flexibility, failure and amendments within a transparent reporting framework.
- Goals, number of priorities and timeframes need to be more realistic.
- Donors should adopt targeted approaches which focus on two or three rapid results to build confidence and on narrowly and realistically defined institution-building.
- A stronger focus needs to be placed on addressing external stresses (such as economic shocks and the infiltration of organised crime and trafficking networks)
- It is critical to support strong leadership – committed to security, justice and equity.
- It is critical to establish lines of accountability.”
Regime Change in Libya
So now the end of the Gaddafi regime seems more or less a fact, after several months of bombing by NATO forces, on behalf of the UN Security Council, to “protect civilians”.
I am happy to celebrate the end of his rule; though I remain anxious that what comes next may be difficult. National unity may be hard to achieve.
Questions remain however about the way this has been achieved, and only a fool would agree that NATO’s hundreds of sorties, supported by special forces on the ground, were genuinely flown to protect civilians. This was – and was early on declared by the most active NATO members – to be about regime change.
Does this make a mockery of the rule of international law, or is it simply a pragmatic way to use the international instruments available to achieve an outcome which offers an opportunity for Libyans to begin to construct a new polity?
I just spent a week in Juba, and was struck by two apparently opposing views of the future I heard from South Sudanese people. On the one hand, a fairly predictable pessimism – or perhaps it would be better described as realism. From this perspective, South Sudan faces a troubled near- and medium-term future, beset by problems with its neighbour to the north, and by a host of internal difficulties so vast, they seem beyond the capacity of a new nation to resolve. Meanwhile others expressed their view of the future in terms of what seemed at first to be cautious optimism, along the lines of “if the government gets it right over the next few months, we should be OK”.
This apparent dichotomy is reflected more broadly. At one extreme we find views such as that expressed by Dennis Blair, former head of US national intelligence, who told US Congress last year that among countries at risk of outbreaks of mass violence, “a new mass killing or genocide is most likely to occur in Southern Sudan”. While at the other extreme we find the delirious enthusiasm which greeted South Sudan’s independence last month, after decades of civil war and dashed expectations, and a feeling that it’s now full steam ahead for a brighter future; accompanied by a genuine sense of goodwill within the international community, and a desire to support the world’s newest nation in its first few years of independent existence.
The reality presumably lies somewhere in between. If one examines the “optimism” camp more carefully, it tends to be conditioned by qualifiers such as “if the government gets it right”, and “if Khartoum doesn’t interfere” – neither of which inspires massive optimism based on recent history. Indeed, President Kiir’s 8th August speech to the Legislative Assembly in Juba was sobering, setting out the need to build a new nation by putting the people’s well-being and needs first, through service delivery in education and health, infrastructure development, justice and the rule of law, peace and security, underpinned by a culture of transparency and honesty. He ended with the exhortation to “start work right away”.
President Kiir’s speech was interesting for the balance he sought between what one might call a technical, problem solving approach – providing services, building police posts, fixing the things which new countries need to fix, etc. – and the more inspirational idea of re-creating South Sudan in a new image, characterised by honesty, altruism and putting an end to corruption. I am not sure he got that balance quite right.
Development as a technical challenge
Looking at the challenge of building a prosperous and peaceful South Sudan – starting from a low baseline – I am reminded of the origins of the international agreement (or at least intention) by rich countries to spend 0.7% of their GDP on overseas aid. The source of this figure is clouded by various myths of origin, but one of the more credible is that it was calculated back in the 1960s, based on the need to invest in infrastructure in poor countries. The idea was that, once the infrastructure was in place, development would surely follow; and 0.7% of OECD annual income was approximately what was needed, over a decade or so, to meet this investment deficit in what was then known as the Third World, and bring poorer countries up to par.
It is tempting to apply this model now to South Sudan, which lacks even the most basic all-weather infrastructure of intra- and inter-city roads (it is often said there are less than 100km of paved road in the country), let alone the secondary and tertiary feeder roads needed for the reliable transport of inputs and produce in an agro-pastoral economy. Given the complexities of the political economy in South Sudan, a simplistic formula like this would surely be a welcome relief to government, civil society, businesses and international donors trying to chart a way forward.
Of course one would need to add the human dimension, and invest also in health and education services: clinics, schools, training, educational and health materials, and so on. Quite a challenge in the vast and under-served territory of South Sudan.
Problem solving
Meanwhile the new country’s leaders have some pressing problems to solve. Negotiations with Khartoum over their mutual border, over the cost of exporting southern oil through northern pipelines, over separating the two countries’ currencies, over sharing the national debt, and over the rights and responsibilities of and towards each other’s citizens, to name but a few. Fighting on both sides of the border appears to have been stimulated by secession, and the disputed territory of Abyei remains a potential flashpoint, whence thousands of people have been displaced by violence in recent months.
The police service needs a complete overhaul, and massive investment in training and new police posts. The army needs to be rationalised as a single force and brought under proper civilian control, and ghost soldiers removed from the payroll. New contracts need to be agreed with oil companies. Internal borders need to be clarified. A massive decentralisation process is foreseen – redefining the roles and competencies at different levels of government. Corruption needs to be stamped out…. And so the list goes on.
Setting out a more complex idea of progress
One can look at this long list of challenges and problems (the actual list is far, far longer), and see it as a set of technical accomplishments to be ticked off on a long checklist: perhaps starting with infrastructure and continuing from there. In so doing one can imagine the government and the international community – donors, United Nations agencies, etc. – planning a programme of fund transfers and technical “capacity building” until the list is exhausted. Overall, I’d say this is how President Kiir’s speech sounded: although he started with an exhortation to nation-building, and later made excursions into issues like values, his speech in the end seemed mainly to be about “getting things done”, and was laced through with words like delivery, deliverables, services, etc.
Such things are clearly critical, but they don’t fully describe the challenge facing the South Sudanese, any more than the challenges faced by poor countries in the 1960s could be met by the simple injection of 0.7% of rich country GDP to meet their “investment deficit”. Solving the problems which present themselves – the phenomena of fragility and poverty – is not the same thing as building peace and harnessing South Sudan’s and the South Sudanese people’s development potential. Based on some of the ideas I heard from South Sudanese in Juba last week, I had the impression that the challenge can partly be defined along the following kinds of lines.
Creating a vision and sense of nation. South Sudan has been defined in public discourse as much by what it is not – the Sudan from which it has now seceded – as what it is and can become. A great deal of leadership time and effort at all levels will be needed to create a shared long-term vision, towards which South Sudanese can aspire, and to which they can hold their leaders for making progress. There are many ways to do this, and the process is probably never-ending, but the comments I heard last week in Juba suggest that a great deal of dialogue and debate is needed, focused loosely on the question “what kind of nation do we want to build, and how to get there?”
An evolution in the culture of power. Many of the conflicts in the country are defined around access to political and economic power. The length of time President Kiir is taking over his cabinet reshuffle is a good indicator of how tricky a subject this is: exclusion from the halls of power may push some disaffected members of the elite back to the bush, and the threat or use of the gun. This has already happened.
But it is not just at national level that violence is intertwined with politics: young men in cattle-herding tribes traditionally raid cattle from neighbouring clans or tribes as a way of increasing their economic standing and power in the community. Ethnicity and identity, rather than policy differences, are major factors in determining political alliances locally, and at state and national level. South Sudan has in any case emerged from Sudan, and thus reflects the Sudanese culture of power, characterised by violence, patronage and exclusion, among other factors. As Ugandan Professor Mahmoud Mamdani asked recently “Will the South establish a new political order, or will it reproduce a version of the old political order, such as the old state we know as Sudan?” Perhaps this is what Salva Kiir had in mind when he exhorted members of the Legislative Assembly:
“Let us recreate ourselves, let us find new ways, new thinking and be ready to learn in order to adequately meet new challenges.”
And a nation which is born of violence – civil war with Khartoum, as well as between various southern factions over the years – has a culture of power which is bound up with notions of violence as a means of political expression.
Like it or not, culture expresses the values held in society. It is difficult to change, and there are no blueprints. Indeed, it is particularly difficult for those who have only or mainly known a culture of power tied to violence, to take the lead in changing it; what practical models do they have to draw on, especially locally where people have been less exposed to outside influences and have neither seen nor experienced other cultures of power? But difficult or not, it seems critical for South Sudanese leaders (at all levels, in government, in civil society, and in business) to focus on this issue from now on, and identify ways to begin promoting and instilling a culture of inclusive power, and more functional non-violent relationships between people and peoples.
These measures do not in themselves have to be deeply structural, or huge: many small steps can add up to a decent distance covered. There are many ways to increase the level of popular participation: e.g. when negotiating new contracts with oil companies, involving civil society and local representatives from the different groups in the oil areas, and paying attention to their concerns about pollution, jobs, revenue sharing and infrastructure development; or including opposition politicians in the reshuffled cabinet. There is a lively debate going on about the decentralisation of governance to be as close as possible to the grassroots, and the concept of subsidiarity seems highly relevant, i.e. that decisions should be taken at the lowest appropriate level. This offers the best opportunity for transparent and responsive governance.
Livelihoods. One of the great challenges is the need for decent livelihood opportunities across the country, so that as many South Sudanese as possible benefit sustainably from the peace dividend. This means figuring out – through participatory processes – what kind of economy will best promote peaceful development.
Currently the country is too highly dependent on oil, which accounts for 98% of government revenue, and other extractive sectors like gold mining also beckon. It is of course crucial to obtain government revenues, but an economy dominated by oil and mining supports a political economy which tends towards violence. It creates vast disparities in wealth, yet few jobs, thus fuels a sense of exclusion. It is vulnerable to corruption, skewing political choices towards the self-interest of the elite, ignoring the interests of the majority, and thus undermining moves towards democracy. Meanwhile there are many stories of large tracts of land being bought up by outside investors – perhaps unlawfully sold to them by those who have no right to do so – which risks alienating rural people from the land, and from both its livelihood and its cultural value.
In the short term, there is likely to be a rise in agricultural production provided there is enough stability, as an automatic peace dividend. Infrastructure projects can be designed to be as labour intensive as possible, as a way to create paid work for as many hand as possible. It’s also critical for infrastructure investments to be chosen with an eye on their contribution to peace: e.g. it is important to avoid giving the impression that certain geographic areas linked to particular individuals or groups are more favoured than others, so as to avoid entrenching exclusion or the perception thereof. Outside investors need to be required to take their time, so their plans can be subject to full, informed scrutiny by all those likely to be affected, and mitigation measures put in place where there is a risk of social or economic disruption. Contracts with oil and mining companies will need to be negotiated firmly, to ensure they pay adequate attention to their corporate responsibilities – and some existing contracts will need renegotiating.
Security and justice. In President Kiir’s speech he highlighted the need for improved security and justice. His focus was on improving the professionalism of police and security institutions, and on building police stations and prisons. He did not mention the plans – which are quite well developed – to work at a very local Payam level, to find ways to enhance the security of people in their communities.
In the discussions I had, people were keen to look beyond the formal justice and security services: recognising the importance of the “traditional” and less formal mechanisms on which South Sudanese often rely, while also aware that such mechanisms are often quite unfair, and can also entrench dysfunctional relationships between communities.
Last week there were relatively large scale armed clashes between Murle and Lou-Nuer, in which many people died, continuing a recent trend. The authorities and communities have to find ways to reduce the likelihood and intensity of these kinds of “tribal” conflicts, and prevent them from being manipulated and escalated by militia leaders; this is not just about forcible disarmament, since new weapons will easily become available to replace the ones taken away.
The window of opportunity, and how to seize rather than squander it
One way to see the situation in South Sudan is as a window of opportunity: new nation, enthusiastic people, plenty of international support and goodwill. It is of tremendous importance not only to seize this opportunity now, but also to define carefully and accurately what the opportunity actually represents, as this time will not come round again.
The lesson for me, from listening to discussions among South Sudanese in Juba last week, is that it seems essential to broaden the discourse – frame the opportunity – to include not just what I have called technical challenges and problem solving, but to embrace a genuine and honest vision of what a peaceful South Sudan might look and feel like in the future, and then start to map out the pathways towards that vision. There is no lack of ideas, but they need framing in a way which creates useful clues about what progress will look like, so that it can be measured not just by technical jobs done, and practical challenges met, but also by incremental movement towards that vision.
How to re-think international aid agencies to fit the findings of the 2011 World Development Report?
The 2011 WDR is a radical document. It’s well-packaged in the politics and jargon of international aid, and so just about palatable to those individuals who have invested their careers in a now-faded approach to development; to donor governments who have invested their billions in both the Washington Consensus and the post-Washington Consensus consensus; to borrowing governments who prefer their grants and low-interest loans linked to soft, technical conditions; and to the many organisations – NGOs, IGOs and private companies – which benefit from and have helped define the way aid has been dispersed over these past couple of decades.
Within this clever wrapping, the WDR has a hard, core message: that in countries experiencing or threatened by violence, where 1.5 billion people live, one of the main “development” challenges is how to foster the emergence of the right kinds of institutions; and among these the most important are those which mediate a functional relationship between a responsive state and responsible citizens.
The World Bank and other development agencies are now considering the implications of the WDR for the way they define and implement their role. This will be difficult, as it is always hard for institutions – especially large, well-established ones – to imagine a radically different role and thus genuinely to radically restructure themselves. Simply put, the question should not be “how can we adapt our existing institutions to the revised terms of reference implied by the WDR?”, but rather “what kind of institution would best be able to foster the emergence of institutions which reduce the fragility of fragile states and societies?” In other words, don’t take the institution you are sitting in as the starting point, as it will get in the way of clear thinking. Instead, take a zero-based approach.
This implies first of all an attempt to define, generically, what kind of tasks this new development assistance role implies. Here are just a few suggestions.
1. Defining the strategic approach
Thinking strategically on a continuous basis, and adapting accordingly, is as or more important than having a perfect strategic plan. Nevertheless, organisations need strategy documents for planning and reference, so it’s important to invest in the right kind of strategic analysis every few years. Some people are recommending that outside agencies – the WB, DFID and so on – conduct their strategic analysis entirely in concert with the host government of the aid-recipient country. This is a seductive idea, in keeping with the Paris Declaration, but – like so much connected with the Paris Declaration – it’s a mistake.
It woud be immensely difficult for the staff of – say – the World Bank to discuss issues of legitimacy and citizen-state relations completely truthfully with the representatives of relatively undemocratic regimes, whose own political survival often depends on untransparent and inequitable policies and practices; and even on a dysfunctional relationship with the populations they are meant to represent. Any joint analysis of such issues would therefore be conducted without complete honesty, would therefore be be based on half-expressed diagnoses, and would therefore recommend incomplete or just plain wrong approaches. This is one of the things which was wrong with the PRSP model, so let’s not make that mistake again.
So while the strategic analysis should obviously be based on wide-ranging conversations with different stakeholders, inlcuding the host governnment, local civil society, businesses, other internationals, etc., it nevertheless needs to be done by the international institution itself, so as to preserve the integrity of the analaysis. It also needs to be based on the right conceptual model. There is no perfect prescription for this, and a thousand methodological flowers should be allowed to blooom, but those conducting the analysis should aim to understand as well as possible:
- How does the political economy actually function, where is it positive for peaceful outcomes, where does it obstruct them, where are the potential opportunities for improvement, and how can those in positions of economic/political power be persuaded to allow or support changes?
- What institutions currently exist in society, what function do they/could they play?
- What is a realistic vision for transformation over the next 25 or more years, in tems of reducing fragility and fostering the emergence of institutions which ensure that people are safe and justly treated, and that they have a voice in decisions which affect them?
- Who are the likely leaders of such changes?
- What people or factors might stand in the way of progress, and can they be prevented from doing so?
- Finally: can we envisage any role for our (international) organisation, which would help enable the kinds of changes we have in mind? (The potential for a “no” answer to this question should be taken seriously).
2. Recognise the difference between humanitarian and development aid
Humanitarian aid is often just a synonym for emergency aid – like the support currently being provided to millions of people in the Horn of Africa in dire need. But it may be that a lot of so-called “development aid” is really just humanitarian aid dressed up in a more intellectual, less sentimental construct.
Take international support for capital investment and recurrent costs in the education or health services of states whose economies will take decades to reach the levels at which they could pay for such services themselves from tax revenues, and where the institutions of power are so flawed that the schools and clinics built and staffed with aid may quietly crumble away or be destroyed due to social violence. Is that really an example of development aid – i.e. supporting the establishment of an enabling environment for societal progress – or is it more like humanitarian aid – i.e. sending money and technologies to fill a gap in service provision? If the task is to help shape a society which is more likely to both want and be in a position to provide schools, clinics, and universal health care and education to its members, is the best way to achieve this to send them money and ideas about schooling and health care? Or should that more properly be described as fulfilling a numanitarian impulse along the lines that “it seems wrong for children to be denied the opportunity to go to school, so we fund school programmes in countries far away”…
It’s obviously a lot more complicated than that. But to me it does seem clear that the test for any “development” investment ought to be whether it is likely to contribute to a change in the likely outcome for society several years hence, and whether that change is likely to contribute to the emergence of effective institutions, and a reduction in fragility. Anything else is a humanitarian transfer of resources. I am not arguing against this kind of humanitarianism, simply for clarity of purpose. But it is also true that humanitarian investments should be undertaken with great care, lest they inadvertently make things worse.
An obvious example of the latter would be a programme which inadvertently reinforces inequalities in society – as for example happened in eastern Zaire where international programmes designed to improve livestock management benefited herders over farmers, hence skewed the terms of trade between cattle and land, and contributed to conflicts which have yet to be brought under control in a quintessentially fragile environment. It was particularly unfortunate that herding and farming were, as so often, linked to different ethnicities, so the livestock improvement programmes may inadvertently have fuelled inter-ethnic tensions.
3. Seek out and support change agents – wherever they may be found
Change comes largely from within society, and is often led by inspired and inspiring individuals, at local level or on a wider scale. It stands to reason therefore that international agencies looking for ways to support transformation need to find ways to identify such individuals and support them.
The support doesn’t only have to be in the form of funds: it might equally be in the form of solidarity, the provision of opportunities to broaden horizons and explore ideas with others, or may take other forms, depending on circumstances.
As to identifying leaders: that is clearly a task fraught with risk. We need to accept that, as in the old European fairy tale, we may have to kiss a lot of frogs before we catch our prince. Above all, it’s very labour-intensive: looking for and getting to know leaders and potential leaders, and isn’t something which many international civil servants spend much time doing, as of now.
4. Provide long-term economic subventions to provide decent job opportunities
One of the core findings of the WDR is the need, in fragile and conflict affected contexts, for jobs. Young people, especially young men, are vulnerable to being recruited to violence by political leaders, in inverse proportion to their access to decent economic opportunities. Meanwhile, societies which exclude young women from decent economic opportunities are holding themselves back in terms of their ability to harness the potential for progress. Ergo, an economy in which jobs and other economic opportunities are in short supply is one which remains vulnerable to instability…
… Ergo, one might think, donors and other international agences would invest large amounts in job creation in conflict-affected contexts. But they don’t, at least not on the scale which one might expect. Take Sierra Leone, for example: it’s commonly accepted that one of the main factors underlying the civil war was the lack of opportunities for young men. Indeed, post-war elections have been marked by the mobilisation of violent youth militants representing both the main parties. The analysis of the UN, World Bank and other donors – and the government itself – all make a big issue of the need for jobs. But none of these agencies appear to have plans to invest in a way which will create the tens of thousands of jobs which are needed to build peace in Sierra Leone. Instead the international agences fall back on the mantra of “sustainable economic growth”, and the main investment focus is on mining and oil, neither of which are likely to create large numbers of jobs per GDP percentage point of growth – and which are associated in other contexts with instability.
Surely the problem here is that the agencies are failing to develop a strategy to match their own analysis. Rather than support peacebuilding, by subsidising job creation on a massive scale – e.g. through large scale, labour-intensive public works – they prefer to stick to the economic development orthodoxy that says it is wrong to distort the economy by creating jobs with external transfers. But it will take years, decades, for a country like Sierra Leone to create sufficient jobs in its own economy to absorb enough of its young people to reduce its vulnerability to destabilisation. Surely the orthodoxy is standing in the way of what the agencies’ own analysis tells them is needed? Which is worse: artificially subsidising jobs which thus reduce the risk of violence, but which may have unintended consequences for endogenous economic growth; or taking the longer-term, orthodox approach, stimulating FDI and local entreprenership – but enhancing the risk of more cycles of violence?
So one of the most important questions facing large international development agencies, post-WDR, is how to fast-track the creation of jobs and other economic opportunities in a careful way, so that the short-term gain of getting young people active in the economy – laying the foundations for peace – is not achieved at the expense of laying the foundations for healthy economic development which will in time, perhaps 15 years or more, replace the international transfers.
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These are only a few of the things which international agencies need to consider in their programmes in fragile and conflict-prone contexts. What they imply is that the agencies – the World Bank, DFID, the EU, and so on – need to have a capacity for disinterested strategic analyis and planning, within a clear conceptual framework of how societies changes over the medium term; for the identification and support of change agents; and for implementing and supporting very different kinds of programmes, designed to fit the local context, and which at times seem to go against the orthodoxy of both the Washington Consensus and the post-Washington consensus. That’s quite a challenge.
Land grabs in Africa are much in the news. For example we read in a recent Oakland Institute report that up to 60 million hectares (an area the size of France) were bought or leased in Africa by outside investors in 2009 alone. It’s widely reported as an iniquitous state of affairs and so it is, when African governments take advantage of low levels of transparency and citizen accountability to sell or lease off large parcels of land at prices and terms and conditions which disadvantage their nation and their people, and especially people local to the land in question. In that sense it has much in common, as a phenomenon, with the way some mining and oil companies have long dealt with African governments, and vice versa.
This seems completely wrong. But, taking a closer and dispassionate look, are there at least two possible silver linings to this cloud?
First, this kind of behaviour by governments and international agribusiness creates just the kind of situation around which civil society activists in Africa can mobilise, and demand a higher level of transparency and accountability of their leaders. Because it touches on land – something dear to the heart of many people at a very cultural level – it is an issue around which it’s possible to mobilise a wide constituency of opinion, including influential civil society in capital cities, as well as in rural communities more closely affected. Governance improvements emerge, it seems to me, when citizens pull together in support of a real common interest, rather than when they get together to “improve governance” for its own sake in the abstract.
Second, and no doubt more controversially, perhaps this is just the kind of opportunity through which the rural sector of some poor African economies can begin to be modernised, making agriculture more efficient. This might in its turn mean that more people would move to the cities, which would certainly create new social and political challenges. But there are also far greater opportunities in cities than in the countryside for women and men, young and old, to engage in civil society in pursuit of their interests. In this way, a secondary impact of the change could be a reinforcement of the kind of citizen-state relationship which is needed for governance to improve, and which is often so lacking in rural parts of the continent.
It’s dangerous to generalise, and I don’t mean to claim that land grabs are an inherently good thing. But nor would I want to be the one trying to make the argument that peasant agriculture in marginal parts of Africa is a sustainable basis for a growing economy. Something has to give.
Phil Vernon 