Four measures of success at Busan
This is slightly adapted from a piece co-written with Dan Smith and with inputs from other colleagues at International Alert, and represents not just my views but those of Alert, which has advocated for more effective aid in conflict-affected and fragile environments for many years. A version of this piece is also published on OpenDemocracy.
The Fourth High Level Forum on Aid takes place at Busan in South Korea, 29th November – 1st December. Two thousand representatives of governments, the UN, the World Bank, and other multi-lateral organisations and NGOs will meet to debate how aid can be delivered more effectively. Previous meetings in the series were in Rome (2003), Paris (2005) and Accra (2008). Such meetings produce worthy outcome documents full of technical language and compromise, which are often hard to pick through and get at what was really discussed and agreed. But ultimately we will know if the Busan meeting is a success if participants:
-
Recognise how little is really known about how aid can promote and foster the emergence of better governed societies in fragile contexts
-
Disagree on the best way forward, and thus retain the good ideas around which there is no consensus, instead of marginalising creativity in the search for what everyone can agree on
-
Decide to stop holding forums on aid effectiveness, and instead begin a discussion about what effective development – human progress – looks like; and link this to the process of replacing the Millennium Development Goals with more appropriate measures of progress, and with the need for governments and others to change their behaviours outside the narrow realm of aid
-
Commit to operationalising some of the exciting new ideas in development, such as building more peaceful and better governed societies, if necessary by changing the architecture and mandate of aid and development institutions.
New thinking about aid and development in conflict-affected countries
The background to this is that no conflict affected country has yet achieved a single Millennium Development Goal (MDG). This failure has stimulated much reflection over the past few years, for example:
- The World Development Report 2011 outlined a new paradigm for development assistance in conflict-affected countries – where a total of 1.5 billion people live
- An increasing recognition that development is about more than economic growth, health and education; it is also about how people are governed, the relationship between people and state, access to justice, and whether people are kept safe from danger
- A renewed focus on the need to show concrete results will help citizens in donor and recipient countries to hold their governments more accountable for aid effectiveness
- Some aid is being used in creative ways, in line with the new thinking.
Meanwhile emerging economies like China, Brazil and India are providing increasing slices of the aid pie, sometimes using different approaches that are not part of the aid orthodoxy.
The way ahead is unclear: we’ve learned enough to know how little we know
As our understanding of the complexity of development has grown, so we have better grasped the difficulty of programming aid effectively. The very purpose of aid has changed, to embrace the unfamiliar language of statebuilding and peacebuilding. It has become far more ambitious, and rightly so. Twenty years ago an aid programme might have built schools and trained teachers. Ten years ago, it might have strengthened the capacity of the government to plan, provide and oversee education, including a grant for school building, operating costs and teacher training, while increasing tax revenue to pay recurrent costs. Now some donors want to foster better relations between the state and the people, increasing the sense of responsibility, responsiveness and citizenship. This implies change in some of the institutions at the heart of governance and society. No small thing.
Peacebuilding organisations like International Alert have been arguing for these kinds of changes for ten years or more. Progress has been made, but many challenges remain, among them:
- Building responsive and responsible citizen-state relations is key to peace and prosperity, but little is known about how to do so at a speed and scale commensurate with people’s expectations; how to get the balance between democratic progress and stability right?
- The lack of decent work for young people is often a major threat to stability. Aid orthodoxy says the private sector should create jobs. But it will not do so at the scale and speed, nor with the dependability and stability needed in countries emerging from civil war (e.g. Sierra Leone), or from years of repression (Burma or Guinea), when people’s expectations are raised. Should we ignore the aid orthodoxy, and consider externally funded 30-year public works programmes, to provide employment, inject cash into the economy and provide breathing space?
- Climate change brings new challenges – of pressure on resources such as land and water, of the collision between growth and green priorities, and of adaptation – together with huge additional aid budgets. These are largely being managed separately from other aid, bringing a risk of increased incoherence, which can be a destabilising factor in fragile contexts.
- The practice of aid organisations in fragile contexts has not kept pace with the learning, and the new purpose of aid. Without urgent change, they risk being unfit for purpose.
- Getting the right metrics for assessing progress towards stability and peace in fragile contexts is a task that is far from complete. It cannot be done with the same metrics that suffice for health or education and it is increasingly tiresome that agencies seem pulled towards inappropriate indicators by the results agenda. Rigorous qualitative indicators and a time-frame appropriate to the task are key components.
- The behaviour of governments continues to hinder development. The foreign policy of some donors undermines their own aid goals, while some recipient governments use aid to strengthen their hold on power, undermining democratic accountability and holding back development.
Busan, the first step on a new road
The wording of the Busan Outcomes Document is largely agreed, and reflects much of the new thinking on aid: statebuilding and peacebuilding; human security; transparency and results. But it fails to reflect the challenge, scale and complexity of promoting and supporting development in conflict-affected countries in a changing world. Busan should be seen as the final High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, and the beginning of a new debate and discourse. A successful Forum will be recognisable by evidence of four critical factors in the speeches made and the documents emanating from Busan:
1. Recogniton of fundamental change, coupled with uncertainty about the way forward. A recognition that the framing of aid and development has fundamentally changed. It has become more complex and more political. We need new tools and methods to achieve and measure success. Good work has been done, but we don’t yet have the tools with which to meet expectations. Politicians, NGOs and opinion leaders like Bono and Bill Gates are uncomfortable with uncertainty, but they need to accept it now, otherwise they will continue to make the wrong choices. Participants at a successful HLF4 will define this challenge and set out a process for meeting it.
2. A balanced combination of agreement and disagreement. Beneath the technical language of aid, development is a highly political, ideological and contentious idea: it speaks to different theories of progress and change. International forums about aid in the past have glossed over this, focusing instead on agreements about process. That way consensus is achieved – but only a shallow and artificial one that often leaves aid practitioners in difficult positions, trapped by official niceties into policies they know are flawed, targets they know are unreal and actions they know are ineffective. Participants at a successful HLF4 will recognise that their different interests and perspectives lead to quite different views about how development happens, and how aid can be applied to promote it. This will allow the issue to be debated more openly as the international community begins defining the set of measures which will replace the MDGs after 2015.
Nevertheless, international agencies, governments and civil society do need to collaborate much more effectively, based on the comparative advantages of each. Thus participants at a successful HLF4 will agree to promote and mandate a more selective but deeper collaboration among agencies at national level.
3. Development, not aid. Aid is important, and the way it is planned and used matters. But the time for meetings about aid effectiveness is over; future meetings and processes should instead be about development strategies. They should debate what constitutes development, identify the policies and behaviours of governments, businesses, NGOs, IGOs and citizens which are most likely to promote progress, and how they can be encouraged and supported. Participants at a successful HLF4 will agree that future international forums should be defined in terms of promoting effective development progress, not just best practice in aid.
4. Operationalization. Getting global agreement on critical issues is hard, and results in a watering-down of commitments. So it is critical to recognise that some of the most important progress over the next few years will be made at the level of specific organisations, projects, countries, etc. This implies a need for individual countries and organisations to push through the operationalization of some of the new development thinking associated with the World Development Report 2011 and the International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and State-building. Participants at a successful HLF4 will agree to prioritise the operationalization of new approaches to promoting development in conflict affected countries, and to share the results of these.
NB In a later blog written after Busan, I have used these four criteria to score the success of the Busan meeting.
Civil war in Europe?
In the 19th century a continental union was torn apart by the tension between running two incompatible economies within a single monetary zone: the industrialising north versus the slave-plantation south. This unresolved tension led to the American civil war, perhaps the worst war in history until that time. Even no less a sage that Bob Dylan says in his book Chronicles that “it was one big battle between two economic systems, that’s what it was.” Later he notes that it was also a war between two cultures: the north where you had to be on time and live by the clock, and the south “where you lived by sun up, high noon, sunset, spring, summer”. (Bob Dylan, Chronicles Vol 1, 2004, Simon and Schuster UK Ltd.)
Could the same happen again, this time in Europe? On the one hand, I doubt it: war in Europe seems unthinkable now outside the Balkans; and hopefully not even there. But on the other hand, why not? If the current eurozone crisis goes the way the pessimists say it might, the people of southern europe will face economic ruin and devastation. What will their governments have to offer them, apart from military revenge against the economies of northern Europe who have ruined them, in populist rhetoric? Meanwhile, northern European leaders will explain to their people how their economies have been undermined by the profligate and ill-discplined south.
There is more at stake than we perhaps realise, in this “eurozone crisis”. It is not just about the banks and jobs; and it can’t be contained within national borders. The public institutions of the EU and of European civil society are our buffers against a political and human crisis which could, in the extreme case, lead to violent conflict within the EU zone.
Democratic Greece: lessons for African countries receiving aid?
Ancient Greece is the cradle of democracy, so how ironic that the democratically elected government of modern Greece should call a referendum on its latest bail-out agreement with the Eurozone leaders. Ironic, because referendums are anti-democratic in the way they allow politicians to shirk the difficult responsibilities for which they are elected, and particularly to allow the majority to tyrannize minorities – thus shirking one of the most important aspects of parliament, which is to ensure that the executive governs on behalf of all. Eighteenth century British MP Edmund Burke’s famous reminder to his Bristol constituents not to expect him to represent their narrow perspectives is a good illustration of how MPs should see their role: he reminded them they had elected him to exercise his voice and his vote in the interests of the country as a whole, not just them.
In the UK today, referendums would almost certainly lead to a large reduction in the country’s overseas aid programme; to the restoration of the death penalty; a reduction in the rights of asylum seekers; and the exclusion of many people in need from welfare and the support currently provided to disabled and other minorities. Yet these are all issues on which UK MPs have resisted the majority view and taken decisions which reflect a broader perspective and their responsibilities to higher values.
And yet, in the case of Greece, perhaps this is the right time to ask the people what they think, because in some ways the bail-out package represents a change in sovereignty, a constitutional change. Under the terms of the bail-out, the Greeks’ government – their elected ministers and their civil servants – will come under the supervision of bureaucrats from abroad, who represent the interests of taxpayers in 16 other countries and a bunch of foreign banks – not Greece. We may flippantly describe these people as “bureaucrats from Brussels”, but think about it: for the Greeks they represent German interests above all. When was the last time Greece was supervised by Germany?…
So Papandreou is calling this referendum not just as an alternative to a general election which he wants to avoid. It is to ask Greeks if they are willing not only to accept a restructuring package which will cost them dear over the coming 20 years, but also whether they accept the undermining of their democratic political process by the dictation of fiscal and other policies from abroad, and by the placement of viceroys to oversee their performance – as though sent from the capital of an imperial power. In those terms, seen from here, the referendum seems well justified, even if inconvenient: and after all, isn’t one of the whole points of democracy that it’s supposed to make governing just a wee bit inconvenient?
A second irony is that Angela Merkel feels justified in criticising Papandreou for doing what he feels he needs to do – the referendum – in order to stay in office and implement the restructuring he has been forced to agree to; even while she accepts that she has been bound by the terms of her relationship with the German parliament to string out the Greek bail-out negotiations for six months, rather than bring them to a conclusion back in the summer when the technical solutions and plans were already quite clear. Surely therefore she should accept that Greece needs to do its own politics before moving ahead with the plan?
Greece: a member of the EU and thus a relatively wealthy country, as viewed from Africa. But are there perhaps some lessons in this story for African governments and civil society. This is effectively a story of aid – of taxpayers from other Eurozone countries pledging and spending vast sums of money on and in Greece. The self-interest of the donors in this case is easier to see than in more classic models of overseas aid, but the basic idea is the same: use our money to help them.
Nevertheless the idea of bureaucrats from donor countries overseeing the decisions and practices of ministers and civil servants in recipient countries is very familiar indeed to Africans. I recall a few years ago being told by a British person working in the Ministry of Finance in Kampala that he was one of 26 outsiders who had been placed in the ministry to keep an eye on things. Such practices are a regular source of anger, frustration and shame in Africa – and are an essentially anti-democratic measure in countries whose citizens are trying very hard to nudge their rulers into being more democratically accountable to them, rather than to representatives of Brussels, London, Washington, etc. If the government in Uganda is being held accountable by representatives of the UK and the EU, what role is the Ugandan parliament playing on behalf of ordinary Ugandans? And, as some Greeks perhaps view Germany with mixed emotions, a mere 65 years after the Second World War, perhaps Kenyans and Ugandans view their donor the UK, and Malians France, a mere 50 years since their independence…
So perhaps there are some lessons from Greece for MPs and civil society in places like Uganda, Kenya and Mali: use occasional referenda to ask the population whether they accept an aid programme tied to outside meddling. Or at least, make the issue part of their election campaigning and political discourse. Perhaps the referendum result – “yes” to the money, and a begrudging “well I guess we have to” with regards the international oversight – is fairly easy to predict. But the campaigning and the individual and group reflections that the referendum would stimulate would surely be a step for democracy, and might go some way to offset the anti-democratic effects of receiving large sums of aid from elsewhere.
As the crow flies: mapping the power of DFID at home
According to rumours, the UK’s Department for International Development is planning to move from its current office next to Buckingham Palace to the Old Admiralty Building, off Whitehall. This is of course highly symbolic – one of the government’s tools of altruism and soft power, moving into the old headquarters of the Senior Service, ultimate tool of empire and Britain’s military reach for more than two hundred years; even while DFID’s budget is increasing and that of the Ministry of Defence is being cut. But it is important for more practical reasons, too.
The approximate distances in kilometres between the current and proposed new offices of DFID and other departments of state and government buildings are as follows:
| Distance from current DFID office | Distance from proposed new office | |
| Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) |
1.5 |
0.7 |
| Department of Business, Innovation & Skills (BIS) |
1.2 |
0.9 |
| Ministry of Defence (MoD) |
1.7 |
0.4 |
| Department of Energy & Climate Change (DECC) |
1.7 |
0.4 |
| The Prime Minister’s office (10 Downing Street) |
1.9 |
0.6 |
| Parliament |
1.3 |
0.9 |
|
Average (km) |
1.6 |
0.7 |
True, DFID is closer to Buckingham Palace (where the Queen sometimes lives) than are the others, but in 2011 this is not a sign of its closeness to the centre of power. Meanwhile, the other departments of state listed above are all clustered in or very close to Whitehall – the centre of executive government – and Parliament.
DFID has often been seen, by its staff and its supporters and collaborators in civil society, as outside or on the edge of government. And some have welcomed that. The 1997 White Paper which was DFID’s founding document included language about how helping poor people abroad was somehow in the UK’s self-interest. But it wasn’t at all convincing, and you felt that then Secretary of State for DFID Clare Short and her staff didn’t really see that as important: what mattered was getting on with the higher mission and task of helping those who needed help. Under Short and successive ministers DFID’s aid programme has gone from strength from strength, quadrupling in size from £2 bn in 1997 to about £8 bn today. Famously, DFID is one of only two ministries whose budgets have survived the cuts instituted under the current government, which has committed to increasing the aid budget by more than 20% over the next two years.
Prior to the 2010 general election, when people expected the Labour government to lose, it was common to hear staff of UK overseas development NGOs expressing their fear that an incoming Conservative government would place less value on aid, and would make it subordinate to other national interests. It was common to hear people say we needed to “protect aid from foreign policy objectives”. At the time I felt this was the wrong approach, and that we should stop seeing overseas aid as separate from foreign policy, but rather an intrinsic and integral part of it. If there are tensions between our aid programme and other aspects of the UK’s interests abroad, we should manage and where possible resolve them – that is after all the whole point of cabinet government.
Good news therefore if DFID is moving to the Old Admiralty building next year, which puts it within a 5 minute walk of all the departments mentioned above, except the BIS which remains just under a kilometre away. UK overseas aid will remain an important feature of the international institutional landscape, as poor people’s lives continue to be disrupted by natural and man-made disasters, and as they try to build more prosperous lives and better approaches to governance. It’s important that everyone in government and outside sees DFID as a critical part of government, not some do-gooding add-on department, of limited relevance to the core issues of the next decade. This is particularly important given the hostility felt by most taxpayers towards the government’s commitment to increasing the aid budget at a time of economic difficulty. Thus being closer to No. 10 Downing Street – to which the Old Admiralty is presumably connected by an underground tunnel – is of great importance.
The rivalry between DFID and the FCO seems to have been much diminished of late. Some at the FCO harboured a feeling of resentment after their overseas aid function was removed with the creation of DFID in 1997; the progressive marginalisation of the FCO in UK foreign policy (e.g. over Iraq) did little to remove this feeling, especially as DFID’s budget continued inexorably to rise. A huge amount of time and energy has been expended over the years by civil servants from the two departments in trying to “coordinate” their efforts, and this is beginning to pay off, especially as the FCO feels like it is being taken more seriously under the current government, than before. Being closer physically to one another will make this that much easier, for example in collaborating on UK policy towards specific locations like post-civil war Libya, or on global issues like the UK’s engagement in and support for UN agencies.
And this is equally true of DFID’s need to work closely with other departments. There are countless examples: e.g. its shared interest with the BIS on improving the transparency of oil and mining companies and host governments in poor countries; its need to work with the MoD on Afghanistan; and its need to collaborate with the DECC on the development of financing mechanisms to support adaptation of poor communities in the face of climate change.
Meanwhile of course it is essential that DFID and Parliament are walking step-in-step, so that taxpayers’ representatives and ministers/civil servants can keep one another well-informed. The UK’s overseas development programme is justly viewed by many as one of the world’s best. It has been the subject of great changes over the past 15 years. It is now faced by the need to make other important changes in an era of increased transparency, more competition for resources, a greater focus on concrete results, on the need to find new mechanisms to assist conflict-affected and “fragile” countries, and within a changing international institutional landscape. This will be hard, and therefore all the more reason for DFID’s London office to be as close as possible to the place where important decisions of state are made and monitored.
DFID and the risk of corruption
The UK parliament’s Public Accounts Committee has warned that the amount of UK aid funding at risk of corruption will increase, as it targets more fragile and conflict-affected countries while increasing aid spend over the next two years. In response, the Department for International Development (DFID) reported it has a zero tolerance approach to corruption, and that only £1,156,000 (or 0.016% of spending) was lost to corruption in the 2010-11 fiscal year.
This unbelievably low figure, along with the statement about a zero-tolerance approach to corruption, are illustrative of a problem inherent when democracies provide aid to governments and other institutions in fragile or conflict-affected countries. On the one hand, you have transparently accountable donor governments trying to do the right thing. This entails – among others – transferring large amounts of funding, sometimes tens of millions of pounds per year, to the relatively untransparent and less accountable institutions of poor countries, as part of an attempt to strengthen their capacity and to provide much-needed services to their citizens. At its best, this approach allows DFID simultaneously to provide health and education services to millions of people at relatively low cost; to help governments build their technical, planning and service delivery capacity; to ensure a high degree of local ownership of aid programmes; and to strengthen the hand of citizens in those countries by building in accountability mechanisms – complaints and ombudsman systems, local management committees, the involvement of MPs and local councillors, parent-teacher associations, patient feedback mechanisms, etc. – into the service delivery models it supports.
On the other hand however, even when mechanisms for citizen involvement are built into DFID’s aid programme design, it is frankly inevitable that large percentages of aid money go astray (much more than the 0.016% figure). If you ask a citizen of Uganda, Kenya, Zambia, Ghana or India (by no means all seen universally as “conflict-affected countries”) whether her government funds are safe from theft and misuse by civil servants and politicians, you’ll get a resounding “no” in response. She knows what she is talking about, because she deals with them regularly. When DFID’s funds are handed over to such governments in support of public service delivery programmes, it is not merely a “high risk” that some will be misused or stolen: it is a virtual certainty. Only the amount will differ from one location to another, and from one programme to another. Funds go missing in several ways, but it is not all about personal theft. It is very often quite systematised. When civil servants steal money they are frequently required to share a significant proportion with their bosses, some of which may go to the ruling political party’s election fund; other times the money is used to buy political support within a patron-client system. And of course some stolen money also goes to pay the school fees and medical costs of underpaid public sector staff… It is impossible for donors to prevent this by placing their accountants in the system – that has been tried, and has failed.
The point is, that if DFID is to sustain such a high annual budget, and is to continue targeting progressive changes in fragile and conflict-affected countries, it really has no choice but to fund their governments directly. (Unless it provides funds to multilateral organisations and trust funds, which ultimately do the same). There are no other institutions in such countries with the capacity to spend and report on such high sums of money. And it makes little sense to create parallel service delivery systems for services which governments typically and traditionally are meant to provide. But when funding these governments it is certain (not just a risk) that some of the money will go missing.
The problem is, a very superficial story about aid and development has been told to parliament and civil society in the supposedly accountable and transparent UK over the years – by NGOs, campaigners and governments alike. This narrative has glossed over the truth about corruption – pretending it is an exception, rather than a rule, and seeing it as an anomaly, rather than a central feature of the way governance actually works in fragile contexts.
The current government is thus in a very difficult position: it has quite rightly decided to maintain a large and UK strong aid programme. And it has also quite rightly decided to focus most of this on the most difficult, fragile and conflict-affected places. But these are the very places whose governance systems are the most marked by a lack of transparency, and whose leaders are held accountable not for equitable service delivery but for keeping their own factions in power and their friends and supporters in funds and business opportunities. Ergo, the most likely places where UK taxpayers’ contributions will be used for something other than what was intended.
So, does the UK government come clean and ditch the idea that it has a zero-tolerance approach to corruption? Does it start to create a new compact with its taxpayers about the risk of theft and about whether this risk is acceptable as a price of building local capacity for transparent, accountable and delivery of critically needed services? Or does it continue to bury its head in the sand as successive governments have done for years? The risk of maintaining the latter course may be becoming much higher than the more obvious risk that, in coming clean, it will create unmanageable headlines in the Daily Mail, and turn even the Westminster and London elite against aid.
I strongly believe that the UK should continue to be a generous aid provider, and should do so in ever more intelligent ways. But I fear our ability to do this is being undermined by the half-truths which those of us involved in aid tell ourselves and others about how things actually work. The PAC’s questions and conclusions about DFID and corruption are therefore an opportunity to be seized, not ducked. As Margaret Hodge MP, Chair of the PAC said, the inability to understand mismanagement and fraud risks undermining DFID’s ability to fulfil its larger mission. It really is time to come clean about how things work in fragile and conflict-affected countries, and conversations in parliament and in our media would not be a bad place to begin.
What this also means of course, is that the likes of DFID and the multilateral organisations through whom it channels about 30% of its aid money need to become more adept at understanding and working within the corrupt systems they support, to promote not just better service delivery but also a more transparent and at times fractious relationship between recipient governments and the citizens whose interests they are supposed to represent. And thus a more transparent and less corrupt governance. This is the kind of thing for which UK parliamentarians should be holding DFID to account, on behalf of the citizens they represent.
Liberia: Unity in Diversity?
There’s a narrative in Liberia in which the erstwhile easy co-existence of different ethnic groups, including the “Americo-Liberian” settlers (ex-slaves and others from the US), Mandingo “settlers” from elsewhere in the region, and a number of “indigenous” tribes was manipulated by unscrupulous leaders during the civil war years. As a result, the country became mistrustful and divided, and remains so.
The part of this narrative I don’t buy is the idea that things were all sweetness and light before they fell apart. When Samuel K. Doe seized power in 1980, executed the previous government and launched more than two decades of disorder, he was surely acting somehow on behalf of an “indigenous” population which felt – and was – structurally disenfranchised within the political economy.
After all, the previous government (whom he displaced and many of whose members he killed) had itself recognised this and was beginning to try and redress the balance by extending education and leadership opportunities outside the ruling elite. The very symbol of the Liberian state – a ship riding at anchor with the motto The Love of Liberty Brought us Here – seems to represent only the Americo-Liberians and to exclude the descendants of those they found living in the land they colonised.
But there is no doubt that Doe’s action initiated or reinforced a period of ethnically based manipulation. Doe himself is widely seen to have engineered his own downfall (he was assassinated in his turn) partly by favouring his own Krahn ethnic group along with Mandingos. And so the Liberian civil war initially became a war defined and fought to a large degree on the basis of ethnicity and identity. When it was finally brought to a close in 2003, it was hardly surprising that many Liberians had learned to trust their own identity group more than others. Nor is it surprising that many – seeing the national institutions of Liberia collapse around them – sought solace and community in the institutions and identity of their ethnicity. And nor – given the later stages of the war when it was hard to trust anybody, is it surprising that there remains a generalised lack of mutual confidence within society.
Either way – whether you take a Hobbesian or a fallen-from-grace view of recent Liberian history – there’s no doubt that one of the big post-war challenges from 2003 was the need to recreate a sense of national identity and rebuild trust, confidence and solidarity among Liberians. Between Liberians such as “indigenous” Mano and Gio, and Mandingo “settlers” in Nimba County, whose disputes over land remain a thorny issue to this day; or between the indigenous tribes in the interior and the Americo-Liberians from the coast whose forefathers had unilaterally sold land belonging to the former to international rubber plantation companies.
The mistrust and enmity resulting from history was put somewhat to one side during the elections of 2005, as an artefact of the immediate post-war moment. Most people still felt too acutely the pain of the just-ended war. They voted for a measure of stability and, when Ellen Johnson Sirleaf won with 59% of the vote, even those who had voted against her accepted the result as an opportunity for a bit of peace and quiet. (Losing candidate George Weah – who had led in the first round – dropped his allegations of electoral fraud, in the interests of peace). The government’s subsequent exhortation to Unity in Diversity was a clear call to “think Liberia”, even while acknowledging local or ethnic identity.
It is perhaps a testament to the progress made since then, that people seem to have lost the inhibitions which subdued them in 2005. The electoral map and electoral tactics seem to be drawn very much with ethnic identity in mind. George Weah – member of the Kru group – has cleverly presented himself as the vice presidential candidate running with Winston Tubman, nephew of a previous president and of Americo-Liberian origin. Thus they can attract at least two sets of voters. Prince Johnson, an ex-warlord turned born-again Christian, has polled enough votes in the first round mainly from his Nimba people, to be seen as the kingmaker in the run-off.
This is not to say that ethnic identity is the only factor in the election; nor to deny the sophistication of many voters. But is an enormous factor nonetheless. Just as warlords and war leaders especially during the early years of the civil war manipulated people’s identify for warlike purposes, so their peacetime equivalents – political party leaders – are doing the same for political purposes. Highly understandable – what politician would not use the levers and tools available to gain or maintain power? – but also worrying. Because despite the rhetoric of Unity in Diversity, the practice is actually deepening divisions between peoples.
I have not examined them myself, but I have it on good advice from Liberians during a visit to Monrovia over the past few days, that the election manifestos of all 16 political parties are more or less carbon copies of each other. Perhaps that’s an indication of the dearth of fiscal and other political choices available to the next government of this poor country which is so dependent on the interests of international donors, mining and oil companies. But the phenomenon I have described above provides an important clue to one of the priorities the incoming government should adopt.
Whoever leads the government coming to office after the election must surely focus on the need to stimulate, promote and strengthen trust between and among Liberians. This means creating some kind of national framework for reconciliation along the lines suggested by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which reported a couple of years back. It also means stimulating local trust building and reconciliation measures while resolving local conflicts e.g. over land. The envisaged decentralisation of power promises improved local governance, which should provide an important opportunity to situate decision-making closer to the people, while avoiding doing so along predominantly ethnic lines. There is also a plan to undertake a Vision 2030 process, involving Liberians in imagining the country they would like to live in two decades from now. That too, is an opportunity to put reconciliation and trust at the heart of national policy. Unity in diversity, yes, but diversity does not just mean tribe.
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.
Phil Vernon 