The Wheel Has Turned: UK Aid Policy
The UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) published the results of its Multilateral Aid Review and Bilateral Aid Review today. The reviews had been ongoing more or less since the coalition government took office last May, and the results were much-anticipated, and not without anxiety. The government had long ago ring-fenced the aid budgeted and was committed to increasing it, so the anti-aid brigade knew they had little to hope for in today’s announcement. Many supporters of aid meanwhile were anxious that too much aid would be linked to the UK’s military adventures in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, and taken away from other parts of the world less linked to the UK’s security in this era of international terrorism. Others were of course worried that their particular perspective or interest would be ignored or dropped. But overall, I’d say that most people will admit, whatever their fears and particular interests, that the government has done a fairly good job in trying to make a bit more sense out of its large, complex and unwieldy aid programme.
At the heart of all this has to be a recognition that the aid wheel has turned. For over a decade since DFID was established in 1997 by Clare Short, it had been subjected to little really rigorous scrutiny at the fundamental level, for a number of reasons. Because the moral case for aid was and remains strong, it was easy to label those asking difficult questions as heartless. Meanwhile, the aid enterprise was so vaguely and broadly defined, and was in any case clearly a long-term endeavour whose outcomes ought not to be measured too soon, that it was by nature difficult to know what success looked like, and thus how to hold its institutions accountable. In this respect it was almost a faith-based enterprise, undertaken and supported by people and institutions whose faith in its importance was sufficient to maintain their energy and commitment. In any case, most aid experts were in one way or other part of and party to the system, so why scrutinise it too closely?, especially when anti-aid critics might seize upon any criticism to propose cuts or abolition. Finally, when the economy was doing pretty well, most people were happy for a relatively small proportion of GDP to be spent on the welfare of poor people elsewhere; in fact for most people in the UK, DFID was fairly invisible. This phenomenon was not limited to the UK, but applied to other OECD countries too.
But the economy took a turn for the worse, the offices of government changed hands, in the UK as elsewhere, and it was time to shine a brighter light on the institutions of aid. In the UK the new government to its credit committed itself straight away to maintaining a large and growing aid programme, despite the views of many – perhaps most – taxpayers who were concerned that the budgets of other government departments were being cut while aid kept growing. Instead of cutting, the government would review and revise the aid programme to be less focused on process and more on results, and ensure that its contribution to UK security and prosperity were maximised. DFID’s spending is more or less divisible into two main instruments of roughly the same size: bilateral aid, targeting specific countries; and multilateral aid, supplying funds to the UN and other multilateral agencies. Hence, the two reviews whose results were announced today: the Multilateral Aid Review (MAR) and Bilateral Aid Review (BAR).
The BAR will cut the number of core bilateral aid partners from 43 down to 27 over the next four years (though it may actually be 28, as Sudan is due to split into two countries come July this year). China and Russia are out, along with other nations deemed no longer in need of UK aid such as Serbia and Vietnam; and other nations where the UK was deemed to lack a comparative advantage, like Burundi. Of the countries the UK will continue to support, a significant number are “fragile” or conflict-affected, in recognition of the “double whammy” faced by citizens there, and the extra support they need. In all 27 countries, DFID’s focus will be on a broad and comprehensive set of results, loosely grouped under five headings:
- Wealth Creation
- Delivery of the Millennium Development Goals to improve health, education, water and sanitation, and reduce vulnerability, hunger and poverty
- Governance and security
- Climate Change adaptation and mitigation
- Humanitarian assistance.
The result of the MAR – a rapid and complex assessment of 43 multilateral recipients of UK aid money – is that four agencies are being dropped, because their mission fails to overlap sufficiently with DFID’s goals and/or their performance fails to come up to scratch. These are UN-Habitat, the International Labour Organisation, the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction and the UN Industrial Development Organisation. Some other recipients were put on notice that their funds may also dry up if they fail to improve.
Both the BAR and the MAR have been conducted with the degree of professionalism and excellence we have learned to expect from DFID over the years. And with a good degree of transparency too. Despite the speed with which the reviews were done, the resulting reports clearly demonstrate a reflective approach and a recognisable methodology for decision-making.
How should we judge the results of this fast-paced, politically driven policy review? On the whole, it seems a pretty welcome wake-up call. Taxpayers’ money is being spent in large amounts, and should be subject to rigorous accountability. Those who feared that the new government would flex its muscles just to show that it meant business have been reassured that the process has been undertaken without such cynicism. Certainly there will be people and organisations, and especially in the countries and organisations which will no longer benefit from UK aid, who have cause to complain. Personally I am very disappointed that Burundi is being dropped, since it’s something of a donor orphan and needs plenty of help to recover from decades of conflict. But decisions do have to be made after all, and there will always be winners and losers. On the whole, there is plenty to welcome about the BAR:
- The decision to focus on fewer places makes complete sense. Development aid is labour-intensive work, especially in complex, fragile or conflict-affected environments. Civil service numbers seem to be going down, even in DFID whose budget is going up. So it makes excellent sense to focus its efforts on fewer places where its efforts can be planned, executed and monitored with care, and adapted on a regular basis as needed.
- Fragile and conflict-affected contexts do need special attention: they are the places where rapid progress is hardest to achieve, and where people live with the least hope of improvement.
- From the documents that were released today, DFID has done a pretty good job of squaring the circle between the need to deliver on a set of concrete results which look, sound and feel good to a sceptical electorate, and the need to tailor its support to the specificities of each context. This means tangible headlines like 11 million children in school, and saving the lives of 50,000 women in pregnancy and childbirth, and 250,000 newborn babies; alongside less concrete but, in the scheme of things, equally important issues like “turning the police into an accountable, community based service” in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), “promoting stability and strengthening accountability” in Kenya, and “increasing the ability of citizens to hold [their government] to account” in Sierra Leone. Getting this balance right is tremendously important, so that the aid programme does not get hijacked by the need to support only those programmes which are concrete and easy to measure. Development progress is more complex than that.
- The attention to fragile states does not appear to have tipped too far towards AfPak and other areas of current or recent UK military operation. The aid programme in Iraq will be phased out, since Iraqis are considered to have sufficient resources of their own, especially from oil.
- Countries which have not made the cut are not just being dropped, but will be phased out over a few years, and the UK will respect commitments already made.
- The bilateral programmes will be complemented by regional programming, able to focus on cross-border or regional issues, such as trade. This is particularly welcome for conflict-affected regions, where conflicts all-too-easily cross borders, and thus peacebuilding efforts need to do so, too. In this respect for example, the UK’s continued and enhaced support for conflict-sensitive and confidence-building economic cooperation across borders in Africa can make a big difference.
So as far as the BAR goes, DFID appears to have done a creditable job and what’s important now is to ensure that the platform it has thus established from which to build on and improve its work in 27 countries over the next few years is exploited with as much care as necessary, especially in the fragile contexts. DFID is helping to lead the ongoing International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding, in which a number of donor and recipient countries, along with multilateral organisations, are trying to figure out how international cooperation, including aid, can help build peaceful societies and effective states. It is not easy and the answers are not yet clear, so DFID just like others will need to adopt a patient and adaptable approach if it is to achieve its aims in this respect. Support to Peacebuilding and Statebuilding should no more be immune from scrutiny and accountability than any other aspect of aid; but nor should we pretend that it can be reduced to a set of one-size-fits-all results as some might like. And nor should the UK’s support to fragile and conflict-affected societies be limited to “aid” in its classic sense. A subtle approach, tailored to the context and based on a sophisticated analysis of the political economy and its potential to adapt and transform, will be needed; and DFID will need to ensure that its staff in each context, as well as those who support them in London, are well versed in the skills and talents to do this, and are held accountable for it. There will be times when, even in this new results-based era, the planned programme and some of the expected results will have to be set on one side because other issues become more important.
DFID and its sister UK agencies are not there yet, in terms of their ability to act in this politically astute way, but they are trying and can get there with the right political leadership. But this is the very area where the multilateral agencies have been found wanting. The MAR is a very impressive document, applying a clever combination of simplicity and sophistication as one must when measuring such a wide and diverse array of agencies as UNICEF, UNHCR, UNESCO, the EC, the World Bank and the Red Cross and Red Crescent. My gut feeling is that the MAR is harder to defend than that of the BAR, mainly because the task was a much harder one based on less solid conceptual foundations. If DFID’s budget is increasing, even while its staff complement goes down, and it commits to spend at least 30% of its funds in fragile contexts where – by definition – the institutional capacity is limited, it has no choice but to work through the multilateral agencies who operate in such places. Four agencies are being dropped, and a few others given fair warning they need to up their game. Fine, but 39 (90%) are being retained. Is this a fair reflecton of their worth? Are all 39 agencies good enough?
The report found that, setting humanitarian agencies apart (since they would after all be expected to understand how to operate in fragile contexts) not a single organisation was considered “strong” at operating in fragile contexts. While 14 were rated “satisfactory”, 15 were “weak”, and 4 “unsatisfactory”. Almost all of the multilateral development banks and private sector development organisations were weak or unsatisfactory at operating in such contexts, which speaks volumes about the challenge of meeting economic recovery needs in the places they are most needed – and where the political economy is often at its most complex and resistant to change. As DFID says, “all the multilateral banks are actively engaged in fragile states, and often play a significant role….[and they] generally have good policies and guidance on working in fragile states …[but] lack adequate in-country capacity”.
The review also found multilaterals in general to be poor at incorporating gender. This is very worrying indeed on its own account, but also because an inability to apply a gender lens is likely to be a symptom of a more fundamental inability to understand the complexity of the societies in which mutilateral agencies work, and which they aim to help transform. And this is made worse by the poor scores they received for transparency and accountability which are likewise key to successful performance.
As the MAR very clearly says, the world needs effective multilaterals, which potentially have the legitimacy and the scope and reach which individual donors like DFID can’t aspire to. But too many of them have become unresponsive, too often taking on the characteristics of monopolies. Too often they are held accountable for the wrong processes and the wrong set of outcomes. Working in fragile contexts needs decentralised organisations, able to adapt and react to the context. Too few of the multilaterals are able to do this yet.
So I welcome the MAR as the first step in a process in which the UK, along with other like-minded Member States and funders, pays far more attention to shaping the ability of the institutions it supports and helps lead, to operate more politically and more sensitively in complex political economies, with a view to improving not only the economic and social indicators as measured by GDP and the Human Development Index, but also the much-harder-to achieve-and-measure outcomes such as better and more responsive and participatory relations between citizen and state.
Going beyond impunity for rape in the DRC
Like others I welcome the conviction this week of a number of soldiers, including their commanding officer Lt-Col Kibibi Mutware, for crimes against humanity for their part in the horrific rape of more than sixty women and girls in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The attack took place at the beginning of January in Fizi in the province of South Kivu. It appears to have been essentially an act of terror, designed to intimidate and keep the people of Fizi under the thumb of Lt-Col Mutware’s forces.
Unfortunately this kind of incident is all too common in eastern DRC. Rape has been called an act of war there, and in many cases this is an accurate label, since soldiers of all sides appear to have used – and been encouraged or even ordered to use – rape as a way of humiliating their enemies. But in the not-war/not-peace situation which prevails in large parts of eastern DRC, rape is not so much an act of war as an act of domination in the exercise of governance by military forces, whose hold over local populations is a way to control and benefit from the local economy in their own interests while supposedly representing the interests of the state.
Lt-Col Muware is an ex-rebel who has been “integrated” into the government’s army as part of the peace process, and as such is supposed to represent the Congolese state. But the atrocious behaviour of his soldiers in Fizi is a grotesque caricature of Weber’s concept of the state exercising the monopoly of violence. As one women quoted in The Times yesterday put it, “Most of the rapists are still right here in our village. If we go to the river for water, we get raped; if we go to the fields for food, we get raped; if we go to the market to sell our goods, we get raped. There is no peace.” So by her account, in Fizi rape is now the normal price to be paid for access to water and food, the very stuff of life.
The special military court which convicted Mutware and others this week was paid for and assisted by George Soros’ Open Society Institute, and we should applaud their willingness and initiative to put resources and action behind what has otherwise become a largely hollow call by the international community for an end to impunity for rape in the DRC. This is at least one instance of people being held to account, under the DRC’s own laws, for their role in a serious crime committed in a context where it would normally have gone unpunished.
But one trial does not create sufficient disincentive to stop others from doing what Mutware did, in a context where rape has become a norm. The woman of Fizi quoted above clearly believes that it will not prevent the same behaviour from being repeated there. We should salute the courage of those who gave evidence at the trial, many of whom now face the double injustice of being excluded from their communities for the shame of having been the victim of violent rape, and the risk of revenge being taken against them by Mutware’s allies who are still at liberty. There is a strong case for the UN to beef up its police and military presence in Fizi to provide greater protection for these witnesses and their families against future reprisals.
It’s also very important that people in the DRC see that those who are convicted in cases such as this do actually serve the sentences which the courts have imposed. As such courts continue to do their work, they must also be seen to act against any and all perpetrators. Some people have claimed that Mutware had fallen foul of the powers that be, hence was a convenient scapegoat. I don’t know if that’s true or not. But my opinion doesn’t much matter. What is essential is that Congolese people see and believe that all those who abuse their positions of power are subject to justice, and all those who rape are subject to justice. Whoever they may be, and whomever they may know.
Meanwhile, there’s a deep and complex transformation process needed. Practically everyone in eastern DRC is caught up in a situation not of their own devising. Even soldiers who commit crimes like the ones in Fizi are in a sense victims – committing acts which they know are wrong. A new report soon out by International Alert explores this issue, and shows that increased incidence of sexual violence is not just an act of war, as it is sometimes simplistically reported, but rather a specific and explicit element of the social and political economy of the area which has both led to and grown out of war, and which must change significantly, for there to be a chance of sustainable peace.
Further court cases are an essential part of any strategy to address the issue of impunity. But rape and sexual violence will only be substantially addressed through a process of comprehensive transformation, based on a thorough and honest understanding of how thing are. Clearly this cannot be imposed from outside, but those Congolese who are trying to bring it about can be supported with resources, with ideas and with solidarity. For example by help with further research to better understand and explain the part sexual violence plays in the social and political economy, and identify realistic ways to change this.
How do outsiders measure the results of their peacebuilding work in conflict affected environments?
I spent two days last week at a conference surrounded by experts in peacebuilding, and in monitoring evaluation. The challenge? To try and figure out how to measure the success of the increasing volume of efforts by well-meaning outsiders to contribute to peacebuilding in places like Sudan, Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, etc. Why? Because it’s important to know if well-meaning efforts translate into impacts on the ground; and because the governments and international agencies who fund and mount these efforts have to be held accountable for the good use of resources.
Working for a peacebuilding organisation myself – albeit a much smaller one than the likes of the UN and big donors like the UK who were represented at the meeting – I know all too well how difficult it is to measure the impact of what we do. In fact I tend to use the word estimate, rather than measure, since it’s such an approximate art.
The difficulty for many of those involved in peacebuilding is that they frame their work as “conflict prevention”. This gives rise to two problems. First, conflict per se is not necessarily a problem, provided it does not become violent. After all, without differences, without conflict, how would we make progress as a society? So preventing violent conflict is really what they mean.
Second, if you set out to prevent violent conflict, it is hard to measure success except through the use of counter-factuals, and what-ifs? But then one is in the realms of speculation. Can one really uses measures such as “a civil war avoided” as a way to demonstrate the effectiveness of peacebuilding programmes? How can you demonstrate the war would otherwise have happened? And anyway, how likely is “civil war averted” to be sustainable as an outcome, since you are unlikely to have been able to magic away the underlying causes of the putative war through outside intervention, and thus the war has more likely just been postponed?
I think the clue is in the word “peacebuilding”. This is not so much about negotiating a solution to a specific conflict which has become or threatens to become violent. It is about building the attributes in society – locally, nationally, even internationally – which allow people to anticipate and resolve their conflicts without resorting to violence. These are wide ranging and complex. They include the way people relate to one another in society, and whether they have institutions, systems and a culture which provide mechanisms to resolve problems. Parliaments and other councils are obvious examples, but mostly such institutions are deeply embedded, cultural.
Other elements of peacebuilding are that the economy has to be working well enough for most of the people: they have decent opportunities for work, or to run a business. There should be a relatively high degree of well-being, with regards education, health, etc. People should feel safe, and that they will have access to justice, should sonebody harm them or if they are accused of harming others. And above all, access and opportunity to all of the above – political voice, economic opportunity, well-being, safety and justice – should be open to all, regardless of gender, ethnicity, etc. If you doubt that these are the attributes of a peaceful society, consider the degree to which they are present in Libya, Egypt, the Democratic Republic of Congo, or the core countries of the Middle East.
Obviously these attributes take time to build; and in the main, they cannot be gifted or imposed from outside – though outsiders can certainly provide assistance. They can, to a large degree, be measured, and thus they provide the basis for the international commnity to judge whether its long-term peacebuilding efforts are bearing fruit. What they need to do, if they want to know if the billions of dollars they are spending in places like Congo and Sudan are making a difference, is look at whether progress is being made in the areas I have mentioned above, and whether their efforts have contributed.
Egypt: leadership for peace in the Middle East
No great surprise that those in power eventually found a way to react violently to Egypt’s velvet revolution. It was great – invigorating, even – to sense via TV news reports the slightly bemused vibe being given off by the demonstrators in the first few days of the anti-Mubarak demonstrations in different towns across Egypt. It was as if they couldn’t quite believe their government was letting them get away with it. Watching the news from Egypt, I was also struck by the relaxed body language of the BBC’s Middle East reporters, who had all dashed there from wherever they happened to be, to cover this extraordinary story. They are so used to reporting on situations of tension, repression, inequity and violence that they seemed not to have the right language available to them, to describe what was happening around them. It was all too good to be true!
And indeed, the reaction did come: violence, repression, vested interests, the status quo reasserting itself. So how should the international community respond to this situation? There is a real opportunity to be seized here.
One of the reasons there are never any real breakthroughs in the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians and other neighbours is that the status quo suits so many of those who could make a breakthrough happen. That there are factions within Israel and in Gaza and the West Bank who find it impossible to accept a compromise is obvious. But one of the disabling factors for peace which doesn’t seem to be written and spoken about enough in the mainstream western media is how having a long-term and apparently intractable structural conflict in the neighbourhood serves the purpose of those who fear change, and who therefore block the possibility of peace.
All the undemocratic regimes of the region use the presence of the conflict to justify their own unwillingness to change and become more open. As long as the Israeli conflict remains unresolved, it serves as a welcome distraction from internal calls for change. And western governments have long been happy to go along with idea that they want peace between Israel and its neighbours, when in fact what they really want above all is stability, and especially during their own time in office. Surely that’s one of the reasons the USA has supported Mubarak’s regime to the tune of a billion dollars a year or more since Camp David. Predictable stability is easier to deal with than the uncertainties of democratic elections or a democratisation process, especially in a region which supplies so much of the world’s oil.
In the USA every president comes to power with a declaration he’ll do something to bring peace in the Middle East. But bringing peace in the Middle East is not something that can be achieved over a 4-year US election cycle. Indeed, the first steps towards peace which could be achieved within a mere four years are probably so minimal when viewed from Washington that they’d be virtually invisible, and would quite wrongly be seen as a failure by the media, Congress and the voters there. So the incentives for US presidents – and other democratically elected leaders – aren’t aligned with the needs of peacebuilding.
What’s needed from Washington, and in the international community more broadly now, is leadership. One of the main components of leadership is risk-taking. Obama has an election in less than two years, so choosing to support the unpredictable path of change in the Middle East, with all the accompanying risks, is a tough political call.
But the US can’t put the Egyptian genie back in the bottle even if it wants to. It can probably watch and wait to see if Mubarak is able to do so. But given there’s a pretty good chance he’ll smash the bottle in the process, the political risk for Obama may well be that he’s damned if he does, and damned if he doesn’t. What this means is that this is probably one of the few times in recent history that the US president really has a political choice vis-à-vis the Middle East, and can take a political gamble by supporting – or at least not blocking – an unpredictable process of political change.
Sustainable peace in the Middle East is not the same as stability. Nor is it possible unless something happens to shift the status quo. The popular uprising in Egypt is a potential shift in the status quo. What it will lead to is unclear and uncertain, but in that uncertain future, there may be an opportunity no-one has previously seen to build a successful peace process.
North African unrest: will it spread south as well as east?
In response to an earlier blog of mine, Sir Edward Clay commented on my decision to limit my series of Ten Things to Know about Africa, to Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). His comment was that at least one of the factors I ascribed to SSA was also relevant to the countries along the southern Mediterranean shore. He made a good point.
But looking at recent events in Tunisa, Egypt, Algeria and now Yemen: the unrest seems to spreading eastwards and westwards, and has jumped across the Red Sea, but so far at least is failing to spread southwards across the Sahara.
I wonder why not. Is it because the regimes in SSA are less repressive, or repressive in a different, less centralised way, with a less tightly-fitting lid to the pressure cooker? Or perhaps it’s that young people there are less proactive or courageous (or foolhardy, their mothers might say?) than their counterparts further north? Is it something to do with culture or religion? Is that the countries in the north are wealthier?
Or is it that there are perceived similarities and connections between and among people across the Arab belt, who are therefore quicker to see the need or opportunity to act as their “brothers and sisters” have done; whereas young people in SSA feel less of a connection, don’t see the rioters in Tunisia as their brothers and sisters, and therefore don’t relate their own situation to that of the people in the Maghreb and Egypt, and don’t engage in copy-cat demonstrations.
Perhaps the countries in SSA share a number of characteristics with those north of the Sahara from an objective outsider’s perspective. For example they are ex-colonies of one kind or another, they have made limited progress towards democracy, they have patronage-based political economies, and they have massive youth bulge. But there’s also something other than the desert itself which divides the northern countries from those further south. Whatever it is, perhaps it is protecting some Sub-saharan regimes from the kind of pressures the governments further north are experiencing right now.
Meddling to promote peace in Africa
The “International Community” is a fuzzy concept covering a multitude of sins and virtues. Put simply, it’s when states operate together to promote international public good outcomes which transcend the narrow national interest of each. The Responsibility to Protect principle, adopted by the UN general Assembly in 2005 adds the powerful idea that the international community must intervene to protect and promote the rights of citizens in countries where the state is unable or unwilling to do so. In other words, meddling. This is a big ask, and one which we still lack the tools and political will to put into practice.
You have to feel sorry for the International Community in its attempts to meddle in parts of Africa. At times every step forward seems to be followed by a step backward of equal length or longer. The unrest in Côte d’Ivoire after recent elections there is just one more glaring example of how difficult it is for outsiders to foster a judicious mixture of stability and development progress in places where both are undermined by conflict and which lack the institutions to manage these conflicts without violence. (And by “outsiders”, I don’t just mean non-Africans: surely Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga is as much an outsider in Côte d’Ivoire as French President Nicolas Sarkozy would be.) In Sudan, after the referendum in the south, which will certainly result in a vote for independence, commentators are predicting turbulent times ahead for what will presumably become the newest African state later this year. Southern Sudan’s unresolved internal conflicts, its over-reliance on oil, its deep poverty and still-nascent governance institutions – along with the potential for interstate war with Khartoum and/or conflicts between people living on either side of the new border – are seen by many as a recipe for disaster. Doomsayers are even calling it a “pre-failed state”.
Many other situations in Africa are resisting the attempts of meddling outsiders with good intentions. The International Criminal Court’s intervention in Kenya is being resisted by the political elite’s apparent decision to close ranks and protect those of its members that the ICC wants to indict for their alleged role in inciting violence after the 2007 elections. Zimbabwe resists outside attempts to help it emerge from political and humanitarian disaster with long-practised ease. Peace in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) still seems a distant prospect. The deadly combination there of lucrative mining opportunities, well-armed military and paramilitary groups changing allegiance according to opportunity and need, patronage-based governance linked to impunity, the meddling of neighbouring states, and the sheer geographic scale and remoteness, represent a range of forces far too powerful for the puny UN to defeat. The list of violence-prone countries goes on and on.
But this is not to say the international community should not keep trying. The problems in the Republic of Guinea are far from over, but carefully targeted international assistance has been critical in helping Guineans meet difficult challenges since the death of President Conté two years ago: military coups, election violence, a political rhetoric highly charged with ethnic rivalry and tension, and all against a backdrop of growing public dissatisfaction and poverty, in a region where young men have shown they are all-too-ready to answer the call to arms over the past two decades. Some of the international help for Guinea has so far been provided in a usefully ad hoc way: a combination of well-placed individuals, and of international organisations, intervening in a joined-up way, with minimal publicity. The good offices of the AU, ECOWAS, Burkina Faso and the USA among others combined in a coherent and coordinated way to help negotiate a practical way forward on several occasions. But we should be honest: so far this has been crisis management, which while difficult is far easier than the more complex challenge of building peaceful, developmental and citizen-responsive polities and states.
Côte d’Ivoire is clearly a country in crisis, and it will surprise no-one if Southern Sudan runs into crises once the honeymoon of independence is over: the history books tell us that state formation and violent conflict often go hand in hand. It’s really important as the international community in all its permutations tries to help countries like these emerge peaceful and prosperous from their current travails, that they look beyond crisis management.
When countries and international organisations get together to help places in difficulty, they need to step back from crisis management and play the longer game. The international approach to ending the civil war between southern Sudan and Khartoum was successful in getting both parties to agree to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement – CPA. This was no small achievement. But it’s well documented that the international focus on north-south peace meant that Darfur was ignored at a crucial time. Arguably, the very success of the process that led to the CPA also stimulated an increase in violence in Darfur. The CPA carried within it the seeds of a genuine comprehensive agreement applicable to the entire country. But the opportunity to leverage its content to build a sustainable peace throughout Sudan was lost. Crisis management is the default setting for the international community: it responds to urgent humanitarian needs as expressed by NGO lobbyists, and it fits the skillset of international statesmen-turned-peacemakers. But it is not enough, which is why so many peace settlements brokered by outsiders don’t last.
This means getting the purpose right. In seeking to help the people of Côte d’Ivoire, the international community has got to look beyond simplistic aims such as “remove Gbagbo from power and install Ouattara as the rightful winner of the election”. It has to work on the understanding that whatever the election numbers say, and whatever international definitions of “electoral legitimacy” might imply, for a very large number of Ivorians, with limited experience of democratic elections and no experience of living in a mature democracy, Outtara has no legitimacy at all as president. Indeed, anyone who sees Côte d’Ivoire’s future as democratic and peaceful might reasonably question whether a new president indelibly associated with the dictatorship of Houphouet-Boigny and a prime minister who led an armed rebel movement with an ethno-geographic constituency are best placed to lead the way forward. Thus while figuring out what to do next, it’s incumbent on internationals to consider what outcome they think is desirable and feasible fifteen or twenty years from now, and work back from that to figure out what they should do next. In the end, the people of Côte d’Ivoire will decide their future, as the cliché goes, and like everyone else they will do so by muddling through rather than following a clear and predictable pathway. But outsiders do have an influence: after all, the election itself was very much outsider-enabled. If people are proposing and threatening a military intervention to remove Gbagbo from power without a clear, realistic and resourced multi-year plan fostering the emergence of better governance, smacks a little of Iraq.
Once the purpose is more or less clear, the tools and architecture have to be adapted to it. So often, the international community’s starting point is “what can we do with these tools?” rather than “what should we do, and whayt tools do we need?” While pragmatic, the former approach is self-limiting. The UN Security Council’s interventions in the DRC have made a difference there. Fighting is much reduced (though not yet enough), protection has been improved (though not yet enough), elections held, etc. But faced with the issues which undermine peace and development in the DRC, it is not at all clear that the UN’s state-focused approach is always the best one. The state is, after all, a major part of the problem there, given the involvement of members of the government and government forces in armed violence and associated economic activities such as mining.
Indeed, to speak of the “Congolese state” at all verges on tautology at times. I doubt Max Weber would recognise his concept of the state in the way government behaves in the DRC. He would recognise the labels – parliament, ministry, presidency, elections, etc. – but would find it hard to reconcile how they behave with his normative concept of the state exercising the monopoly of violence in the public good. The last UN Group of Experts report on DRC illustrates the problem well. It gave chapter and verse on how and why the situation in eastern DRC was not improving, citing the role of armed groups, government officials, politicians, companies and neighbouring governments in preventing peace. It explicitly showed how the UN had failed to overcome these factors. But its recommendations to the Security Council can be summarised as “can do better”, rather than recommending a change of approach.
There are times when the UN should be able to disentangle itself from the tortured logic that it is intervening in a particular country on behalf of that country’s government (a “UN Member State”), and instead base its intervention on the Responsibility to Protect. In the DRC this would for example require it to treat the depradations of all armed actors as illegitimate, whether committed by government forces or non-government forces; and have a mandate allowing it to intervene on behalf of those whose lives are threatened and whose rights are undermined by any armed group, in whatever uniform. The so-called brassage programme for merging government and other armed forces in the DRC – which has provided the cover for ex-rebel warlords to behave as before, but in government uniform – needs to be completely rethought. But it needs to be rethought by the UN and the AU in their roles first and foremost as outside entities determined to improve the prospects for peace in the DRC; not by the UN and the AU first and foremost as partners to a failing government.
Getting the intenational architecture right in Sudan post-referendum will be critical. There is a danger that the international community will breathe a huge sigh of relief when southern Sudan becomes independent, and focus most of its effort on helping southerners create a viable new nation. Meanwhile it will pay far less attention to the rest of Sudan. The international architecture will no doubt include some kind of UN or AU entity to keep an eye on north-south border issues, but it will probably lose sight pretty quickly of the need to focus, for at least the next decade, on a whole-Sudan approach – i.e. on both north and south of what is now one country, Sudan.
This is a pity, as the resolution of many of the obstacles to peace within and between Khartoum and Juba will require an analytical and operational capacity to regard the two entities as part of a larger, sub-regional peacebuilding challenge. By focusing its efforts separately on Juba and Khartoum, the international community may well reinforce the natural tendency in both to convert separation into conflict; instead of building on and reinforcing the factors which could enable a peaceful co-existence and partnership between the two states and their peoples.
So, instead of feeling sorry for the international community, we should probably advise it to become more effective by taking a longer term approach instead of crisis management, by turning this into a clearly expressed long-term vision and goals relevant to each context, and by ensuring it makes its institutions and organisations more fit for purpose.
How African politicians learned about economic governance from France
This is a story I have heard in West and East Africa. In francophone countries it is linked to France, and in anglophone countries, to Britain. I recount it using the francophone version of the story (though the smart reader will have noticed I do so in English).
In the early years after indendence, a finance conference was held in Paris. Finance ministers from all the newly independent French speaking countries in Africa attended, hosted by the Finance Minister of France.
The conference took place over three working days, Thursday to Monday, with the weekend off. On the Friday afternoon, the French minister asked his counterpart from one of the new nations if he’d like to visit his chateau for the weekend, and his colleague accepted.
On Friday evening they were taken to the airport in a fleet of limousines; they flew in a helicopter to a beautiful chateau, in its own immaculate grounds, and surrounded by woodland and lakes. They spent the most incredible weekend feasting, drinking and dancing at night, and hunting in the forest during the day. Early on Sunday evening, sated, they returned to Paris in the helicopter. The African finance minister was visibly perturbed about something, and his host asked him what was the matter?
“Monsieur,” answered his guest, “I am troubled. I have spent the most incredible weekend of my life as your guest, and I hesitate to bother you with questions…”
“Go ahead my friend,” replied his host kindly. “If I know the answer to your question, I will gladly provide it.”
“Well,” his guest began, “I have seen your chateau, and can only imagine the cost of such a place – to say nothing of the costs of the magnificent party to which you invited me over the weekend. And I know that France is a wealthy country, much richer than mine. Nevertheless, I struggle to comprehend how you can afford such things, on the salary of a finance minister.”
The French thought for a moment. He looked out of the window of the helicopter at the landscape beneath, apparently searching for something. Afer a couple of minutes he smiled and gestured to his colleague to look out at the landscape below.
“I am not at all offended, my friend,” he said. “On the contrary, it gives me great pleasure to be able to give you some guidance in carrying out the important role of finance minister. Do you see that new road down there, and the newly built bridge which crosses the river?”
His counterpart looked down through the gathering dusk, and indicated that yes, he could see the road and the bridge in question.
“Yes, I see the road and the bridge, but what of it?”
“Well”, said his host, “everything that is built by the state here in France comes across my desk, so I simply take a small cut of 2% to help finance the lifestyle appropriate to my role as a minister. You see?”
“Ah!” said his new friend, happy to have got the answer to his question. “Yes, I see now. Thank you.”
They returned to Paris, and the rest of the conference went well.
Three years later, it was the turn of the African minister’s government to host the finance conference. Again, it was held Thursday to Monday, with a weekend break. On Friday, he approached his old friend the French finance minister with an invitation.
“My friend,” he began, “you were so kind to me three years ago, and I would like to repay your hospitality. Please be my guest for the weekend at my country estate.”
The Frenchman agreed, and at the end of the afternoon they were whisked off to the airport in a fleet of limousines, flown in a private jet to an airfield up-country, and from there in another fleet of limousines along a brand new four-lane tarmac road to a vast and luxurious compound complete with swimming pools and fountains. Again, they had a fabulous weekend, which surpassed the level of luxury and entertainment they had experienced in France three years earlier. It was a weekend of excess, and as they were flying back to the capital on Sunday, the Frenchman dozed for a while, before raising himself up in his seat a little to address his host.
“My very good friend. You have provided me with a weekend the like of which I could only have dreamed. You have more than repaid my hospitality of three years ago, and I thank you. But I do have one small question, if I may?”
“By all means, my friend. Fire away.”
“Well… Three years ago, you seemed very ignorant of how to makes ends meet as a finance minister, and I gave you a small piece of advice. Now, a mere three years later, I see that you have done very, very well for yourself. But I struggle to comprehend how you have managed to secure such riches, especially since your country’s budget is so much smaller than mine….?”
“Ah yes. I see what you mean. But it’s easy to explain. Look out of the window.”
The Frenchman did as he was bid.
“Now, do you see that six-lane autoroute down there, and the bridge, and the power station?” He gestured expansively with his right hand towards the ground, hundreds of metres below.
The Frenchman searched everywhere, but could see only fields, trees and the occasional small village of round grass houses.
“I am sorry my friend, but try as I might, I cannot see them,” he replied. “In fact, I am pretty sure they do not exist.”
“Exactly, mon frère,” said his host with a proud, wide grin. “One hundred percent!”
Phil Vernon 