The Somaliland city of Burao, high above the
sweaty coastal plain that centres on the port of Berbera, was the site of a
remarkable conference nearly a quarter of a century ago that ended the fighting
in this Horn of African country.
Somaliland’s democracy was built on five major
internal meetings, starting with the Grand Conference of the Northern Peoples
in Burao, held over six weeks and concluding with the declaration of
Somaliland’s independence from Somalia on 18 May 1991.
Once the capital of British Somaliland, at the
time Buroa was, says Mohamud Jama, then a UN official, “a mess – the stench and
flies forced us to wear masks over our mouths. The refugee population and the
militias had defecated in the buildings, and there were no services at all.’
The declaration was signed in an octagonal
tin-roofed building near the colonial governor’s building, without electricity
and running water, the white walls outside still pock-marked by bullet holes,
the blue inside smeared with dirt and graffiti.
Today children play on its porch, swinging on
its pillars, darting around the sandy streets. Burao’s officials are determined
to leave the building as is, a memorial to those heady days.
Conferences in Burao and, later, Bomora, were
managed and financed by locals, bringing their own food and shelter. These
events were “bottom-up, not top-down”, emphasises Mohamed Omar, the Minister of
Commerce, “unlike Somalia’s, which has been top-down, driven by donors through
leadership and taking place outside the country”.
Somalilanders concentrated on achieving peace,
not on acquiring financial rents for delegates from the process, a feature
which has continually by contrast blighted Somalia’s attempts to the south,
where conflict entrepreneurs have fed off both the fighting and the talking.
While contemporary isolation might impede the
consolidation of its development, Somaliland’s home-built steadiness so far
exemplifies the limits of external intervention in stabilising countries and
the necessity of local ownership. The irony does not end there. The route to
reclaiming Somaliland’s independence lies through Mogadishu, in getting its
southern neighbour to agree to a divorce; but the Mogadishu government is
barely functional, little more than a Western-supported and African-military
controlled client state.
Somaliland’s stability illustrates the paradox
and limits of aid. The economy is poor, based on livestock farming and exports
and remittances. The Somaliland government budget was just $152 million
in 2014. GDP is estimated at $350 per capita annually for its 3.5 million
people. Donor funding is just $120 million annually, most of which goes into
roads and water infrastructure, and much of the rest into boosting agriculture.
By comparison, the European Union alone is spending €25 million each month in
Somalia to the south, much of this on those that otherwise would be at war.
The difference between Somaliland and Somalia is
the difference between a peace that is locally ‘owned’ and a rent-seeking
peace. A lack of aid has meant that Somalilanders have had to find their own
way, and the lack of external involvement has left local structures in place.
It is a prototype for making peace elsewhere, the lesson for outsiders being:
Less is often more. Foreigners cannot after all want peace more than the
locals. This is a first of several lessons in understanding why states recover
and the role of outsiders in this process.
Getting it right depends on answering the
question of why the international community so often gets it wrong in managing
transitions, from war to peace, and from poverty to prosperity. Even so, the
difference between state recovery and failure involves more than the efficacy
of external actors, no matter the attempts to plan and resource a coherent
strategy, to achieve better coordination, staffing, communication, and to
establish clear pillars, goals, objectives, systems of accountability, and
clear priorities.
The drivers of state success include legitimacy,
not just stability; soft systemic not just hard physical infrastructure; and
the emergence of issue- rather than identity-led political and economic
choices, where narrow self-interest is subsumed by national concerns.
Transforming states is not just about ‘getting the external formula right’ and
resourcing it properly. It’s about the politics, and the political economy, and
living with local solutions, however messy they appear.
Security is imperative: indeed, it is the door
through which much else follows, including better governance and development.
You can’t fix instability without fixing, first, security. To do that effective
armed forces are required, including the police.
But security alone offers only a temporary fix.
As one US Marine general put it in the headquarters of the International
Security Assistance Force in Kabul, “The military is inherently corrosive to
development, but necessary too. It’s a bit like treating cancer with the
military the chemotherapy. You try and kill the disease – the insurgent –
before the patient …”
Experience teaches that back-filling behind the
establishment of security with increased economic activity ensures transitions
are more likely to stick. Understanding and implementing policies for economic
growth is however the bit that many have struggled with, for a whole host of
reasons – not least that governments and, from outside, aid agencies don’t
understand business well or, worse still, are sometimes ideologically
antithetical towards the private sector.
As a result, the international community is very
poor at delivering development, especially in post-conflict countries. This
should not be surprising since the donors themselves developed through internal
rather than external actions. Donor and other forms of external support not
only disincentivise normal entrepreneurial activity (with an aid-mothership
happily distributing largesse sufficient for the elite) and distorts key
economic factors such as overvaluing the currency through large donor inflows,
but offers local politicians convenient means to externalise their choices,
problems and failures.
The traditional route of an entrepreneur
possessing a good idea – borrowing money and starting a business – is lost in
the focus on easy money, where talents are diverted to tapping soft donor
sources. And there is a deeper and more intractable generational issue that has
been exacerbated by conflict and aid regimes. It lies in changing attitudes and
ingraining a culture of personal responsibility; that is the biggest challenge
to be gripped if Afghans, Liberians, Somalis and Sierra Leoneans, among others,
are to ascend the recovery ladder from simply security through peace-building
and reconstruction to prosperity.
These failings are inevitably worsened by an
inability to stay the course. Countries are quick to respond to emergency
situations, or to engage militarily, driven often by their own domestic
political considerations. But few have the staying power, as is evidenced by
Iraq, whatever the strategic folly in getting involved in the first instance.
Thinking things through to the finish, by locals and outsiders, is imperative.
Wherever countries find themselves along the
recovery spectrum – emerging from state failure a la Somalia or, at the other
extreme, from economic crisis – there is a need to pursue economic policies for
success. Development is not a mystery, hence rapid change over decades,
especially in Southeast Asia. There are many examples to follow, for big and
small countries, and for those both resource rich and poor, and along the full
spectrum from outright state collapse and civil war to economic reform and
diversification. To not realize this, leadership are epic incompetents, lacking
personal courage and political will, obviously somnolent or just uninterested –
or all of the above.
Conversely, there is a need to avoid desperate
mercantilist, protectionist nationalist measures in trying to recover and grow.
There is good reason why such measures were last in vogue during the
black-and-white TV era. They don’t work. While short-term booms may be
possible, such choices can only ultimately prevent membership of the club of
serious economies, especially for African countries, given 97 percent of the
global market lies outside the continent.
There are no magic remedies, no silver bullets,
no matter how politically attractive such populist policy spasms and combative
polemic might be, whether this be Argentina or, for that matter, South Africa.
Indeed, if one thing is imperative for all those seeking recovery, it’s to
ensure you have a good crisis – use the opportunity to make the right decisions
and implement policies for growth, not payback.
The costs of failure and the potential rewards
of recovery are enormous. Today the bulk of the world’s poor – totaling 1.1
billion of the planet’s seven billion people – live in failed or failing
states. Not only is their lack of development and progress a missed opportunity
for all, but their problems are unlikely to remain at home in a world
increasingly connected by the flows of people, capital, goods, technology,
information and news.
Such statistics have a tragic, human dimension.
During 2013, Italian authorities were kept very busy intercepting boats filled
to the gunwales with refugees fleeing failure in search of a better life and
security. More than 12,000 illegal migrants were detected off Sicily and 8,000
off the island of Lampedusa in the third quarter of 2013 alone, the hazardous
Mediterranean passage only one stage in a longer, grueling ordeal for most.
In October, the decomposing bodies of 87
migrants, among them 52 children, were discovered in the Sahara Desert. The two
trucks carrying the migrants had broken down while trying to reach Algeria.
Their passengers’ corpses were found in groups in a wide radius around a well
they were trying to reach. Some had been eaten by jackals. They were fleeing
one of the world’s poorest countries, Niger, second from bottom on the United Nations
Human Development Index.
The quicker the situations that give rise to
such desperate migration can be turned around, the better. History teaches
however that the period of recovery for states from failure is at least as long
as the period of decline.
Although state failure – or pockets of failure
within states – is present in most continents, understanding why states fail
and, more importantly, why they recover is particularly pertinent for Africa,
since it houses the majority of failed states globally – 23 of 28 at one count.
The imperative for transformation is amplified
by the demographic challenges the continent faces. While the world population
(at current fertility levels) is anticipated to increase to the nine-billion
mark by 2040, Asia and Africa will make up three-quarters of this number, the
latter almost topping two billion – twice as many people as today. The problem
is not the numbers per se, given that Africa’s population density (27 per
sq/km) is little more than half the global average (45), but rather the
inability or unwillingness to prepare adequately, hence the chaotic state of
Africa’s cities and the paucity of infrastructure. The future, without proper
preparation and selfless politics, looks bleak.
Africa’s recent unprecedented economic growth is
as welcome as it is necessary in changing these conditions. But it will need to
be sustained over generations, and it will give rise to other challenges,
especially in the compressed urban setting which will, within a generation,
house the majority of Africans, where dearth and excess live cheek by jowl. As
De Tocqueville reminds, misery becomes less acceptable when no longer absolute.
State failure, of course, is not just about
Somali-style collapse. The strains of fragility – of governance, economics,
politics and society – intersect and play out differently in different
circumstances. While many states are fragile, there is a group at one extreme
that threatens to explode or implode, and is as a result prioritised by
external actors. At the other extreme, there are authoritarian democrats;
states that might work for now, but whose lack of democratic governance
threatens to undermine both their standards of governance and prospects of
long-term growth. Think Rwanda.
There is no single reason or tipping point at
which a state becomes officially ‘failed’; an imaginary dividing line between
success or normality and failure. This explains the difficulty in defining such
states, and especially in categorising them. Hence terminology including failed,
fragile, weak, collapsed, vulnerable, moribund, straggling, struggling, crisis,
quasi-failed, ‘non-state’, broken, invisible, insufficient, stillborn, phantom,
or even ‘Potemkin’ states. But these situations should be viewed on a spectrum
or continuum rather than a balance sheet of failure.
Countries that work for some, at least for the
relatively well-heeled visitor, can work against the locals. Think Kenya. There
are those that significantly and continuously under-perform, lurching from
crisis to crisis, a roller coaster of political and economic collapse, but do
not explode into violence and become the focus of international aid groups, one
external metric of failure. Think Argentina.
Yet, there are common features on this spectrum,
including the role of policy and personality. Seldom is collapse or failure not
in the interests of one group or another – and it can even be a choice, a
course of action deliberately and frequently assiduously pursued regardless of
the consequences for many citizens. This is a short-term game; while this
environment may benefit different groups, the transaction costs are ultimately
as ruinous for the privileged elites, if only they knew it, as they are for the
nation.
Transformation, to use the former Mozambican
finance and Prime Minister Luisa Dias Diogo’s terminology, requires a
leadership committed to a ‘national project’, to popular welfare, and intent on
putting the country and not their personal interests first.
Popularised by billionaire Warren Buffet, known
as the ‘Sage of Omaha’, the term ‘buy and hold’ is synonymous with taking a
long-term view; not aiming to enter low and sell high, but rather to build a
business over generations. This approach discourages speculative investment and
promotes the practice of holding onto shares for years in the belief that the
stock is undervalued, and that sound management and patience will not only add
value for the investor, but create wealth and jobs in the process. Buy and hold
is also the strategy necessary to fix states. Local leaders need to adopt this
approach, investing in the future of their countries, and not simply using
their power to extract personal wealth.
The paths of reform and recovery are
carefully-studied, well-known and available to many; why, we should ask, in a
time of peril and possibility, do so few leaders walk them?
Dr Mills heads the Johannesburg-based Brenthurst
Foundation. His latest book – ‘Why States Recover’ (Hurst) – based on his
assignments in three dozen case-studies across the world, is being launched with the
RAS this
month.
Source; posted on October 7, 2014 in (http://africanarguments.org/author/africanargumentseditor/)
