Hate or love Paul Collier, the Oxford University gadfly with provocative ideas about development or lack of it, in the poorest countries of the world: but you can trust him to come up with astonishing analysis every time he gets to it. That is precisely what he has done in his latest book War, Guns and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places.
Collier is a contrarian. He goes against the flow of conventional thinking, which, in the case of the countries he baptized the bottom billion assumes that somehow those countries will turn around and become success stories. Not so says Collier, who by the way has updated the list of the countries he implies are basket cases to include virtually all sub-Saharan African countries. The way he sees it, the trajectory is in the wrong direction. More precisely, these poor and dangerous places are cornered. Left to their devices, these countries will stew in their misery forever, which may be fine by the rest of the international community except that the conditions of these countries imposes global public bad on the rest of the international community, which must act in self-interest, if nothing else, to minimize the costs to them.
Collier is not a heterodox thinker of big ideas distilled from opaque philosophies. He bases his analysis squarely on results of state of the art quantitative analysis. The thrust of Collier’s argument is that poor countries are hobbled by many challenges, most of them self-inflicted, that it would be unrealistic to expect them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps although an attempt to do so would help.
Take the matter of nation building. According to Collier, few of these places are nations: maybe they are states, and even so barely, but they are not nations in the modern sense of the term. Collier says a nation must have some internal identity and cohesion. Most of them lack both. Why is that a problem? By Collier’s lights, many of the countries are too big to be nations in the sense that they are an amalgam of various competing, often ethnic identities, and too small to be states because their size does not allow much of economies in the provision of public goods. That is his punch line. Bad consequences proceed from this fact. The politics in these places is ethno-centred because national cohesion is nonexistent. Bad governance further exacerbates the problem because its modus operandi is ethnic manipulation that sets the stage for perpetual ethnic rivalries over the control of public goods without consideration to the whole society.
In these circumstances, observes Collier, increased democracy simply ups the scale of rivalry that very often results in violence and the weakening of already weak societies Does Collier therefore believe that democracy is bad for fragile societies? In the short-term yes, but the alternative, dictatorship, is not really an option because it merely suppresses pressures without attempting to address their root causes. The reason increased freedom becomes disruptive is because rulers and the casts of supporting elites have not internalized democratic and accountability values. This leads to fundamental contradiction between form and content.
Collier dwells a great extent on Kenya as an exemplar of what could go wrong. The book is dedicated to John Githongo, the whistleblower on grand corruption in Kenya and the subject of a recently published book on governance in Kenya, It’s Our Turn to Eat, by Michela Wrong It did not surprise Collier in the least that the last election in Kenya held in 2007 was followed by mayhem of frightening proportions. The tragedy according to Collier is that the correct lessons are being missed and episodes like those that are likely to be repeated if both the countries concerned and the international community do not put the effort to learn from such experiences.
As far as internal solutions go, Collier pins his hopes on enlightened and visionary leadership such as Julius Nyerere's and Nelson Mandela's. Collier’s acknowledged friends, Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni and Rwanda’s Paul Kagame do not make the cut although of the latter, Collier says, is the most effective state builder in Africa. Notice the use of the word state rather than nation. Kagame is building an effective but largely authoritarian state that militates against nation building because of its ethno-based ideologies.
Since the emergence of visionary leaders is chancy, Collier focuses on the international community as a potential source of corrective. International aid is the lifeline of the bottom billion countries. The trouble is, says Collier, aid has not been strategically and effectively deployed leading to disillusionment on both sides, particularly among the donors, who keep doling out money anyway for a variety of reasons, guilt among them.
This nonsense should stop declares Collier who would go a step further and add even stricter conditionality to ensure that aid reaches those it is intended for.
Sovereignty should not be an issue Collier claims boldly. Countries of the bottom billion do not have much national sovereignty to begin with; few of them are nations anyway. They might have state sovereignty but even that has been converted to presidential sovereignty. By framing the issue thusly, Collier carefully isolates what he sees as the main obstacle, leadership or lack of it, and then proceeds to propose remedies that target that major link in the chain. His conclusion: the international community should design carrots and sticks to influence leaders in the Bottom Billion countries to move towards better governance systems. The sticks, threats of military intervention in certain instances, should be credible. After all, observes Collier, the international community owes it to fellow human beings who bear the brunt of suffering in the Bottom Billion countries. A return to colonialism or trusteeship of a sort? Collier is unapologetic. If that is what it takes to heave the benighted places in the 21st century, so be it. Already, he says, it is underway in several places. Liberia has virtually ceded its sovereignty of its financial management to international donors. All checks cut by the country’s ministry of finance have to be countersigned by donors.
Collier may have found unlikely allies in certain parts of Africa. During a recent demonstration to protest the suspicious killing of two civil society activities, university students in Kenya carried placards calling for a return of foreign rule in Kenya. That was not much different from a comment by a bewildered character in Chinua Achebe’s the Anthills of the Savannah who wondered perplexedly when independence would end. Beware Africa. Berlin Conference II may not be too far off.
By John Mulaa PhD
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