This issue of ROAPE appears at a time when, among Africanists and internationalists, three preoccupations struggle for prominence: first, (plans and preparation for and reactions to) elections in several African countries; second, unfolding ‘complex emergencies’ in east, west and southern Africa; and, finally, the new and unfolding ‘complex realities’ of the UK Brexit vote and the start of a Trump presidency. Recent developments in the Gambia provide an example of how these different issues, and associated debates, can intersect.
Thus, while incumbents John Dramani Mahama (Ghana) and the Gambia’s Yahya Jammeh both initially conceded defeat in December 2016 presidential elections to their respective opponents, Jammeh would later retract his concession, plunging the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) region into a political crisis lasting several weeks into the new year (Smith 2017). Jammeh’s eventual departure into exile in Equatorial Guinea on 21 January 2017, partly under threat of forcible removal by ECOWAS forces to make way for his elected successor, marked a seeming resolution to this potential ‘complex emergency’ (Maclean 2017).1 But the episode continues to stimulate reflection and debate – including much popular satirical commentary on social media.2
At the same time, there have been the inevitable and varied references to Trump and Brexit – most commonly whether and how a Trump administration might react to the Gambia crisis and its immediate aftermath (development funds were promised following the inauguration of President-Elect Adama Barrow), and whether its America First policy, in signalling a withdrawal from America’s traditional global leadership role, might serve to embolden future Jammehs.3 But, frequently, too, what a swift return to the Commonwealth might yield in the form of a potentially enhanced status with a post-Brexit United Kingdom, which President Barrow reportedly described on Sky Television as ‘our number one partner in terms of trade, in terms of democracy, in terms of good governance’ (Crawford 2017). And, finally, what Gambia's notification to quit the International Criminal Court in October and declared commitment to human rights and belief in public accountability mean for relations with the EU. The latter strongly and publicly supported Barrow’s accession to the presidency; and has promptly released development funds previously withheld as a result of governance concerns under the Jammeh regime. The EU has also promised further significant support for the country’s emerging political and economic recovery programme (Ceesay 2017; Maclean and Jammeh 2017). These promises require in turn that the new regime ‘delivers on its promises’, while adhering to the principles and objectives set out in the Cotonou Agreement (Anders 2017; Darboe 2017a).
Clearly, while it is too early for conclusions of any kind about Gambia’s recent experience to be drawn,4 there is understandable interest in identifying wider lessons from the specifics of the case (Anders 2017; Cheeseman 2017; Hultin 2017). Somewhat helpfully, President Barrow frames the immediate (and specific) challenges that his country faces in governance and in development-related terms, which resonate well beyond the country’s borders:
We have just assumed the task of governing the country after decades of dictatorship and self-imposed isolation […]. We had a dictatorship that thrived on bad governance, human rights abuses, bad policy choices, and violation of the rule of law. A dictatorship that cost us our friends. A dictatorship whose conduct deprived us of our development and aid. A dictatorship that was brutal toward its citizens. (Maclean and Jammeh 2017)
For now, there is, however, little doubt that the Gambian experience does indeed speak to traditional areas of interest to ROAPE and its readership – electoral democracy and politics of succession; the complexities of political power; the use and abuse of constitutional authority; and consequences of, and resistance to, systems of (mis)rule.
Significantly, the papers making up this issue address themes, which revolve broadly around political economies of governance and rule, in a number of countries that, like the Gambia, have experienced major transition crises; namely, Kenya, Rwanda, Mozambique and Somalia;5 as well as in Senegal and Sierra Leone, two of the Gambia’s ECOWAS neighbours, whose leaders were involved in mediation during the recent crisis (and which also have first-hand experience of electoral transitions and associated political crises).
In the opening paper, Biniam Bedasso is interested both to theorise ‘elite bargaining […] as an organisational tool’ and demonstrate why ‘ethnicity often trumps economic cleavages’ in Kenya. His paper traces the salience of ethnicity in Kenya over the longue durée, while locating the persistence of ethnic allegiances in the deployment of ‘political tribalism’ in the service of political compromise and elite accommodation. In the process, he shows how and why – high postcolonial income and inter-regional inequalities notwithstanding – the ‘interplay between ethnic allegiances and historical institutions’ has failed to produce class consciousness, leaving working-class Kenyans ‘allied to wealthy elites from their respective ethnic groups’. But it is in his exploration of the enduring question of why ‘ethnicity [has] continued to be the most viable means of collective action’ that the real value of Bedasso’s contribution lies. He provides a careful, detailed and nuanced analysis which is at pains to point out, first, that while both ‘ethnic clustering’ and incipient class differentiation predated colonial rule, they became intensified with European contact and postcolonial rule; second, that ethnicity was (and continues to be) deployed in public life in (often extremely) nuanced ways; and, finally, that ‘an environment of political and social fluidity’ was arguably indispensable to such instrumental use of ethnicity.
This tightly argued piece leads to two conclusions: first, that recent (and, by extension, earlier) election-related violence is probably best understood as ‘complex outcomes of historical grievances and elite posturing’; and, second, that structural transformation of the economy alongside investment in human capital offer the most promising long-term responses to ethnic strife. Ultimately, it is really the means to, rather than the conclusions in themselves, which sees the paper at its most challenging and thought-provoking. Significantly, the new government in that other ‘weakly institutionalised polity’ of the Gambia, with which this editorial opened, appears to have arrived at a very similar conclusion, judging by early statements of intent for tackling youth unemployment, empowerment and skills acquisition, on the one hand, and economic diversification, on the other (ABM 2017; Hultin 2017), even if the overarching vision beyond international aid and investment could do with greater clarity (Anders 2017).6 Either way, at the very heart of the vision of a New Gambia lies the question of how patron–client networks and various ‘partnership’ relationships might be reconfigured in the wake of the transition currently under way (Cheeseman 2017; Hultin 2017).
Felix Conteh, in his contribution on the instrumentalisation of decentralisation in post-war Sierra Leone, contains indications of what forms such new and redefined interactions might take, notably how ‘kinship and informal networks have often shaped configurations of political class’. He shows how, like their opposite number in Kenya, political elites have ‘reconfigured the post-conflict state on their own terms’; and how such elite interconnectedness rests on a negotiated consensus based on compromise and accommodation. More specifically, he argues – with shades yet again of Kenya – that historical ethno-regional voting patterns have both facilitated and underpinned such accommodation, thereby securing the survival of the two main political parties (the All People’s Congress and the Sierra Leone People’s Party), ‘whether in government or in opposition’. Political economic specifics are thus central to both accounts, which emphasise to varying degrees mechanisms for maintaining peace while instrumentalising (the threat or actual use of) violence. Conteh’s case study is thus no less instructive than Bedasso’s; but where the former concentrates on how political class unites against ‘others’, the latter explains how (and why) such a cleavage is also maintained by actively dividing to rule (through political assassinations, for example). In post-conflict Sierra Leone, Conteh concludes, the adoption of decentralisation policies was not driven by a desire to empower citizens through facilitating their participation in governance and enhancing their access to public goods; rather, it has often reflected the interests of a bi-partisan ‘political class’, particularly its ‘rationalisation of the policy’s political and economic benefits’, including central control over local-level (‘decentralised’) political structures and processes (and thus the power of patronage).
Like both Conteh and Bedasso, the authors of the next paper are also interested in how politics ‘works’ in everyday life. Nonetheless, while Conteh illustrates instances of the deliberate manipulation of both quantitative and qualitative data by the political elite to subvert popular aspirations to narrow class interests, An Ansoms, Esther Marijnen, Giuseppe Cioffo and Jude Murison are particularly interested in the politics of knowledge production and deployment in Rwanda. They are specifically interested in ‘the production of knowledge on poverty’ and, equally importantly, the deployment of statistics on poverty reduction. Thus, they note that, following indications that Rwanda’s impressive economic growth in the early to mid 2000s was not matched by corresponding reductions in either poverty or inequality, more recent survey data shows a continuing upward trend in growth being matched by ‘a spectacular decrease in poverty’ and reduction in inequality. However, like words, numbers (can) have consequences. And, in countries like Rwanda which are heavily dependent on international political and financial support, Ansoms et al. observe that ‘socio-economic progress is important in enhancing the legitimacy of the recipient government, while donors need “success stories” to legitimise their expenditure in development cooperation’ (in this issue, 49). This is precisely the kind of mutually dependent ‘development partnership’ (or, more accurately, political economic patronage) which gave rise to the adoption of Sierra Leone’s decentralisation policy in the first place, and which is already envisaged for the New Gambia by its main international development partners (Anders 2017).
Yet, while being mindful of the political significance of the statistics in question, but unlike Conteh in his Sierra Leone study, Ansoms et al. make no accusations of deliberate manipulation of statistical information. Instead, they stress the limitations of macro-level statistical data based on large state-run household surveys for apprehending ‘everyday’ local-level poverty dynamics, which lend themselves much more readily to ethnographic and qualitative research, than to standardised household survey techniques and methods. To this end, they complement findings of official household living conditions surveys with findings from their own longitudinal in-depth research, and conclude with admirable understatement, that ‘our qualitative field data suggest very different trends than the large-scale quantitative data.’ Moreover, their use of data is careful, nuanced and enlightening in a way which recalls Bedasso’s earlier contribution. And, while not shying away from overt recognition of the role of power in the generation and use of the statistics in question, they also, and for the most part, allow the reader to draw their own conclusion(s) based on information provided. Nonetheless, the overriding impression is of the centrality of enumeration, on the one hand, and the instrumentalisation of the interpretation of enumeration data in the political economy of rule, on the other. But there is also a third: in a tightly governed and ‘target-oriented’ Rwanda, processes and structures of development are integral to both the production and surveillance of governable (increasingly market-oriented) subjects.
Papa Faye’s examination of the political economy of charcoal production and trade in Senegal returns us to the politics of decentralisation, this time in the context of natural resources management, even while maintaining the collection’s ongoing focus on how politics works in everyday life and governance. He sets out to ‘analyse the effects of [decentralisation] policies and regulations applied to the charcoal market’ in Senegal, using notions of ‘citizenship’ and ‘identity’ as they are revealed in the everyday workings of two project interventions in the east of the country. Here, as elsewhere, the adoption of policies and practices of ‘democratic decentralisation’, starting in the late 1990s, relaxed formerly tightly restricted access to community (but not state or private) forests and woodlands. As a result, opportunities for charcoal production and trade were extended to local village communities, albeit under (World Bank- and USAID-funded and/or managed) forest and energy projects. In principle, decentralisation involved local electoral representation in Rural Councils and direct participation in woodland management decision-making via consultative institutions like the Presidents of Rural Councils. In practice, decentralisation heightened identity politics but seemed to bring little meaningful change (e.g., reduced inequality) in its wake.
Significantly, however, villager participation in the charcoal trade remains as rare and as constrained after decentralisation as before, with villagers or local producers (still) priced out of the market as (potentially) independent producers and traders by prohibitive licence fees and the deliberately discriminatory interpretation of relevant rules, regulations and laws, to the benefit of large urban-based commercial dealers. The latter have continued to employ local villagers alongside migrant labourers in gangs producing charcoal under licence, as well as gaining increased access to supplementary local supplies of charcoal at subsidised prices for eventual sale in an urban market in which they enjoy near-monopoly control. In contrast, local village producer access to migrant labour, urban markets and even community woodland/forests has been severely curtailed or banned altogether. According to Faye, ‘although some decision-making powers had been formally transferred to local governments by the central government, the exercise of power was retained in practice by forest agents despite the intervention of participatory forest management projects’ (Faye, in this issue, 70, emphasis added). In short, and as in the Kenyan and Sierra Leonean cases, a coalition of (in this case technical and/or bureaucratic and commercial) elites have successfully reconfigured post-decentralisation realities on their own terms and for their own benefit. For Faye, the contrasting fortunes of the two main producer groups under decentralisation reflect not only ‘the politics of recognition’ (i.e., identity and citizenship) of these groups, but also their respective abilities to ‘influence the political economy in which they are embedded’ (Ibid., in this issue, 68). Like the other contributions, then, this one is as much about elite capture as it is about localised grievance at perceived misrule.
Next, Marta Regina Fernández y Garcia challenges us to rethink peacebuilding practices on the strength of the Somaliland experience. Her contribution is based on a careful reading of the discourses underpinning the various international attempts to ‘rectify’ the perceived ‘failure’ that is post-1992 Somalia, and raises, yet again, the perennial questions: what is a state, and what are states for? On what or whose authority might they be ‘governed’? To what end, and with what consequences, might their citizens and subjects be ‘disciplined’? In other words, how, to paraphrase Fernández y Garcia's overarching question, might the notion of the ‘reconstruction and modernisation’ of the Somali state be variously understood and with what material and other consequences? As with Ansoms et al. on Rwanda and Faye on Senegal, the politics of knowledge production and deployment emerge as central to the case that Fernández y Garcia advances. She demonstrates the material consequences of evolving UN and USA discourses of violence, chaos, anarchy, disorder and tradition in relation to Somalia’s various crises, and is careful to highlight how these routinely ignore the origins of conflict in the country, while highlighting the reasons behind the reproduction of such conflict.
This has the added advantage, she suggests, of both depoliticising and externalising the crises, given that discourses of a Somali return to a Hobbesian state of nature are, by definition, exempt from the necessity of referencing any possible role for colonialism, the postcolonial state or indeed Cold War regional militarisation in the genesis of such crises. Yet, for Fernández y Garcia, and contrary to the dominant discourses she reviews,
the problem that Somalia faced in the post-cold war period was not linked to the pre-colonial Somali lifestyle, but predominantly […] to the introduction of the modern state to Somalia and the changes this introduction produced in Somali practices. Thus, the problem faced by Somalia was in part due to the introduction of elements associated with modernity within Somali society and not, as commonly alleged, derived exclusively from pre-modern factors. (Fernández y Garcia, in this issue, 94–95)
In the final paper, Isabela Nogueira, Ossi Ollinaho, Eduardo Costa Pinto, Grasiela Baruco, Alexis Saludjian, José Paulo Guedes Pinto, Paulo Balanco and Carlos Schonerwald trace the intertwined fortunes of the Brazilian and Mozambican economies during the 2000s and, in the process, remind us once more of the frequently transnational reach and interdependent nature of systems of governance and rule. Here, they show how, despite an annual growth rate in excess of 7% over more than two decades, Mozambique did not experience a concurrent reduction in poverty. They account for this via an investigation of the role of economic porosity and the country’s system of accumulation; and highlight the role of Mozambique as a destination for Brazilian aid and investment which contributed to the country’s capital accumulation up to about 2013/2014. Building on the work of ROAPE contributing editor Carlos Nuno Castel-Branco (2014), Nogueira et al. are insistent that ‘extraction of the surplus from the economy has taken place in the form of social expropriation from the working class, capital outflow abroad and concentration of capital in the hands of a few, domestically’ (Nogueira et al., in this issue, 106). Indeed, much of the paper is devoted to detailing the processes, dynamics and outcomes of economic and social porosity and associated patterns of primitive accumulation, as well as highlighting the economic disarticulation resulting from their combined effects. In providing details of the penetration of the Mozambican political economy by Brazilian technology and capital, they illustrate how the latter functioned as both instrument and beneficiary of such porosity. And, given what the paper notes as the ‘political connections between Brazilian investors and Mozambican elites and the export-oriented purpose of their activities’ (Ibid., 114), it is not surprising that what challenges to this system of political economic governance exist have come from the working class and peasantry who bear the brunt of the costs of porosity, with strong support from civil society. As for the Mozambican state, even in the changed context of the much reduced influence of Brazilian investors distracted by ongoing crisis at home, there is little to suggest it is ready to either question or replace the logic of porosity which has driven it thus far.
Taken together, the papers in this issue of ROAPE are therefore as much about governance and rule per se as they are about associated grievance and the diverse forms of resistance which such grievance fuels. They serve, too, as reminder of the variety of ways in which politics is ultimately about power and, therefore, why elections are so keenly contested and political power as jealously guarded as Jammeh has recently demonstrated it can be.
In a similar vein, Yusuf Bangura, long-time ally of ROAPE, observes in the conclusion to a paper reflecting on the politics of poverty reduction how:
Power relations lie at the core of development. They determine which actors are in a position to define policies and influence development processes and outcomes. Strategies that seek to bring about changes in poverty outcomes must therefore consider ways to shift the balance of power. (Bangura n.d.)
For our purposes, these coincide with specific examples of grievance highlighted by several of our contributors, who also provide indications of the range, reach, power and influence of the entrenched interests which will need to be confronted and overcome for meaningful shifts in the balance of power of the kind Bangura advocates to take place. Yet, both here and elsewhere, there are encouraging signs of a willingness on the part of various forces to join local and not-so-local struggles, capitalising on the power and potential of social media wherever and whenever possible in organising and advancing such struggles (Dukureh 2016; Gathigi 2016; Karekwaivanane 2016; Naidoo 2017). Indeed, to return to the Gambia, in closing this editorial, Smith and Moss conclude from that country’s recent experience that its
transition from dictatorship to democracy might provide a blueprint for other democratic movements across Africa. A united political opposition, active regional support, increased media attention and public advocacy, and a vocal diaspora all came together to bring down one of Africa’s longest-serving autocrats. Those factors could help spur democratic progress in other countries, too. (Smith and Moss 2017)