by Alex Evans | Mar 5, 2008 | Africa, Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development
“If you see people throwing stones, it means if they had guns, they would have been shooting”, observes Frederick, an economics grad who drives a motorcycle taxi in Douala, Cameroon.
The FT’s Matthew Green explains:
Only a few crumbs were left on the counter at the Boulangerie du Rail delicatessen in Douala after looters swept the shelves of cake, croissants and champagne… “People are hungry, they have nothing to eat,” said Felix Djoyo, the manager, who had locked himself behind a metal door while shanty dwellers ransacked his bottles of Bordeaux.
The crisis in Cameroon might have generated few headlines abroad, but the violence shows how soaring oil and food prices on global markets are threatening the patronage systems propping up some of Africa’s longest-serving leaders. Protests linked to surging inflation have broken out in Guinea and Burkina Faso in recent months, where presidents have ruled for more than two decades. Niger, Ghana and Senegal have also seen demonstrations …
The government has agreed to a small reduction in fuel prices to placate protesters, saying it cannot afford the kinds of subsidies needed to shield the economy from global market forces. But many residents blame Mr Biya for the hardship, saying years of venal rule have skewed the economy to favour a tiny elite.
So, another point to add to the growing list of what rising food and energy prices mean for Africa: patronage systems come under increasing stress in conditions of scarcity. Look at Kenya. People at the tops of agencies are acutely aware of the problem – DFID’s Douglas Alexander and the World Bank’s Bob Zoellick both returned from Davos fired up about the political impacts of scarcity issues, for instance. Some people in country offices get it, too.
But the underlying problem is still that many donor agencies’ culture is all about disbursing cash – rather than having a really sophisticated analysis of endogenous drivers of change and a theory of influence to go with it. Neither the old problem of patronage nor the newer problem of scarcity issues is really that well understood in donor agency cultures. We’d better hope they get up to speed pretty fast…
by Charlie Edwards | Mar 5, 2008 | Global system, Influence and networks
I am sure Alex and/or David will post something about Miliband’s speech to the FCO leadership conference which happened yesterday. My advice – don’t get too carried away with the speech – it’s good and runs through a familiar set of themes, instead watch the video embedded into the speech.
Two things stand out. Miliband’s plea for a culture of creativity and challenge in the FCO and secondly, the need for the FCO to do the vision, strategy and the detail.
There is also a nice line about diplomacy no longer being solely about relations between governments but about governments and civil society.
by Jules Evans | Mar 5, 2008 | Europe and Central Asia, Influence and networks
Am back in Moscow for a week, working on a story. The impression I get from my meetings so far is that the West has underestimated the extent to which a new era has begun in Russian politics, and the extent to which Russia genuinely has a new leader, with his own agenda, in Dmitry Medvedev, who was elected president on Sunday.
The consensus Western view is that Medvedev is Putin’s stooge. The Western press were full of cartoons last week depicting Medvedev as a puppet sitting on Putin’s knee. Western politicians have been happy to parrot the same negative opinion of the new president. Hillary Clinton, for example, said the new president (whose name she couldn’t even remember – see this video. Man, that’s foreign policy experience for you!) is “someone who is obviously being installed by Putin, who Putin can control, who has very little independence”.
Obama was similarly down on the new guy, saying “Putin will still have the strongest hand”, while John McCain, well-known Russophile, said Medvedev’s election meant that “Putin had just made himself president for life”. Nice one fellows – how to offend the new Russian president before he’s even been inaugurated!
Russians themselves are unsure how seriously to take their new president. I haven’t met anyone who’s voted for him, in fact, I haven’t met anyone who voted at all. When he appeared on stage at a rock concert with Putin on Sunday, it was Putin’s name the crowd chanted, which must have been somewhat gutting for Medvedev. The public have already given the diminutive president a nickname though: ‘nano-president’.
But we shouldn’t be too quick to write off Medvedev. Kremlinologists tell me Medvedev is his own man, with his own team, and his own agenda. And, as president, he has vast powers of appointment. In fact, the rumours from the Kremlin are that there is already tension between him and Putin over personnel changes. Medvedev wants to bring in his own team, and get rid of some of the old guard.
What can we expect from the forthcoming personnel changes? It may mean out with the spooks, in with the lawyers. (more…)
by Charlie Edwards | Mar 5, 2008 | South Asia
The International Narcotics Control Board has published its report on narcotics in Afghanistan. The increase in opium cultivation which is taking place in the south of the country (Afghanistan is estimated to supply more than 90 per cent of the world’s illicit opium) the effects of the drug trade: an increase in organised crime, corruption and drug dependence (which is severe in Iran and has led to a major HIV epidemic in the NE of the country) and the impact on Iran, Pakistan and the central Asian republics all make for an increasingly familiar story and one that will come as no surprise to GD readers. The facts are still worth thinking about.
- Iran, the chief transit country for drugs from Afghanistan, now has the highest rate of opiate abuse in the world.
- More than half of inmates in Iran’s prisons have been convicted for drug-related offences, and seizures of opium, morphine and heroin have risen rapidly.
- Pakistan, through which an estimated 35 per cent of Afghanistan’s opiates are smuggled, faces growing problems, with seizures in 2006, the last year for which figures were available, rising 46 per cent.
- An estimated 21 per cent of Afghanistan’s heroin and morphine transit via central Asia, the report says, leading to large increases in seizures in Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
- Drug trafficking and abuse in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, which have long borders with Turkey and Russia, will deteriorate further
- Drug abuse in Iraq appears to have risen dramatically and while opiate use in western and central Europe has remained stable or declined, it has increased in Russia and eastern Europe.
- The rise of cannabis cultivation in Afghanistan, including in some areas that have been declared poppy-free.
Aside from these devastating facts and the sense of powerlessness that comes with them the annual report is a timely reminder that Afghanistan’s drug addiction is a primary indicator for how well the Karzai Government, NATO and all the other international organisations are managing the stabilisation and reconstruction of the country.
The INCB report also clearly demonstrates the negative influences the drugs trade is having across a broad spectrum of issues. My concern, however, is that our conventional approach to countering narcotics in Afghanistan, a so-called wicked issue, remains hamstrung by a set of assumptions that is actually making it more not less difficult to manage. The Narcotics problem is only one node in a complex system. All of which reminds me of a saying from the gritty, realistic and addictive American TV series The Wire – ‘ follow the drugs, all you find are drug users and drug dealers, but if you follow the money, you don’t know what you’ll find’.
by Richard Gowan | Mar 4, 2008 | Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa
Last week, I noted that the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee had come out with a new report calling for the EU to get serious about Iraq’s reconstruction. I’ve now read the text in full. It’s a detailed set of proposals, built on a strong case that most current European funding to Iraq might as well go down a drain, and it gets 60% of the way to a strategic alternative. Here’s a summary:
- The EU should move from supporting reconstruction to governance: the bulk of European money earmarked for Iraq is currently committed to the International Reconstruction Fund Facility for Iraq (IRFFI), which is jointly managed by the World Bank and UN. The MEPs think this is poorly managed, isn’t transparent and (sin of sins) doesn’t give the EU “visibility”. They skip over the fact that many EU members have basically ignored the fund – France has donated a whopping $31,800 to it since 2003 – but they’re probably on the money overall. Except, as they point out, nobody’s quite sure where the money is. The alternative is to shift towards “projects focussed on technical assistance and capacity-building in the fields of rule of law, financial management, democratic governance and human rights.”
- Link the money to missions: although the MEPs may not like the way IRFFI’s been managed, they’re happy for a lot of governance work to be run through UN agencies. But they also seem to like the idea of getting EU personnel to assist in police reform and “large-scale disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration”. They support greater European involvement in Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Iraq – the US currently has 25 PRTs around the country, although they focus on infrastructure rather than all that governance jazz. In addition, the British and Italians lead one each already, but this is one area on which the MEPs are coy about what to do. More European personnel in U.S.-led units? Stand-alone Euro-PRTs?
- Fly the flag: what the MEPs really seem to want is that elusive “visibility” though. EU members that don’t have diplomatic missions in Baghdad should set them up. Security allowing, current European offices in provincial cities like Erbil should raise their profile, and so forth.
It’s this flying the flag dimension that worries me a bit. I like the idea of targeting money on governance, and there’s a case for deploying smallish EU missions to handle issues like police reform. To date, the only EU-flagged mission “to” Iraq is a justice reform program largely based in, erm, Brussels organizing training courses and (ah the romance) work experience for Iraqis in Europe. Slightly closer-range support should be an option – although the MEPs have doubts, and argue that the EU should look at how to use Private Security Companies to deliver missions.
But wherever the personnel are found, “visibility” is not a strategy. And here the MEPs mix realism (for the time being, it’s the U.S. that provides the strategic framework for EU engagement) with optimism (over time, the UN should take on that role). They rightly note that the UN has adopted a greater role in Iraq in recent months, and they urge the EU to support its efforts to promote political reconciliation. But they avoid the question of what happens after the U.S. elections, and how the EU’s members should react to the prospect of a U.S. withdrawal – or, if McCain wins, a whole lot more counter-insurgency.
So I give the report an A+ for its basic instinct (the EU can’t desert Iraq); an A for its overall logic (the EU needs to use its money better); and a B+ for its tactical proposals (reduced from a B++ due to over-use of “visibility”). But the pupil doesn’t really want to study strategy, so I can’t really offer a mark for that.
