A man from the British government rang me up the other day and asked what I thought would happen in the next five years in West Africa (the advantage of being interested in an obscure subject: you don’t need to know that much for people to think you’re an expert). This is like asking someone to predict which lottery numbers will come up this week but, having prefaced all comments with the get-out clause that the only thing certain in such an unstable part of the world is uncertainty, I ventured a few guesses.
The first thing to note if you’re a Western government is that of the five really key countries in the region – Nigeria, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Ghana and Guinea (in order of importance based on the impact of what happens in them on other countries) – four have quite serious internal divisions to deal with. Nigeria faces rebellion in the Delta and increasing unrest in the middle belt and north; Senegal has the long-running Casamance rebellion; in the Ivory Coast there is a dramatic north-south divide which is threatening to explode (again) into war; and Guinea has the disaffected Forestiere region and simmering resentment among some sections of the large Fula community. In other words, four of the region’s five most important countries are bedevilled by internal instability. This complicates policy-making and means Western governments, businesses and civil society organisations taking an interest in the region cannot be sure who will be in charge next month, let alone five years down the line. You only need to look at the recent elections in these five countries to see how shaky are their foundations: few would have predicted that Guinea’s elections would go off peacefully, but they did; elections in Ghana, the beacon of good governance in the region, looked tense for a while before a result was called; and the Ivory Coast, which had enjoyed a few years of peace after a brutal civil conflict, now has two self-declared presidents who may soon declare war on each other.
Elections in West Africa are a tinderbox – nobody knows whether they will result in peaceful change, uneventful stasis, or devastating civil war. Two of the three pillars that have not held recent elections – Nigeria and Senegal – have ballots coming up in the next twelve months. Goodluck Jonathan looks like winning in Nigeria (and stability is generally much more likely if the incumbent wins), but what if he loses? Will he try to cling to power at all costs? Will he look across to the defeated Laurent Gbagbo in the Ivory Coast and see that he doesn’t need to stand down if he loses? It’s unlikely, but nothing is impossible, and some of Jonathan’s recent pronouncements suggest a growing taste for power. And in Senegal, where Abdoulaye Wade plans to bulldoze the constitution and stand for a further term in power in 2012 (ignoring the official two-term limit), will the opposition manage to mount a defence of legality? If not, will others take it into their own hands and turn to violence to oust the increasingly unpopular president? If the octogenarian Wade wins and then hands over to his son, this could trigger even greater resentment (a Senegalese friend I spoke to in Spain a few days back said his people would rise up if they thought their country was being turned into a kingdom, and since I started writing this post, the country has already experienced its first day of rage).
There are external threats, too, of course. South American cocaine dealers are strengthening their foothold in Guinea-Bissau, and are likely to take advantage of any signs of weakness or instability in neighbouring Senegal or Guinea to broaden their operational base. The drug dealers appear to have already linked up with another external threat – Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb – which is branching out from kidnappings to assaults on governments and foreign interests in the region (the US government has just warned of an imminent attack on its embassy in Bamako, Mali). AQIM has made overtures to Islamists in northern Nigeria, suggesting a pan-West African terror network is the goal. The governments of Mauritania, Mali and Niger are most vulnerable to the extremists, but they could also have destabilising effects on Nigeria and Burkina Faso as they spread south.
It is not all bad news, however. Ghana is at peace, and if it can use its new oil revenues effectively and fairly it will act as a motor for the surrounding economies. Guinea is stable, and if it can avoid contagion from the Ivory Coast troubles has the potential to achieve rapid development as prices of minerals continue to rise. And if Senegal and Nigeria can get through their elections without drama, four of the five regional pillars will be well placed to confront internal and external threats.
This would leave the Ivory Coast as the basket case. I have argued before that a power-sharing deal is the least bad solution, and it still looks better to me than civil war. If the country does slide back into conflict, the domino effect will first imperil its fragile neighbours Guinea and Liberia (where elections are due this year), before possibly rippling to Sierra Leone (elections next year) and Burkina Faso, which has problems of its own.
Underlying all this instability is the fact – and this part is not a guess – that West Africa has too many young people and not enough resources or jobs. Climate change, which is triggering desertification, the drying up of boreholes and drought, is speeding the rush to the cities, where services are mostly absent and living conditions often unbearable (Burkina Faso may be an unlikely venue for a revolution in the short-term, indeed, simply because it is less urbanised than most of its neighbours). Climate change is also increasing food prices, and even the strongest governments are unlikely to be able to withstand a prolonged and violent protest campaign by the young urban-dwellers who are hardest hit by price rises.
The more pernickety amongst you will have noticed that I have cleverly avoided making any actual predictions in the foregoing – the region is so unstable that anyone doing so is likely to end up with egg on his/her face. But if forced to pin my colours to a mast, I’d very tentatively put the following possibilities forward for discussion:
– increasing urban unrest, sometimes boiling over into serious conflict as the combination of hordes of young urban men, poverty, corruption and repression of dissent proves as explosive as it has in the Middle East;
– strong mineral prices to boost economic growth in mineral-rich countries while widening the gap between rich and poor;
– Nigerian elections to go off relatively peacefully, though unrest in the Delta and particularly the north will gradually intensify over the next five years; Senegalese elections to confirm Wade in power (sparking violent protests);
– an escalation in activity by South American drug dealers, who may overrun Guinea-Bissau and then use that country as a base for expansion into Senegal;
– Al Qaeda in the Maghreb to join up with Nigerian Islamists and target the weaker governments of the Sahel.
Interestingly, the man from the government didn’t ask me what he thought Britain could do to help West Africa, but I told him anyway. In the short-term, we should promote peace at all costs in the Ivory Coast, admitting that its democracy is imperfect (who is to say that Ouattara wouldn’t do the same as Gbagbo in a few years time if he loses the next election?), but that another civil war would be a whole lot worse and could lead to an irreparable rupture between north and south. And we should hold our businesses to the same standards in Africa as we would expect of them at home (of the $37 billion siphoned illegally out of Nigeria in 2008 according to this Center for International Policy report, about half was stolen by Western oil companies dodging local taxes). In the longer-term, we should stop subsidising our uncompetitive farmers so that West Africans can surf the tide of rising food prices rather than be drowned by it; work to prepare our populations to accept more West African immigrants; and begin to make the case for legalisation of drugs. The latter are obviously far-off goals, but if we continue to turn away its people and encourage illicit drug trafficking, we will be hindering the region rather than helping it.
