West Africa’s looming anarchy

It was first Senegal, then it moved on to Mali and now it’s Guinea Bissau. Guinea Bissau is back in the news again with a thump and as it’s so associated with this small coastal West African nation with many islets in the Atlantic Ocean, it is for all the bad reasons.

West Africa is indeed an interesting sub-region of Africa. On Thursday, April 12, ECOWAS effectively forced Malian soldiers who annexed power in March 22 this year to hand over power to a civilian interim administration led by the former speaker of parliament, Dioncounda Traore.

Even as this was going on in the Malian capital Bamako, Guinea Bissau’s army were quietly fine tuning plans to topple the government and disrupt the April 29 presidential election run-off.

Guinea Bissau

The former Prime Minister, Carlos Gomes Júnior, who won the first round of the presidential election was almost certain of winning the run-off election. 

He is now under arrest, even feared dead, after the army attacked his house on Thursday night, three weeks after Mali’s former president was driven out of office by Capt Amadou Sanogo and his visionless, clueless and directionless thugs.

Disparagingly described by many as Africa’s first narco-state, the country is barely livable: high levels of unemployment, there are no factories, unexploited natural resources, dismembered police and ragtag army infested with narco-traders and associated violence.

Guinea Bissau is not Somalia for sure but it’s still a tough country by any standard. Both countries are ungovernable, even anarchic if you like. Robert Kaplan may not need to revise his 1994 thesis again anytime soon.

It’s scandalous to say that a country is used to coups but Guinea Bissau may be very close to this. Just as this morning, April 13, 2012, on December 26, 2011 the country’s population woke up to the sound of gun and artillery fire from an attempted coup d’tat while the President, Malam Bacai Sanha was receiving medical attention in France. 

The coup failed but the president also never recovered from his illness, diabetes.

Earlier in June 2009, just a couple of weeks to scheduled presidential elections (June 28 to be specific), the military assassinated Baciro Dabo, a leading presidential candidate and Helder Proenca, an ex-defence minister.

These killings took place on the same day but separately. Needless to say, both assassinations were linked. Dabo and Proenca were allegedly plotting a coup to kill Prime Minister Carlos Gomes Júnior and the country’s army chief of staff, Jose Zamora Induta. The same Gomes Júnior who was arrested during last night’s coup.

Gomes Júnior had resigned in February 2012, a month after former president, Sanha died in France, to contest the March presidential election. He won the first round by twice as many votes as his closest rival and former president, Kumba Yala. But with last night’s army putsch, the presidential run-off between will almost certainly not take place on April 29.

Violent clashes are not limited to the politicians and the soldiers in Guinea Bissau. Infighting within the army is intense and so is fighting within the dismembered police service and other Bissau’s security agencies. Factions regularly fight over which group controls the drugs trade and other resources of the country.

Gomes Junior casting his ballot

Irony: Guinea Bissau soldiers queue to vote

It’s a circle of mutinies, coups, uprisings, assassinations and now narcotics trade. Over the last few years, the viciousness seems to have been cranked up. 

It is easily attributable to the spoils of the drugs trade and the acute power struggle between the political class and the politically powerful military.

Guinea Bissau is now a major a staging post for the trans-shipment of narcotics from South America to coke-addicted Europe via West Africa. 

President Joao Bernardo ‘Nino’ Viera, who himself first came to power by toppling Luis Cabral, was murdered by the army on March 2, 2009. Viera’s assassination was partly fueled by an earlier bomb attack on and subsequent murder of his key political rival and army chief of staff, General Batiste Tagme na Waie long suspected to be involved in the drugs trade.

If you thought the plot of Guinea Bissau’s intriguingly opaque and checkered power struggle and political chess game is complicated, you're right. Dabo who was killed in June 2009, three months after the assassination of President Viera was a close associate of the president. 

The army apparently panicked Dabo could pursue them if he won the elections to jail those (soldiers and non soldiers) who plotted and assassinated Viera.

Economically, Guinea Bissau is an even more insignificant economy than Mali in West Africa but the danger it poses to the larger region is grave given its uncharitable reputable as a major narcotics transiting and arms trafficking enclave within the sub-region.

So what can we expect from the regional body, ECOWAS? ECOWAS will quickly get involved in Guinea Bissau as it has done before to restore order.

But the sub-regional grouping is likely to be more nuanced in how it tackles this country in comparison with Mali for a number of reasons not least because Bissau is a longstanding troubled country needing a more careful nudge to remold the failing state and move it and the long-suffering population away from a rather violent and unstable past to a stable and progressive path. 

Put simply, ECOWAS won't adopt a 'machoman' posture with Bissau.

Over to you, ECOWAS!

Captain Sanogo’s Catch-22

The military thugs in Mali seem to have beaten far more than they could chew. From the swift change in tone of Capt Amadou Sanogo and his men, it does look like they wouldn’t have embarked on the adventure if they figured early that the ECOWAS axe would fall so heavily and swiftly on their heads.

ECOWAS leaders

Mid-rank soldiers of the Malian army toppled the elected president, Amadou Toure in March. The former president has since gone into hiding. Some of his ministers are under arrest.

Although the soldiers have since made a U-turn with promises to reinstate the Constitution they tossed into the bin when they annexed power two weeks ago, their motivations for the coup is not simply because the war in the north with the Tuaregs was badly prosecuted by the commander-in-chief, the former president.

The soldiers sought to appropriate power as they read the then scheduled April 29 election would have legitimized whoever was elected and make their thirst for power even more difficult to quench. Been a landlocked country and the northern half in the grip of the Tuareg secessionists, the soldiers are trapped between ECOWAS’ regional embargo and the rebels. 

Mauritania and Algeria also neighbours but who are not members of ECOWAS have adopted the regional body’s sanctions against Mali.

ECOWAS seem to have internalised recent lessons bothering on collective action in the region. Last year the regional grouping cut off former president of Cote d’Ivoire, Laurent Gbagbo, by freezing the country’s accounts at the height of the post-election crisis. 

The move quickly whittled Gbagbo’s influence over the south of the country before he was crushed by French soldiers and forces loyal to Alassane Ouattara.

Capt. Sanogo

One way out for the coup makers in Mali is for the army to accede to the demands of the regional body and return power to the former civilian administration. 

The other is to attempt to overrun the Tuareg rebels and recapture the northern territories to consolidate power.

The latter doesn’t look the least feasible as the balance of power now weighs heavily against the Army. Equally important is the fact that the Malian army doesn’t have access to the means, the war chest – finance, fuel, food and other logistics to pursue the war to any logical end given the ECOWAS sanctions.

Economically, Mali is not a very important player in West Africa let alone Africa. The economy is comparatively tiny albeit the landmass is huge and steeped in ancient history with Timbuktu as the centrepiece. Politically, however, the country has for the most part been a very important regional actor right from the days of independence struggle in the 1950s.

 
The next few days are critical to how the Malian conundrum is resolved and a redefinition of security in the West African sub-region. Mali’s example is set to also define how other regions of Africa respond to future military takeovers in their neighbourhoods.

Africa’s fossil fuels & public expectations

Rising discovery of oil and gas in commercial quantities across Africa has unleashed a sea of excitement in potential markets outside the continent but more importantly in Africa itself.

Fossil fuels are essential to the modern economy, never mind the dangers these fuels pose to global climate and the fact that Africa is most at risk from climate change.

Thus, it came as no surprise that Kenya, East Africa’s biggest economy, is gripped with excitement following the president’s announcement of a major oil find. The British oil company, Tullow Oil made the discovery last week. It is the first such find in Kenya.

Kenya Energy Minister Kiraitu Murungi

Over the last six years, a host of African countries have made significant oil and gas discoveries. The list includes Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somaliland and Uganda. Many more are set to join the club in the coming months and years. Angola, Nigeria, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and Chad in Sub-Saharan Africa contribute a substantial amount to the global output.Nigeria alone contributes about 15% of US annual imports. Angola is a major supplier to China.

Growing instabilities in the Middle East can only emphasis the critical role of African fossil fuels are set to play in the global oil and gas economy.

But intrinsic in these discoveries are the dangers inefficient management and mismanaged public expectations pose to these fragile states. The Nigerian oil narrative is well documented. The growing tension between Khartoum and Juba is in part a proxy battle over oil and public expectation of oil dividends.

The discoveries in Africa is surely good news. It raises the long term prospects of these economies in the face of the ongoing global economic shifts and turmoil.

The oil crisis of the mid-1970s preceded the long and sharp decline 

of African economies which in part resulted in the adoption of the discredited structural adjustment policies in 1980s and 1990s in most Sub-Saharan African countries.

Over the last decade growth rate 

in Africa has been impressive. Millions though remain trapped in poverty with many of the continent’s one billion people still out of the reach of basic public services such as clean water, electricity and healthcare.

Discovery, production and export of the commodity in Ghana in 2007 have spurred foreign and local investment and expansion of the Ghanaian economy but not a lot of jobs. The subject of local content continues to engage analysts, policy makers and the ordinary Ghanaian. Ghana’s economy grew by 13.5 per cent in 2011. The economy  almost doubled last year, after oil exports began.

Evidently, the discovery has raised public expectations sky high to activate a hike in the cost of everything from housing to basic services to food and in some cases heightened tension between hitherto peacefully co-existing communities.

The Ghana Government is presently under fire for changing the proposed location of the country’s first modern gas processing plant to process gas from the Jubilee Field. Traditional leaders and youths of Domunli have even threatened to secede if government goes ahead to site the new plant outside the previously announced Jomoro District in the Western Region.

The plant is now to be sited at Atuabo in the Ellembelle District of the same region. The Domunli area is prone to flooding according to the authorities. It however begs the question why the area was selected in the first place after the first feasibility studies.

Threats of secession may be nothing more than grandstanding but it speaks to the larger issue of how unmanaged expectations could undermine a country’s development agenda and sow seeds of discontent.

Campaigns leading up the keenly contested 2008 presidential elections revolved around the discovered oil reserves. As Ghanaians go back to the polls this December, oil and the larger economy are shaping the campaigns.

Kenya holds its presidential and legislative elections early 2013. The post-election violence of 2007 and 2008 are still fresh in the minds of many even as the ICC seeks to prosecute alleged masterminds of the violence that ensued. Oil discovery in the Turkana County may well raise the stakes to define next year’s election but public expectation must be restrained.

It might seem contradictory but one way to address the possible shortage of relevant skills in the oil sector as well as sufficiently manage public expectation is for the Kenyan authorities to put in place a mechanism to begin the training of young Kenyans in anticipation of commercial production of the black gold. 

This way, Kenya may be more successful (than many other African countries) in minimizing the situation where all the best jobs associated with the industry go to non-Kenyans.