Neither Devil Nor Child by Tom Young

Author:Tom Young
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786073273
Publisher: Oneworld Publications

LOCAL ALLIES?

In contrast to the Chad case, the conflict resources regimes were aimed largely at weaker insurgent groups who were in all sorts of ways weaker than states, and in some respects they succeeded. The contrast was instructive. Consensus positions against insurgent groups, particularly if the insurgents use abhorrent methods, can usually be made to hold. Imposing constraints on states, even weak ones, is much more difficult. Western opinion has vacillated on this issue, sometimes tending to the more punitive view that African elites can be more or less coerced into following the ‘right’ policies, and sometimes tending to the view that elites or sections of elites have to be co-opted somehow into ‘pro-reform’ positions. This dilemma is entirely understandable. Although, on occasion, Western agencies could be ruthless in their demands, and damaging in their actions, the fact was that they were not prepared to push African states to the brink by breaking off aid completely. Though threats to aid did occasionally work, as in Kenya in 1992, there were real limits to them. President Moi went on to win two elections under a multiparty system that he openly despised. Much of the threat to withdraw aid had a theatrical element. Only certain kinds of aid would be withdrawn, or only for a limited time, and African elites knew this. There was a residual respect for sovereignty, even among African states, however much that had been eroded in fact. In some circumstances economic and political calculation played a part, particularly if the collapse of a government might cause wider domestic or regional disorder. In some cases more self-interested motives were at work, especially where these concerned crucial commodities or markets. This seems to have been the case with Chad, where US and French lobbying protected the government from pressures to reform. Lastly, the hugely enhanced influence of international NGOs, dramatically demonstrated by the success of Jubilee 2000,* could not be ignored and, while such organisations were not averse to denouncing Africa’s political leaders, they generally spoke out against excessive pressure on African states. Indeed, the renewed concern with poverty, and the ‘softer’ language of partnership and dialogue, did not sit comfortably with strategies of coercion.

For all these reasons then, co-opting African elites remained an attractive strategy; the cultivation of local allies had been part of Western engagement with Africa from independence, and even in colonial times. There is a long history of trying to shape bureaucratic elites (what the World Bank calls ‘capacity-building’). One of the major problems the BWIs had long faced was that many African states lacked senior officials who were not only competent but also broadly sympathetic to the goals of the BWIs. Considerable efforts were made to train such officials in their image. These efforts ranged from formal training in the prestigious economic departments of Western universities, to the appointment of promising African candidates to senior positions in the World Bank and the IMF (from which they often returned to appointments in their own countries), as well as pressuring African states to appoint such individuals to lead the civil service.

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