Behold the Prisoner

Bosco Ntaganda (from Al Jazeera).

On Monday last week, Bosco Ntaganda, a Congolese warlord facing charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity (notably the conscription of children for his Patriotic Forces for the Liberation of Congo, FPLC, at least six years ago) from the International Criminal Court (ICC) presented himself in the U.S. Embassy in Rwanda asking to be taken to the ICC. An official from the court said it was the first time in history that a person with an arrest warrant voluntarily showed up for being processed. Ntaganda is already in The Hague, and he will be presented on Tuesday before a pre-trial court, in order to verify his identity, inform him personally of the charges of which he is accused, and set the date to begin the hearings for the process.

There are two questions around this surrender. First, why did he do it? Analysts suggest some possibilities. One option is that in fact Rwanda arranged Ntaganda to be delivered to the U.S. Embassy in order to try to clean the national name from accusations of supporting the activities of DRC rebels. It has also been suggested that Ntaganda’s own rebel group, M23 (a secession from the Congolese Army), was divided over the future of the rebellion, especially after in December 2012 it lost control over the city of Goma, which it had taken as a stronghold one month earlier. The group’s fissure would have been so deep that some of its members, defeated by another faction, fled to Rwanda, diminishing Ntaganda’s support base in DRC and increasing the threats to his physical security.

This leads to the second question: what is the future of the M23 and other rebellions in Congo? Ntaganda’s surrender does not leave the M23 acephalic. The winner of the group’s internal divide is Sultani Makenga, also sought for war crimes. It has been argued that Makenga is now so powerful that Ntaganda was better-off being trialed by the ICC than facing a confrontation with his former guerilla mate over the leadership of the M23 and the control over some areas of the country. In any case, Makenga blames and expectedly would be seeking revenge from Ntaganda for the assassination attempt against him last February.

The physical removal of Ntaganda from the scene of conflict then might not have solved much. He will be trialed and more likely than not will be found guilty. But he has left a vacuum of power in the M23 leadership, and Makenga is ready to seize it. However, Ntaganda might still fight for the remnants of his position from the bench of the defendants, thoroughly collaborating to build a case against Makenga. A Congolese warlord is to be put in jail, but his legacy of conflict is far from being over.

Security and Democracy

Tunisian police officers containing a demonstration in January this year (from The Telegraph).

This week a group of Tunisian scholars are visiting Georgetown University to exchange ideas with local academic community about the political developments in their country. As part of this tour, yesterday a meeting took place to talk about the challenge of reforming security institutions.

The task is of a major importance as the security apparatus was one of the pillars that sustained the rule of Ben Ali. Thus, its reform towards a professional force and working for the protection of citizens would represent a substantial step towards the democratization of the Tunisian state. However, two obstacles were identified by our colleagues. First, there is no clear map of the current situation of the security institutions. It is estimated that over 70,000 officials belong to them, and that over 1,200 legal instruments, some of them public and other not, regulate their operations in one way or another. With this numbers it is unclear what are the exact chains of command or the organizational structure of the security forces. Second, it is not evident either where to start the reform. The Tunisian faculty spoke of three possible options: recover citizen legitimacy, establish a new legal framework, or professionalization of officials. However, we were reminded that the security forces still lack a defined mission, vision, and objectives for the democratic times. Without them, it is difficult to provide a narrative for reforms, for which any changes undertaken have the risk of being unarticulated, hence contributing to the incoherence of the current security institutions.

In a way, the challenge faced is not dissimilar to many other processes of institutional reform: the picture of the starting point is less clear than what appears to be, and first actions are far from obvious. However, the specific difference with other reforms is that in this case the outcome is closely linked with the direction the democratization of Tunisia will take: either the new state is strengthened with a, as they call it, republican police, or, without a capable and impartial security apparatus, institutions acquire more resistance to change, the country falls into deeper instability, and the voices claiming for an authority capable of restoring order make more noise.

The stakes of the reform of security apparatus are without question very high. But the approach to it was subject to debate in the meeting. On the one hand, given that security institutions will become part of the new democratic state and that their ultimate goal is their de-politicization, it can be argued that their reform must be kept separate from political upheavals in the country. On the other hand, if governments are unstable (as was seen last month, when many members of the cabinet and eventually the Prime Minister resigned), it is unlikely that the challenges for the reform will be met. What is more, the difference between both processes might not be evident for many citizens who, in the end, could easily group cabinet politicians, members of congress still working on the constitution, and police officers as “the government”, assessing their performance with the same template. If police is still repressive and partial, then people will see little difference between the government of Ben Ali and those that followed him. The problem is tremendously complicated, but because the reward of attending it is so high debates must continue.

Kenyans Head to the Polls

Supporters of the Jubilee Alliance at a pre-election rally / (Reuters/Noor Khamis)

Happy election day! That is, election day in Kenya. The long-anticipated contest began earlier this morning (with polls closing as I write), amid growing anxiety over sporadic episodes of violence in recent weeks. Thus far, today’s reports indicate that violence has been isolated to a few incidents in the coastal town of Mombasa and regions near the Somalia border. We will know much more, of course, after the electoral committee begins the important work of counting the votes.

The election is important for a number of reasons. Some are quite obvious. It is a chance for Kenya to demonstrate that the horrendous post-election violence in 2007-2008 was an aberration, and not a trend. The poll pits Uhuru Kenyatta — son of Kenya’s first president (Jomo Kenyatta), and a defendant in an ongoing ICC trial for his role in the 2007 violence — against Raila Odinga, whose unexpected defeat by Mwai Kibaki in 2007 amid allegations of widespread fraud set the country aflame. Odinga’s late father was also an erstwhile ally of Jomo Kenyatta, before Odinga joined an opposition movement and Kenyatta imprisoned him for two years. This election therefore provides Raila Odinga with a chance at redemption — the opportunity to settle a decades-long familial rivalry, and a final shot to win a position that many believe was stolen from him five years ago. It also holds tribal implications, since Odinga would be the first Luo to occupy the State House. Kenyatta, of course, is a Kikuyu, one of only two groups (along with the Kalenjin) to hold the presidency in Kenya’s half century of independence. In a plural society like Kenya where power and resources often flow vertically along ethnic lines, an Odinga win may hold significant domestic implications.

These storylines certainly provide drama and layers of sub-text. But they also draw attention away from the other important elements of this election. It is the first chance for Kenya to select lower-level leaders to fill new positions created in Kenya’s 2010 constitution, a document that devolved considerable power to county-level governments across the country. This could have a significant impact on future incentives for political candidates as well as citizen-state relations, particularly in a country with a history of centralized power. This election also marks the introduction of a few new technologies to prevent fraud, such as biometric voter registration and electronic submission of results. Many were concerned that the government would not provide the election commission with sufficient resources to procure and deploy these new tools, and today will provide a preliminary look at their capacity to mitigate the problems that emerged in 2007.

For a much more thorough look at these issues, and more, check out this great election primer from IFES. Lots of useful information on both a political and technical level.

I’m sure we’ll be covering the election results, and political implications, in the days and weeks to come. On the presidential level, neither Odinga nor Kenyatta will likely win after today. The new constitution lays out a threshold system, whereby a candidate needs over 50 percent of the national vote as well as at least 25 percent in over half of all counties. Failing that, there will be a second round run-off between the top-two vote winners. Stay tuned…

Malawi’s Banda Continues Her High Stakes Game

Civil servants go on strike / (BBC News)

Last summer, I posted a short piece about Malawi’s Joyce Banda. Southern Africa’s first female president had only been in office for three months back then, but her actions were already making headlines. Banda announced plans to sell the presidential jet, a luxury item acquired by her predecessor and an ongoing source of domestic contention and international condemnation. She confronted Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir over his ICC indictment, refusing to host the planned African Union Summit with Mr. Bashir in attendance. But what finally caught the attention of the international community was a policy shift that, while eminently technocratic, served as a harbinger of the sort of reform that donors love to see. Banda devalued the Malawian Kwacha by 49 percent, and right on cue, the Millenium Challenge Corporation and the International Monetary Fund responded with new aid packages worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

The circumstances surrounding Banda’s rise to power add intrigue to the story. A surprise choice as President Mutharika’s running-mate in 2009, she was booted out of the ruling party for showing flashes of political independence — particularly her refusal to endorse Mutharika’s brother as his presidential successor. But as an elected official, Banda was legally protected from arbitrary dismissal, and she displayed a rugged resilience by shrugging off demands for her resignation as vice president in the face of intense criticism at public rallies and on state-owned media. This obstinate stance ultimately put her in the State House when Mutharika died in office last year.

Banda quickly emerged as interesting case study: What happens when a relative political outsider suddenly rises to the top of the government, confronts an important actor in the region (the African Union), initiates a painful series of austerity measures to rebuild international aid relationships, but does it all without a strong domestic constituency or the support of the ruling party?

After nearly a year, we’re starting to see some answers. As expected, the currency devaluation drove inflation through the roof, simultaneously increasing the cost of living and decreasing the real value of worker salaries. State employees responded this month with a nationwide strike, the biggest in Banda’s short tenure. A majority of Malawi’s 120,000 civil servants refused to resume work until the Banda administration boosted wages by 65 percent. Schools and airports shut down. Nurses and doctors threatened to join the strike. Banda struck a deal, announcing a 61 percent wage increase for the lowest-paid civil servants. But top officials in her administration were quick to note the unsustainable strain that higher wages would place on Malawi’s budget. “If we go down that route then we should forget recovering from the difficulties that we are trying to recover from now,” the minister of finance recently said. “[We would be] returning not only to the way we were before the reform, but a worse situation where the economy would simply collapse.”

But it’s important to remember that a collapse of this sort would be a manufactured one; the predictable result of divorcing domestic politics from economic policymaking driven by donors. The problem goes something like this. In order to attract international aid and investment, the government acquiesced to demands for austerity. As new aid flowed in to supplement the national budget, the domestic sources of government revenue shrank as inflation hurt the economy and put downward pressure on spending and real wages. So the share of Malawi’s budget provided by international aid rose as well, today standing at approximately 40 percent. This gives donors tremendous leverage and alters the incentives of Malawian leaders. But Malawi’s citizens are not happy, and they begin to protest and demand more government spending to alleviate tough economic conditions. Government officials find themselves in an untenable position. If they agree to increase wages, it may indeed overtax Malawi’s still modest budget and threaten the international aid they so desire, since much of it is conditioned upon financially sound policies — as determined by the donors. If they refuse domestic demands for action, they risk punishment at the ballot box. And Malawi’s next election is only a year away.

It appears to be a lose-lose situation for Banda. But rather than grab one of those third rail options with both hands, she has plotted a middle route between them with her recent deal with the state workers. The IMF, for its part, released an amazingly cynical statement warning of “growing public outcry” over the very conditions that its policies helped produce. What does it recommend? A doubling down on austerity, of course, with tighter expenditure controls and monetary policies until inflationary pressures recede. There was no mention of policies or resources to redress the very real economic costs on a human level. In fact, the IMF seems rather pleased with Malawi’s current trajectory, saying that “there are encouraging signs that economic recovery is underway.”

This is the danger when a government finds itself more accountable to international donors than to its own citizens. Banda may well survive this recent storm, but there are a number of domestic groups (including opposition parties) that surely will not forget moments where government policy was driven by external forces and produced considerable internal pain. Perhaps we will have to wait until the 2014 election to offer a more complete assessment of the Banda experiment. But for a leader without a natural political constituency, estranged from much of the political elite, and whose popularity is dwindling among those affected by her austere approach, Banda’s political future does not look promising. Donor darling or not, all politics is local.

The Rules of Engagement (2)

Prime Minister of Tunisia, Hamadi Jebali, announcing his resignation (from The Guardian).

This month, but particularly the last days, Tunisia has faced a major political upheaval. First, it was the assassination of the secular opposition politician Chokri Belaid, generating suspicion against Islamist parties. A special target was Ennhada, that to which the Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali belonged to and which has the largest share of seats in Parliament. Next, there was a conflict between the secularist party Congress for the Republic and Ennhada because the former wanted some cabinet members to be removed under allegations of bad performance. Then, it came a proposal from the Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali to replace all the cabinet with technocrat (and, supposedly, politically neutral) ministers. He said that if this suggestion was rejected, he would quit. And the suggestion was rejected, mainly by his own party, apparently because he made such comprise without any previous consultation. So he quit. Now, Ennhada will have to pick one of its members for the position of Secretary General, thus becoming the new Prime Minister. Its leader, Rached Ghannouchi, said they will try to replace the moderate Jebali with someone more conservative.

This chain of events has raised concerns about the present and future of Tunisia’s political system. About its present, because it was largely believed that this country was an example for other Arab Spring countries to follow. The previous authoritarian ruler was ousted, elections were held, a Constituent Assembly is functioning, and a coalition government was installed. Therefore, there were reasons to think that the institutions necessary for a democratic regime were obtaining sound foundations. The relative facility with which the government has fallen prompts to think twice about the commitment of national political actors to the advancements made towards democracy. The future of Tunisia comes into question because another government must emerge from the Assembly that is currently working on the Constitution. With the same correlation of parties with which the previous cabinet fell down, will a new one come about? If not, apparently the option to consider is elections. Will a new Constitutional Assembly take over the work on the Constitution? What will happen to the articles already drafted and agreed upon?

Of course, no part of the previous discussion includes a suggestion that the transition and democratic institution building processes in Tunisia are now under severe threat. That is a central feature of parliamentarian regimes: allow for a government to leave if it comes to a gridlock. The risk is what replaces it. As has happened in other times and places, Ennhada can present itself as the only party with sufficient capacity to bring order back to the country, while using an expected wider support to push for its Islamist policies, driving the country away from democracy. However, this last sentence is speculation. Political regimes can be thought of as rules to solve problems of power distribution. Now, the problem is that a new government must be formed, and that the Constitution is still pending. The way in which this issue is dealt with can be seen as a test on how firm is the ground on which democratic institutions are being built in Tunisia.