The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa

Money, War and the Business of Power

Alex de Waal

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780745695617
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa delves into the business of politics in the turbulent, war-torn countries of north-east Africa. It is a contemporary history of how politicians, generals and insurgents bargain over money and power, and use of war to achieve their goals.

Drawing on a thirty-year career in Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia, including experience as a participant in high-level peace talks, Alex de Waal provides a unique and compelling account of how these countries' leaders run their governments, conduct their business, fight their wars and, occasionally, make peace. De Waal shows how leaders operate on a business model, securing funds for their 'political budgets' which they use to rent the provisional allegiances of army officers, militia commanders, tribal chiefs and party officials at the going rate. This political marketplace is eroding the institutions of government and reversing statebuildingÑand it is fuelled in large part by oil exports, aid funds and western military assistance for counter-terrorism and peacekeeping.

The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa is a sharp and disturbing book with profound implications for international relations, development and peacemaking in the Horn of Africa and beyond.

1
Introduction
Observing the Business of Power

The View from the Edge

The small town of Kurmuk lies under a rocky hill, a stray outcrop from the Ethiopian escarpment that is just across a small riverbed, inside Sudan; 25 miles to the west is the boundary with South Sudan. Development has bypassed this town: it has no two-storey buildings, no metalled roads. Kurmuk is on the edge – or on several edges. But it is also the cockpit of the Horn of Africa, where armies from those three countries – and also Eritrea – have been sent to fight battles that have determined the fate of the entire region. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, just 50 miles to the north on the Blue Nile, is also a pivot for the future of the Horn and the Nile Valley, including Egypt. Just as the escarpment dramatically separates Sudanese plains from the Ethiopian mountains, so too the ethnic, religious and political lines are drawn sharply through this land. Here we find Muslims, Christians and followers of diverse traditional religions; people who identify as ‘Arab’, and others who assume a range of other labels including ‘African’. Sudan's Blue Nile State was, in the 1990s, the place where Islamist cadres pioneered a total Islamic society and, after the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), where proponents of a democratic ‘New Sudan’ tried to build a model of equitable development.

Near Kurmuk is the customary land of a small community known as Uduk. They were caught on the shifting front lines of several wars and compelled to adapt as best they could. The Uduk are invisible in the high politics of the Horn of Africa, but their long-time ethnographer, Wendy James, has given them a voice. She reflects on a ‘kind of tolerance towards persons’ that applies not only to Uduk individuals who made their choice to join one army or another, or seek protection by marrying across religious lines, but also to the soldiers and administrators posted to their area:

I have rarely heard, at the local level, of individuals in the front-line zones being blamed for supporting one side or the other … individuals on whatever side were praised for personal decency or blamed for personal cruelty, but not for being caught up in one or another armed organization.¹

From the most powerless people we have a simple, human insight into the nature of politics. Similar observation and judgements are made by local commanders, administrators and chiefs, or by their superiors in Khartoum or the headquarters of the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA). The view from the wrong end of the telescope is unexpectedly clear: people see real politics – pithily defined by Lenin as ‘who, whom’.²

Throughout this book the focus of this telescope is turned to the men who conduct real politics in the Horn of Africa. It is a contemporary historical ethnography of these men: their power, their relationships with one another, and their norms and ethics. The dominant, and growing, system that orders their behaviour is what I call the ‘political marketplace’. For the region's political entrepreneurs and business managers, this is not a metaphor. They actually exchange services and rewards, loyalty and money, for prices that are set by the elementary principles of supply and demand, and also influenced by whoever is able to regulate the market. Men who belong in different political camps, or who organize lethal violence against each other's followers, do not hate each other, any more than business rivals may dislike or feud with one another. People with no power simply do not feature in their calculus. These men may have political motives and goals – protecting communities, pursuing beliefs about a better society, or building states – but their political fortunes depend on how well they operate in the political marketplace.³

These politicians share one norm with the Uduk villagers, which is the value they attach to personal character. Ordinary, powerless people value personal integrity and human decency: when they imagine a better society, they think of ‘better people’ in positions of authority.⁴ But for political bosses and security chiefs, decency or cruelty are less important than skill and reliability in political business. Members of this elite work on the assumption that human allegiance is tradable: individuals will serve others for reward. They are not always right, but they are correct for enough people enough of the time, that a system based on exchanging loyalty for money works. As we move from lower to higher levels of political business, the ethical codes change: political-business managers are more remote from ordinary people, and less amenable to sentiments such as community and humanity. In fact, the more that a political entrepreneur can discard humane norms and instead adopt a market-based calculus, the more likely he is to rise to the top and stay there. We will also see that, over the last decades, this auction of loyalties has been liberalized, dollarized and internationalized. This is the change I try to describe and explain in this book.

Political entrepreneurs operate in the political marketplace using money and violence. A politician needs money that he can use at his discretion without having to report or account for it – a ‘political budget’. Every politician, in any system of government, needs such a political budget: in marketplace systems, getting this money and spending it is the very essence of political business. It is a complicated business, as this book will show. Most of this fund will be spent on buying (or renting) other politicians, especially those with armed followers. The public budget is the sideshow. Political-business violence is also complicated: the politician needs to own or hire its machinery and utilize it in a politically effective manner. Guns are themselves a currency.⁵ Their political calibre is the power they can dispose through extortion, killing or destruction, which are demonstrations of their owner's power and determination. For the politician, the ideal is to have an armed unit whose members are personally loyal (for example, family members), but to operate at scale he will need to hire practitioners of violence. A recurrent trait among political-military business practitioners is that they overestimate their skill in using violence and make costly mistakes.

The marketplace has buyers and sellers, trading loyalty for resources. Each buyer is also a seller: a political entrepreneur or business manager will aggregate the loyalties he has bought or rented, and sell the package to a higher-level trader. In doing so, he tries not just to bundle them together but to add value. The market operates in essentially the same way from local to international levels. The political-territorial domain of each political merchant expands or contracts depending on market conditions and his business model and skill. Violence is intrinsic to the market: it is a means of bargaining and signalling value within the marketplace.

The Horn of Africa is an excellent place to investigate political markets. Political bargaining and political entrepreneurship can be seen naked, stripped of the flattering wardrobe of democracy, rule of law and state-building. Political budgets and the price of loyalty can be measured. The Horn is sufficiently diverse that it serves as a laboratory for different political-business strategies, some carried out under extreme austerity and others with relative opulence, some with intense and unregulated competition, others with attempts at tight control. It also is the location of serious efforts to challenge or reverse the marketplace, notably in Ethiopia. The Horn of Africa is important in its own right, but also, I suggest, its advanced political markets reveal emerging patterns of monetized politics elsewhere in the world.

I find this political system fascinating and repugnant. It is intellectually fascinating because it challenges important orthodoxies of political science, development and related disciplines. It is repugnant because it is fundamentally inhumane, reducing human beings to mere instruments and commodities, mutating public goods into private ones, and co-opting good intentions to achieve malign outcomes. We see politicians manipulating commendable policy goals such as state-building and peacekeeping as mechanisms to accumulate power and money, while perpetuating those same miseries that gave rise to those policies in the first place. But in accordance with the Gramscian precept of pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will, it is essential first to understand and diagnose the pathology before starting treatment. Similarly, my challenge to theories of state-building is empirical, not normative. States, especially democratic ones, are a better way of meeting human needs. But in the contest between the most determined state-builders and the logic of the political marketplace, the state-builders are not winning.

A Vignette: The Darfur Negotiations

Shortly before dawn on the final day of the Darfur peace negotiations in Abuja, Nigeria, on 6 May 2006, I travelled from the venue of the talks within the grounds of State House to the Chida Hotel where the delegations were staying, sitting in the back of a car with the leader of the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM), Abdel Wahid al Nur. Also dispersing after an all-night session were the assembled mediators: Salim Ahmed Salim, former Secretary General of the Organisation of African Unity who was leading the mediation team, the Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, who was hosting, and the US Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, who had arrived to help seal the deal. Squeezed into the back seat of the car, speaking in English, Abdel Wahid told me all the reasons of principle why he would not sign the deal on the table. The deal was, he said, deeply unfair. Shortly after arriving in his hotel room, he took a call on his mobile. ‘They offered me $30 million!’ he said to his interlocutor (whom he didn't identify) in Arabic. ‘I demanded $100 million. But I will negotiate.’ He was referring to the first instalment for the fund for compensating the victims of the war, which, it was understood, he personally would allocate.

Later in the day, back at the hall, one of the more memorable moments of the negotiations occurred. Abdel Wahid had been consulting with his delegation at the hotel. The majority was in favour of signing the document – the Darfur Peace Agreement – on the table, but Abdel Wahid was holding out for a better deal, and especially one that gave him more than his rival, Minni Arkoy Minawi. He imagined that the Americans were bidding in the auction for his loyalty: his chief advisor, a Canadian citizen of Sudanese origin named Ahmed Mohamadein, had flown to Canada the week before, promising to go to Washington, DC, and get a better deal than that offered by Zoellick. After talking to his friends in the Darfur advocacy movement, Mohamadein phoned Abdel Wahid and advised him not to sign anything before he returned to Abuja. His call was intercepted by a CIA officer attached to the US delegation, who shared this information with the mediators, and later that week Mohamadein also bragged to me about his role. But at that moment – just after midday – all I could see was Abdel Wahid's defiant body language as he stepped out of his car and walked towards the hall, with his team following.

Not wanting Abdel Wahid to speak to the cluster of journalists on the steps of the hall, I went to intercept him halfway along the side of the building. Taking him by the hand, I said, ‘I need to speak to you,’ and pulled him through a side door. By sheer chance, Obasanjo was behind the door. The Nigerian President turned and confronted Abdel Wahid, jumping into the pose of a boxer with his fist in the Darfurian rebel's face. ‘You let me down, boy!’ he shouted, taking him by the collar and dragging him into a nearby room. Obasanjo had paid at least $1 million personally to Abdel Wahid a couple of days earlier. I discovered afterwards that Abdel Wahid had asked the Americans for hard cash as well, and had been rebuffed.

An hour later, with Abdel Wahid intransigent in the face of promises and threats from both the chief mediators, Zoellick asked me whether there was something psychologically wrong with the man. Abdel Wahid was vain and was vacillating, but he understood one of the fundamentals of Sudanese politics: if he joined the political establishment without enough money in his own pocket, whatever document he had signed would be worthless. If he could not reward his followers, his value would go down. However much the Americans promised development aid for the people of Darfur, this did not solve his political need. In fact, large-scale aid might even make Abdel Wahid's predicament more difficult, as others would become brokers for these funds and could threaten his position. As the day progressed, Abdel Wahid looked like an alcoholic desperate for a drink, offered everything but the one thing he craved, but could not admit he needed.

Over the previous five months, the peace talks themselves had been arranged according to a standard format. Tables in the main conference room downstairs in the Chida Hotel were arranged round a rectangle. The mediators sat across one, shorter side, with the government delegation on their right and the rebels on their left, facing one another. Representatives from the international community sat on the fourth...