"Progress"?

A good piece from Michela Wrong in Foreign Policy:

When Migrants Flee Progress

Each migrant trying to cross the Mediterranean in a rickety boat has his or her own reason for risking the journey. But for people who study Africa, one overall lesson quietly emerges from this mass movement: Man cannot live by MDGs alone.

I’m talking about the Millennium Development Goals, the eight targets the United Nations drew up as benchmarks of successful development back in 2000. The U.N. set precise goals for poverty alleviation, education, and health care that poor countries, supported by Western donors, could tick off a list -- the supposed building blocks of a better life. Ironically, the deadline set for achieving the MDGs was 2015, the very year in which Europe has been confronted by a mass exodus of refugees voting with their feet.

Some migrants are fleeing violence in Syria and Somalia; some are West Africans who worked in Libya and now find it too dangerous to stay. But a significant share comes from African countries neither wracked by civil unrest nor embroiled in war. Counterintuitively, many of these nations perform extremely well on the MDG front.

Take the Red Sea nation of Eritrea, which accounts for the greatest number of migrants to Europe after Syria, an extraordinary figure given its population of just around 6 million. According to the U.N. refugee agency, 34,561 Eritreans crossed the Mediterranean in 2014.

Bizarre as it may seem, I often encourage Western friends to take holidays in Eritrea, this country so many are now fleeing and which I myself can’t access, for want of a journalist visa. It’s safe, clean, and cheap, and it boasts some of Africa’s best roads and most dramatic scenery, and the continent’s most beautiful capital city. Back in 2013, President Isaias Afewerki’s government patted itself on the back for achieving three health MDGs ahead of schedule: reducing infant mortality, improving maternal health, and combating HIV, malaria, and other diseases. It expects to check three more off the list by the end of this year.

... The point is: All that just isn’t enough. Eritrea, run by a former communist rebel movement that seized power in 1991, may well offer its citizens excellent medical care. Claims that it knows how to protect its people from East Africa’s frequent droughts and resulting famines may even be true. But the government has failed dramatically to deliver on a range of less quantifiable needs that hold the key to human fulfillment.

There’s no independent media or political opposition in the country. Religious freedom is narrowly curtailed. A multiparty constitution has never been implemented*, no presidential elections staged. Both men and women must do military service, which is often open-ended. If you’re lucky enough to get demobilized, there’s no private-sector economy to soak up your labor and provide you with skills. Asmara is an elegant cage -- a suffocating place to live.

Africa is struggling to digest a massive youth bulge, and youngsters are instinctively aspirational. They want the chance of a better existence in their own lifetimes, not promises of some distant utopia. While governments such as the one in Eritrea may score impressively when it comes to keeping youth fed, vaccinated, and literate (the MDG emphasis is on primary education, of course, not the tertiary education likely to produce rebellious students), they routinely frustrate deeper needs.

Indeed, the paradox is not unique to Eritrea. Since the end of the Cold War, a new generation of African leaders has emerged that wins the consistent and enthusiastic backing of the U.S. Agency for International Development and Britain’s Department for International Development for delivering on the MDGs, even while these leaders show open contempt for civil society, human rights groups, and the free press. “Democracy is a luxury we can’t afford,” is the implicit message to Western partners.

... “Africa Rising,” the recent buzz phrase adopted by investors excited by the economic potential of the continent’s growing middle class and the spread of modern technology, has distracted attention from a series of reactionary trends. In east, west, and central Africa we are seeing elections rigged not once, but repeatedly; the establishment of de facto royal dynasties; and draconian legislation aimed at closing down the non-governmental sector, muffling the press, and stamping out homosexuality. Annual reports by human rights organizations make for grim reading.

Back when the U.S. President George H.W. Bush promised “a new world order” premised on liberal values, such developments would have alarmed Western partners. Now they generate shrugged shoulders from diplomats and development officials who regard them as part of the realpolitik of the modern era.

The MDGs were designed, in part, to give Western donors and African governments apolitical, uncontroversial common ground upon which all could agree. Clean water, primary education, decent health care -- who wouldn’t want those, after all? But the message coming from the migrants crossing the Mediterranean is: “Oh, sure, we want those. But we want far, far more.” And who can blame them?

Now, that's frustrating!

In a recent commentary in the Guardian, Ioan Lewis is guilty of tantalizing his readers. In an article entitled "Somalia has a role model for success on its doorstep," first outlines of troubles of the failed state of Somalia, then points to a neighbor, Somaliland, as a good example for those who would rebuild the country. Lewis then proceeds to make some interesting observations that suggest more than they actually describe. Lewis is fairly clear in the summary of Somalia's political fragmentation:

Somali society is extremely fragmented along kinship lines and, to a degree most foreign observers fail to appreciate, lacking in political centralisation. The familiar African chiefs are largely absent in this highly individualistic world where the individual's loyalties are a matter of competing blood-ties. Such bonds cut across membership of al-Shabab whose leaders, however, tend to belong to the Hawiye clan-family, based in central southern Somalia. The Somali historian Said Samatar aptly described their predecessors, the Union of Islamic courts, as a "fragile coalition of clans wrapped in an Islamic flag to look respectable"; al-Shabab similarly relies heavily on kinship ties to maintain solidarity and confront its enemies.

The underlying loyalties here are, as is usual in the Somali world, fluid and readily subject to fission. External pressures, especially from non-Islamic sources, normally provoke internal solidarity. This, of course, is a major reason why external force, intended to replace al-Shabab [a radical Islamist group in Somalia] by less extreme forms of Islam, will almost certainly fail. Indeed, radical change in the al-Shabab regime is only likely to be achieved by subtle internal initiatives and the problem would be how to design and implement these. The perceived oppressive character of al-Shabab provides abundant opportunities for currents of Somali disaffection to grow and multiply.

then goes on to laud Somaliland's contrasting success:

A very important local factor will be the positive demonstration effect provided by the existence of the adjacent Somaliland Republic. Although largely officially ignored by the UN and OAU, this state based on the former British Somaliland Protectorate had initially joined Somalia, but in 1990, at the climax of the collapse of dictator Mohamed Siyad Barre's brutal regime, broke away to reassert its independence. Despite being regarded in Somalia as a sort of phantom limb, with virtually no external help, this state has built itself up by a remarkable series of internal peace agreements and democratic consolidation to its current situation as a functioning democracy. This has been achieved by local self-help and without the massive international effort devoted, with such striking lack of success, to restoring governance in Somalia.

Somaliland has just had its second successful presidential election (and changed president in a peaceful process validated by international observers). Its people are Somalis like their kinsfolk in Somalia, but by a judicious combination of traditional and modern politics, have successfully established a viable modern government and associated institutions. Despite internal and external pressures and with fewer economic resources than Somalia, these have demonstrated remarkable viability and have, so far, been blessed by an impressive degree of political stability. Its time now to learn from Somaliland's success and see how to emulate it.

But no hint, not the littlest merciful drop, of how these people who share the kinship values of the people of Somalia, have "by a judicious combination of traditional and modern politics, ... successfully established a viable modern government and associated institutions." Good grief, Lewis, isn't that always the challenge, and don't you think we might like to know how they did it?

It's depressing to have no way of choosing between an overblown observation, a keen insight, and the sad possibility that the guts were taken out of this article by an editor. Except, of course, by conducting one's own research.

Image: Surely this patriotic imagery is not the Somaliland secret!

The danger of a single story

A thought-provoking talk by Chimamanda Adichie from TED. "It's not that stereotypes are false, it's that they are incomplete."