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Foreign Affairs
How to Rebuild Africa
By Stephen Ellis
Stephen Ellis is a researcher at the African Studies Centre in Leiden, the Netherlands, and the former Director of the Africa Program at the International Crisis Group. He is a co-author of Worlds of Power: Religious Thought and Political Practice in Africa.
The Lords of Misrule
This past March, a UN panel revealed that Liberian officials had signed a secret contract with an obscure European company, giving it a virtual monopoly on mining diamonds in the troubled country -- even though Liberia has been banned by the UN from selling its diamonds since 2001. The arrangement, it was disclosed, had involved members of the new transitional government operating under the (supposed) scrutiny of a large UN mission.
The discovery should not have come as a surprise. Liberia's new government, supposedly a model of national reconciliation, is largely made up of former militia members. During 15 years of war, armed gangs ravaged Liberia, turning it into a classic example of a failed state. Since the fighting stopped in August 2003, the erstwhile warlords have been quick to set aside their differences -- at least when doing so helps them acquire more loot. The mining deal was just one in a long series of similar scandals perpetrated by senior members of the transitional government, who are rapidly signing away their country's future in return for personal financial gain.
It did not have to be this way. The new regime was established in October 2003 as part of a peace agreement brokered by West African states and supported by Washington -- and backed up by a powerful UN peacekeeping mission. The UN force, originally led by Jacques Klein (a former U.S. diplomat with strong military credentials), has worked to disarm local fighters, build a working bureaucracy, organize democratic elections, and establish a basis for lasting peace. Preparations for presidential and parliamentary elections are proceeding on schedule, with voting expected to take place in October.
Unfortunately, the interim government has used the time to make things worse. Liberian warlords and politicians have found it easy to outmaneuver the UN and the international community in the conduct of what locals, with their habitual grim humor, call "business more than usual." Despite claims that they are struggling for peace, democracy, and reconciliation, the warlords and their henchmen continue to use the country's institutions for personal profit. Even if one of the few respectable candidates wins the presidential election in October, there is little chance that he or she will be able to rectify matters. And if the UN starts to wind down its mission after the elections, as it currently plans to do, the most likely outcome will be a resumption of politics-as-plunder and war. Nothing worthwhile will have come of the hundreds of millions of dollars poured into Liberia by international donors or of the hundreds of lives lost by foreign peacekeepers.
Liberia is just one example on a long list of African states that have spent years on the brink of collapse (or have long since succumbed) despite international efforts to help them. Together, these countries (the list also includes Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Somalia) point to a stark truth: the conventional approach for helping Africa's failed and failing states does not work.
Part of the problem involves the way that the international community understands failed states in the first place. The conventional view relies on a misleading mechanical metaphor, which leads policymakers to suppose that, like broken machines, failed African countries can be repaired by good mechanics. In fact, dysfunctional governments are more like sick people. Like humans, states fall ill in a variety of ways, can continue to function (after a fashion) even when sick, and do not all respond to treatment the same way. Some illnesses can be treated quickly, whereas others require long-term care. Most important, serious illnesses often leave their victims -- whether people or governments -- permanently changed, unable to return to their former condition . . .