Last week I was asked to review a new book on gender and development. Since these things are usually turgid affairs, full of abstruse jargon (“registers of governmentality”, “idioms of sexualness” and “body reflexive practices” are just a few of the assaults on English perpetrated in this one) and nostalgia for the marxist utopias of yore, I was apprehensive. I envisaged long days of ploughing laboriously through paragraphs, trying heroically to decipher “essentially hetero-normative constructions”, “emergent rubrics”, and “positionalities”, and then having to pretend in my review that I’d both mastered this tangled tongue and maintained sufficient will to live to pass constructive comment on it.

But once you have hacked your way through the impenetrable forest of the introduction (which counts “decentring the traditionally unmarked male” and “normatively naturalizing potencies” among its most egregious language crimes), you emerge into a glade of sunny clarity. For Men and Development: Politicizing Masculinities is no ordinary gender book – reading it will give you a new perspective on the social problems of the developing world.

The idea that gender equality is important to development is not new – efforts to educate women and girls are among foreign aid’s few relatively uncontested success stories, and microfinance programs, the development fad du jour, also mostly target women. Men, however, have largely been overlooked by practitioners and policy-makers; reading Men and Development, you begin to see what catastrophic effects this has had.

The problem lies in the expectations society has of men. In West Africa, for example, men are expected to set up a home, marry at least one wife, and accumulate and provide for children and other dependents. Those who fail to perform these duties forfeit the respect of their elders, women and their peers; they cannot become “real men”.

When the breadwinner role becomes impossible to fulfil – as it did for millions of men across Africa during the economic crises of the 1980s and 1990s – men have other facets of masculinity on which to draw in order to recover their self-esteem. Some of these alternative masculinities are positive – think of the black South Africans who responded to economic emasculation by adopting the role of fighter against oppression and joining the liberation struggle.

But many traditional expressions of manliness are socially destructive. Physical violence is the most obvious of these. Economic insecurity, as one of the Men and Development authors Gary Barker notes in an earlier paper, can prompt men to turn to violence to reaffirm their power – many South African men have joined criminal gangs, for example, while domestic violence becomes more common as unemployment rises.

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Northern Nigeria is in turmoil. Last week’s attacks in the main northern city of Kano, which left at least 180 dead, are the latest in a series of bombings and shootings by the Islamist terror group Boko Haram, which demands the imposition of sharia law across the country.

There is a risk that the violence will spread southwards. A Boko  Haram assault on the United Nations building in Abuja killed 21. Southern Christians have avenged their northern counterparts by burning mosques and Islamic schools. A Yoruba militia group last month marched through Lagos threatening to fight back if the south is targeted. The writer Wole Soyinka has said the nation is heading for civil war.

Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan has responded to the escalation in violence by declaring a state of emergency in the north and announcing a massive increase in the security budget. So far this has proved fruitless, for it is not just policing that the north needs – mistrust of the security forces is so entrenched, indeed, that a response based on strengthening their power is likely to aggravate discontent.

Young northerners’ anger, whose most extreme manifestations have fuelled the unrest, is rooted less in religious sentiment than lack of opportunity. A polytechnic student I talked to in Kano in 2009 said that ‘the violence in the north is not because of religion but frustration about poverty and corruption.’ A Kano University professor agreed. ‘If we have a crisis or violence that they call religious,’ he said, ‘it’s really about poverty. It’s the poor who are easily recruited.’

Northern Nigeria lags behind the south. All ten of the country’s poorest states are in the north. The north has the lowest school attendance, lowest vaccination rates, highest infant and child mortality, and highest maternal mortality. In some instances the differences are stark. Under-5 mortality in the North West region is double that in the South East. Vaccination rates in the South East are seven times higher than in the North East. And while 90 percent of births in the South East are attended by skilled personnel, only 12 percent of northern mothers receive such care. These disparities, as the recent violence has proved, are unsustainable. In the face of glaring regional inequality, a burgeoning northern youth population will not remain placid; even if Boko Haram is defeated, others will come forward to take its place.

To neutralise the threat and dilute the appeal of extremism, Nigeria’s government needs a program for northern development – only by closing the north-south divide will deep-seated resentments be quelled. Enhanced policing in the short-term must be combined with sustained commitment to social and economic reforms. A long view is important – decades of underdevelopment will not be reversed overnight – but quick wins are also needed, to show that the government means what it says and that new promises, unlike old ones, have substance. An Agenda for the North should be based on five principles:

1. An honest assessment of the problem: Goodluck Jonathan must publicly admit that the north has been left behind. He must be candid about the gaps in wealth, education and access to services, and accept that his government and its predecessors have done too little for the region. Northerners, of course, know all this already, but their cynicism will only be blunted if past errors are acknowledged.
2. A grand plan for change: To begin to regain ground in the propaganda war with Boko Haram, big and well publicised commitments are needed. Raising school attendance to southern levels, matching southern infrastructure, and equalising employment rates and incomes nationwide are daunting challenges, but nothing less will be acceptable to young northerners. The north needs its own Development Goals, with ambitious deadlines, milestones and concrete investment plans.
3. Youth involvement: Development Goals in obvious improvement areas like transport and power can be announced immediately, but other objectives should be developed in consultation with northern youth. The latter too want electricity and roads, but what are their other priorities? Research among young people for the British Council and Harvard’s Next Generation Nigeria project threw up widely varying demands, from agricultural extension programmes to support for small businesses to teacher training and school toilets. But unless the government engages systematically with young northerners it will not know what the region needs. Nigerian politicians have cut themselves off from the wider society – giving angry young people an outlet other than violence will help diffuse tensions and make reforms relevant.
4. Small wins: Northerners, understandably wearied by years of broken promises, will have no faith in grand Development Goals unless they quickly see their fruits. While the federal government announces overarching objectives, state governments must spell out which roads will be built and when, how many teachers will be trained, how they will engage with young people, and so on. Then they must take prompt action – begin work on that road, equip a hundred schools with fans, achieve small, quick wins to show that a start has been made.
5. Accountability: When they make targets, federal and state governments must stick to them.  Those who fail to deliver must be held to account, making it clear that business as usual will not be tolerated. Next Generation Nigeria argued for the creation of a national youth forum that would hold regular discussions with policy makers. A Northern Forum could be charged with monitoring compliance with the Agenda for the North, and given free rein to demand action when progress slows.

Goodluck Jonathan is floundering – yesterday he feebly pleaded with Boko Haram to identify themselves and spell out their demands. He has run out of ideas. An Agenda for the North, desirable and necessary even without the emergence of the terror group to give it urgency, has the potential to break the impasse. It might be Mr Jonathan’s best hope of proving the doomsayers wrong.

Although it is extremely hard to predict the actions of a terrorist group such as Boko Haram, Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital, may be a looming target.

The organization’s capacity and ambition have grown swiftly, probably due to assistance from extremist groups in the Maghreb, Somalia, or farther afield.

And, as I wrote in December,

The country’s weak institutions make it ill-prepared to deal with threats like this. It is unlikely to have the capacity to meet the challenge. Expect more attacks in the coming months.

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The situation in South Sudan is very bad and getting worse, as the New York Times underlined in a lengthy and blunt analysis last week:

South Sudan, born six months ago in great jubilation, is plunging into a vortex of violence. Bitter ethnic tensions that had largely been shelved for the sake of achieving independence have ruptured into a cycle of massacre and revenge that neither the American-backed government nor the United Nations has been able to stop.

The United States and other Western countries have invested billions of dollars in South Sudan, hoping it will overcome its deeply etched history of poverty, violence and ethnic fault lines to emerge as a stable, Western-friendly nation in a volatile region. Instead, heavily armed militias the size of small armies are now marching on villages and towns with impunity, sometimes with blatantly genocidal intent.

But aren’t there UN peacekeepers in South Sudan?  There are, but with fewer than 5,000 troops in the country, the UN is struggling to cope.  This was emphasized by an attack by Nuer fighters on members of another tribe, the Murle, in the town of Pibor, which the UN made an effort to deter.  But the peacekeepers were outgunned:

As thousands of Nuer fighters poured into Pibor on Dec. 31, United Nations military observers watched them burn down Murle huts and then march off, in single file lines, into the bush, where many Murle civilians were hiding. Murle leaders have complained that they were abandoned in their hour of need. Neither government forces nor the United Nations peacekeepers left their posts in Pibor to protect the civilians who had fled, and it appears that many Murle were hunted down.

Hilde F. Johnson, head of the United Nations mission in South Sudan, said the peacekeepers had warned residents that the fighters were coming. But she argued that the United Nations troops had little choice but to stay on the sidelines. “Protection of civilians in the rural areas and at larger scale would only have been possible with significantly more military capacity,” she said.

Why are UN forces so thin on the ground?  Independent analysts repeatedly warned that South Sudan could slump into violence after independence in 2010 and 2011.  Although I claim no special knowledge of the country, it’s a theme that I’ve occasionally tried to highlight too.  In a December 2010 article on Sudan and the UN, I argued that Ban Ki-moon’s top priority should be to “offer the Security Council a compelling version of what the UN can achieve in the South.”  Last summer, I repeated rumors circulating in New York of UN turf wars over South Sudan:

More than 40 officials representing various agencies piled into an initial assessment mission. The U.N.’s “integrated” planning process, which has proved cumbersome in the past, was just as unwieldy in this case, and tempers frayed badly in New York.

After I wrote that, quite a few people inside the UN were in touch to say that I was off the mark.  While the UN planning process was a bit of a mess, the real problem was that the planners did not believe that the Security Council would accept a large military mission in South Sudan comparable to those in Liberia or the Congo.  European members of the Council in particular seemed to be fixated with keeping the costs of the mission down, part of larger austerity drive.  UN officials put together ideas for protecting civilians with a relatively small force, but Hilde Johnson’s statement to the NYT suggests that the level of anarchy in South Sudan has now passed the point that it can be handled through “peacekeeping lite”.  To make matters worse, troop contributors to the mission are getting (justifiably) nervous.  Russia, which provides military helicopters to the mission, seems to have had enough already:

Russia is likely to withdraw its military helicopters servicing the U.N. peacekeeping force in South Sudan after voicing alarm at attacks on Russian personnel there, a Russian official said on Tuesday.  Although Moscow has not made a final decision on its possible withdrawal , Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov said the security situation for the 120 Russians aiding the U.N. peacekeepers “recently has not been satisfactory for us.”  “There is a likelihood that our unit will be withdrawn,” Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency quoted Gatilov as saying. He said Moscow had repeatedly asked the U.N. Secretariat and the South Sudan authorities to take measures to ensure the Russians’ security.

An anonymous UN official is reported as saying that Russia’s decision is “outrageous”.  But if the situation is as bad as it seems, then UN officials – up to and including the Secretary-General – are going to need to go further than that.  Last year, Ban Ki-moon took a stand over the crisis in Côte d’Ivoire and, as I point out in the current edition of Global Governance, demonstrated an unexpected degree of moral purpose and leadership.  He needs to repeat that feat over South Sudan.

Ban has already expressed concerns about the situation.  But he needs to make a huge push on this issue now: if he does not, he may find that the UN stands accused of overseeing massacres and crimes against humanity reminiscient of the 1990s.  That would not only sully his second term in office, but the institution’s standing as whole.

OK, OK, that’s not quite what Chatham House are saying in their new report Treasure Mapped: Using Satellite Imagery to Track the Developmental Effects of Somali Piracy. But check out some of what the report does say:

The data analysis indicates pirate incomes have widespread and significant positive impacts on the Somali economy. Although only a fraction of ransoms is exchanged into Somali shillings, the appreciation of the Somali shilling resulting from the injection of US dollars benefits people relying on imported food staples such as rice. There are clear trickle-down effects for casual labourers and pastoralists because of higher cattle prices.

Or this:

Piracy has created employment and considerable multiplier effects in the Puntland economy, even if a significant proportion of the proceeds is invested in foreign goods or channelled to foreign financiers. The distribution of ransoms follows traditional patterns in Somalia, involving considerable redistribution and investment in urban centres rather than coastal villages.

But here’s the real punchline:

The total cost of piracy off the Horn of Africa (including the counter-piracy measures) was estimated to be in the region of US$7–12 billion for 2010, while ransoms were said to be in the region of US$250 million. Even if Somali communities received all of the ransom money, replacing this source of income (for example with a combination of a foreign-funded security forces and development aid) would be considerably cheaper than continuing with the status quo.

A negotiated solution to the piracy problem should aim to exploit local disappointment among coastal communities regarding the economic benefits from piracy and offer them an alternative that brings them far greater benefits than hosting pirates does. A military crack-down on the other hand would deprive one of the world’s poorest nations of an important source of income and aggravate poverty.

Readers could make a real contribution to the people of Somalia by taking their yachts over to the Horn of Africa:

After all last year’s excitement about social media’s role in the Arab revolutions (“Think what Trotsky could have done if only he’d had a twitter feed rather than an armored train, blah, blah”), I’m delighted to see that protestors in Lagos are adopting a lower-tech but highly effective tactic.  To wit, spreading their message via cute animals:

(H/t Teju Cole’s always-excellent twitter feed.)

Guinea-Bissau is one of the world’s unluckiest countries. Ravaged by the slave trade, stifled by Portuguese colonisers (when the latter were forced out, only one in 50 Guineans could read), and then saddled with a series of inept, corrupt post-independence leaders, the decision of South American drug traffickers to use its offshore Bijagos islands as a staging post on the cocaine route to Europe was a devastating blow (for analysis of the latter, see here). The advent of the drug gangs brought chaos, as politicians, police and the military jostled for a share of the spoils. The assassination of Nino Vieira, who had ruled the country for much of the last thirty years, was the most visible of its impacts, but the repercussions show no signs of abating.

Last week saw the foiling of an alleged coup attempt by navy chief, Bubo Na Tchuto (for more on his colourful past, see here). Taking advantage of the president, Malam Bacai Sanha, being out of the country for medical treatment, Bubo had apparently resolved to take charge of the country – and by extension the cocaine trade – before army boss and former friend Antonio Indjai could lay his hands on it.

Some observers believe the arrest of Admiral Bubo was a positive development, as he has for long been suspected of being in cahoots with the South Americans (this analysis ignores the possibility that Indjai himself, who two years ago released Bubo from United Nations custody, is similarly implicated). But the death in hospital of Malam Bacai Sanha today has shaken things up yet again. Instead of settling down, there is now likely to be a new tussle for power. Indjai is likely to be either king or kingmaker, the prime minister Carlos Gomes, whom Indjai described two years ago as a “criminal” but who is now seemingly an ally (alliances in the cocaine era are extremely fluid), will want a slice of the pie, and former president, the disastrous Kumba Yala, may make another bid for the top job. The stakes are high, the power struggle unlikely to result in anything resembling stability as long as the traffickers remain in the country. The death of the president could barely have come at a worse time. Once again, fortune has frowned on Guinea-Bissau.

Southeast Asia has consistently outperformed Sub-Saharan Africa in income growth. As the below chart indicates, its inhabitants were much poorer than Africans in 1960; today they are two and one-half times richer. In fact, over the past half-century, the region has been the most consistently successful in the developing world, growing almost continuously (apart from a brief hiatus after the 1997 Asian financial crisis).

Source: Tracking Development

Southeast Asia’s growth has also been much more inclusive than Africa’s. Whereas the latter’s two growth spurts since independence—in the 1960s and 2000s—have yielded little poverty reduction, Southeast Asia has produced spectacular reductions. Indonesia, for instance, reduced poverty from 60 percent in 1970 to 22 percent in 1984. Vietnam reduced it from 58 percent in 1993 to 14 percent in 2008.

Yet, the region does not meet the standard model for economic success, at least as defined by the World Bank and the rest of the Western development community. Governments have historically not been held in check by elections. Corruption is widespread. Governance has rated low on most indicators.

What then explains this success? (more…)

The radical Islamist group Boko Haram obviously does not like Christmas:

Five bombs exploded on Christmas Day at churches in Nigeria, one killing at least 27 people, raising fears that Islamist militant group Boko Haram – which claimed responsibility – is trying to ignite sectarian civil war.

Gun battles between security forces and the sect also killed at least 68 people in the last few days in northern Nigeria. Earlier this year, the Islamists struck the capital, Abuja, twice, including a suicide car bomb attack against the United Nations headquarters that killed 26 people.

Nigeria has stark ethnic and religious divisions and a history of Muslim-Christian violence. Such attacks are unlikely to improve matters.

Unfortunately, the country’s weak institutions make it ill-prepared to deal with threats like this. It is unlikely to have the capacity to meet the challenge. Expect more attacks in the coming months.

Few journalistic cliches are as irritating as the trope of describing some war-ridden country as “the size of Texas” or “three times the size of France”.  I recall being taught at school that an area of rain-forest “the same size as Wales” was being burned every year in Brazil.  Some wit asked if it would be possible to burn Wales instead.

Most of these comparisons are pretty meaningless because it’s reasonably hard to keep exact data on the size of France, etc., in your head.  Now, however, the BBC has come up with a useful graphic to prove that the Democratic Congo is “around two thirds the size of Western Europe.”  Nasty choice of color-scheme, though…

What can you do with US$1.2 billion? Treat over one million HIV/AIDS patients in Africa for one year. Build 200 new university campuses in places such as Ghana. Provide core funding for hundreds of developing country think tanks. Or organize an election in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Which is likely to improve the most number of lives?

The election in the DRC this week, the second since the end of the bloody civil war that ravaged central Africa in the 1990s, is supposed to bring greater stability and more accountable government to a country almost the size of western Europe. But progress since the first election in 2006 has been disappointing. The country ranks dead last of the 187 countries on the Human Development Index. The poverty rate is 71%. Only 9% of the DRC’s people have even intermittent access to electricity.

And as the New York Times reported recently:

Brutal rebel groups still haunt the hills [in the eastern region], pillaging minerals and killing and raping at will. . . . A witch doctor recently led a revolt in the northwest of the country. In February, rebels besieged the airport in Lubumbashi, in the south, thought to be Congo’s most promising city. Even here in Kinshasa, home to about 10 million people, bands of wiry, adolescent street children wielding iron bars routinely set up roadblocks and steal money from helpless motorists.

This election is unlikely to change much. The polls are widely believed to be rigged, will probably be contested, which will likely yield violence. In releasing a report that detailed abuses, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said, “The kind of intimidation, threats, incitement, arbitrary arrests and violence that we have documented is unacceptable and has a chilling effect on voters.”

There are few other places on the planet where politics are as disconnected from reality. Elections are more a fight to control the spoils of power between competing groups of elites then a mechanism likely to bring better government
to the country’s people.

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Syria is slipping further into chaos.  It’s sad to think that the Security Council has been debating the situation there for almost half a year to no effect.  Or, to be more accurate, the only effect has been to make lots of diplomats very unhappy, as I explain in the new edition of Pragati:

It’s hard to find a happy diplomat at the United Nations Security Council these days. Western officials grumble about the difficulty of negotiating with India, Brazil and South Africa (the IBSA countries) over the Syrian crisis, to say nothing of China and Russia. The non-Western powers, they suspect, are all plotting to frustrate the U.S. and Europe.

Piffle, reply the supposed plotters. The bleak mood in the Council is a result of the West’s distortion of the UN mandate to protect civilians in Libya. If NATO hadn’t used that as a basis for regime change, there might be real cooperation over Syria. Even the unhappiest European officials accept that other powers’ anger over Libya is genuine.

Does anyone gain anything from the stalemate? Russia arguably does. Earlier in the year it failed to halt Western interventions in not only Libya but also Côte d’Ivoire. As Russia’s main claim to leverage at the UN is its willingness to act as a spoiler, these set-backs made it look a shadow of itself. On Syria, its blocking power returned as it resisted – and in October vetoed – EU and US efforts to pass a resolution sanctioning Syria.

For China, the benefits have been less clear, as it prefers to look pragmatic on the Security Council. Nonetheless it felt obliged to side with Russia over Syria. But the real losers have been the IBSA countries, which have often looked trapped between the West and the Russo-Chinese axis as they have tried to respond to events in the Middle East.

But at least IBSA has emerged as a semi-credible diplomatic force in UN affairs, right?  I’m not so sure:

The fact that IBSA voted as a bloc can be interpreted as a success – it is generally recognised that the trio of powers have been significant swing voters in the Security Council this year. But this may only be a temporary phenomenon. Brazil is approaching the end of its two-year term on the Council, and South Africa continues to have a greater stake in acting as the leader of the African bloc than in aligning with India. IBSA’s brief moment of importance in the Council could soon be forgotten, and India’s leverage duly reduced.

On Wednesday ODI was host to Tony Blair, giving a speech on ‘leadership’ and the work of his Africa Governance Initiative. 

There were, of course, predictable howls of protest from people furious that ODI gave a platform to the man who sent troops into Iraq. My view, for what it’s worth, is that Iraq was terrible  but that Blair also did many good things: huge investments in the health service and education, the minimum wage, the Human Rights Act, the creation of DFID, the increases in aid.  I’m unwilling to get into a game of trying to trade these off against each other, and Iraq doesn’t cancel out the good stuff as far as I am concerned.  But anyway. 

Blair talked about the importance of effective leadership – his main argument (very much informed by his own time in government, he said) was that ‘without a strong centre, nothing gets done’.  I found this quite a refreshing challenge to the usual focus in the development canon on processes of governance and democracy.  Ideal processes won’t necessarily turn out leaders who can actually act (one might cite the American constitution and Obama’s current trials as exhibit A here), while some leaders can do considerable amounts of good while presiding over very far from ideal processes (some might argue that Kagame falls into this category – I find it very hard to judge).

One wouldn’t want to push this too far.  Being able to participate in a political process that you trust to deliver, and not being subject to opression and fear while you do so, is a good thing in itself.  But it was a useful reminder that people matter in history, and that having people who can get things done, and who want to do the right things, is a crucial part of making progress happen.  As a part of effective leadership, my former colleagues at ActionAid and Christian Aid will be pleased to know that he put a great focus on the importance of governments being able to raise their own money through tax, and the huge importance of getting investment deals right so that governments benefit. 

Rightly, most of development is focused on what happens in societies and economies at large.  But I found it quite useful to be reminded that what happens at the top of governments can be about making good stuff happen, and we should not always just focus on governments when they start doing things wrong.

A year ago, I was worrying about the implications of the Euro crisis for UN operations:

Despite the financial crisis, the UN’s peacekeeping budget — running at between $7 billion and $8 billion a year — has not yet faced drastic cuts. The Obama Administration has made a point of paying its dues (now 27% of the total) on time, compensating for Bush-era arrears.

However, other big financial contributors — especially members of the European Union, who cover 40% of the costs combined — are looking for cuts as part of broader spending reductions.

In June [2010], Gérard Araud, France’s ambassador to the UN, told the Security Council that “in the context of budgetary austerity, the cost of peacekeeping was increasingly difficult to manage.”

You can find a longer version of this argument in a paper I wrote for ZIF, the German peacekeeping center, in August 2010.  Fourteen months later, my gloomy predictions are being vindicated.  Colum Lynch published a lengthy piece yesterday  on the FP website headlined “U.S. and Europe fight over cuts in peacekeeping”:

Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, fended off a push last month by European governments to press to consider cuts next year in U.N.-backed peacekeeping mission in Liberia, which costs upwards of $525 million a year, more than Liberia’s $459 million annual national budget. Rice has also resisted calls from other European governments, like Britain and France, to consider deeper cuts in U.N. peacekeeping missions in Haiti and in Sudan.

France and Britain are required to pay, respectively, 7.5 percent and 8.16 percent of all U.N. peacekeeping costs.

U.S. officials say that peacekeeping missions must be adequately funded to ensure their success, and that European governments, who each pay a far smaller share of the U.N. peacekeeping budget, are in some instances motivated by a desire to shift funding to their own “pet” missions, not the commitment to fiscal discipline that they claim.

“There is no country that has a greater interest in the economies, effectiveness, and efficiencies of U.N. peacekeeping missions [than the United States]. We pay 27 percent of the bill while the Europeans pay a smaller percentage,” Rice said in an interview with Turtle Bay. “For them to be holier than thou is a bit rich, to say the least.”

I’d like to say “I told you so”, though that’s not super-helpful…