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.

As the IMF agrees to grant Guinea-Bissau $700 million of debt relief, the European Union, the country’s main donor, threatens to withhold $150 million of aid.

Guinea-Bissau’s leaders will at least be pleased it’s not the other way round.

Back in January, I posted the text below (I subsequently took it down for re-posting at a later date because of a bizarre and unnerving incident that happened to me in Dakar):

“The airstrip on the island of Bubaque in Guinea-Bissau’s Bijagos archipelago is, appropriately, a white line cut out of the bush, a narrow sandy strip hemmed in on both sides by thick forest. Only small planes can land there, but small planes can carry large quantities of cocaine.

The Guinean government claims that the drug trade through the islands (which South American dealers have adopted as a transit point on the way to the lucrative European market) has abated in recent months. The country’s leaders are reluctant to forfeit European Union aid, so they are keen to show that they are fighting this new scourge.

I spent ten days on Bubaque over the Christmas period and heard a dozen or so planes in the night. More may have arrived while I was asleep. Given that the airstrip sees no commercial traffic, with the islands’ few visitors and provisions being shipped in on pirogues and the weekly ferry from Bissau, the obvious conclusion to draw is that the planes were from Latin America.

Nor are there signs in the capital, Bissau, of any let-up. The city is in the midst of a minor building boom, as smart new villas spring up, with gardens, fences and security guards – all funded, according to locals, by drug money.

But even if it does show resolve, the government’s capacity is limited. Only around twenty of the eighty Bijagos islands are inhabited, so they are extremely difficult to police (more so when your navy has no ships and your air force no planes). And the resourceful South Americans are putting in contingency plans to pre-empt EU and government pressure. Two of them, I was told, recently scoped out a hitherto unused island, posing as tourists and asking villagers if there was an airstrip (there isn’t) or a forest clearing (there is) where they can land small jets or helicopters. But even landing areas are not essential – the traffickers can also drop the drugs into the sea for collection.

In the islands, few are willing to discuss the drug trade – many believe Colombian or Venezuelan drug lords killed their president, Nino Vieira, last year after he failed to pay them for a consignment of cocaine, so they are understandably fearful. But the return to the country of Admiral Bubo has put the cat among the pigeons and sent tremors through the highest levels of government.

Before he fled into exile after a failed attempt to topple Vieira, Admiral Bubo was head of the Guinean navy. This position gave him privileged access to the narco-traffickers, who use boats as well as planes to transport cocaine across the Atlantic. Admiral Bubo therefore knows many things, which is why the government was so keen for the UN to hand him over, which it agreed to do last week. He knows the extent of Nino’s involvement in the trade (some believe the president carried cocaine to Europe himself, taking advantage of his immunity from customs searches). He knows who killed Nino, and whether senior members of the new government are involved in drug trafficking.

But Bubo is playing a dangerous game. Guinea-Bissau has no prisons, so he will either be freed or “disappeared”. It is almost certain that he profited from the drug boom himself, so if the government doesn’t protect him he will be at the mercy of rival navy or army factions and of the Latin Americans. How Bubo is dealt with will be a test case of the government’s seriousness in combating the trade.”

Last Thursday, the Admiral Bubo story took a new twist. Bubo was taken into the protection of a group of soldiers headed by a General Antonio Indjai, who at the same time arrested the Prime Minister, Carlos Gomes, and forty army officers including the army chief, who had opposed Bubo’s release. As Indjai took control of the armed forces, Bubo announced that Gomes is “a criminal who must be judged.”

When news of the PM’s arrest broke, hundreds of Guineans took to the streets to demand his release. The plotters relented, placing him under house arrest instead.

Admiral Bubo, as I suggested in January, was likely to have been implicated in the cocaine trade. Vincent Foucher, a researcher with the Bordeaux-based Centre d’etudes d’Afrique Noire, claimed in this weekend’s Libération newspaper that Carlos Gomes had been trying to sideline General Indjai because of the latter’s involvement in drug trafficking. The alliance between the admiral and the general is not surprising, therefore.

But what of the Prime Minister himself? Vincent Fourcher believes he is taking a strong hand against the narco-traffickers. Bubo, who knows exactly who is involved, argues the opposite. While in Guinea-Bissau myself in December and January, I heard many conflicting opinions over whether or not Gomes was abetting the traffickers – some even believe he had Nino Vieira killed in the turf war for control of the trade.

Whatever the truth, it seems that battle lines are being drawn, with Bubo and Indjai on one side, Gomes on the other. Where the country’s president, Malam Bacai Sanha, stands is not yet clear, and nor, perhaps most crucially for the future of Guinea-Bissau, is the allegiance of the Latin American drug cartels…

“The nature of the ties linking the African with the European has not really changed since the first Portuguese ships went sailing down the west coast of the continent: the sophisticated magic of the white man remains irresistibly alluring to the black.” (Shiva Naipaul)

In all the debates about aid, its visual impact is rarely remarked upon. In rural areas, aid probably looks like a good thing. When you see that a donor has dug a well for your village, you may feel grateful to and enthusiastic about the donor (that is, if you don’t feel embarrassed that your community has failed to dig its own well – a fact rammed home in nearly every village in Guinea-Bissau by a billboard placed next to each well proclaiming that it was a gift of the Kuwaiti, Spanish, Portuguese or American people).

But in cities, to which young Africans are migrating in droves, the visual effect is more ambiguous. When the urban African looks at aid, he sees aid workers and missionaries driving around in brand new Toyota Land Cruisers or Hiluxes. He sees them staring at laptops or chatting on snazzy mobile phones. He sees them dining in expensive restaurants or drinking in smart cafes. And he sees their glittering air-conditioned offices and villas, with iron gates and security guards.

In countries like Senegal, where there are tourists and Western businessmen, aid workers do not stand out. But in poor, remote, unvisited Guinea-Bissau they play an important part in shaping perceptions of the developed world (Guinea-Bissau has no cinemas, precious few internet cafes or televisions, and no press to speak of). And, as they have done for centuries, Africans see all this opulence and want a part of it. Guinean politicians, grown rich on drug money, purchase Land Cruisers and build gated villas. Ordinary citizens spend more than they can afford on mobile phones. And young Guineans, who until recently have not joined the West African exodus to Europe, have begun to talk about taking the boat to Spain – a journey which at least one in six of the many Senegalese who attempt it does not survive.

Of course, foreign aid workers are not the only cause of this new yearning, but it is likely they play some role. Many young Guineans I spoke to, who do not want to risk the trip to Spain, are desperate instead to work for foreign NGOs or the UN. It could be argued that giving young Africans something to aspire to will hasten progress and encourage hard work. Maybe so, but is owning a mobile really progress when you can’t afford your daughter’s $10-a-month school fees (as one mobile-owning mother in Bissau complained to me recently)? And in a country like Guinea-Bissau where aspiration is outpacing people’s capabilities and even well-intentioned governments are struggling to manage expectations, are ostentatious displays of affluence the best way of promoting peaceful development rather than the violent upheavals Nigeria, Guinea-Conakry and others are beginning to experience?

We achieved the record for a ‘sept places’ (seven-seater) the other day. This is considered the most luxurious form of transport in this part of West Africa. It consists of a Peugeot or Renault estate car slightly modified with an extra row of seats where the boot should be. It is designed to seat seven plus the driver.

If you are seated in the front or middle rows, it is fairly comfortable, provided of course that you don’t object to clouds of dust billowing in through the uncloseable windows, chickens pecking around your feet, or spray from the driver’s spittle occasionally flying in your face.

If you are seated in the back, however, it is less luxurious. You then have to choose either to bend your legs double in front of you so that they are folded tight against your chest (and these cars never stop during the journey, so your knees may be folded for seven hours straight, as mine were on our first sept places journey), or to put your legs on the floor and instead have your head rammed up hard against the metal ceiling. Shifting from one buttock to the other, moreover, to avoid contracting haemmorhoids from the rock-hard seats, is impossible – there is no room.

The middle row is only comfortable, of course, if the driver sticks to the 7-person limit. Often, however, he cannot resist the temptation to fit a few more in. Sometimes there are four people in a row designed to squeeze in three, turning the sept places into a neuf places. This is uncomfortable, but not the worst of all possible worlds.

The other day our driver allowed no less than 16 passengers (plus 3 chickens) into one of these cars. There were people standing up! They were leaning from the rear row over the middle row, where Ebru and I were seated with three others and the chickens. Astonishingly, nobody complained when we stopped to let in more passengers – when there are fourteen of you in a car designed for seven, after all, a couple more bodies doesn’t make that much difference.

The driver was not satisfied with our discomfort. He decided to make the journey even more challenging by giving us a demonstration of his driving skills. He seemed to have only recently passed (or bribed his way through) his driving test, for he looked extremely nervous. Sweat poured down his long hooked nose from under his white Muslim cap. He gripped the wheel tightly, and hunched over it to be closer to the road surface. Then, every time he reached down to change gear, he lost control and the car veered into the middle of the road. This behaviour provoked some complaints from the passengers; we were lucky the road was virtually deserted, so that when he regained control of the wheel we were still intact.

Near the end of the journey, a rotund, stern-looking woman passenger asks him to stop to let her out. “Where?” he asked. “At the mango tree.” The road is lined on both sides, as far as the eye can see, with mango trees. “Which one?” asks the hapless driver, gripping the wheel and staring intently ahead. “That one there, straight ahead,” the woman replies, tutting at the driver’s stupidity. He keeps driving, bemused, sweat pouring down his black robe, until she shouts, “This one! Stop!” We screech to a halt, and are down to a more comfortable 15 again…

And so we move on from Guinea-Bissau. The journey to Ziguinchor in the Casamance region of Senegal passed without incident, although reports of the road from here to Gambia are less positive, with the separatist rebellion hotting up in recent months. Have decided to hole up here for a while to write – although Ziguinchor is surrounded by trouble, the town itself is well protected by army roadblocks and appears peaceful.

It was strange and slightly sad to leave Guinea-Bissau, a difficult, testing little country that somehow we’d grown to like. You can learn a lot about a place by leaving it. Although itself one of the world’s poorest nations, Senegal is affluent compared to Guinea-Bissau. It has buildings of two storeys. Some even have three, four floors! Its markets have piles of food rather than just scraps. There are factories, cash machines, bookshops! People in boats are made to wear life jackets. There are tourists, and the incessant hassle from hustlers that comes with them. Guinea-Bissau has none of these things.

Most amazingly of all, Senegal has electricity. You press a switch and a light comes on! Wonder of wonders! Fans turn instead of lying still. There are streetlights, so you don’t need a torch to pick your way through the potholes at night. Food is stored in refrigerators. Guinea-Bissau, whose lights went out in 2003, has none of these things.

But I’d take Guinea-Bissau over Senegal any day. The people are friendly but not overfriendly. Foreigners are left in peace. There is solidarity among Guineans, too – despite its poverty, there are far fewer beggars there than in Senegal, and far fewer people yearn to make the dangerous trip to Europe. Guineans who are in trouble can turn to family and friends for food and shelter, and they are ridiculously generous even to wealthy strangers like us. And despite its governments’ venality, the country is at peace, and its people have hope for the future.

I myself am less optimistic than many Guineans. The drug trade (of which more later), an over-reliance on cash crops, an over-hasty rush to the cities, and the clash of generations are likely to put a brake on the country’s development, while it may not always remain unaffected by the instability of the region as a whole. On the next stage of my journey, I will find out how it compares with Sierra Leone, and then Burkina Faso. It should be an interesting ride.

Yesterday on our way back to Bissau from the south, we were stopped at a military checkpoint and forced to empty our rucksacks. Well, empty them until the soldier got bored halfway through and told us to stop – he didn’t look at the other half.

The reason for this sudden rigour (at the same checkpoint a few days previously mentioning Manchester United was sufficient to avoid a bag check) is the return to Guinea-Bissau of General Bubu, the former head of the navy. Bubu had to flee the country 18 months ago when he was discovered plotting a coup d’etat against the then president, Nino Vieira. He took sanctuary in Gambia.

Last Monday, weary of exile, the general returned secretly to Guinea-Bissau in a dugout canoe, entering via one of the country’s many rivers. Eluding checkpoints such as the one we passed through, he arrived in Bissau, walked into the United Nations building and claimed refugee status. There he remains today.

The government wants the UN to give him up so they can try him for his crime – although Nino Vieira is now dead and Bubu claims he has come in peace, you can’t trust anyone around here, especially someone with his popularity. But the UN constitution makes handing him over impossible, so there is deadlock. All that can be done is for soldiers at checkpoints to make sure people like Bubu don’t get through in future (although checking only half of one’s bag and not asking for ID may not be failsafe). After us, the regional governor passed through the same checkpoint. His bag was searched too, and he angrily asked the soldiers why they were shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted. The soldiers, chastened, shrugged.

This morning I went to an orphanage in Bissau (see @markweston71 on twitter for more photos). Can there be a less promising start to life than being orphaned in Guiinea-Bissau? Actually, yes. Some of the orphans were disabled, physically and mentally. Others had been raped and were infected with HIV (unfortunately the southern African myth that you can rid yourself of HIV/AIDS by having sex with a child has reached West Africa, and orphans are an easy target).

Some of the children wanted to play and have their photos taken, and to touch your white skin and long hair. Most, though, just wanted a hug, and to rest their little head on your shoulder for a while.

A dispute broke out in our neighbourhood in Bissau when a woman bought a plot of land and began to build a small shop on it. A neighbour objected, claiming the territory was his. The man who had sold the land to the woman remembered that a palm tree used to mark the border of the neighbour’s plot. “Where’s the palm tree?” he asked the neighbour. “It died many years ago,” came the reply.

Undeterred, the landlord asked the neighbour to get out his spade and dig in the place where he thought the palm tree once stood. This the man did, and he eventually found the roots of the old palm tree between his own land and the woman’s new shop. Realising his error, he apologised to the woman, who promptly got on with building her shop. Property rights, Guinea-Bissau style…

(For more on my travels in West Africa, see @markweston71 on twitter.com).

Last December I wrote about a Somali pirate’s justification for his choice of career. A former fisherman, like many of his countrymen, his main gripe was with foreign fishing vessels which overfished Somali waters and bulldozed local boats out of their way.

Well it turns out that now, thanks to the pirates,  fish stocks off the Somali coast have recovered. The greedy foreign piscatorial plunderers have been scared off, leaving locals to haul in bumper catches. Now that his justification for piracy has been removed, I wonder if our pirate friend will go back to his fishing rod.

Update: On the other side of Africa, Guinea-Bissau is clamping down on foreign fishing vessels too, but so far in a less swashbuckling way than the Somalis. The tiny West African country’s government has had a trawlerful of Spanish fishermen in custody for the last two weeks (which given the flimsy state of Guinea-Bissau’s navy and its complete absence of prisons is no mean feat). Apparently, the Spaniards are “losing patience.” Should have kept to your quotas then, shouldn’t you?

Cross-border wars in Sub-Saharan Africa have been few and far between since the end of the colonial period. Instead, the continent’s disaffected have fought numerous battles with their own countrymen. Last weekend, however, Guinea’s new leader, Dadis Camara, who took power in a coup last Christmas, claimed that neighbouring Guinea-Bissau was amassing troops at the border in preparation for an invasion of his country.

This would be a remarkable move by Guinea-Bissau, which doesn’t currently have a leader (the second round of presidential elections is due on 26 July) and whose army is a disaffected ragbag of poorly paid, badly trained young men who have enough trouble keeping the peace at home (their chief of staff was assassinated in March) without contemplating an invasion of a much bigger neighbour.

Camara reckons the planned invasion is a plot by the region’s drug lords, from Guinea, Guinea-Bissau and Latin America, to remove him. Camara has been surprisingly thorough in his purging of those Guineans involved in the cocaine trade which has plagued the countries of the Mano River basin in recent years, and he believes those high up in the industry want him out so that they can maintain their freedom to operate.

A war between the two countries would be disastrous for both and for their region. Both are extremely fragile politically, dirt poor and surrounded by other historically unstable states (Liberia, Sierra Leone, Senegal’s Casamance region). Guinea’s opposition parties are less worried, however. They see Camara’s warning as a ploy to entrench his power ahead of promised elections in October.  Given that he has also banned all political and union activities in his country, it seems that a false alarm of an invasion would indeed be in keeping with a strategy to stay in power, despite his promise to step down once elections are held.

Just a final word at the end of a turbulent day on the assassination of Guinea-Bissau’s two most powerful men, the President Joao Bernardo Vieira and the army chief of staff, General Tagme Na Waie.  It seems pretty likely that troops close to the General were responsible for killing the President, in revenge for what they thought was a Vieira-backed plot to do away with his rival.

But the more interesting question is who killed Tagme Na Waie? Vieira is obviously the prime suspect, as he hated the General, who had accused him of involvement in the cocaine trade (many diplomats thought Tagme was also involved). Vieira had not shrunk from murder to get rid of political opponents during his first spell in charge of the country in the 1980s, and Tagme Na Waie himself blamed the presidential guard for an attempt on his life in January.

But an analyst who spoke to the Times today said the killing of the General bore the hallmarks of a hit by drug cartels.  South Americans using other Guineans (including possibly Vieira) to smooth their path through the country could have wanted to remove Tagme as he was getting in their way. This would tally with similar killings in Colombia and Mexico over the years, with one gang eliminating another’s key contacts or leaders.

But would the inevitable chaos provoked by such an action benefit the cartels? If they’d wanted chaos, surely they’d have chosen Liberia or Cote d’Ivoire rather than Guinea-Bissau as their transit point. Both those countries were or had just been at war when the Colombians arrived. Guinea-Bissau was stable by comparison. It is hard to see how turmoil helps the cartels, who, as John Robb said when I interviewed him recently, “want the maximum level of corruption and to be left alone, with bureaucratic apparatus geared towards helping them do business.” The dealers are, in the end, businessmen, and doing business will be infinitely more difficult if civil war breaks out.

Perhaps Tagme’s killers miscalculated, and assumed that Vieira would quickly be able to put a lid on any unrest that ensued from the murder.  If so (and even if they had no hand in either killing), might they now shift their operations to somewhere more stable – Senegal, maybe, or even Ghana?

The life of Joao Bernardo Vieira, the President of Guinea-Bissau who was assassinated this morning, was a microcosm of the post-independence history of his country.

Born in 1939 and an electrician by trade, “Nino” rose to prominence during Guinea-Bissau’s war of independence, when he was a trusted comrade of Amilcar Cabral, who as head of a well-organised band of guerrillas led the country to freedom in 1974.  The PAIGC party, which Cabral formed and which Vieira led until his death, began as a revolutionary group whose goal was to expel the Portuguese colonialists and set up a socialist state. The party was both idealistic and pragmatic, its ethos summed up in a famous speech by Cabral:

Always remember that the people are not fighting for ideas…they fight and accept the sacrifices demanded by the struggle in order to gain material advantages, to live better and in peace, to benefit from progress, and for the better future of their children. National liberation, the struggle against colonialism, the construction of peace, progress and independence are hollow words unless they can be translated into a real improvement of living conditions.

(more…)

My forthcoming article in EMEA Finance magazine on how the assassination of Vieira is likely to be linked to the cocaine trade that has swamped Guinea-Bissau:

As most of the world worries about capital flight, a small corner of its poorest region has enjoyed an unexpected surge in foreign exchange reserves. Guinea-Bissau and its West African neighbour Guinea have recorded sharp rises in foreign direct investment (FDI) in recent years even as investors in more prosperous countries are running for cover. FDI in Guinea-Bissau rose from a meagre $20m to $120m between 2004 and 2006, while Guinea has seen a tenfold increase since 2000. In the last five years, Guinea-Bissau’s foreign reserves have more than tripled.

What accounts for the sudden popularity of these countries, which according to the latest United Nations Human Development Index are the ninth and thirteenth poorest in the world? The UN Office on Drugs and Crime believes drug money is to blame. Its director, Antonio Maria Costa, says that the influx of cash is “a form of money laundering, it comes in as foreign direct investment, it goes into rural real estate, purchase of land, hotels, tourism.” Antonio Mazzitelli, head of the UNODC’s regional office for West Africa, explains how it works: “If you want to launder money, you can declare full occupancy in a hotel for one year after opening it even if it’s empty. If you look at the occupancy rate of hotels, it’s not increasing.”

Drugs are a growth industry in West Africa. Colombian and other South American dealers, dislodged from their traditional channels by stricter US law enforcement and lured across the Atlantic by the strong euro, have adopted countries like Guinea-Bissau, Guinea and Sierra Leone as staging posts on the cocaine route. They fly or ship in large consignments of the drug, break it up into smaller packages, and dispatch it north across the Sahara to Western Europe.

West Africa’s governments are powerless to stop the trade. Guinea-Bissau’s police force has no handcuffs or vehicles, its air force no aircraft, its navy no ships. There are no prisons, and officials’ paltry salaries, which often go unpaid, give them little incentive to turn down Colombian bribes. Few observers doubt that senior figures are involved. In the recent general election campaign the opposition leader described President Joao Bernardo Vieira as the country’s top drug trafficker. In Sierra Leone, meanwhile, the chief of the airport police was arrested last July while allegedly assisting in the delivery of 600 kilos of cocaine to Freetown’s main airport.

The military futurist John Robb, author of ‘Brave New War,’ believes the Colombians’ wealth and weapons mean they can more or less do as they please. “When a transnational criminal organisation that has guerrilla warfare capability penetrates an easily corruptible country, you end up with a hollow state,” he says. “They have financial resources far in excess of what’s available internally within that state and the ability to put in more money and more resources than the international community. If the Colombians have found a hole in West Africa, there are no barriers to their expansion.”

An uncertain future

Some West Africans will benefit from the drug trade, at least in the short-term. Politicians, police and army officials paid by the Colombians to provide security or help them elude arrest are reaping rich rewards. Some ordinary citizens are also doing well. Drug ‘mules’ who make it to Europe send back some of their profits to relatives back home. Remittances to Guinea-Bissau were negligible throughout the 1990s but increased from $2 million in 2000 to over $28 million in 2006. Families can use these funds to feed themselves or invest in businesses (perhaps providing services to the drug barons).

The risks, however, are manifold. Numerous African countries have already suffered terribly as a result of the “resource curse,” and cocaine, like diamonds, gold and oil, is a commodity whose immense value can distort economies and societies with devastating effects.

Some of the effects are common to all such commodities. The disproportionate profits from the drug trade (or diamonds, gold or oil) discourage investment in other activities. Guinea-Bissau’s main exports are unprocessed cashew nuts, Senegal’s peanuts and fish. It is not difficult to see the allure of cocaine, a couple of tons of which are worth more than the Guinea-Bissau government’s entire annual budget. As drug exports push up the value of local currencies, moreover, other products become less competitive in international markets. Legal exports from much of West Africa have declined in recent years and may suffer further as the drug trade grows. With agriculture and manufacturing withering, the masses who are excluded from the cocaine windfall will sink deeper into poverty.

Political instability is also common to resource-cursed countries. The contest for diamonds in Sierra Leone led to one of Africa’s bloodiest wars. Oil has made Nigeria’s delta region a no-go zone. Battles over cocaine have torn apart Colombia and rocked northern Mexico. West Africa, as Mazzitelli warns, is much less equipped than Mexico to deal with the problem. “Mexico is big,” he says, “the state can respond, the economic structures can cope with illicit and criminal activity. In Africa, the overall state structure is much more defenceless to this kind of push. There are weaknesses all over the region that leave it exposed.”

In the last few months these weaknesses have become increasingly apparent. In November 2008, a group of soldiers attacked the President’s palace in Bissau with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, killing a guard but failing to reach the head of state himself, who was cowering inside. Two months later, the head of the armed forces was shot at by presidential guards. A recent feud between rival police factions left two senior counternarcotics officers dead. And in neighbouring Guinea, a group of young soldiers staged a successful coup d’état at Christmas. The coup leaders promised to wipe out corruption and stage democratic elections, but Guineans have heard such promises before – former president Lansana Conté, whose death precipitated the Christmas putsch, had himself come to power in a coup before proceeding to turn his country into a cesspit of corruption.

Although there is as yet no clear evidence that the above events were linked to the drug trade, that the sudden increase in instability has occurred just as the profits from cocaine are soaring has not escaped the notice of observers. Discussing the attempted coup in Guinea-Bissau, Antonio Mazzitelli commented that “control of drugs is becoming as contested as the control of diamonds was in Liberia and Sierra Leone. It’s a major source of income, and different providers of services will start fighting each other for control of the source of income.”

Political instability and damage to manufacturing and agriculture are the lot of many resource-cursed nations, but some impacts of the curse are unique to the drug trade. First, cocaine addiction is spreading through the affected countries. Second, money laundering requires the complicity of those working in the financial sector. Banking in the region is booming, with Gambia emerging as a key financial hub and banks opening up even in dirt-poor Guinea-Bissau. Once corrupted, says the UN, financial professionals “can be used for concealing all manner of criminal proceeds,” and financial institutions, crucial for promoting development, will be undermined.

Finally, the global illegality of drugs means that, unlike with diamonds or oil, foreign countries are likely to try to snuff out the industry, cutting off the supply of remittances and starving new businesses of funds. The European Union has provided aid and technical assistance to help West Africa’s governments tackle the problem. Military intervention may soon follow if the region becomes a stopping point on the heroin route from Central Asia to the US. If the Colombians leave, foreign investment will dry up, and West Africans, forced to rebuild agriculture and manufacturing from scratch, will have taken a step backwards on the long road out of poverty.

Shocking news from Guinea-Bissau, where president Joao Bernardo Vieira and his army’s chief-of-staff have both been assassinated.  The two men were thought to be rivals, so the killing of Vieira may have been a revenge attack. There is no evidence yet that the killings were linked to the country’s lucrative drug trade (see my earlier posts here, here and here), but the battle for access to it appears to be intensifying. Coming just weeks after the successful coup in Guinea, this latest convulsion may be part of a worrying trend of increasing instability on the West African coast.

Update: The Times is fairly sure Vieira’s death was a revenge attack.  Interestingly, too, it quotes an expert analyst who thinks the bombing of the army chief-of-staff, General Tagme Na Waie, was a “drugs hit,” with his men killing Vieira in the erroneous belief that he had authorised the hit.

Another update: An army faction has admitted that it killed President Vieira, who was shot by soldiers loyal to General Tagme as he tried to flee from his house. They say this is not a coup, however, and that they will respect the constitution and allow the head of parliament to take over. A different army spokesman, on the other hand, promised that his bit of the army would pursue the killers.  Dangerous times indeed.

And another: Anyone wanting background on the wider issues behind the troubles in Guinea-Bissau might be interested in this talk I gave to the UK Home Office last month.

One more: Fear is gripping the people of Guinea-Bissau. According to one eyewitness, they are staying in their homes because radio stations have been closed down and nobody knows if it’s safe to venture out. The reporter expects mixed reactions to the assassination, however – he points out that 70% of Guineans voted against Vieira in the last elections. I expect the majority reaction will largely depend on whether or not the next leader can maintain peace. If another civil war breaks out, even those who voted against the late president might long for the relative stability he brought.