Aid Thoughts

Digesting the difficult decisions of development

Archive for category Elections

New Political Strategies in East Africa

Apr 2

Posted by Ranil Dissanayake in Africa, Elections, Governance | 10 Comments

The future of political recruitment?

New media is all the rage. Tanzania’s political class has been pretty excited over the last week or two by the formation of a new political party, CCJ (the name stands for Chama Cha Jamii, or Party of Society). There are a number of interesting things about this event, but one of wider interest beyond the confines of Tanzanian political discourse is their use of an innovative way of registering new party members, normally poaching them from other parties: text messaging and internet registration. The Swahili daily Nipashe ran an article about this a few days ago which I’ve only just noticed now, under the headline ‘CCJ Yazidi Kujitanua Kisiasa’ (‘CCJ are Growing and Widening Themselves Politically’). It writes:

“This strategy, unprecedented in the history of the whole of East Africa, relates to the use of news and communications technology [ICT] … as the service which allows citizens to join the party by electronic means wherever they are…”

(This and the rest of this piece is based on my translation of two pieces in Nipashe in Swahili – Swahili speaking readers can drop me an e-mail or a comment and I’ll transcribe the interesting bits so they can read in the original language).

How do they do it? Quite simple, really: mobile phones. Prospective members send a text to the number 15337 including the word ‘CCJ’, then their exact name, a star, their address, a star, their state, a star and their area. After three weeks, a registration card will be sent to the address listed. In the most amazing (and selfless) part, Richard Kiyabo, the chairman of the party in question, has said they are ready to provide technical support to other parties to teach them how to use the same system of registration.

This is a great idea, given the size of Tanzania. To sign up people in the villages and fields would require a huge investment in time either from the party (sending out activists far from the towns) or from the potential members (traveling long distances to register). Mobile phone use is very widespread here these days, and the great thing is you can just borrow someone else’s mobile to register yourself. CCJ are just a few weeks old, and this recruitment strategy is the central prong of their drive to ensure that they can participate meaningfully in the elections expected to be held in October.

That’s the technical side of things. The political implications of this new party, formed on the 2nd of March, are now becoming apparent. For those unfamiliar with Tanzanian politics, since independence and the unification of Tanzania and Zanzibar, respectively, only one party has ever ruled in either place: TANU, which became CCM after the Union. My reading is that in the mainland, CCM have had no real worries about their ability to retain power.

The arrival of CCJ didn’t seem like it would influence this much one way or another. But on March 31, Fred Mpendazoe, an MP from CCM announced his defection to the new party. By this defection, Mpendazoe (described as one of the men in CCM on the front line in the battle against corruption by the same paper) has drawn rare praise. It seems this defection is likely to cost him Tsh 45 millions (roughly $35,000) in benefits and other perks of Government membership. By foregoing all of this in order to join the new party he has made himself, and his new party, front-page news. This kind of publicity will perturb CCM, but I doubt it will change the final result at the ballots on the Mainland – but if CCJ succeeds in ‘harvesting’ more members from CCM, things could get interesting.

In Zanzibar, though, the situation is different. Zanzibar’s traditionally warring major parties, CCM and CUF have agreed on a coalition Government after the coming elections, an idea which the House of Representatives just a couple of days ago agreed to put to referendum. This worried me because with CCM and CUF joining arms in a new Governmental structure, Zanzibar would be left without any viable opposition. A complete lack of contestability in Government would be disastrous for political accountability. The remaining party, Chadema, never really seemed to me to be at the races much. The emergence of any new source of political contestability would be great: Zanzibar would enjoy the benefits of peace and better representation that the coalition Government will likely bring without losing too much of the contestability that is required for democratic politics to work.

It’s going to be an interesting few months for East African politics.

UPDATE: A reader has tried the service and found that he wasn’t asked for an exact address, as reported in the papers. It seems that the service may not be all its made out to be. He still got a membership number, though. And I imagine that boosting numbers to get on the October ballot is CCJ’s main aim, so perhaps they’re getting what they need out of it.

FURTHER UPDATE: It seems that registration safeguards on this system aren’t very strong, thanks to a bit of investigation from a reader. But the point about how this technology, once problems are ironed out, could be useful remains valid.

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Some thoughts on and from ‘It’s Our Turn to Eat’

Jan 17

Posted by Matt in Africa, Aid, Development, Economics, Elections, Governance, Political Economy | 3 Comments

wronggithongo

By request, I received Michala Wrong’s excellent chronicle of patronage and ethnic division for Christmas. If you haven’t read or bought it yet and have even a passing interest in development, aid, corruption, ‘Africa’ or even espionage thrillers, I highly recommend you pick it up. Wrong’s storytelling feels effortless and definitive, yet manages to avoid the typical trappings of this sort of literature.

It isn’t a flawless piece of work – Wrong spends a long time trawling through John Githongo’s (interesting) life, looking for clues that this particular man was destined to be a whistle blower. I think such predetermination is unlikely; men like Githongo are as much a product of their times and of random cumulative processes (it’s worth noting that his school, credited as shaping many of his ideals also churned out many of those complicit in the sorts of scandals he was later to challenge). Her handling of the time line of Githongo’s tenure as the anti-corruption czar is also a little confusing, as she sometimes jumps back and forth by months and sometimes years (usually to make a particularly punchy point, even if it is chronologically suspect). Against these (minor!) complaints, I still find the book to be amazingly fun to read.

What has made some portions of the book more thrilling to me was my (purely geographic) proximity to some of the events taking place. I was barely a few months into my master’s degree at St. Antony’s College when Githongo took up residency there. While I remember the odd whisper and newspaper article about who he was and why he had fled Kenya, there was little in the way of detail; I was much too busy tackling graduate school to find out. So it is quite tickling to find out that he spend time at my college putting together the dossier, transcribing taped blackmail attempts and worrying about possible assassination attempts.

A few sentences that have jumped out at me during the later chapters on aid:

Other analysts might shake their heads at Sach’s simplistic formula for the continents recover, but he had successfully wooed pop-star campaigners like Bono and Sir Bob Geldof, and their ability to mobilise a younger generation bored by traditional politics awed Western governments. Whether on the right or left, political parties realised that promising to ‘save’ Africa was apo tential vote-winner in the eyes of an ideaelistic coming generation. No wonder members of the African elite, aware of these pressures, sometimes sounded unappetisingly smug when contemplating tortured Western attitudes to the continent. As one Kenyan newspaper editor told me: ‘What we Africans have relaised is that your leaders need to lend to use more than we need to be lent to.’

Wrong goes on to discuss the urgent need of development agencies to get the money flowing. She later singles out DFID, as the organisation was often at odds with the Foreign Office over what to do about the bubbling scandal Githongo was revealing. She blames DFID’s meddling on the disbursement culture: the need to keep things moving.

On accountability and fungibility:

Critics of international aid often claim it all ends up in Swiss bank accounts, a charge development officials easily swat away, pointing at the accountants and consultants who police spending. The argument should be a different one: not that the aid is itself stolen, but that donors make it possible, via that aid, for governments to dip their hands elsewhere in the budget while still delivering basic services, thereby escaping the electorate’s wrath. Accountability moves offshore, thanks to aid’s fungibility.

We’ve all been in debates about fungibility, but it wasn’t until I had read this paragraph that I considered that there might be fungibility of graft. It makes me worry about a place like Malawi, where DFID helps fund a massive fertiliser subsidy program (which makes the population happy and willing to re-elect the governing party), but might also lead to less attention on less ‘urgent’ expenditures.

And finally, on ethnicity and division among (seemingly) absurd lines:

Kimunya and Gikonyo were there to make sure John did nothing to blow the referendum campaign off course. ‘They kept saying, “SWEAR to us, SWEAR that you won’t spill the beans before the referendum. You must swear, John.” Sensing resistance, Kimunya made the mistake of appealing to John’s supposed ethnic loyalites. ‘Do you really think uncircumcised people can rule Kenya?’

Pick it up.

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The struggle of the African farmer, from the safety of your own home

Oct 2

Posted by Matt in Africa, Development, Elections | 1 Comment

Suit up, it's time to take on world poverty, with your game pad

Suit up, it's time to take on world poverty, with your game pad

Thanks to Kerry Brennan at the Innovations for Poverty Action blog, I’ve discovered my new favourite computer game: Third World Farmer!

From the game’s website:

In the game, the player gets to manage an African farm, and is soon confronted with the often difficult choices that poverty and conflict necessitate. We find this kind of experience efficient at making the issues relevant to people, because players tend to invests their hopes in a game character whose fate depends on him. We aim at making the player “experience” the injustices, rather than being told about them, so as to stimulate a deeper and more personal reflection on the topics.

OK, sounds a little preachy, but let’s give it a go.

  1. Turn one. My name is Eyakobo (which I quickly change to *Matt*). I’m married with two children. I own a hut and my family is in good health. I’ve got some cash ($50) and a field, so let’s get the planting started. I plant mostly maize (corn) with a couple sections of peanuts (high risk) to diversify my crop portfolio.
  2. Turn two. Rats! A drought year! I lose all my crops and am now $12 in debt. My health has suffered.
  3. Turn three. No cash, so we go without proper food for a year.
  4. Turn four. A seedy businessman offers to let me grow opium (?!?!) on my plot, I do so and quickly turn a tidy profit of $152. I buy a shed, some chickens, and another diverse set of crops.
  5. Turn five. Rats! a drought year! I lose all my crops, and now have no money to plant more, just my chickens.
  6. Turn six. Rats! My chickens died! My health is low. No money for food.
  7. Turn seven. “Some paramilitaries hear of your relative success as a farmer and raid your farm, taking everything.”
  8. I die. My wife dies. I send my daughter away to work (and get $1 in return). My son is old enough to run the farm himself. I find him a wife. The wife has, as a clickable option: have a baby (the demographic economists go wild).

I could keep on going about the epic story of my son’s family, but it’s much of the same. Just when things look like they are going well, you get slapped down by the unjust hand of fate (anything from rising input prices, higher costs of living, wars, famines, dumb neighbors, diseases, chicken-specific diseases). These shocks seem a little too convenient (just when I was doing well, something bad happens). It’s a bit like an African Oregon Trail (without the perpetual dread of fording rivers).

I’ve got mixed feelings about this game. On one hand, the game feels like “Poverty Porn: The Game, African Stereotype Edition”. On the other hand, it does at least a minimally decent job of modeling the sort of  decision-making economists like to think about (it’s a good year, do I have a child? What sort of crops do I plant? Should I buy crop insurance?). Give it a whirl and post your experiences on here!

Wow: how about we have the most prominent development economists compete to see who can do the best? Development bloggers, who’s in?

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The dog with two bones

Sep 18

Posted by Matt in Aid, Development, Economics, Elections, Governance, Political Economy | 3 Comments

Ian Birrell of the Independent asks a question that’s worth a ponder: why do the British give money to repressive countries?

Why, he asks, is Britain handing out so much aid to [Rwanda] when its ruler is fighting a proxy war in the Congo; when its elites are getting rich on stolen minerals; when democracy is a sham and dissent is stifled?

And aid flows into Uganda, where Yoweri Museveni’s regime has been accused of torture and repression. Britain increased total aid to Ethiopia even after Meles Zenawi, another poster boy for this supposed new wave of African leaders, oversaw a brutal clampdown following a blatantly rigged election and waged war on Somalia. A strange paradox seems to be emerging: the more money spent on aid, the less chance of criticism.

Birrell also highlight’s DFID’s growing power in Anglo-African relations:

The most outrageous example was in Kenya, where Dfid officials tried to prevent the British ambassador from speaking out against obscene corruption. Only last week I heard of a senior minister who, told he was signing agreements with one of Kenya’s most corrupt politicians, glibly replied that he was less interested in the man’s record than the desire to get children into education. Little wonder Kenya remains plagued by corruption.

The problem is that out of the many reasons we give aid, the only two that are (arguably) unselfish often conflict with each other:

  1. giving aid to hammer away at poverty and inspire economic growth and
  2. giving aid to incentivise governments to stay free, accountable and democratic.

Does our pursuit of poverty reduction collide with our preference for a free and democratic world (the titular two bones)? We’d like our decisions to be clear-cut: When governments are both repressive and bad at governing (or free and follow good policies) the decision is pretty easy.

However, when we’re dealing with countries that are relatively free but still have incompetent governments or those that are repressive yet follow good development/economic policies, our decisions will be marked with flecks of grey.

Sometimes I feel like I’m closer to the “give effective aid even if it gives you icky feelings” camp. Effective governments are arguably more important than free ones – Robert Mugabe’s economic policies did far more damage to Zimbabwe than his brutal methods of staying in power.

On the other hand, it does feel particularly icky to look the other way when successful governments begin to look more authoritarian, as they have in Uganda, Rwanda (and as donors in Malawi often did while I was there).

What do you think?

Stealing elections for dummies: Part 1

Jun 22

Posted by Matt in Elections | No Comments

The post-election turmoil in Iran doesn’t seem to be improving. Despite the large amount of press the crisis is receiving, there doesn’t seem to be much of a consensus about what, if anything, the rest of the world can do but watch and wait.

One of the less controversial things we can do is sit down and analyse the election data. Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco describe their analysis of provincial data from the Iranian election. It turns out that a great place to look for falsified data is in the last two digits: humans are just bad at making up numbers randomly.

The numbers look suspicious. We find too many 7s and not enough 5s in the last digit. We expect each digit (0, 1, 2, and so on) to appear at the end of 10 percent of the vote counts. But in Iran’s provincial results, the digit 7 appears 17 percent of the time, and only 4 percent of the results end in the number 5. Two such departures from the average — a spike of 17 percent or more in one digit and a drop to 4 percent or less in another — are extremely unlikely. Fewer than four in a hundred non-fraudulent elections would produce such numbers.

More here, at the Washington Post, as well as here.

Hat tip to Chris Blattman for the link.

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