Reckoning with Guinea-Bissau’s enduring political and economic stagnation
Reckoning with Guinea-Bissau’s enduring political and economic stagnation
Lessons on postcolonial political decay in African states
I: Early postcolonial political decay in Africa
Guinea-Bissau may be a small country of just over 2 million people, but its political history offers important lessons on when the rain started beating many postcolonial African states. In less than a decade after independence, the country went from a hopeful (socialist) society with a mobilized citizenry under the leadership of one of Africa’s most celebrated liberation movements to a personalist dictatorship that systematically demobilized the citizenry and presided over successive decades of political decay. The ensuing incoherence of public affairs forced most Guinea-Bissauans to “exit” civic life, thereby creating even more room for misgovernance.
It is easy to look at Guinea-Bissau today and imagine that its current situation was ineluctable. However, that would be a gross misreading of history.
Guinea-Bissau of the early 1970s had the potential to be a more politically coherent and institutionalized polity than many African states. The liberation war against Portugal created conditions for revolutionary political education, mobilization, and administration of liberated areas in the countryside. While it’s socialist ideological bend may have limited economic performance within wider global capitalism, it most likely would have produced a coherent nation-state in the mold of Tanzania or better — especially on the dimension of human development. With this in mind, the descent into political and economic chaos in the four decades after independence ought to be understood as a historical process occasioned by the failure to effectively manage competing elite interests and the gap between citizens’ demands and state fiscal-administrative capabilities.
The same goes for many other African states. What Nelson Kasfir (1976) calls “departicipation” is significantly under-appreciated as a driver of African political development in the first three decades of independence. Through departicipation, Africa’s ruling elites intent on hoarding power and state resources systematically forced their publics — who had been mobilized in opposition to colonialism — out of civic life. In so doing, they destroyed any chance of building coherent polities and national economies; and exacerbated the problem of multiple competing “primordial” publics occasioned by ethnic heterogeneity as described by Peter Ekeh (1975).
In many countries local governments and elections — potential sites for actualizing self-government — were abolished. The organs of ruling parties were left to atrophy. Trade unions and opposition parties were banned or defanged by being subordinated to ruling parties. Nationalization of key industries extended state mismanagement and control to the economic sector. Universities were defunded and vocal academics forced into exile. Talent and individual entrepreneurship were devalued. It is no wonder that when the economic crises of the 1980s hit, most countries had no answer and quickly capitulated to the dictates of foreign technical expertise while further entrenching departicipation.
A common explanation for these developments in much of Africa is that departicipation was the only way to avoid the problem of institutional inability to absorb the demands of a mobilized (and politicized) public; or to implement centrally-directed rapid economic development. However, such a reading elides the fact that departicipation was not the only option available. It was equally possible for African states to adopt the inherently participatory “campaigns” model that characterized much of Asian rural transformation under autocracy. The rise of postcolonial autocracy in the late 1960s need not to have led to departicipation.
Most African states never recovered from departicipation. The reintroduction of multiparty electoralism in the early 1990s came with thin forms of mobilization around valence issues (democracy, human rights, good governance) and identity. This was in contrast with the thick mobilization of the decolonization and early postcolonial periods on materialist terms (land, poverty, disease, illiteracy, industrialization). Overall, it is fair to say that early postcolonial departicipation is partially to blame for the lack of coherent ideology-based political mobilization in many contemporary African states (regardless of levels of democratization).
II: The trouble with Guinea-Bissau
On November 2, 2009 a burnt out Boeing 727-200F was “discovered” in the deserts of northern Mali. The plane is suspected to have crashed moments after takeoff from a makeshift airstrip before being abandoned and set on fire. No crew or cargo were found on board. The plane, operated by a Senegalese subsidiary of a Spanish company (West African Aviation), had forged Saudi Arabian registration and is believed to have had a Nigerian crew. Before its last flight the plane had passed through Guinea-Bissau, where authorities had questioned its airworthiness and registration status.
A United Nations investigation into the mystery jet concluded that the plane might have been carrying up to 10 tons of cocaine from Venezuela at the time of the “accident.” Leaked US embassy cables suggested the involvement of a web of entities in Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, Spain, and Venezuela.
This was not the first time that a drug-related aviation incident had been linked to Guinea-Bissau. According to the New York Times:
[A] Gulfstream arrived unexpectedly from Venezuela on July 12, 2008, and taxied to a hangar at the adjacent military airbase — where soldiers formed a line and unloaded its contents. The contents, reportedly more than a half-ton of cocaine, vanished. The crew was arrested and released. The army permitted the government to impound the plane only after several days. Since then, the plane has sat in the harsh sun, a reminder of Guinea-Bissau’s helplessness before forces far more powerful than itself.
The New York Times report captured an important source of recent political instability in Guinea-Bissau: an enduring inability to escape struggles between civilian and military elites over the control of the lucrative drug trade linking producers in Latin America to consumers in Europe.
Yet the problem runs deeper. On paper, in the early 1970s Guinea-Bissau looked like it had the ingredients for a successful postcolonial nation-building. It had fought a war of liberation throughout which elites invested heavily in the creation of a national identity and rural political education and mass mobilization. Research from the time suggest that self-government and nationalist ideological indoctrination were common in liberated areas. All these happened under the direction of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), one of Africa’s more organized and ideologically ambitious independence mass parties. Unfortunately, instead of building on the positive legacies of the decolonization process, the country’s founding elites chose to rapidly deinstitutionalize the state and demobilize the citizenry by sidelining political organizations and forms of participation/self-government that had been forged during 13 years of war. This development flew in the face of research showing that mobilization for war has positive effects on political participation.
The assassination of President João Bernardo Vieira (orchestrator of the first successful coup in 1980) and his military chief Batista Tagme Na Waie in 2009 following an alleged dispute over a drug cache vividly illustrated captured the extent of political decay in the country. In total, Guinea-Bissauans have endured four successful coups, multiple coup attempts (9-17 depending on datasets consulted), and a civil war. The last publicly reported coup attempt — involving a brazen gun attack on a cabinet meeting — occurred in February 2022.
Guinea-Bissau’s political decay was accompanied by economic stagnation. This is vividly illustrated by the divergence in economic fortunes compared with Cape Verde (3.5 times richer) over the last 30 years. One would be forgiven for forgetting that for much of the first half of the 20th century, including when both were under Portuguese colonial occupation, Cape Verdeans regularly migrated to Guinea-Bissau to avoid famines and economic want.
While Cape Verde certainly started off with a better human capital base (its per capita colonial education spending was almost 5 times that of Guinea-Bissau) and administrative capacity, with a more coherent system of government Guinea-Bissau ought to have more than made up for the difference on the back of a better natural resource endowment. Instead, Cape Verdeans now live almost 15 years longer than Guinea-Bissauans, despite the latter having a lower infant mortality rate in the early 1960s. Notice that the dramatic divergence in incomes shown above happened during Africa’s most recent growth period — which Guinea-Bissau missed out on largely because it successfully avoided the political/economic reforms that swept the region in the 1990s.
As late as 1983, McCulloch had the following to say about Cape Verde’s prospects:
The outlook for Cape Verde is extremely grim. The islands have virtually nothing of value to export and, since independence, foreign aid has been the only thing standing between the people and famine. However, as in mainland Guine, government mismanagement and lack of imagination have not helped. A new parliament house is presently under construction which, when completed, will cost over $US 17 million. Although the project is being funded entirely by foreign aid, it is hardly an appropriate enterprise for a country such as Cape Verde to undertake.
Decades of economic stagnation mean that Guinea-Bissau heavily relies on commodity exports (which come with exposure to weather and commodity cycle disruptions in demand). For example, coconuts, Brazil nuts, and cashews currently make up more than 80% of the value of exports. The latest available poverty estimates (from 2014!) found more than 67% of the population to be below the poverty line, with 44% of the adult population not having completed primary education. Less than 20% of eligible children attend secondary school.
These are not outcomes that anyone would have predicted for the land of Amílcar Cabral in the early 1970s.
Notably, Guinea-Bissau has the largest per capita natural resource endowment in West Africa (forestry, land, water, gold, petroleum, phosphates, bauxite, etc). With a reasonable level of political stability and moderately competent administration, there is no reason why the country could not pull itself up to, at least, the regional average in terms of incomes and other development outcomes.
III: Paths to economic and political development not taken
Would Guinea-Bissau have taken a different path if Amílcar Cabral had not been assassinated in 1973? How about the Central African Republic under Barthelemy Boganda, Burkina Faso with Thomas Sankara at the helm for longer, the DRC under Patrice Lumumba, or even South Sudan with John Garang as the founding president?
It is important to ask these questions, if only to avoid the tendency to uncritically valorize leaders whose lives were cut short.
In the case of Amílcar Cabral, there is strong evidence that he most likely would have steered his country towards a better path than it took after his assassination. He was a serious agronomist who walked the talk on his socialist ideological commitments. He was also a thinker who read and wrote a lot — exhibiting deep intellectual interest and depth regarding what needed to be done to achieve transformative political and economic development in Guinea-Bissau and the wider region. Broadly speaking, his profile looked like a cross between Julius Nyerere (political theorist and nation-builder), Thomas Sankara (developmental nationalist), Meles Zenawi (a revolutionary insurgent, nom de guerre Abel Djass), and a party builder (Nyerere/Kenneth Kaunda). In short, Cabral is not likely to have transmogrified into a Mobutu Sese Seko, José Eduardo dos Santos, or even Mathieu Kerekou.
Cabral valued political education (and participation). In his own words, without political education “nothing of lasting value can be done. This political preparation is the toughest, most daunting, but also most important of the whole campaign for national liberation.” While the 13 years of insurgency were not enough to fully transform the Guinea-Bissau countryside, it is telling that PAIGC under Cabral focused not just on political liberation, but also political education and participatory mobilization. When in 1972 PAIGC held elections under universal suffrage and secret ballot, over 80% of registered voters in liberated areas showed up to vote.
After his assassination in January 1973 in Conakry, Amílcar Cabral’s successors sought to carry on his legacy. For example, at independence Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde shared a ruling party (PAIGC) — in a symbolic merger forged under the decolonization struggle and in cognizance of the two countries’ demographic ties. They also had a common national anthem, nearly identical flags, and considered each other sister republics that would eventually merge into one sovereign state.
Guinea-Bissau’s postcolonial dream turned into a nightmare almost as soon as it began. Cabral’s successor, his half-brother Luis Cabral, led an administration that concentrated power in Bissau and grew increasingly insular. The administration was also accused of favoring the more educated Cape Verdean immigrants who had dominated the administrative apparatus from the colonial days. Beginning in 1976 most of PAIGC’s regional and sectoral committees were nominated and not elected. The same regional councils were stripped of their policymaking and fiscal powers. This brazen curtailment of political rights caused significant resentment, especially in the countryside. Carlos Lopez’s excellent book summarizes this process of demobilization and departicipation thus:
[A]fter 1977 … participation of leaders in the work at the base became more and more infrequent and then totally vanished. Many of the base committees also vanished or ran out of steam, with the lack of interest that was shown for middle level and grassroots party activity.
Having demobilized the general citizenry, the administration’s focus became concentrated in Bissau, the capital. Economic and political neglect of the countryside followed. Aid dependence and corruption mushroomed. Amílcar Cabral’s philosophical commitment to a people-focused economic planning was abandoned. For example, in the 1979 Bissau gobbled up 54.8% of the development budget despite only having 14.1% of the population. According to Galli:
By 1980 relations between party and state officials and the people detiorated considerably. The party had atrophied and was used primarily as a channel for government instructions. The mass organizations were too tightly constrained by the leadership to be able to articulate at a national level the aspirations and grievances of the populations they were meant to represent. The Assembly had no effective power to change policies set by government leaders. But it was the major disaffection within the top leadership that set in motion the chain of events [a coup] which followed.
There was no organized domestic opposition to keep PAIGC in check. Its only potential rival, Frente de Lula pela Independencia Nacional da Guiné (FLING), was based in Dakar, Senegal and barely had any following in Guinea-Bissau (The likely nature of the Senghor/Cabral relationship would have been one for the history books. Senghor is reported to have secretly met António de Spínola, the last Portuguese colonial military governor who lost the liberation war to PAIGC).
It is under these circumstances that João Bernardo Vieira, then Prime Minister and former head of the military, ousted Luis Cabral in the November 14, 1980 coup. Trouble had been brewing for a few years. Accusations of concentration of political and economic power in Bissau, neglect of the countryside, corruption, favoritism towards Cape Verdeans, among other justifications of the power grab resonated with the people of Guinea-Bissau. It was not a surprise that the coup took place following progress on constitutional amendments to facilitate the merge between Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau. It didn’t help that many of the Peoples’ Stores were run by Cape Verdeans in the midst of biting shortages and general resentment at the their overrepresentation in Guinea-Bissuan public life. After the coup Cape Verde formally abandoned PAIGC and any possibilities of future political union with its continental sister republic.
Vieira initially projected institutional continuity (see table above). His first cabinet retained key senior PAIGC members, even as he suspended the constitution and dissolved key state institutions like the legislature. Despite the return to constitutional order in 1984, his administration accelerated the process of departicipation and entrenchment of personalist rule as he sequentially fought and defeated different PAIGC factions. His hold on power foreclosed on any political restructuring in the midst of the wave of multipartyism that swept through much of African in the early 1990s. Viera was eventually forced out of power after a brief civil war and coup (1998-1999) and went into exile. Since then the average presidential term in Guinea-Bissau has last about 1.74 years — in no small part because of the severe political instability caused by competition for control over the drug trade.
IV: Conclusion
Guinea-Bissau’s political history is a lesson on the dangers of departicipation. A country that gained independence with a hopeful and mobilized population quickly descended into personalist rule that blocked opportunities for material advancement while ushering in seemingly irreversible political decay.
Other African countries experienced the same problem, albeit to a lesser degree. The fact that many African governments ignore large sections of their populations (unregistered and underserved) is partially due to the legacy of deliberate departicipation in the 1960s and 1970s. Unfortunately, the reintroduction of electoral politics in the 1990s did not reverse the effects of departicipation. The prevalence of performative electoralism devoid of any meaningful programmatic or ideological debates in much of Africa is evident of this fact. This fact also partially explains the entrenched complacency among the region’s political and economic elites in face of all manner of economic, political, social, and security crises.