[Continued from the previous issue]
Patronage Politics, Foreign Aid, and the Start of State Collapse
The 1960 unification of British Somaliland and Italian Somalia as an independent state did not result in a reduction of external financial support, nor the economic irrelevancy that IMF investigators and scholars predicted. Though no magnet for foreign investment, Somalia’s rulers discovered that they could turn prerogatives of sovereignty into tools to attract external economic assets. Somalia’s government perfected the art of playing to the diplomatic and strategic interests of former colonial rulers, superpowers and others willing to exchange aid for affirmation of a particular ideology, diplomatic alignment, or access to military bases. Rulers used these resources to attract popular legitimacy and manage domestic political rivals. The latter presented more pressing challenges and dominated the conduct of Somalia’s external relations. As southern Somali agricultural projects shows, capital-based strongmen used foreign aid to build political networks that later provided key agents of violence and armed groups of followers when central control over this network collapsed. Ironically, the preferred strategies for building a state and political community on the margins of the global economy after 1960 also lay at the heart of state collapse and violent community fragmentation after 1990.
The high water mark of this centrally managed political project began with the coup of General Mohamed Siyaad Barre on 21 October 1969. Initially it appeared to be a state-building project. Barre (a former member of the Italian Somaliland and British wartime interim administration police) announced that all speakers of the Somali language should be unified in a single state, and supported crash literacy programs to propagate a new Somali script. In 1970 he unveiled an official ‘Scientific Socialist’ ideology and invited the Soviet navy to lease the deepwater port of Berbera, in former British Somaliland. Barre took ideological cues and foreigner’s cash where he could find it, combining Islamic poetry with the centralizing vision of Lenin, the cult of personality of North Korea’s Kim Il-Sung and advice from Western creditors and donors who in fact remained his primary financial supporters even during his alignment with the Soviet Union. Barre also admitted to admiring Benito Mussolini, who he called ‘my former commander’. While Barre was insistent on ideological consistency, he did maintain a consistent pursuit of a centrally organized state-building project, whether of fascist or socialist inspiration. In this sense, Barre responded to the global incentives of his time, a political and economic world that supported state regulation of domestic economies and that provided financial support to leaders of new states who embarked on these projects.
Barre went even further, and vigorously pursued an irredentist project of consolidating all Somali speakers in a single state. This translated into official support for a Northern Frontier District Liberation Front in Kenya and a Front de Libération de la Côtes des Somalis in neighboring French Somaliland. Somali state-building continued with the infiltration of Ogadeeni clan fighters of the Somali-Abo Liberation Front (SALF) and the Western Somalia Liberation Front (WSLF) to ‘reclaim’ ethnic Somali territory in Ethiopia’s Ogaden after a coup in 1975 amidst challenges from separatist movements in Eritrea, Tigray and Oromo. SALF and WSLF ties to the Somali government were tight enough that a government office in Mogadishu distributed their propaganda in the consolidated Bulletin of Somali Liberation Fronts, denouncing ‘Abyssinian colonialism’ and calling for these regions to (re)join the Somali nation. By March 1978, however, Ethiopian counter-attacks reached Somali territory after Ethiopia’s rulers made their own bid for Soviet aid. Barre’s attack on Ethiopia had consequences decades later as Ethiopian leaders concluded that keeping Somalia very weak and disorganized after Barre’s fall in 1991 was integral to their own security. Barre’s Soviet backers abandoned him in 1978, preferring instead to align with a seemingly more genuine Marxist-Leninist ruling party in Ethiopia (which also is ten times more populous than Somalia). This came on top of the bad news for Barre in 1977 that French Somaliland voters rejected union with Somalia and opted for independence as the Republic of Djibouti in a referendum.
Despite Barre’s loss of Soviet patronage, his regime managed to find a new external source of income. The US government established its own (more modest) military presence and gave Barre’s regime more than $800 million in aid. A quarter of this was devoted to military expenditures. Italy was more generous. Conveniently for Barre, his Italian patrons were willing to include local politicians in insider deals in providing over a billion dollars in the 1980s for more than one hundred projects, which contributed to Barre’s role as a distributor of largesse to his informal political network of associates, both inside government and in ‘private’ (but politically well connected) business.
Overall, outside aid generated $2.8 billion for Somalia between 1972 and 1989, making Somali people Africa’s greatest beneficiaries of aid on a per capita basis at that time. The geographic, sectoral and political distribution of aid, however, shows that most Somalis benefited very little as aid, not just from his Italian patrons, became a major source of corruption and kickbacks to regime favourites. The extreme dependence of the country on foreign aid for 90 percent of recorded development spending underlines the centrality of Barre in all avenues of economic life-as manager of formal state allocations and as patron to political allies-at the expense of broader community or commercial efforts. Barre’s domination of these economic channels also entrenched his power in the institutional frameworks of communities targeted for development spending. He used these initiatives to overlay his own political network over old informal local networks. The consequence later would be that informal mediating institutions such as xeer and the authority of ‘traditional’ leaders would be weakest in these areas once sustained conflict broke out in the late 1980s. Thus economic globalization in this manner laid the groundwork for state collapse. When examined in its patrimonial context, it also provides a guide for predicting which communities would organize their own responses to state collapse and which ones would not, and how each category would respond to economic opportunities in the 1990s and 2000s.
Meanwhile, agricultural projects and programs absorbed 22 percent of development spending in the 1980s, with 90 percent of that allocated to large-scale commercial crop farming. Favoured groups benefited from the construction of dams, irrigation and plantation farming in the south. This southern area was the dominant beneficiary of this category of spending. Foreign experts complained that this priority excluded more numerous pastoralists, especially those in northern areas affected by conflict that continued long after the Somali invasion of Ethiopia, even though agriculture spending rose as a proportion of development spending during this period. Further accentuating the social differentiation that development spending promoted, social service expenditures fell from 6.3 percent of development spending in 1975 to less than one percent in 1989. By the 1980s, even this small amount was reserved in large part to provide housing for faculty and staff at the National University in Mogadishu.
Even though state support declined politically favoured groups continued to benefit. Industrial firms, for example, received 35 percent of development spending in 1975, dropping to 10 percent in the mid 1980s. This decline reflected the regime’s acceptance of creditor advice to privatize industrial enterprises. This was carried out on the basis of political favouritism, and was immediately followed with massive manipulation of credit markets to benefit regime cronies. Administrative regulations depressed formal market interest rates for credit to -80 percent in real terms in 1984, compared to marginal positive rates in the late 1970s. Not efficient in economists’ terms, negative rates ensured that credit would be distributed to politically powerful groups and businessmen. Lucky recipients later paid their creditors in severely depreciated local currency, which effectively meant that the state provided its favourites with a bonus for holding these loans. The fiscal demands of this policy meant that the politically marginalized had to seek credit on their own in much more expensive informal markets that did not enjoy patronage from the state. Alternatively they could leave the country in search of economic opportunities abroad. This further marginalizing politically disfavoured groups from Barre’s informal patronage networks, though it would have positive significance in later years when their community leaders would find that they had influence over these overseas sources of income independent of strongmen associated with Barre’s regime.
Likewise, policy failure coupled with a steady flow of foreign aid helped civil servants migrate into regime-sanctioned clandestine channels. By 1989, civil servants were paid only three to four percent of the real value of their 1975 salaries, and had to support themselves through corruption, bribes and kickbacks. Despite declining salaries, Barre increased civil service employment from approximately 20,000 in 1969 to over 56,000 in 1983. This made association with foreign financed development projects a vital part of the survival strategies of civil servants. Uncertainty and scarcity helped turn these projects into an even more valuable political resource for Barre. A foreign consultant observed, however, that the civil service lost a disproportionate portion of more educated employees, particularly those who came from the north who Barre regarded as less desirable as political clients. As shown below, politically marginalized communities in the north were forced to became more adept at exploiting the economic opportunities of clandestine markets and overseas employment on their own, often in defiance of the regime and in conflict with clandestine rackets that regime favourites ran.
Even when Barre’s irredentist adventure and destructive economic policies brought growing popular insecurity, foreign relief aid offered him additional political resources that he could plow back into his ‘official’ clandestine economy. UN officials, for example, complained that $100 million in relief aid to refugees of the 1977-78 war was distributed on the basis of clan leadership loyalties to Barre, and was used to reinforce the control of regime strongmen who were responsible for controlling distribution of relief aid in the camps. Aid workers testified that food was pilfered from convoys and sold in local markets with the connivance of local officials. UN officials used this same complaint over pilferage to justify intervention in the early 1990s. Nor is it coincidence that the same individuals and armed groups were responsible for this use of violence in both periods, though prior to 1990 this was an informal ‘official’ state policy, while freelance in the latter. One aid worker estimated that three quarters of all supplies were stolen, with some going directly to pro-Barre militias that attacked clans that Barre believed opposed his rule. Massive over counting of refugees, 1.5 million by Somali government estimate versus 650,000 in the view of aid agencies also were geared toward generating resources for patronage.
To be continued...
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