Looking Back at Mali’s bad governance (2020)

30 years living in Mali

I have been in-and-out of Mali since 1980. Back in the early 1980s I lived in Timbuktu, on the edge of the Sahara Desert, helping to rebuild an economy and a society ravaged by drought. Crops had failed, livestock had died, thousands had emigrated and hundreds had died of starvation in Northern Mali during the terrible drought of 1973-74. In fact (but I didn’t know it then) the Sahel suffered from an acute drought period that lasted from 1965-1990, part of a slow drying out of the Sahara Desert that has been continuing for 3000 years.

I worked in rural Gao, Timbuktu and Kidal as director of ACORD, a non-governmental organization (NGO) sinking wells and improving irrigation. We help farmers to build cereal banks and introduce seed-selection, and to rebuild their small herds of goats, sheep and camels, by organizing farmer, herder and medical cooperatives in a vast region that was less “governed” than surviving under a corrupt military occupation force.

That is no exaggeration. Every position of importance was occupied by a military officer. The most impressive was the Keita, Commandant de Cercle in Kidal who would later by Chef d’état major under President Konaré. He was jovial, intelligent, competent …. But he was a military officer working under the corrupt military régime of General Moussa Traoré and under the authoritarian Governor Colonel Ongoïba. Life for a Songhoy peasant farmer or a Tuareg semi-nomad herder was not fun. Every day, some official would turn up looking for bribes. Competent forestry officials could do nothing to stop the colonels hunting protected animals with automatic rifles fired from racing military landrovers. But none of these was a Tuareg: they were not allowed to rise above the level of captain.

In the Malian capital, the police were so corrupt that I used to leave my car papers permanently at the Commissariat: that way I did not have to show them five times every day, to some guy hoping to extract from me the double of his day’s salary. The houses in which American and European officials live today, are rented from the colonels who sold off thousands of tons of food aid with which they built houses to rent. The Europeans sent the food aid; now they live in those Villas de la Sécheresse. Meanwhile thousands of Tuareg women and children died of hunger in Boureissa, on the Algerian frontier, because the food aid never reached them.

Malians do not remember life under Moussa Traore. 50% of Malians are under 25, and Moussa Traoré was overthrown in 1991, 29 years ago. He died in 2020 as a distinguished Elder Statesman; but I remember Moussa as a cunning and brutal dictator.

100 years of ‘negative peace’ under military domination

For one hundred years, from France’s military colonization of the 1880s until the popular revolution of 1990 against the military dictatorship in Bamako, Northern Mali was ruled by soldiers. Northern administrative positions of “governor” and “commandant de cercle” were held by military officers, all of them Southerners, and before that, they were French. Even after Mali’s Independence on September 22nd 1960, it seemed to Northerners that they still lived under an army of occupation. In those days of military dictatorship, Tuaregs in the Malian army could not rise above the rank of captain. Southern Malians hate hearing about the brutality and corruption of their army in Northern Mali; but I lived there when the regime of General-President Moussa Traore was in charge. I fought to defend the peasant cooperatives against the theft of diesel fuel by soldiers: for if the diesel was taken, the motor pumps could not irrigate the food crops. I remember how bitterly the Director of Forest Resources complained that corrupt colonels flouted the laws about hunting game. They would drive around the desert shooting deer and ostriches from their vehicles, using military rifles that could shoot multiple rounds per second. This was not hunting; it was massacring wild life. No wonder there are no animals left. When he files a complaint, the Director of Forest resources was transferred and demoted. No wonder North Mali welcomed the advent of democracy and the overthrow of military government. No wonder the Tuaregs took up arms against general-president Moussa Traore in June 1990, and against the military putchists of March 2012.

Mali has a long tradition of democracy and good governance. In 1235 the Lion King founded the Mali Empire. The following year, he promulgated the Kurugan Fuga, which we may describe as a “written Constitution” laying down the rules for governing society. Sunjata Keita was King of Kings, acclaimed Mansa by his peers. He was elected, rather like the elitist Electoral College system established by Thomas Jefferson and Co. to select the President of the United States. Democracy, in my opinion, is not so much about “elections” as about “listening to people” and ensuring that they have a say in decisions that affect them. After all, elections can be fixed, and very often they are.

350 years of stable rule under the Mali Empire

The Mali-Sonrai Empire had stable government most of the time from 1235 until the Moroccan conquest of 1591, run through what we now call “decentralized democratic governance.”

The village chief Chef de Village was the most important official, and he was beholden to the people of his community. This was “democratic” both because the post was-and-is elective (the villagers choose the most qualified person descended from the Founding Family of the village), because every family was/is represented in the Village Council, and because women have always been consulted in Malian society before any decision is made. The system was not perfect. For a start, it was a gerontocracy, where old people were the bosses and everyone was not equal. Founding families and wealthy families had the loudest voices. The poor, recent immigrants, and people descended from ‘captives’ did not have much say in decisions. Nevertheless it provided a better system of governance than the military rule I discovered when I reached Mali in 1980.

Where did the military rule come from? It came directly from the colonial succession. In 1960, White administrators left, and Black imitators moved straight into their spaces, their desks and their boots.