Civil Society and Security in Africa (2010)
An address I gave to a high level security conference in Abuja
CIVIL SOCIETY AND THE SECURITY SECTOR IN WEST AFRICA
(This text is based on a talk I delivered in Abuja on 20th April 2004 to a conference of senior ambassadors and officials who included the Nigerian Minister of Defense and of Foreign Affairs and the chiefs of staff of all the Nigerian armed forces. Some of it was also published as an opinion piece in The Comet newspaper of Lagos.)
Strengthening Civil Society
The role of civil society in democratic governance is a most important subject for peace builders. Africa has always been governed by civil society. Traditional organizations of Africa society which include age groups, village councils, women’s associations and hunting societies, have existed here for 400,000 years, perhaps longer. When I was a small boy in the 1950s living in Enugu (then the capital of Eastern Nigeria), Africa had no history. White colonial regimes and white colonial missionaries wanted us to think that history started with their conquest. Not so! Africa was already filled with civilizations run by sophisticated civil society organizations, when people in Europe were still learning how to grill raw meat.
Let us be clear about a definition of civil society. Civil society is made up from groups of people who share a common objective and who come together in organizations which support that objective. So civil society is not just ‘civilians’, is it essentially made up of organizations and associations. A football club is a part of civil society. So is the Chamber of Commerce or an association of blacksmiths or teachers, or parents and teachers.
Colonial rulers needed to centralize government in order to control Africa, therefore they did everything to discourage civil society. Yet Africa traditionally has always been decentralized, organized through the democratic governance systems of civil society. When I am looking at civil society in West Africa, I therefore distinguish between two types of civil society:
- Traditional civil society which is composed of local structures that encourage women to have an important role in decision making. These include initiation groups, village councils, women’s associations, hunting societies, and also the church and mosque organizations that regulate spiritual worship at the village level. Parent-teacher associations that run local schools may be a part of this traditional civil society, or they may fall into the ‘modern’ category.
- Modern civil society is often based at a more regional or national level where men dominate. The most important organizations in modern civil society are the trade unions and professional associations (lawyers, doctors, teachers, etc), the cooperative movements, credit and savings unions, national and regional sports organizations, as well as foreign-inspired (and often foreign-funded) non-governmental organizations known as NGOs.
The voice of African women
One of the important functions of civil society is to increase the voice of women. African societies have always provided a strong place and plenty of space to women. The Bambara proverb tells us that “behind every beard, you can see the point of a plait”, and certainly in Mali no group of men ever dares to take a decision unless it has been approved in advance by the women, except, I suppose, for a group of army officers. (Laughter)
The late Amadou Hampaté Ba, the sage of Mali and one of the Founders of UNESCO, says in his autobiography Amkoullel that the greatest title in West Africa is not President or General, but Mother. Mothers, he says, attain a level of importance and status that makes them almost divine. You may – if you must – disobey your father, but you can never, ever, disobey your mother.
Traditional civil society provided space for women to express their ideas and their needs, in a way that the modern state does not. Regional and national structures have evolved from colonial rule, into political decision-making spaces from which women have often been excluded. This has weakened Africa. We need to create structures where mothers and other women can express themselves and where we can hear them. My friend and colleague Dr Funmi Olonisakin makes the important point that it is not only mothers that have a right to be heard. Unmarried women, young women, women with no children all have a right to be heard. Young women especially, need to band together in associations in order to strengthen their voice and increase their influence over the future orientations of the society that they will inherit.
In modern Africa, the professional woman (whether or not she is a married or a mother is not important) needs to find opportunity for her voice to be heard, and when the African Woman speaks, we simple men must learn to listen.
The limited role of foreign NGOs
It is important to remember that the NGOs are only one part of civil society. Many African leaders deplore the dependency of NGOs on foreign funding and foreign ideas. There are two remedies, I believe. The first is to remember that trade unions and cooperatives and parent-teacher associations are indigenous groups with a true political and economic base inside their African societies, and they are more important than foreign NGOs. The other remedy is to insist that foreigners invest their time and money in building a strong African civil society.
When people in USA or Europe talk about ‘withdrawing’ their NGOs or designing an African ‘exit strategy’, I accuse them of having a colonial mentality: they are people who come, and take, and then leave. I ask them when the Red Cross Society is going to withdraw from the USA? Unfortunately the things that the Red Cross does will always be necessary. Poverty and accidents and earthquakes and neglected children will always exist in the USA, just as they will continue to affect people in every other part of the world. Civil society is a permanent and important component of the modern state.
If foreign organizations want to come and work in Africa, we should welcome them provided that – and only provided that – they truly want to stay and help us build a strong African civil society. If the want to compete with African civil society, then they are in the wrong business and they should become capitalist businessmen. If they are really tourists, they should come for a visit to enjoy our traditional West African hospitality for a couple of weeks, and they return home.
When I was working for USAID in Mali, running a major funding project for US and West African civil society, I refused funding to any American NGO that was not intending to stay and work for at least 15 years. My experience suggests that the worst culprit here is the European Union, funding European NGOs which come to Africa simply because the EU gives them money. The result is often that we find a bunch of amateur white people driving around in expensive four-wheel drive vehicles, getting in the way of proper development work being carried out by African professionals who really need for their proper work the money and vehicles those white amateurs have commandeered.
Not only that: The European Union is dominated by accountants, who will only fund projects lasting three years. What can anyone achieve in only three years? It sometimes takes a year or two to recruit a project director, who then has to select and train her or his staff. And then suppose somebody falls sick for three months? Sometimes the EU funding is finished before the proper work has had time to begin. Three year funding is a guarantee of inefficiency and of wasted tax-payer money.
Accountants are bean-counters who count euros and cents without looking ad whether the money was spent wisely. Accountants are not project managers, who know that a “project cycle” is not a matter of accounting, but of producing results and of obtaining positive impacts thanks to money well spent. I will return to the “project cycle” which is a term poorly understood often abused. Since the EU has all these three-year funding cycles run by accountants, a lot of the EU’s NGO projects are a waste of time and money.
I am not against all European NGOs, I criticize only the amateurs. I am not a racist. Some of my best friends are white. In fact I often discover to my surprise, when I wake up in my house in Bamako and look in the mirror, that I am also white. (Laughter)
Civil society, political society and military society
All citizens who are active in their society are probably a part of civil society. At the same time they can be a part of commercial society, or political society, or military society… or they can be a part of all these at different times when they are wearing different hats.
A soldier with children is also a parent. He (or she) may be a member of the parent-teacher association of their child’s school. The same soldier may a member of a football club or a member of the Red Cross society – in which case (s)he is a member of both military society and civil society, but (s)he must wear a different hat on each occasion. The hats must not get mixed up. You do not want the soldiers taking over the school, nor the teachers taking over the army. Neither option seems like a very good idea. In fact Nigerians – and many West Africans - know from experience that it is a very bad idea.
The risk of confusion is greater with political society. If the head of a women’s credit and savings union decides to stand for parliament, she enters political society. In that case I believe it is important that she should resign from her civil society position in the credit union, to ensure that her two roles are not confused. Many civil society groups act as lobbying groups, whose job is to put pressure on the political and administrative authorities: they want to protect savings banks from taxation, or to increase school funding, or to defend the rights of independent lawyers/ doctors/ veterinarians/ teachers/ trade unions. It is better to keep these different types of functions separate.
Typically a military or a dictatorial regime hates all pressure groups. Autocrats hate the cacophony of voices coming out of civil society. Military types don’t like noisy debate. Many do not like debates at all: for soldiers are used to hearing instructions, wanting strong decisions coming down through the hierarchy. The army is “La Grande Muette’ or the Great Silent One, as they say in French, and the best way for soldiers to stop debate is to impose a one-party state. That is a bad solution!
Democracy, on the other hand, is noisy and filled with contradictory ideas and voices. The greatest source of new ideas is civil society. To make our nations strong and creative, civil society needs to be encouraged. I believe this is best achieved through decentralization.
Colonial governments wanted to centralize and control Africans. Independent Africa, on the contrary, is strongest when it has decentralized forms of governance that encourage democratic participation. Democracy is not about voting (although voting is certainly one useful way for people to participate). Democracy is really about making local choices: about speaking and listening and participating, and most especially this means participating in local decisions that affect people’s daily lives.
The best way for West Africa to strengthen the rule of law and fight against poverty, is to instill decentralized governance with strong civil society organizations. Strong local associations can improve the performance of the police, help the police fight against organized crime and smuggling, limit the damage caused by corrupt judges, ensure that political decisions benefit the community. Local civil society organizations can be effective because they are composed of citizens who know all about their local politicians, who can check up on their chief of police, who can identify criminals and smugglers, who can report on the bad behaviour of judges, and who will ensure that local administrators obey the rule of law and do not behave as local dictators.