Life After Violence
Page 9
Ordinary Burundians have become far more critical toward the state and the powers that be as a result of the war. They ask more questions, they do not unquestioningly follow leaders anymore, they voice their displeasure more easily. Reflexive ethnicity is weaker than before: many Burundians realize it has not served them and wish to move beyond it. But ethnic division has not suddenly lost all its salience: there is too much pain, too much memory, and humans are not lizards who can overnight shed one skin in favor of another. And most ordinary Burundians have long learned to distrust ‘Leta’ (the Kirundi word for the state, which includes the international community) and to make themselves as small and invisible as possible before it, asking for favors rather than rights (Pouligny 2006: 103, 109).
As shown in the previous chapter, the overwhelming majority of Burundians do not demand the Western institutions of democracy (the only ones the international community is capable of recognizing or conceiving of). They care far more for security and minimal development than for elections or human rights laws. At the same time, they deeply desire equity, respect, an end to corruption. Burundians have a language, a set of values, to describe better governance with, and it is the language of the institution of bashingantahe. A deep adherence to values of truth, justice, non-discrimination appeared everywhere in our conversations. While at first sight similar to Western concepts of human rights and good governance, this bashingantahe-inspired notion of respect is less focused on ‘right structures’ and more on ‘good people.’
But new institutions with the potential to facilitate change have come into being as a result of the war. The press has become diverse, courageous, often in touch with the countryside and the lives of ordinary people. More NGOs, foreign and national, work closely with the people and can create opportunities for local innovation.
Political change is possible in post-war Burundi. The future is not fixed – it is neither a guaranteed march toward progress, nor an inevitable decline to the situation of before. Things are contingent, and individuals – Hussain Radjabu, for example, for the two years he led the CNDD/FDD – can have profound impacts.
What is the role of international aid in all this? The international community was very successful in supporting the transition to peace in Burundi: it facilitated the negotiations, and supported the implementation of their results both through carrots (support to temporarily bloated institutions; private guards for returning politicians; promises of more development aid; leadership seminars at the highest levels; early support for DDR) and sticks (threats of reductions in aid; united diplomatic pressure). Once the transition was successful – i.e. most of the hostilities were ended and, especially, once peaceful elections were held – the situation became a lot more complicated.6 No longer did the international community share the same clear goal; the mechanisms for donor coordination became weaker (in part because the newly elected government itself wanted to weaken them – hence its attack against the UN leadership); the usual disjointed system reemerged.
This system understands pretty much nothing of the dynamics of political change I documented in this chapter. Democracy, good governance, rule of law, justice – all are on the agenda, but none of these is rooted in a fine understanding of the specifics of Burundi. Donors continue to profess totally unrealistic goals – what Pritchett and Woolcock (2004) so nicely call ‘skipping straight to Denmark,’ without clear intermediary goals (Ottaway 2002), a fine sense of the system they are intervening in (Pouligny 2006), or any discussion of what they will abstain from intervening in (Uvin 2004).
Indeed, donors, in Burundi and elsewhere, seem incapable of understanding politics or acting politically. There are important processes that can lead to peace, the expression of citizenship, and the learning of democracy in Burundian society. But donors fail to understand them or to act on them. They simply copy products, but do not support processes. This worked reasonably well when it came to the transition, which consisted of a set of clearly defined products: demobilization of soldiers, creation of a transitional government – any government – for a number of months, organization of elections by a specific deadline, etc. But it works a lot less well once this easy phase is out of the way, and sustainable, locally owned institutions need to take root in Burundian society. At that point, the ‘product vision’ becomes largely irrelevant: it may be writable, subcontractable, manageable and spendable, but it is also overwhelmingly irrelevant.
Most of the democracy and governance work supported by the international community does not involve any opportunities for the exercise of real power or learning by Burundian citizens, and is thus easily manipulated by political elites and insiders. Too busy copying their own institutions, typing endless reports and sitting in interminable meetings, disconnected from the reality of urban and rural life, saturated by a constant stream of missions, expert reports, assessments, workshops, and indicators, donors fall back on the standard solutions and products. Recipient governments and elites much prefer this product-centered approach to governance, for it is much easier to sabotage or appropriate.
Take the decentralization policy – a favorite of the development community in Burundi for close to three decades now, and hence one every local insider knows how to play like a well-strung tambour! The decentralization law is entirely set up to create the least possible bottom-up dynamic and the maximum amount of centralized control. But the donors love decentralization, and masses of money flows into it – in the name of service delivery, good governance, or conflict resolution. And so donors do again all the same old things they always did: lots of training – the same people over and over receiving training from different agencies on the same subject, politely collecting their per diems; some general campaigns to educate the masses in how the new institutions in theory work; and of course the building of buildings everywhere. Most of this is entirely irrelevant to the real potential for citizen-driven democratization in Burundi. It will produce nothing in the way of citizenship or true democracy.7
5 | Hard work and prostitution: the capitalist ethos in crisis1
In this chapter, we bring together the answers to questions that deal with economic well-being. This was by far the largest section of our conversations. We asked people both to describe their own lives, plans, dreams, and support networks, and to analyze long-term trends, social mobility, and gender differences. No one single vision presented itself: people’s analyses diverged, according to their objective circumstances (whether they were rural or urban, women or men, migrants or not) and subjective factors (their personal values and trajectories).
There is a growing literature about the economic dimension of the post-conflict agenda (Collier 2003; Addison 2003). What should be the economic priorities of post-conflict countries? Is economic liberalization after war a bad idea? Is economic growth possible without major prior investment in public infrastructure, or without major improvements in governance first? Should conflict resolution concerns be mainstreamed into economic projects (multi-ethnic cooperatives, for example, or positive discrimination measures to combat horizontal inequality) or should economic growth be the prime aim? Most of these concerns are very macro-oriented and expert-based. Here, we present the voices of some of the millions of ordinary Burundians who struggle each day to eke out a meager existence for themselves and their children. After twelve years of war, how do they survive? How do they see the future?
Changes since time of parents: long-term trends
We first present the results to the question: ‘how is your life different from the life of your parents?’ This was a way for us to encourage people to analyze long-term development trends. It is also an entirely open-ended question: it did not specify any field of human life. People could discuss trends in the economic, social, personal, or collective realm – and they did.
Unsurprisingly, the large majority of people, especially in rural areas, thought the long-term conditions of life had deteriorated (same results in MINIPLAN 2006: 11). Ruhororo and Kamenge
were most negative in their outlook. These are both places where nearly all people consider themselves to be on a downward slope in life (a fact corroborated by their answers to many other questions). Yet these are very different places. Ruhororo is totally rural, Kamenge urban; Ruhororo’s IDP camp, where most (but not all) interviews took place, is fully inhabited by Tutsi, whereas Kamenge is almost exclusively Hutu. What these two places share, however, is that they have been among the very worst hit by the war for many years, and full of people who carry deep personal traumas – and nothing has changed since the end of the war. The continued impact of the war, then, can clearly be seen in these answers.
Almost all people in rural areas gave us reasons for why their lives were not as good as their parents’. They identified three roughly equal factors: the war, climate change, and population growth. I expected the war to be the prime factor causing a deterioration in people’s lives, and, indeed, in conversation after conversation, people detailed to us the many losses they had suffered during the war: in order of frequency, these include theft of animals, theft of other possessions, destruction of property, being forced to flee, losing years of schooling, death of family members, permanent injury. I did not expect population pressure and climate change, however, to be mentioned as frequently as the war. Note that when people talk about climate change, they are referring to the frequent droughts that occurred during the last decade in Burundi. Many people talked about lack of land – logical in a country where 57 percent of households have less than one hectare to live off (ibid.: 42). All this demonstrates that even in countries at war, there is more going on than war. War may capture the attention, dominate the political discourse, and its resolution may be a sine qua non for meaningful change, but it is not the full story of life, and people know it.
TABLE 5.1 General trends
About one third of our interviewees discussed improvements, rather than deteriorations, when they compared their lives to their parents’. This is far beyond what I had expected, given the fact that Burundi had come out of twelve years of almost constant violence and economic decline. This was especially the case in parts of the city, where this type of response constituted almost half of all answers. And many of the people who answered positively were not the richest in society.
In Ngozi province, more than half of the (few) positive answers came from women, who told us that they were more independent now. This may be related to a major and rather successful gender empowerment project there by an American NGO, CARE. In Nyanza-Lac, about one third of the people saw positive trends – by far the highest in the rural areas we worked in. People (especially older ones) here often told us that they lived more modern lives … they have better clothes and wash more, can buy a broader range of products at the local market, have more free time and are more independently minded.2 In this commune, there is generally a sense of moderate optimism as to the economic future – that it is possible to make it, to feed oneself decently, to give better education to one’s children, if one just works hard and smartly. There is more land here, and more trade as well, than in Ngozi province. Part of this optimism may also be related to the fact that Nyanza-Lac is a land of migrants and returnees. Eighty percent of our interviewees were recent returnees from Tanzania or from IDP camps in Burundi. These are all people who have recent bad memories and who were very pleased to start a normal life again, in a place with visible economic potential.
But the two groups that stand out for the high proportion of positive answers are the rich in Bujumbura and the people from Musaga. Both these places are overwhelmingly urban and Tutsi, as well as disproportionately composed of migrants.3 This suggests a very important political fact in Burundi, namely that those who are upwardly mobile in the country are mainly Tutsi, and they are generally a group that is more positive in its outlook on life than most other people, for they have a sense of forward momentum. This seems to persist even though the Tutsi as a group have lost political hegemony. In other words, while political power may have shifted in Burundi, deeper social and economic processes – resulting from historical differences in access to education and social networks – have not yet. And hence, even at the end of a war that they, from an ethno-political perspective, objectively lost (and they know it), many Tutsi may still be benefiting in the economic realm from the advantages that the previous system conferred on them.
This is surely not unique to Burundi: El Salvador and South Africa immediately come to mind as situations where similar dynamics occurred. What these cases share is that their transition to war from peace results from negotiations, in which a formerly dominant group loses its monopoly on political power but keeps many of its economic assets. This may help to promote their buy-in to the political transition and thus have a stabilizing effect on it – although it may of course produce the inverse effect on the people on the other side of the social equation, in this case the Hutu, who find they did not gain as much as hoped for from the struggle. As a result, in Burundi assessments of the recent transition are not purely ethnic – even though the war itself was fought along ethnic lines. Hutu from Kamenge are generally less pleased with life after war than Tutsi from Musaga; similarly, Hutu may admire Buyoya more than Tutsi do, and Nkurunziza is popular among many Tutsi.
This also throws light on debates about horizontal inequality, i.e. when economic differences overlap with ethnic ones (Stewart 2000). First, aggregate data on rural poverty in Burundi demonstrate that average incomes of Hutu and Tutsi are roughly equal there; it is only at the level of the upper class that Tutsi had major advantages. This observation is often taken by Great Lakes specialists to disprove the notion of horizontal inequality – Hutu and Tutsi are equally poor, they argue, and it is only a small group (no more than 1 percent of society, really) of politicians, military and bureaucrats who are well off. But this underestimates the social facts of mobility and expectations: more Tutsi managed to escape the rural world than Hutu did, and this makes an enormous socio-political difference. Second, horizontal inequality is sticky – it does not change easily. When the political system changes the persistence of horizontal inequality creates a more mixed system, with a likely stabilizing impact. Horizontal inequality, in short, is a crucial phenomenon in many societies.
Education
Education is the issue that came up most in our conversations about how (young) people try to make it in life. It is at the heart of individual social mobility and family strategies for survival.
Let me begin with some data: I kept information on the educational attainment of almost all of the 388 persons I interviewed. In Ngozi province, the average educational attainment was between fifth and sixth grade. In Nyanza-Lac this dropped to fourth grade. Among the poor in the city of Bujumbura, educational level was no higher than in Nyanza-Lac. Among the rich, it was eleventh grade – vastly higher. Generally, as elsewhere in the world, our data show a strong correlation between educational attainment and income level, both in rural and urban areas. Of course, this tells us nothing about the direction of causality. Note the interesting anomaly that, in rural areas, the educational attainment of well-off farmers is not higher, and in one case is actually lower, than that of the poorer farmers (also observed in MINIPLAN 2006: 35). Our interviews suggest that this may be due to the fact that the minority of well-off farmers value education less, for they are confident in the capacity of their children to live off agriculture and they prefer to maintain a traditionally valued lifestyle.
Another fascinating question is to disaggregate educational achievement data by group in terms of how the war affected them. The results are surprising. First, in the countryside, most people are pretty much equal – whether you fail primary school finals at age twelve before the war or at age fifteen because you missed three years of schooling owing to the war makes little difference in the long run. In the city, however, all people who did not stay at home – all people who were forcibly displaced, or who joined the fighting – are significantly worse off tha
n those who stayed at home. For city dwellers, then, it is clear that not having had to flee has constituted a major educational bonus.4 There are pockets of exceptions as well. In the IDP camp in Ruhororo, for example, we found a very high educational level for young women – ninth grade on average for our group of interviewees. With little agricultural occupation and the close availability of a recently built school, families sent their kids to school, and, as is the case almost everywhere, girls did extremely well when given the opportunity.
TABLE 5.2 Education per category, in years, by region
All Urban Rural
People who stayed at home 7.3 10.3 5.0
IDPs 5.4 6.1 5.0
Repatriated refugees 5.9 8.21 5.2
Child soldiers 3.2 4.2 2.4
Adult ex-combatants 6.9 8.0 (6.7)2 5.4
Migrants 7.5 8.0 3.23
total 6.5 8.1 5.0
Notes: 1. N = 5 only. 2. If we take away five career FAB soldiers, the average falls to 6.7. 3. N = 6 only.
If anybody has really missed out on education as a result of the war, it is child soldiers, who have by far the lowest educational achievement of any group. This legacy is, however, less dramatic than may appear at first. The differences with non-combatant civilians of their age are generally not enormous (see too Taouti-Cherif 2006: 25), for the large majority of poor people in Burundi suffered from low access to education during and before the war. At the same time, as we will show below, education makes a serious difference in Burundians’ life only if they reach at least tenth grade. Whether they have four years of education while others have six years does not really make that much of a difference – you remain on the farm or in the informal sector regardless (Uvin 2007b).
A few more words about urban migrants. We have data for sixty-six of them, all of whom had moved from the interior to Bujumbura during their own lifetime, almost all without their family. Their educational attainment is much higher than the average rural educational attainment – than that of the peers they left behind, in other words. Actually, migrants are better educated than their non-migrant peers at all levels of income, although the difference is especially striking at higher levels. This clearly documents the well-known phenomenon of rural–urban brain drain. But disaggregation is in order here too. This group is composed of at least two subgroups: those who came to the city to study – mostly at university or in other post-secondary training, but some also in secondary school – and those who came to the city after they became ‘déscolarisés,’ in search of income opportunities. It is of course especially the former group which jacks up the average educational attainment of the migrant category. The latter group is not very different at all: for them it is not studies, but dynamism, or personal networks, which explains their migration fate.