Corruption and Violence in Burundi
Reprinted from New Routes Journal
By Peter Uvin
Originally posted in the third 2009 issue of New Routes Journal.
Since independence in 1962, politics in Burundi has become more unstable and violent with each decade. Violence along ethnic lines has become a constant of life, hundreds of thousands have died and many more lost their possessions. The economy has declined and coups d’état have been frequent.
The Burundian conflict is like an atom, composed of two central electrons – ill-governance and competition for power along ethnic lines – that spin around a nucleus of massive poverty and institutional weakness. Burundi’s economy is one of the world’s poorest, landlocked and devoid of any significant resource. The institutions of the state have hardly ever worked the way they were written in law. Corruption, social exclusion, impunity, total lack of accountability and clientelism have prevailed for decades. The main constant of public life has been a brutal competition for power and its attendant material advantages, played out increasingly along ethnic lines.
The latest, longest and most destructive violence was the civil war that began in 1993 and formally ended in 2005. It had different and contradictory impacts on corruption. Public salaries stagnated (if they were paid at all) and jobs were destroyed rather than created. The entire economy went into free fall. As a result, everyone tried to make some personal gain in a desperate attempt to survive. Corruption and all sorts of abuses of power grew exponentially. Many Burundians nowadays talk about corruption as being the result of the war. While this is false – it prevailed pre-war already – this image testifies to the widespread sense that corruption has changed in nature and volume during those years.
But the war and the transition also created factors that ran in the opposite direction. Since independence, most Burundians have lived in a state that, while formally based on a Weberian1 rational-bureaucratic model akin to states in Western Europe, in reality functioned along lines more akin to pre-colonial client-patron relationships. Ordinary Burundians knew how this system worked – how to behave in order to solicit benefits (even though in theory as citizens they had rights to those benefits), how to connect to the more powerful, how to donate little gifts to get things done. To Westerners, this may have looked bad or corrupt, but to most Burundians this was familiar terrain: things had always worked this way, and, as long as the power-holders were people with some traditional claim to power who delivered the goods, this system possessed a certain legitimacy.
Over the decades, though, this system had become severely weakened by administrative reorganisation, the emergence of national and local leadership that was entirely devoid of traditional legitimacy, and, from the 1980s onwards, severe economic decline. The war provided the final death blow to the illusions ordinary people had. It laid bare the illegitimacy of the system, as well as its total ineffectiveness, and the fact that nobody in power gave a damn about the needs and the interest of the majority of the population. It weaned people, maybe once and for all, of any belief in the old system. They want change.
In addition, during the war the state lost its monopoly of information and organisation. New media – first newspapers, then radios – came into being, as did a much wider range of NGOs. Initially, many of these new civil society actors were ethnically- and urbanbiased, but over time new ones came into being, and smart young men and women built, piece by little piece, a different, pluralist Burundi civil society. New political parties were born during the war as well. The Burundi of 2005 was a far more intellectually and politically diverse place than the one before 1993. This, too, has the potential to help curb ill governance and corruption.
The price for progress
At war’s end, a number of new dynamics were added to the previous ones. First, total aid increased dramatically. A lot of the new international funding went to reconstruction and rehabilitation projects (reconstruction of roads, bridges, hospitals, schools), as well as continued emergency aid (food aid, repatriation and shelter, etc.). These projects are cash cows for the corrupt, providing almost endless opportunities for illicit gain. Especially in the initial years, when outdated security measures were still in place and oversight was sporadic and short, a lot of money could be made by those without scruples and with good connections.
At the same time, there was a general (and justified) sense within the international community that the transition from war to peace was the most important challenge for Burundi to achieve, and for donors to support. Getting former opponents to work together, armed forces to lay down arms and integrate, politicians to vote laws that could endanger their personal future – those were extremely tough challenges. All international players were focused on those goals, and tolerating a bit of corruption was seen as a necessary and acceptable price for progress. And hence the years of the transition became maybe the most corrupt ones Burundi had ever known, with more than 50 per cent of the funds of major bilateral and multilateral donors frequently disappearing without any trace.
After the transition (i.e., the peaceful 2005 elections), little changed. A new, democratically elected government was now in power, and donors were pleased with their success. The new government, flush with the presumed legitimacy of electoral victory, made sure it pushed back hard on any attempt to control its behaviour (one of the first things it did was unceremoniously kicking the head of the UN out of the country), and donors were happy to go along. And corruption continued unabated.
Second, a decent argument could be made that corruption favoured stability of the transition. What we call corruption is simply good politics in a situation where few other sources of individual progress exist than those provided by the state. The new rulers needed to reward the tens of thousands of people – fundraisers, students and teachers, supporters in the diaspora, traders who sold them goods, local officials whose sympathies lay with them – who had supported them during their years in the bush. These supporters needed – deserved, demanded – a recompense too, lest they turn against the regime.
Second, opponents needed to buy into the new dispensation. Corruption and clientelism were used to encourage opposition politicians to ally themselves with the winning party. This happened already during the transition, as it became clear the CNDD/FDD (National Council for the Defense of Democracy/Forces for the Defense of Democracy) would overwhelmingly win the elections. Politicians from other parties – especially Tutsi – flocked to the party, thus allowing it to claim to be a national rather than a Hutu party. This process of cooptation born out of a desire to access advantages may undermine “true,” Western-style, competitive party politics, but it does have a stabilising, conflict-reducing effect.
Hence, in the short run, both the need and the opportunity for corruption increased seriously after the war, and, in the name of supporting a young democratic post-war regime, the international community looked the other way. This was understandable and may have contributed to the establishment of peace and the organisation of elections. The longer run effects of this practice, however, are dangerous.
Risk for renewed conflict
Among the population at large, the continued, if not increased, prevalence of corruption produces cynicism and anger. In my interviews in Burundi, corruption – from local officials giving emergency aid to their family to national leaders building giant villas – was the most frequently mentioned political issue by people of all ethnicities, all income levels, all ages, rural or urban. As the transition from war to peace was also one from authoritarian rule to democracy in Burundi, this discredits democracy. People do not defend, or invest in, institutions they do not care about or believe in. Corruption, thus, undermines one of the most important potential gains of the post-war settlement.
In addition, corruption frequently leads to local-level conflicts, which, while not a prime cause of the civil war, constitute facilitating factors, the way pre-existing nutritional deficiencies facilitate the contraction of new infections by a person. In Burundi, as elsewhere, centrally-instigated violence spreads through the country by feeding into local conflicts and grievances. Corruption and its corollary – lack of rule of law – create a multitude of local points of contention, sense of exclusion and abuse, lingering angers at past abuses. This increases the risk for new dynamics of violence to take root in Burundi.
That said, corruption may also promote an opposite dynamic: the nearuniversal unhappiness with its continued prevalence contains the seeds for a new (non-ethnic) politics. Condemnation of corruption and a widespread desire among all citizens to be treated more equitably and transparently by the state suggest that people are ready for a different political game. As corruption now prevails under a blatantly Hutu-dominated regime, it becomes increasingly clear to people that it is the system that is at fault – not the (Tutsi or Hutu) individuals. Certainly many intellectuals have started seeing it that way. This may lay the basis for nonethnic coalitions of anger and political change, if credible and non-corrupt political entrepreneurs manage to emerge in Burundi.
Conclusion
Transitions like Burundi’s are moments of uncertainty. The old is still there but new factors have emerged as well. There are factors pushing towards change, and factors pushing towards the return of the status quo. This holds both at the top of society and for ordinary citizens. There are political openings here, but they are unclear, vague, threatened by closure. The doors are neither open nor closed until people learn where the hinges are, how the locks work, and how much pressure the wood can take.
Corruption increased during the war. At the end of the war, some factors pushed in favour of its continuation if not further rise: greatly increased amounts of aid, including a lot of reconstruction funds, and this against a backdrop of unwillingness by the international community to look too critically at the transitional or newly elected government. The new people in power, after more than a decade in the bush, feel they deserve to eat well too, for a change – they also have families to think of. Accommodations, mostly “illegal” and informal ones, need to be found for the many people who provided services to the winning side during the war. And opponents need to be brought into the fold, so that mediumterm survival of the new regime can be assured. The broad notion of corruption – contracts allocated without bidding, fake NGOs managing international aid, quotas allocated to politicians, primary commodities controlled and hoarded by supporters of the regime, legal judgments made in return for money, food aid distributed to the locally well-connected, roads and buildings built shabbily but at full cost, juicy jobs awarded on the basis of relationship and not competence – provides a tool (maybe the only tool) for the ruling elites to do politics with, to stabilise their position and, with it, the country.
But other factors run counter to this. The war has also led to a stronger demand by Burundians for citizenship: they are angry at the system, diagnose its ills more clearly, and talk about it more critically. A much freer and more competent press, and a growing civil society strengthen this. People may also come to realise, as some intellectuals do, that corruption is not limited to “those Tutsi” but to all people in power – a situation that could lead either to paralysis or to a non-ethnic sense of grievance.
Nonetheless, the likelihood that the system returns to the situation ante quo is larger than the one of serious change. The country’s core problems – the nucleus of the atom, to use my earlier image – have only become worse: the poverty more massive, the infrastructure more destroyed, the institutions more weakened. Under these conditions, corruption, and its corrosive effects on democracy and peace, is likely to continue. The only ways for donors to counter this are to be far more willing to expose and fight corruption (mostly done with their own money, after all) than they are now, and for them to build far more strongly on the emerging social demands for citizenship than they have. Unfortunately, neither of these has occurred.