PART II CASE-STUDY: GUINEA-BISSAU
6. Migration and development in Guinea-Bissau: a macro-level overview
6.1.3 After liberalisation: the unstable politics of the elites
Economic liberalisation in the mid-1980s was followed by political liberalisation in the early 1990s, paving the way for the first general and presidential elections in 1994 (George et al 2010). This gave a more formalised and open character to the political process, which from then on was no longer the exclusive remit of the PAIGC and President Vieira49. A number of new political formations emerged to give voice to various segments of society (such as the Balanta ethnic group50, which constituted the main basis of the Partido da Renovaỗóo Social: Temudo 2008:249). Other, smaller parties mainly expressed the views of elements of the urban elite who were disaffected from Vieira. The latter included in particular what Cardoso (1996:144-145) has described as an emerging political class comprising lower-level State bureaucrats, relatively skilled professionals and a small number of small bourgeois, as opposed to the nomenklatura proper (which was the result of an earlier process of take- over of State power by the PAIGC leadership that had led the independence struggle).
here is that the liberalisation phase of the country’s history signified the final consolidation of ‘the city’ (“praỗa”, i.e. the urban and mostly foreign-oriented economy) and ‘the village’ (“tabanca”, i.e.
the rural population) as largely disconnected realms with diverging interests.
48 This assessment does not consider the traditional authorities – chieftains, elders’ councils, etc. – to be a dominant class in Guinea-Bissau. While these authorities hold a significant level of political and legal power to this day (especially in the rural areas), this power is usually quite localised, unarticulated with that of other chiefs and elders, and lacking in class consciousness, in addition to involving limited exploitation in the strict sense of the word.
49 Vieira ruled as head of the State and of the PAIGC until being ousted and forced into exile in the context of the civil war of 1998-98. He eventually returned to the country, was again elected President in 2004, and subsequently murdered by members of the military in 2009 (George et al 2010).
50 The Balanta contributed the bulk of the PAIGC armed forces during the independence war (and in fact remain a majority in the military to this day), but never quite had a level of access to political power befitting their historical role and military prominence. They constitute the main electoral base of support of the Partido da Renovaỗóo Social (PRS) - the only party so far to have interrupted (in 2000-2003) the monopoly of the PAIGC over government (George et al 2010).
139 However, the ability of party politics to express conflicting interests was a limited one. On the one hand, ethnic-based politics was largely limited to the phenomenon of the PRS (which had, and has, an ethnic character in form but less so in content, as it mostly expresses the disaffection of the rural base of the PAIGC independence army vis-à-vis the post-independence urban elite). Moreover, the structure of Bissau-Guinean society did not lend itself easily to political expression through class-based parties, as the majority of the country was, and is, made up of rural smallholders. Thus, the crucial arenas of political struggle and control remained the PAIGC itself and the military, with control over these providing the ability to access and put to personal and political use various rents from largely foreign-oriented sources: foreign aid, the granting of concessions over natural resources and, in some cases and especially in more recent times, participation in, or connivance with, arms and drugs trafficking. This control was ultimately and effectively exerted by Vieira for almost two decades, but long-standing factional and ethnic grievances within the military and against Vieira eventually surfaced in the late 1990s (George et al 2010).
Indeed, it was Vieira’s failure to ensure the allegiance of the military in the context of an episode linked with the trafficking of arms to neighbouring Casamance (albeit symptomatic of wider discontent) that would trigger an uprising which would turn into the country’s only civil war in 1998-99 – fought between the majority of the military and numerous veterans from the independence struggle, on one side, and the minority of the military that remained loyal to Vieira, along with troops from Senegal and the Republic of Guinea that came to the President’s rescue, on the other (Temudo 2008, Zeverino 2005).
No reliable estimates are available on the number of casualties caused by the 1998-99 conflict. However, the war was mainly fought in and around Bissau (Temudo 2008:246), and the fact that it was thus geographically confined contributed to what is commonly described as a relatively limited number of casualties (numbering in the thousands). Still, it did have other major, albeit temporary, social and economic consequences: economic activity and output were quite severely affected (see Figure 7.1, above); transports, communications and access to imported goods were significantly disrupted; and the periods of heavier fighting saw a temporary return to the countryside by a majority of the population of Bissau (upwards of 200,000 internally displaced persons), who fled the on- going fighting to safer areas (Temudo 2009b:256).
The conflict ended with Vieira’s defeat and ousting from power, and was followed shortly after by the elections that brought the PRS into government and its leader, Kumba
140 Ialá, to the Presidency. The war also marked the beginning of a period of prolonged political instability, largely due to the fact that the ousting of Vieira after 19 years had created a power vacuum that encouraged previously subordinated elements and factions to struggle for ascendency. Sporadically, this has taken on a violent character, particularly whenever it concerned control over the military – between 2000 and 2010, as many as five different Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Forces have been appointed, and none of the first four left the post of their own will: three were murdered, the fourth was overthrown and arrested by his deputy (George et al 2010).
The PAIGC returned to government in 2004, after which Vieira himself staged a surprising return from exile to win the presidential elections of 2005 (albeit without the support of the PAIGC, from which he had been expelled in the wake of the war). However, the proverbial cat had been let out of the bag, and factional fighting for supremacy would remain a constant from then onwards through means both constitutional (especially within the PAIGC) and non-constitutional (through sporadic involvement by the military). A paroxysm of this factional instability and violence was reached when the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, Tagme Na Waie, and President Vieira were murdered in 1-2 March 2009 (George et al 2010; ICG 2009).
At this political level, the current situation remains characterised by precarious and shifting balances. The current government of Carlos Gomes Junior, in power since 200851, is strongly backed by donors and international actors, but remains politically contested by many in Guinea-Bissau, and on several occasions has barely succeeded in ensuring its own political survival – namely by narrowly thwarting a coup in 2010. The structure of power within the military also remains precarious and unclear, as does the current willingness of the military as a whole to refrain from circumventing the Constitution and intervening directly in the political process (id ibid).
In a long-run perspective, however, the key thing to be said about political developments in the post-1999 period is that they have not reflected a clash of fundamentally-opposed social forces or political projects for the country. Rather, to a large extent they have reflected informal struggles within the political and military elites over access to power, rents and privileges to be directly obtained either through the State
51 Gomes Junior and the PAIGC had already been in power after 2004, until losing a vote of no confidence in the National Assembly in mid-2007. 2007-2008 saw the nomination of several different cabinets on precarious political grounds. The current government came out of the general elections of October 2008 (George et al 2010).
141 apparatus or through participation in illegal activities. As the 1998-99 civil war gradually becomes a more distant memory, overtures have been made by foreign capital with a view to setting up large-scale operations exploiting natural resources such as oil, phosphates, bauxite and land for the cultivation of agrofuels: actual extraction or production has not yet begun in either of these, but negotiations and prospection have been under way (George et al 2010b).
Thus, Cardoso’s (1996; see above) analysis arguably remains largely valid today. The primary content of current Bissau-Guinean politics can be described as consisting of shifting alliances and conflicts of interests among and between various fractions comprising (i) the military elites, with their own political linkages; (ii) the ‘old’ PAIGC political hierarchy and State bureaucracy; and (iii) Cardoso’s “new political [middle] classes”. Crucially, however, all of these, with the partial exception of the military, are largely urban-based, in the sense that they maintain few linkages with what goes on in the rural areas where the majority of the population lives. There is no significant ‘classical’ bourgeoisie, either urban or rural, because there is little by way of a capitalist organisation of production (see section 6.2, below). In their turn, the popular classes mostly comprise relatively independent rural smallholders, who watch the struggles for power from afar and with limited direct interest (Temudo 2008:258). Of the three dominant groups indicated above, the latter is apparently the one with the greatest ‘revolutionary potential’, but for the time being it also seems the weakest of the three.