Getting around in Juba

As a foreigner in Juba without an INGO/UN cocoon, I spend a lot of time getting up to speed on the workings of public transport. Private taxis -- often posh SUVs -- are prohibitively expensive. This leaves three options: foot, matatu (minibus), or boda-boda (motorcycle taxi).

[An aside: this city is run by foreigners, and I'm fascinated to see how that affects language -- which words overheard on the street are taken from English (anything NGOish), which from Arabic (numbers) and which from Ugandan street talk (boda boda, of which all the drivers hail from the land of the crested crane).]

As one boda driver observed, laughing, yesterday, "You are fearing!" It's true -- I don't feel very safe on the careening motos. The young drivers wear dark sunglasses even as the gloaming turns definitively to dusk. They take the bumpiest, narrowest, most-rutted and soccer-playing-children-filled dirt tracks so as to avoid the traffic police, who can always find some infraction with a boda driver. When walking is not possible, I prefer matatus. Matatu parks are always a mess: the minibuses jostle, bodas dart, hawkers ingratiate, and would-be passengers stay alert to the alternating squishes of mud, dust, and garbage underfoot as they scope out and push for a seat on the next bus home. They're Hans Monderman on speed.

Here's what I really like about these situations: being forced to rely on strangers for navigational aid often reaffirms my faith in humanity. Usually someone will see my confusion and help me find my way, taking on my cause as her own. (Three times people -- who I'd barely had time to say hello to -- offered to pay my fare. That has never happened to me in CAR.) Here's what I don't like: getting dumped in a far-off marketplace just as it's emptying for the night and discovering that, kindnesses of strangers or no, I am miles from my intended destination.

Humanitarianism Under Suspicion

Since the rebel attack on Ndele on the 26^th of November, the government has severely limited humanitarian and NGO workers' movement. The rebels occupy a stretch of road some 80km north of here (not far from the Chadian border). Before the attack, there were four international NGOs in Ndele. Now there are three, and they are allowed only to work in Ndele and on the road leading south toward Bangui. An NGO that hoped to do a risk assessment on the Golongosso road, another road to Chad, was told “nyet” (as many Central African francophones put it). That road has had problems with cattle rustlers and highway robber-type incidents (some perpetrated by the rebels), and past 84km from Ndele it's said to be more or less in the control of Chadians in uniform (which, given the pervasiveness of men-in-arms in Chad does not necessarily mean soldiers). But it's not particularly more dangerous than many other places where humanitarians work. The government's, and especially the military's, aversion to allowing humanitarian access seems to be motivated not just by security concerns but by a certain mistrust as well.

In a recent conversation, my interlocutor explained one version of the government's reasoning. For one thing, the humanitarians cannot help but support the rebels, he argued. The rebels have a road block, and they will demand “formalities” even of humanitarians. But this man went further, arguing that humanitarianism and rebellion are symbiotic. “If the rebellions end, there will be no more NGOs. In order for an NGO to exist, there have to be rebellions. You will at least agree with me on this one? So, if you want your career to exist there has to be rebellion. When the rebellions end, they'll tell you no, we don't need NGOs and that will end their careers. There won't be any more funding from over there either.”

The boom in NGO presence in CAR dates to late 2006 and 2007, when CAR was able to capitalize on its proximity to Darfur and the extensive fund-raising of a highly energetic UN coordinator to draw international interest. Not entirely incidentally, since then the number of rebellions has gone from two to five or so, depending on how you count (one of the groups is generally brushed off as Chadian and thereby an illegitimate contender for the upcoming disarmament program. Never mind that the leader of one of the other armed groups – Abdulaye Miskine – is also a Chadian/CAR citizen and under suspicion of the ICC to boot).

For the international NGOs there is always another crisis somewhere else, whether an earthquake or a war. But their local staff might have to scramble a bit to find new employment. One young man I met in Birao (the far northeast, near Sudan) a couple of years ago who was doing dance and games for kids courtesy an NGO contract now sells pilfered flowers outside a Bangui supermarket and, when he recognizes an NGO face, pretends that they were in fact a gift to this special person...and does she know of any job openings?

Many state employees have explained to me that, in contrast to “here one day, gone the next” NGOs, the biggest advantage of their posts is that once a public servant, always a public servant. You even get a pension. Not necessarily a regularly paid pension, but a feeling of entitlement to one. But the people who seem to have the most dignity and self-respect are those who aspire to use whatever jobs they hold to squirrel away money so they can buy a tract of land in the countryside where they can farm, raise animals, and live off the grid, free from politics.

Though the comment above exaggerates and simplifies, it reminded me of the reason a friend gave for leaving the anti-landmine world, where she had worked for a number of years. Getting rid of landmines, she said, is entirely doable. It takes nothing more or less than tedious work by humans (guinea rats and dogs are not reliable, meaning that the fields they “clear” are not really cleared). But she came to the conclusion that her fellow bureaucrats in Geneva were so comfortable with their modern offices and business class travel to international conferences that, whether consciously or sub-consciously, they stalled real progress. Sometimes it seems to me that all an armed group needs to do to go from highway bandit – criminal – to rebel – political opponent – is to adopt a patriotic acronym. And once one does that, recognition from the international system, with its peacebuilding programs and aid and all the rest, descend. Arresting the cycle of rebellion does not get easier as more disaffected politicians try to work these levers, with all the jobs they represent.

Signs of the financial crisis

Last week the president celebrated his birthday. As his motorcade rolled down Bangui's main drag, he tossed 500 CFA (about $1.25) notes out the window to passerby. People grabbed at them, but also shrugged – he used to throw out 10,000 CFA notes. Call it a sign of the financial crisis.

I heard this story from an NGO employee, who was appalled at this manifestation of local politics. That same week, another employee of his NGO flew into Tiringoulou, unloaded three tons of food, and promptly departed, without so much as helping to distribute in an equitable way. (Their departure was slightly delayed due to the fact that the plane got stuck in the mud at the edge of the runway – one of the most exciting things that has happened around here in ages.)

Parallels, anyone?

Privatization of the state

Alex de Waal has just finished up his five-part critical review of Jean-Francois Bayart's The State in Africa. (For those without the time or inclination to read the full five-part series, I'll serve up the punchline here: despite critiquing the lines of analysis Bayart does and does not pursue, de Waal concludes by giving the book the highest praise an academic work can hope for – that it's “useful.”) Part Two looks at the idea of extraversion, which I discussed in a previous post. De Waal uses the Sudan/Chad/CAR context to illustrate his critique of extraversion, and in so doing he lays out the broader context of the raiding dynamics I'm studying ethnographically in CAR.

In another of Bayart's books, The Criminalization of the State in Africa, the author argues that the state in Africa has become privatized. The public/private distinctions associated with the Habermasian democratic ideal are inoperative and political institutions represent means of private enrichment. The political position is coterminous with its holder, rather than existing as a set of theoretical ideals of service apart from the “kota zo” (big person) inhabiting it.

I have mentioned in earlier posts how the French leased pretty much the entirety of CAR's territory to concessionary companies. Any administration was a by-product of the quest for private profit. That kind of privatized state is pretty straightforward to imagine. It is similar to contemporary enclaves like mining operations. But what does it really mean to talk of the privatization of the whole state today? I heard a story yesterday that provides an excellent illustration, if also a tragic one.

Armed men, believed to be members of the Lord's Resistance Army, attacked a truck carrying humanitarian and development supplies for an NGO working in the southeastern part of the country. Two of the people in the truck were killed, and one was gravely injured. The injured man suffered a bullet in his spine, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down, and he was airlifted to the hospital in Bangui. There, his condition worsened and his body wasted as the doctors waited, apparently unsure whether they had the expertise to treat him. Finally, two weeks after his arrival in the capital, the doctors issued their verdict: he should been flown to Cameroon and operated upon immediately.

The NGO employees launched into making this happen. Foreigners here generally have health insurance and so can be evacuated with relatively little red tape, but CAR nationals do not, and airlifting them requires a signature from the minister of health. Following many frantic phone calls and intervention by the UN humanitarian chief and various other high-placed people, the minister of health signed the paperwork at 11am on Tuesday. The once-weekly plane would depart just three hours later. One of the NGO employees called the doctor needed to accompany the injured man. For various reasons, only this one doctor could accompany the patient – it is a state hospital, and the patient was his responsibility.

The doctor was at home when he received the call. Perhaps he expected that it would take longer to obtain the minister's signature than it did. But he flat-out refused to get on the plane. He said he didn't want to. It didn't suit his schedule. He didn't elaborate and didn't seem at all ashamed that he was so flagrantly neglecting the responsibilities of his post. Obstinate, the doctor continued stalling. Soon the plane would depart, and he wouldn't have to leave for another week, if at all.

In the end, the NGO employees prevailed, and the wounded, quite possibly dying man made it on the plane to Cameroon at the last possible minute.

In this situation, the doctor's position in the civil service position represented little more than a bundle of his individual interests. It could almost seem like to the doctor, the patient was somehow less than human – otherwise, how to explain the lack of empathy for the dying man under his care?

This question reminds me of Peter Singer's recent book, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End Poverty. In it, Singer argues against valuing the lives of those proximate to us over the lives of those far away. Thousands of people die of water-borne illness and worms and other scourges, and all of these would be easily treatable if only the world's wealthy people would open their pocketbooks. Moreover, our dollars go further in poor countries than they do in rich ones. Singer asks readers to picture a starving person, or a worm-ridden person, standing in front of them: shouldn't you give a few bucks to save that person's life? It shouldn't matter that in reality the person lives thousands of miles away. Singer, in other words, argues that we all face the doctor's choice on a daily basis, and most of us respond as the doctor did.

I don't think the situations are as analogous as I imagine Singer might, but they do raise the issue of the relationship between responsibility and proximity when it comes to helping those in need. Still, I find the privatization of the state especially troubling because it means that the structures intended to ensure some kind of generalized responsibility for fellow humans are just a front for personally-determined interests. It is such an insidious problem it's difficult to know how it will ever change.

But then, perhaps from the perspective of people like the doctor, there isn't really a problem. Perhaps from his perspective, responsibility does not lie with him, but rather with the NGOs that have stepped in to fill the need created in the wake of the neglect of people like him and the officials who preceded him. If so, the doctor and Singer would be making strangely similar arguments, both placing private charity above public responsibility.

Either that or private charity has become the new public responsibility. But in that case what's the value of the vestigial state structures?