Madagascar, discussing a comment by Hector

Posted by Sappho on October 8th, 2009 filed in Africa news and blogwatch

Hector, frequent commenter on my blog among other blogs, has been following the Madagascar situation more closely than I have, and has some strong opinions. I’m promoting this comment, not because I agree with all of it (the African Union policy of discouraging regime change by coups sounds reasonable to me and fair to back), but because, first, it has some additional information on the grievances that led up to the coup, and, second, well, I’ll get to the second part after I post the comment.

Just to clarify, I don’t think the 2006 election was a fair one. I was there when it happened, and it was fairly farcical (e.g. Jean Lahiniriko was accused of treason, and his campaign funds, which came from Iran, were frozen until right before the election). I also had a friend who after a political conversation told me, “if the police heard about this conversation, i would be in trouble”. Now the fact that the election was unfair, in itself, isn’t the end of the world, I don’t think most people in the countryside cared too much about who won the election. Much worse, in my view, was the fact that Ravalomanana did so much to help himself, his class,a nd his ethnicity, and so little to help the rural poor. Ravalomanana was distinctly unpopular in the countryside, particularly in the south and west, in my opinion for good reason.

– He disestablished the provincial goverments in order to centralize power in the capital.
– He passed a citizenship law discriminating against people with French last names, i.e. many of the non-Merina and coastal peoples (the Merina are the largest single ethnicity and the traditional ruling and economic elite).
– He encouraged the breakup of communal and village-based land tenure, and the move to a privatized, capitalistic system of land ownership (though I blame USAID as well for this).
– economic investment and foreign aid flowed disproportionately to the capital, to the rich, and to the Merina.
– Food prices soared under his rule, and he made no effort to distribute food to the rural poor, as previous governments had done.
– A good portion of the country, including the rural areas where I was, remained without much basic government social services, with social services provided only by foreign NGOs or by the churches.
– Ravalomanana had shut down trash collection in the capital after his enemy Rajoelina won the mayoral election, an act of pure and unmitigated spite.
– Ravalomanana burned down Rajoelina’s radio station (which was quickly reciprocated).
– In the aftermath of major floods and malnutrition in the South and West between 2004 and 2007, the government made abysmal efforts to relieve the situation, and such relief as existed was provided almost entirely by foreign faith-based NGOs.
– Ravalomanana funneled foreign aid money to his own (massive) businesses, including his cattle and dairy empire and his supermarket chain.
– Since his overthrow, he has collaborated with Libya to try to retake the country by force, and may have been involved in a plot to invade the country from Mozambique on heavily armed boats (this still unclear).

I saw footage from the capital the day that Rajoelina was ‘inaugurated’, and spoke to my best friend’s wife about it. She is of working class Malagasy origins, and her father (who lives in the countryside) was quite happy about the overthrow. My understanding is that so was much of the rest of the countryside- there were massive celebrations in the capital when Rajoelina took power. Personally, I think Ravalomanana had to go, and I’m bothered by the fact that Europe and the US are putting their political considerations ahead of the economic needs of Madagascar.

There are two things I want to highlight here in particular, because they have an application that goes beyond Madagascar. First, “Just to clarify, I don’t think the 2006 election was a fair one.” As it happened, the sources I had checked (but it was a quick check) seemed to believe that Ravalomanana had actually won the election as stated, but they did reference a dispute about it. And, though even the most clearly elected government may, in some countries and at some times, get deposed by a coup, coups are more likely the less well-established is the legitimacy of the government in the first place. Second, the reference to Ravalomanana helping himself, his class, and his ethnicity. Corruption is often given as a justification for coups, and in fact the sources I checked mentioned complaints about corruption as part of what led up to the coups in both Madagascar and Guinea. It’s also one of the bigger reasons that coups sometimes actually have popular support (although that support may be disappointed if the new government proves in its turn to be corrupt).

A paper that may be relevant, though more to coups in general, is this one, which analyzes a whole bunch of coups in Africa and concludes that the biggest predisposing factor is poor economic performance, something that would definitely apply to Madagascar.