Op-Ed | Nigeria’s Moment

  By

The following essay also appeared in The Globalist.

On May 29, Nigeria experienced its first peaceful transfer of power between two elected leaders from rival parties. This is cause for celebration despite Nigeria’s recent hardships.

While it might not seem like it at this moment, Nigeria could also well be on the verge of its long-awaited global economic breakout.

View of Abuja, Federal Capital Territory, Nigeria, 2012. (Credit: Bryn Pinzgauer - Wikimedia)

View of Abuja, Federal Capital Territory, Nigeria, 2012. (Credit: Bryn Pinzgauer – Wikimedia)

Among the world’s major economies, Nigeria is now either the 20th or 21st largest national economy in the world (depending on who’s counting).

According to an analysis by PwC released in February 2015, Nigeria is expected to climb 11 places in the rankings by the year 2050. That would mark the single greatest projected increase for any top 20 economy over that time period.

It would also put Nigeria into the top 10 economies worldwide, ahead of Germany and just behind fellow oil producer Russia.

Yes, there are still problems

It is true, of course, that security concerns and corruption could pose challenges to Nigeria’s projected growth. The past year’s government scandals and the violence of the northern insurgency were very much on the minds of voters in the recent national elections.

It is also true that among the major emerging market economies, Nigeria currently ranks as the hardest place to do business, according to the World Bank. It stands at 170th out of all 189 states ranked.

The country’s new president, former General Muhammadu Buhari, has pledged to crack down on corruption and inefficiencies as a top priority.

While, as always in Nigeria, it remains to be seen whether he puts his words into actions, Buhari has at least the advantage of having been around Nigerian power politics for a long time. He will not be cripplingly dependent on inept “advisers” as his inexperienced, neophyte predecessor was.

If the country manages to turn the corner on some of its past ghosts, then there is nothing preventing Nigeria’s dynamic rise.

Ultimately, the demographics are simply too favorable to stop Nigeria’s economic rise altogether in the coming decades.

The very good news

The country, which is sub-Saharan Africa’s 10th largest by land area, currently has 183.5 million people. While that makes Nigeria the seventh most populous nation on Earth right now, it is expected to reach the third spot – ranking behind only India and China by 2050.

Nigeria’s population is slated to increase by nearly 257 million between now and then. That market size makes it an attractive destination in itself. It is also well positioned to become Africa’s business leader, given the dynamics of its entrepreneurial class.
Read more

Rwanda joins the Third-Termism bandwagon

  By

As long expected, Rwanda’s parliament has joined neighboring Congo and Burundi (and beyond) in bids to repeal constitutionally-imposed term limits on their presidencies. France24:

The debate, set to take place over the next two months, was prompted by parliament being handed petitions signed by a total of two million people – or roughly 17 percent of the population – asking for the constitution to be changed, the head of the chamber, Donatilla Mukabalisa, told AFP.

“We have received two million requests,” she said, explaining that parliament has been receiving a number of what she insisted were spontaneous letters and petitions from individuals, groups or associations.

 
However, there are two significant differences in the Rwanda case, although all involve relatively authoritarian elected leaders.

The first is that Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame is already now in his 15th year in office (3 of them under an older constitution and 10 under the 2003 constitution) and the term length at the moment is a whopping 7 years. That length used to be more common under constitutions inspired by the French constitution of 1958, but it had fallen out of favor in most places some time ago and was removed in France itself in 2000. 4-5 years is the prevailing world standard for presidents and prime ministers at this point. Kagame’s new “first” term (after the 2003 constitution) was from 2003 to 2010. His second term began in 2010 and will not end until 2017. He would therefore have served a full 17 years as President of Rwanda even before embarking on a “third” term under the proposed constitutional revision now under consideration. Were he to serve out that term as well, and assuming that the term lengths are not shortened when the limit is lifted, Mr. Kagame would have served for an uninterrupted 24 years. As usual, his relationship with democracy is superficial and procedural at best.

The second is that, unlike many of the sub-Saharan African leaders who have been trying to remove term limits in the past year, Paul Kagame is widely supported enthusiastically by the international community to the point of getting a free pass on most abusive actions. It will be interesting to see which allies, if any, part ways with him over this issue after so much Western criticism of efforts to lift term limits in other countries.

Iraq’s army is still comically terrible

  By

(Comic in the cosmic sense. Not for the people affected in Iraq.)

ABC News reports that hundreds of ISIS fighters walked into a city that days earlier had had thousands of Iraqi troops: “Ramadi Fell to ISIS Fighters Even Though They Were ‘Vastly Outnumbered’ by Iraqi Troops”

The pullout of the Iraqi counterterrorism unit from Ramadi first appeared in the Kurdish news agency Rudaw. The departure of that elite unit led other Iraqi military commanders in the city to order the departure of their troops even though they held a significant numerical superiority, the U.S. official said.

 
iraq-map-cia

According to the anonymous Kurdish commander interviewed by Rudaw (linked above), the well-armed, American-created Special Ops unit began disappearing from Ramadi in the lead-up to the ISIS takeover. The Office of the Prime Minister of Iraq had not ordered the withdrawal and was not informed of it until the other units began calling it in and asking what was going on.

And in an eerie echo of the fall of Mosul 11 months before:

They pulled out so fast that in most cases they left their vehicles intact with their weapons and ammunition inside. […] By the evening of that day, most of the soldiers of the Special Operations had fled. Even the personal guards of the commander took with them their six Humvees and left the commander alone.

 
All the other units that remained were vastly less well-equipped to withstand an ISIS assault and felt they had little choice but to retreat hastily.

We torched what we couldn’t carry to prevent it from falling to ISIS. […] At 6pm, I was still inside the city stadium. When I realized it was all lost we pulled out, too. Along the way out of Ramadi I caught up with the force that had withdrawn earlier. There were 600-700 vehicles filled with soldiers, police officers and their families.

 

Free college AND a better Wall St? Sanders sees a way.

  By

Sanders-021507-18335- 0004Senator Bernie Sanders has unveiled his latest policy proposal as part of his Democratic presidential campaign: Free public college, funded via a new financial transactions tax to discourage damaging Wall Street speculation. It’s a step up from his earlier pre-campaign proposal of cutting tuition only in half. Here’s a summary of his new plan:

Annual tuition costs at those institutions add up to roughly $70 billion, according to a fact sheet from Sanders’ office. The proposed legislation would require the federal government to compensate for two-thirds of that sum, with the states making up the additional third.
[…]
The federal funding for Sanders’s proposal would come from a tax on financial transactions. Stock trades, bonds, and derivative trading would be taxed at rates of 0.5 percent, 0.1 percent, and 0.005 percent, respectively. Supporters of the financial transaction tax […] say it is not only a progressive way to raise revenue but would also discourage dangerous levels of Wall Street speculation.

A recent report from economist Joseph Stiglitz and the Roosevelt Institute, intended to provide a comprehensive framework for reworking American economic policy, endorsed a financial transaction tax as a way to “penalize short-term traders and incentivize longer holding periods, thus reducing instability and encouraging longer-term productive investment.”

 
Unfortunately perhaps the biggest pitfall of this plan — though it is (abstractly) an excellent starting point for a negotiation in Congress — is its dependence on state governments for a third of the funding. Low-cost public colleges and university educations are already being demolished in the name of dogmatic tax cuts. This plan depends on somehow convincing dozens of states not to slash funding / hike tuition and fees for their public colleges. But it’s a lot better than nothing.

Related reading on…

– How much would it cost to make public colleges free?
– Corporate borrowing diverted to shareholders, not investment
– Putting Finance Back in the Box
– Stock market speculation
– Billionaire stock speculation

Lessons from Burundi’s post-Civil War constitution

  By

The following is an installment in my ongoing series on the 2015 Burundian constitutional crisis.

Flag of Burundi

Flag of Burundi

After reading the 2005 French-language Burundian constitution myself, I have tentatively come to the conclusion that the current President, Pierre Nkurunziza, is technically constitutionally allowed to seek another term — but only by deliberately misconstruing some poor word choices in the text. First, I present my textual analysis to develop this finding. Second, are my recommendations on what lessons can be drawn from this crisis, in terms of future drafting of documents to guide political transitions and post-transition foundations.

Basically, there are two conflicting elements in the text. Article 302 stipulated that the first “post-transition” president — which ended up being Mr. Nkurunziza — specifically had to be elected by both chambers of parliament, rather than the voters directly, “on a purely exceptional basis”:

A titre exceptionnel, le premier Président de la République de la période post-transition est élu par l’Assemblée Nationale et le Sénat élus réunis en Congrès, à la majorité des deux tiers des membres.

 
(My direct translation: “On a purely exceptional basis, the first President of the Republic of the post-transition period is chosen by the elected National Assembly and Senate assembled in Congress, with a two-thirds majority of the members.”)

But at the same time, Article 96 states that (in general, presumably): “The President of the Republic” is to be “elected by direct universal suffrage for a five-year term renewable once”:

Le Président de la République est élu au suffrage universel direct pour un mandat de cinq ans renouvelable une fois.

 
So President Nkurunziza’s argument is that because he was indirectly elected under Article 302 in 2005 and then elected directly to a five-year term in 2010 that means he is eligible to renew his term one more time by direct election. Which is pretty sketchy — but a literally acceptable interpretation of the text, since Article 96 failed to take the lingering effects of Article 302 (which falls under the “Special Provisions” Title XV) explicitly into account.

Lessons: The wording of Article 96 is grammatically and syntactically stitched together for elegant efficiency rather than explicit clarity, which now seems to have been a mistaken decision. I believe one of the former Burundian Supreme Court members labeled it against the “spirit” of the document and the Arusha Accords that preceded it, even if it was perhaps a textually permitted interpretation.

Of course, there’s little likelihood that preventing this loophole could have avoided the current situation entirely, given that the President was determined to amend the constitution anyway, until he discovered he could use the loophole instead and avoid the hassle. Clearly he had an agenda, with or without this language error. Still, it has needlessly provided him a very convenient shield for his actions. And that, at least, could indeed have been avoided.

Recommendation to future transitional/foundational document drafters: Break up your sentences. And account for deliberate misinterpretations of conflicting provisions. If it had said “The President of the Republic is elected by direct universal suffrage. A presidential term is five years in length and renewable once” there would likely be no way to misread it intentionally. By joining those three thoughts (direct election AND term length AND term limit) into one sentence, it made the term limit contingent upon the election method, which itself had been exceptionally overridden in the other article for the purposes of the first post-transition term only.

While this subject may seem excessively narrow to which to devote a detailed analysis, I bring up these observations about the importance of precise drafting because I found it to be similar to Burkina Faso’s incredibly messy constitutional revisions that (apparently inadvertently!) left literally no one in line to succeed the presidency upon a vacancy, forcing — or at least facilitating and quasi-legitimizing — a military coup when the president resigned unilaterally. These decisions on wording can have far-reaching implications years later.

There will be a next political and economic leap forward

  By

Why should it be surprising that systems and processes created 50-70 years ago no longer work or command broad popular support? An international order created in a cauldron of Cold War and unresolved global colonialism has broken down in a completely different world? You don’t say!

Processes of democracy have remained largely stagnant since a period before internet, computing — or even legal participation by most of humanity. Many of its elements have hardly been modernized in many of the world’s “leading” democracies since before even all adult White men had the right to vote, let alone everyone else.

Many if not most of the major parties or their clear predecessors in the northern industrialized democracies (including those in the United States) were launched/became serious or were significantly reforged a little over 100 years ago. Of those centennial parties, few have undergone serious, radical transformation since then, even after two world wars and the end of the Cold War. They may have moderated or moved toward a midpoint, or they may have consolidated toward the wings, but they are largely still organized along century-old ideological axes.

In the span of 50 years, virtually all the global conditions and realities have changed. Virtually none of the governing, formal organizing, or official economic systems have.

History isn’t “finished” or “completed.” It didn’t end in 1965. It just keeps evolving, constantly. Why would you expect to see fewer radical changes in the global situation in the coming century (or quarter-century) than in the last century (or quarter-century)? If anything, they seem likely to grow more frequent.

Why are there so many people in positions of power or the media who seem stunned and confused that there is widespread public dissatisfaction in stagnant and unresponsive institutions at a national, supranational, and global level when they were devised 50, 70, 100, or more than 200 years ago and have barely been revised since? Why are they writing it all off as the misinformed whining of ignorant masses, after spending decades preaching about the wonders of democracy and public participation in self-governance?

There is no “permanent” order of things unchained from time, place, or circumstance. There’s no “inevitable” course of political and economic development. Why are we collectively so unwilling to begin to consider the next evolution of the two?