This paper was Prepared by Ms. Soraya Aziz Souleymane, for presentation at a conference entitled “Recent Developments in the Democratic Republic of Congo: Local, Regional, and International Perspectives” held on February 25th-26th 2013 organized by the Great Lakes Policy Forum, and held at the Council on Foreign Relations and Johns’ Hopkins University’s Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC. The views presented are her own, and do not necessarily represent the views of the Forum, the host institutions, or any other structure. (The original document can bbe downloaded Here)
Abstract.
The DRC is experiencing one of the deadliest wars ever. While significant efforts were noticed in the past few years, many observers have flagged the deterioration of the situation since the past elections. One of the reasons is the lack of state capacity to enforce law and order and to deliver services. It is a common challenge for state building in post conflict situations. In this document we respond to four essential questions on capacity building in the Congo: what is the problem, what can be done about it, where to start and what can the USA and other countries do to help the DRC and its people.
About the Author
Ms. Soraya Aziz Souleymane is a rising academic and promising professional in the mining industry as well as development fields in the DRC. She is the Community Relations Manager of Banro Corporation, a Canadian Mining Company operating in the eastern the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Maniema and South Kivu), a company employing her for the last six years. At 29 years, she won the youth leadership competition organised by the Congolese Civil Society, a tittle she holds since 2011. In July the same year she was awarded the British Chevening Scholarship. She holds a Masters in Development Studies from the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), hosted at the University of Sussex, England. This Masters comes in addition to a postgraduate degree in International Relations specialised in conflict resolution and international relations completed in Kenya. Most of her academic papers were about Conflict resolutions and governance in the DRC.
To Contact Soraya Via the GLPF:
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“Building State Capacity in the DRC:” Remarks Prepared by Ms. Soraya Aziz Souleymane
The Problem
The DRC is a vast country, located at the center of the African continent. The country is 2,354,000 square km and is divided in 11 provinces, which include the province-city of Kinshasa, home to 12% of the population.
For the past century the DRC went successively through brutal colonisation by Belgium, a failed transition to independence (Fought by heroes like Patrice Lumumba), 35 years of dictatorship under Mobutu, and a civil war during Laurent Desire Kabila (who overthrow Mobutu through a rebellion) and Joseph Kabila.Today, the country is still experiencing war and the State authority fails to impose order and security throughout the country.
One ot the consequences of this troubled history is that the state has never built its public services in a way that they could carry their mission (serve the population) but in an oppressive manner that reaps the population from what they are supposed to provide because it has been built in a way that benefits the few ruling class. The security brings insecurities, the mining department participates in the smuggling, the road department makes it difficult for road infrastructure users to use the roads etc.
The last elections of 2011 were not well conducted. Many reputed institutions and observers have reported massive frauds. This has weakened further the legitimacy of the government in power. The government was proclaimed 3 month after the electoral results, and its composition was more an acrobatic distribution of power within the presidential coalition than a competent team of technocrats and experts capable of bringing the country out of the current situation and competently face the challenges that exist on the ground.
In the absence of a cohesive and nationwide state authority, it is not unusual to see some public services acting autonomously, particularly in remote areas, collecting –sometimes illegal- taxes for personal benefits. Corruption has become the norm, be it used for survival or in the absence of remuneration or a reward to build a circle of “loyalty” around power holders.
The state as people understand it from books is very different from what Congolese see.
The aim of this document is to understand how the US and any friend country can help the DRC State to enforce its capacity and serve its people.
These problems are known and various actors have tried to solve them with very limited success. State building is a very long process and its results can only start to be seen decades after the first efforts take place. Some of the common challenges faced in building State capacity in the Congo have included:
• Funds mismanagement (State, Civil Society, NGO)
• Access to the poorest
• Security
• Bureaucracy
• Lack of baseline data
• Lack of strong leadership and demonstrated political will
Since the question of Security is part of the Conference agenda as a topic of its own, mentions of security in this document will be very superficial. It is nevertheless important to understand that Security is part of the problem and that without the necessary security strategies and their implementations, the recommendations of this presentation are not likely to produce the expected results.
What to do?
The problems observed are the results of three main factors: The institutions that represent the State, the people working in these institutions, and the mission of the institutions.
1. The State. To build some form of legitimacy it is important for the current government to open up to dialogue with parties from the opposition and the civil society. This has started to take place under the guidance of NDI, but unfortunately there government is sabotaging the efforts by politicizing the initiative, and even suggesting that the national dialogue should take place in a foreign country (Congo Brazzaville). The government has given the initiative to the rulling party and this weakens further its legitimacy. For the initiative to succeed it must be run under the moderation of an international actor trusted by both parties but the initiative should be a national initiative, under the responsibility of the government, not the ruling party.
2. The institutions: As we said, the institutions sometimes act autonomously. This is sometimes due to their own greed but most of the time because the administrative process that links them to their hierarchy is obsolete. In the Congo there are very poor infrastructures, there is almost no landline and public offices, most of the time, don’t have a communication budget. This means that communication from an office to another is done via mail, wrote on Olivetti typewriter. How can we expect to see any efficiency in the system when offices can’t communicate among themselves? It is not unusual for a client to inform the public servant of new rules and regulations in the very sector that the public officer is working in. If they act autonomously it is because the over-centralised bureaucracy of State offices is far more complicated to implement. It is therefore important that the constitution of 2005 is implemented. This constitution allows a greater decentralisation and brings the decision making level closer to the people.
Still on institutions, one of the institution that has kept its authority on people, especially in rural areas is the traditional system. It is also important that the traditional system is taken into consideration while rebuilding State Capacities. These leaders must be the representatives of the state at the local level and participate in the provision of public services.
3. The Staff: one of the things that must be decentralised is the recruitment of staff. A public sector reform was initiated in 2006 but did not produce the expected results as the program was terminated before the end. One of the key things the reform unveiled was that almost half of the civil servant were fictive, while another good number of people working in public offices did not exist in the official books and were appointed locally, paid with corruption money. If the decentralisation comes in place and the staff is recruited and paiyed locally, the State will have a better control and the monitoring mechanism will become easier to implement and tougher to cheat on. Furthermore, the training and motivation programs will be adapted to the specific needs of each entity. A chieftainship, for example, is a decentralised entity. Each traditional leader knows his/her entity, the problems and the solutions; he interacts with his population on a day to day basis. Identifying the training required for his staff will be easier than if this task was carried out by someone else from the province capital or from Kinshasa.
4. The missions. Institutions with competent staff and a well-defined vision, with enough decision making power and population participation will deliver better services to the population. It is important to redesign the mission of the public offices in a way that it is accountable to the population. This will be achieved if the civil servants and their clients (the population) hold series of workshop to redefine the vision of the public services and the way in which they carry their activities. The same exercise should be held with their hierarchy to ensure the local expectations are aligned to the national standard and national vision.
Where to start?
One has to start at the most important and urgent points by carefully managing the scarce resources, and progressively encouraging a domino effect in other sectors.
1. Security. The reform of the army and restoration of a clear chain of command is important. Equally important is the security of people and the insurance that the can work and invest safely.
2. Health and education. The Country will not develop if it keeps ignoring the health and education of its population. Because most of the time the State cannot compete with the generous packages offered by the private sector, the hundreds of thousands civil servant will be what the market has in the bottom of its basket, and the elite. To counter this, it is important that educated people are available in such a number as even the state can afford excellent quality economists, agronomists, lawyers, doctors and nurses, accountants and other skills to run the State activities. For the same reasons, it is important to keep the population healthy and avoid tragedies whereby the scarce resource’s allocated to health programs are all used for treatment, with nothing left fro prevention, infrastructures, training, remunerations and researches.
3. Economic reforms: More than 70% of economic activities in the DRC take place in the informal sector. Unfortunately the state lacks capacity to maximize the opportunities that these activities represent for the national economy. The current focus of the central government is the “cadre macroeconomic”, a word too often repeated but which results are overdue for the population (dixit resident Joseph Kabila). What could make a direct impact is a mechanism whereby the country can regulate the micro economic level, collect taxes and use this money to improve the conditions for these activities to take place in a more beneficial manner (eg: training, microfinance schemes, incentives etc). Again, this would require a throughout review of the rules, regulation and staff working in the sector, eventually with creation of ad hoc institutions to assist small economic operators.
4. Tax collection and participatory management. The province of South Kivu has been introduced as a pilot province the participatory budget approach. This project assisted by the World Bank encourages the local government to include the local population in the public management from the tax collection to the fund allocation. Any project is also selected by the population, the tender process is monitored and the implementation overseen by special committee composed of voluntaries. It is a very good model of governance and democracy. However, the success of the project is limited due to lack of funds. All the taxes collected locally are sent to the central government and 40% should come back to the local government for implementation and this money, so far, has never been returned. The money instead is used for expenses in Kinshasa, far from the tax payer. It is imperative for the Government to assist and strengthen the participatory budget program of the South Kivu by returning the 40% to the provinces, as per the constitution, and to extend the program to other provinces as soon as possible.
5. Infrastructures (Roads and bridges, electricity): In order to enforce the state authority, a country needs a good road network. There is a correlation between Security, State authority enforcement and road access. As a development practitioner I have monitored and evaluated the impact of some road in rural areas. Up until recently the government has put a lot of efforts to fix roads in cities, but not in rural areas where they are needed the most. It is encouraging that there is a national program to open up some National Roads but this program is very limited as it comes as a loan through the World Bank. Other means of financing infrastructure projects exist. The most common and efficient one would be a public private partnership on a build-operate- Transfer model. This model will not necessary benefit to the poorest at first (vast majority of the population), but it is a starting point because once the transfer happens, the infrastructure exists for the benefit of all. Another way to make the poorest benefit is for the government to take part of the operation charges in its budget, as it does with health and education when contracted by Religious Organisation.
What can the US and other countries do to help?
1. Because the current government lacks enough legitimacy to rule, force the DRC central government to form a constitutional implementation commission with members from the Civil Society, political parties and elders of the nation to oversee the decentralisation process, with a timeline and budget.
2. Aid, if any, must be canalised through local governments. The Civil Society must not be seen as an alternative to the Government in delivering public services, but a monitoring body with whistleblowing capacity. Any assistance to the civil society should be in the governance sector.
3. Direct training programs with civil servant (including those in the police and justice) straight at the local levels, focussing on the needs of various entities, rather than nationwide programs that do not respond to specific problems.
About the Great Lakes Policy Forum
Since 1995, the Great Lakes Policy Forum has aimed to keep the Great Lakes on the agenda of policy makers and provide a platform where Government, NGOs, academics, and the Diaspora can come together to search cooperatively for solutions to conflicts in the region. The Forum is presented by some of the leading NGO and academic voices on the Great Lakes in the Washington, DC area.
Our participants include members of the NGO community, the diplomatic corps, international organizations such as the United Nations, and representatives from USAID and the State Department. Participants have used the GLPF to present reports on their activities and to advocate for a more consistent and cohesive policy in the Great Lakes. One of the primary goals is to encourage a broader dialogue between NGOs, academics, regional experts, international organizations, and policy makers on particular issues. Such dialogue can lead to a greater understanding of the dynamics of the region’s conflicts, the key players involved, and the regional dimension of envisioned solutions for sustainable peace in the Great Lakes.
The GLPF is led by a committee of Principals, and coordinated by Search for Common Ground, an international conflict transformation organization active in the region. Current members of the group of principals are:
• Amnesty International USA
• U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Committee on Conscience
• Council on Foreign Relations, Center for Preventative Action,
• Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University
• Refugees International
• Search for Common Ground
• U.S.Institute of Peace, Center for Conflict Analysis and Prevention
• Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Africa Program
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Additional support for this conference was provided by the National Endowment for Democracy and the World Movement for Democracy.
