Cashew coup

Gamal Nkrumah notes that this week's coup and assassination of Guinea Bissau's President Vieira were not about the country's official trade, but rather to do with cocaine
The assassination of President Joao Bernardo Vieira of Guinea Bissau on Sunday exposed a fragile and cumbersome political system in a sleepy West African backwater. There were no celebrations on the streets, but the question remains whether any succession plan existed. Apparently, there was.
The big problem for Guinea Bissau is that it is too tiny a nation-state. Another problem is that the trafficking of narcotics sometimes counts for more than local politics. All these factors, a quest for quick profits, a hunt for big-hearted donors, create a combustible recipe for blow-ups every time the power struggles at home coincide with the dynamics of the global narcotics trade abroad when they hit turbulence. Hours after it was announced that the president was assassinated, Guineans, their regional neighbours and international donors were struggling to decipher the implications.
"We want to consolidate democracy, peace and security in this region. The death of a president, of a chief of staff, is very grave news," summed up Mohamed Ibn Chambas, the secretary-general of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).
Full details will not emerge before Al-Ahram Weekly goes to print. However, Vieira's passing presents an awful dilemma for the ruling clique in Guinea Bissau, and for the international donors whose aid is desperately needed in the desperately poor country, ranked the world's fifth poorest nation, according to United Nations estimates.
It is against this dire backdrop that Guinea Bissau has emerged as a key transit point for cocaine smuggled from Latin American countries to Europe. Cocaine is neither grown nor processed as crack ( pedra as it is called in Guinea Bissau), but the monetary value of cocaine being trafficked through the Lilliputian West African narco-state far surpasses its gross national income. The nation of one and a half million people is strategically located at the westernmost tip of Africa closest to South America. The impoverished nation officially depends on the export of cash crops such as cashew nuts and peanuts. However, Colombian cocaine cartels exploit its rugged 350km coastline with its 90-island archipelago as a cocaine transit hub.
Exclusive Hispanic-style haciendas have cropped up in the country and the entire economy is now geared towards serving the interests of South American drug barons and their local henchmen -- corrupt politicians, destitute customs officials, ambitious army and police personnel. The cocaine consignments have replaced peanuts and cashew nuts as the population's main source of income. Pedra consumption is also on the rise.
In a vibrant democracy, political parties need active ideologically inspired members, and not mere token representatives of rival tribal and ethnic groups. Vieira's demise exposed the twin scourges of Guinea Bissau's democratic experiment: ethnic specificity and military might. No stabilisation strategy is feasible unless tribalism is brought under control. The military has also gobbled an ever-greater portion of the dwindling state budget.
Vieira, an ethnic Papel, was the undisputed leader of the African Party for Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), a political movement that has been attributed with single-handedly waging the liberation struggle. The PAIGC's stranglehold on power has been palpable ever since it supplanted the Portuguese colonialists as the rulers of the land. However, the PAIGC, a microcosm of Guinea Bissau itself, is torn apart by tribalism. It would be a shame to leave Guinean politicians at the mercy of unscrupulous tribalists.
The Balanta ethnic group dominates the upper echelons of the Guinean army. The Balanta and Papel are mainly adherents of indigenous African religions and Christianity, and vie for power in the Guinean capital Bissau. They are both coastal people and have controlled the army and civil service much to the consternation of the predominantly Muslim Fulani and Mandinka peoples of the underdeveloped interior of the country. Roughly 60 per cent of the population of Guinea Bissau is Muslim even though Christians (mainly mixed race Papel and Balanta) form the bulk of the political, military and economic elite.
Most of the hoopla surrounding Vieira has been about what he was, rather than what he would do for his country. He was a pillar of stability in a politically unstable country. The country has been prone to military takeovers, most unsuccessful, and has been embroiled in a 13-year civil war which ended with Vieira's triumphal consolidation of power. ECOWAS was instrumental in buttressing Vieira's position.
Vieira, who won the 2005 presidential polls, ruled the country for 23 of the past 29 years since Guinea Bissau gained independence from Portugal in 1974. His seat- of-the-pants policy served him well. He was a political survivor. Vieira was a wily politician who played one rival against another. However, his proclaimed struggle against narcotics trafficking epitomised sloppiness at best, and hinted of the sinister at worst.
Dealing with Guinea Bissau's cocaine challenge, Vieira seemed all at sea, emitting panic and indecision. Cocaine trafficking in particular, and the narcotics trade generally, became the single most important source of foreign currency in a country riveted with tribalism and political turmoil.
The most powerful institution in the country became the military establishment rather than the ruling PAIGC. Indeed, the ruling party lost much of its revolutionary reputation with the assassination in 1973 of its charismatic founder and one of Africa's chief Marxist ideologues Amilcar Cabral. The PAIGC fast lost its socialist fervor, and with it the mass appeal and international prestige that Cabral so laboriously cultivated and propagated. Vieira was a pragmatist par excellence, but in the end, his pragmatism and political acumen failed to save his skin.
It is impossible to forecast when the next West African military takeover will take place. However, what is glaringly clear at the moment is that most coups in West Africa fail -- the December attempted coup that followed the death of Lansana Conte, the president of neighbouring Guinea Conakry is typical. Even military takeovers that do eventually prevail do so only partially -- Mauritania's 2008 coup is quintessential in that sense. The immediate focus of regional and international observers is why such coups occur and how far political chaos can be contained after the coup. It seems to happen every time, the moment Guinea Bissau comes close to tackling its myriad problems seriously, fate steps in to block the way.
Yet there are also longer-term challenges. With Vieira's assassination, the struggle against cocaine trafficking for the time being has been put into cold storage. A more consoling scenario is that Vieira's demise would help focus attention of the dangers of the cancerous growth of the narcotics trade in Guinean society and politics. Guinea Bissau is virtually devoid of mineral riches, and has little else to fall back on but the lucrative cocaine trafficking business. The fight against the drug barons must now be intensified. And, there are no angels in this war.
Chief-of-Staff Batista Tagme Na Wai was also killed in the coup. With corruption rife within the ranks of the PAIGC, it is reasonable to conclude that a power struggle over who is to take the lion's share of the narcotics trade was the real impetus behind the military takeover.
This uneasy tension underlying the dynamics animating Guinean politics bespeaks of spirit democracy activists, the unsung heroes who persevere under horrendously arduous circumstances to keep the flame first ignited by the legendary visionary Cabral alive.
Parliament Speaker Raimundo Pereira is entitled by the Guinean Constitution to assume presidential powers until a democratically elected president officially takes office. The bottom line is that while democracy hides a multitude of sins, coups expose the cracks.