Corruption has become a short-cut accusation, a term used by those who are angry at the system to express dissatisfaction and cast aspersions. It is a (rhetorical) weapon of the weak – all the more credible as there indeed is a lot of corruption in Burundi. This is related to what we ended the previous section with, where we said that Burundians desire ‘better people’ rather than ‘better structures.’ Corruption as described by Burundians is a ‘bad person’s’ fault – not a structural issue. Corruption, then, is in part to the masses what human rights are to the well educated. Both are ways to ‘stick it to the man,’ terms whose currency in protest and dissatisfaction is useful. Hence, more than simply accurate descriptions of a social fact, talking about these things is a political act – a way the jargon of the international community has become reappropriated in local political struggles. Given that in Burundi both corruption and human rights violations are indeed prevalent, this makes understanding these discourses very complicated.
It takes deep knowledge of Burundian society and trust by Burundians, which few foreigners ever acquire, to get a sense of the real extent and mechanisms of corruption. Almost always, when aid-related corruption in Burundi is uncovered, it is because a Burundian told a foreigner – foreigners cannot figure it out for themselves. What is required for foreigners to effectively combat corruption includes: the trust of local employees to learn what is really going on in terms of hiring and firing people; a detailed knowledge of real prices on local markets; and knowledge of rumors in the street about the reputation and social networks of the relevant agency’s personnel. This runs oddly counter to the usual approach to dealing with corruption by almost all agencies, which is to send in a foreigner to control the money. It is not foreign expertise/control which is required, but profound internal workplace changes – clearly much harder to initiate. And hence the charade of the foreign money controller continues, with little impact.
Historical interlude: long-term changes in people’s attitudes toward governance and corruption
There are two historical elements that set Burundi apart from most other African countries. First, the weakness of social structures apart from the family. Burundians did – and still do – not live in villages but in isolated homesteads, spread out throughout the country. All early scholars agree that the only center of a Burundian’s life was his family. Typically, one’s neighbors are one’s family, and while there is a sense of joint belonging to a colline, that is hard to separate from belonging to an extended family. People do have broader networks of friends and advisors, but these have no formal role. There are no traditional village chiefs or masters of ceremony, no age groups or secret societies. In short, then, Burundian social life has long been very non-hierarchical and atomized, focused around individual nuclear families.
At the same time, Burundi was a kingdom, a centralized state, long before European colonizers arrived, with largely the same borders as the current state. Although the king ruled the country, most local power was held by princely families of Ganwa, assisted by Tutsi sous-chefs (with some Hutu among them as well). Burundians have a longer history of ‘being Burundian,’ of being members of a Burundian state, than many other Africans have of an equivalent status. Much of this system survived until well into independence, bringing Ziegler (1971: 14) to exclaim that ‘the Tutsi state represents probably the most complex and the least culturally influenced traditional society that exists today in Africa.’
All descriptions of Burundi’s pre-colonial system describe a society in which clientelism and person-driven rule dominated (Trouwborst 1962; Ziegler 1971; Laely 1997). Land and cattle – the two most important items for economic and social survival – were attributed through personal dependencies, clientelistic structures of subordination at different levels – from king to Ganwa to chiefs to sous-chefs, etc. Thomas Laely’s work is among the most revealing on this:
The structures of government and administration of the pre-colonial monarchy were not determined by permanently given territorial units; they were dependent on personal relationships of the moment, and were shaped according to the pattern of patron–client dealings. This resulted in what might be described as multi-layered, overlapping pyramids of people being dependent on each other. […] The fact that so much was arranged on an informal basis resulted in favourites, and even personal clients, greatly influencing the day-to-day work of government and administration. They can be classified as ‘anonymous’ or ‘proto’ functionaries since none held any specific, differentiated official position. […] Bearing in mind that such a subtle hierarchy and pattern of stratification was determined in many ways by multiple intersecting variables, there could be no generalised access to political authorities by universal rules, but only highly personalised and very particularised ways of approach.
And Ziegler (1971: 54) says that ‘social structures of Burundi are of constant fluidity.’ When the colonizer came, a formal layer was added on top of this proto-state, but it was a weak one. On the one hand, the colonizer formally abolished the personalized positions and clientelist relations of the past, replacing them with the trappings of the modern state: fixed taxes to the state instead of tributes to patrons, written law instead of custom, formal equality of all instead of cattle clientship,3 bureaucrats instead of allies. On the other hand, the layer of the modern state that was grafted on top applied basically only to the whites and, slowly, to the urban bureaucrats who became part of this system; its extension farther into the country was theoretical rather than real.4 For ordinary people, nothing much changed in how they were governed, except that local authorities imposed many more demands on them and inequality became stronger.
It is this system that, in 1962, became independent, with little preparation. During the very last years before independence, the Belgians had organized elections, but these had not fundamentally altered the system: those who were elected were overwhelmingly traditional leaders, and the people continued to behave toward them on the basis of traditional allegiance and clientship, rather than democratic citizenship, which most of them had never known (ibid.: 63, 69). As Ziegler describes it in 1971:
Since 1962, Burundi lives in a strange juridical situation. Almost the entirety of the five principal strata of the nation – the King and his family, the Baganwa, the Tutsi, the Hutu and the Twa – remain ferociously attached to the Burundian cosmology, model their behavior on traditional motivations and scrupulously respect the social order as it has been handed down by custom and oral tradition. At the same time, those in charge of the country pursue a sort of masked dance, invoking by words and gestures a western constitutional order, and giving to the entire world the impression, convincing only to the non-initiated, that Burundi has renounced its history and transformed itself into a European-type constitutional monarchy.
Bujumbura was no more than a town at the time, and the country had a mere handful of secondary schools and university-educated nationals. The circle of people who competed for power was mainly composed of Ganwa, Tutsi close to the royal court, and some high-caste Hutu. A fierce rivalry emerged among families of Ganwa, continuing at least a century of antagonism (ibid.). The king’s authority, already weakened by decades of colonialism, was insufficient to resolve these recurring crises. Over time, these fights for power began to acquire an ethnic tone. Four years after independence, the king was deposed by the army, and almost three decades of rule by low-caste Tutsi military from Bururi began.
There was, during those years, still no major social demand for democracy. Laely, who did his research in the late 1980s, writes:
Current relationships between rulers and ruled in Burundi are still influenced by the old monarchical model of domination in many respects. Access to the state and its infrastructures is perceived as a special favour, not least since the services provided are still not generalised and often distributed arbitrarily or at random. […] The rulers of today are perceived to a lesser degree than in the past as benefactors, albeit still as the most
efficient potential protectors. […] The peasants look upon the achievements of those in authority – and the latter include the intercessors in the post-colonial state – as the equivalent out-come of their own services rendered beforehand, and sometimes even as generous favours. This helps to explain why relations to superiors are actively sought, and not perceived or felt to be oppressive, despite or even because of the implicated arbitrariness.
In short, what ordinary Burundians wanted was not democracy but a system – or people – that delivered, as in being effective, recognizable, acceptable.
Under those circumstances, what Westerners call corruption, or clientelism, was to ordinary Burundians normal, understandable, and uncontested. It displayed predictability and it provided rewards to those who were good at it, for both elites and ordinary people. Hence, for decades, all new entrants into positions of importance in the country were socialized into this system, its rules and demands very clear to them – ambiguous or incomprehensible only to the outsider, who focuses exclusively on the formal institutions of the state (see Chabal and Daloz 1999).
During the decades of military rule from 1966 to 1993, major changes started taking place in how the state related to the citizens, which eventually led to the destruction of this system. One change was the weakening of the checks and balances that had characterized the pre-colonial proto-state. Commune and colline borders were redrawn so they did not fit traditional chef and sous-chef areas anymore; the institution of bashingantahe was weakened; central state coercive power was exercised raw and naked to defend the status quo, as attested above all by the mass killings of Hutu in 1972.
Unlike the former kingdom, which found legitimacy in shared religious values and symbols, a dictatorship of low-caste Tutsi had little to justify itself by. The successive military regimes and the single party they managed primarily sought control, and secondarily legitimacy. For the former, brutal violence was used whenever necessary; for the rest, the regimes sought to supervise and control every aspect of social life. The state and the single party both had structures reaching down all the way to the collines and everyone with a position in the former had to be member of the latter. Local state and party institutions were not institutions of citizenship but of control, and, for those who managed to become part of them, of individual advancement. The regimes also sought to construct two pillars of legitimacy: nationalism and development. UPRONA adhered to an ideology of nationalism that had the added convenience of hiding the disproportionate power held by a small group of people (Lemarchand 1996). Prince Louis Rwagasore, the young, modern, charismatic politician shot to death before coming to power, was the ideal symbol for the party, trying to reach into the past while being ruled by people with no past. Development – the ideology of material progress and individual advancement – was the other pillar, probably more important to and successful with foreigners than with most rural Burundians. Development projects were used as tools to continue clientelism at the local level.
By the late 1970s, the state had become a giant machine sucking income out of the (mainly Hutu) rural poor toward the (mainly Tutsi) urban rich. Corruption grew, and with it disincentives against investment. This system could last only as long as it produced the goods, i.e. as long as it managed to create some development throughout the country and to generate enough jobs for aspirants to power to share in the pie. But economic growth slowed down to a trickle, and intra-elite political competition began rising. Popular unhappiness started growing as well – primarily among Hutu intellectuals, who felt socially excluded, but also among Tutsi. But there is more.
We said earlier that what Westerners call corruption was to ordinary Burundians normal. True, but there are borders – lines that can be redrawn, but which denote real differences most everyone recognizes.5 Increasingly, the types of abuse of power that many politicians and administrators engaged in went beyond what could be justified or recognized by ordinary Burundians: ‘people perceive that forms of corruption no longer rooted in a moral economy of kinship are on the rise’ (Smith 2007). Showing great deference to people of authority is a traditional norm, indeed, and it is not difficult for a Burundian farmer to enact these behaviors – the shuffling, the downcast eyes, the left hand on top of the right arm – when asking for services she would legally deserve to access as a citizen, but when that same administrator abuses his power to capture lands of her family, he has gone beyond what is mutually legitimate, and they both know it. When teachers require sex with female students to let them pass, or when employers do the same to hire, this not only runs counter to the modesty Burundians pride themselves on; it is also perceived as a clear abuse of power.
In addition, the values of the modern state – even if that state was in practice subverted – did slowly spread throughout Burundi. While Burundi’s imported ‘modern’ state was always more a façade than a reality, it did bring with it new values and new rhetoric. There were laws on the books, and sometimes they were applied correctly. There were increasingly well-trained young people who brought with them a desire for another way of working. Foreigners and aid agencies did bring with them different discourses and tried to function according to different rules. The official rhetoric of the state of equality and progress and rationality – mainly designed for international consumption – did trickle down, and the contrast between these proclamations and reality became clearer. But although individual people may be more aware of some of these concepts, that does not mean they are as a society ready to challenge the status quo. To quote Laely one last time:
The attitudes adopted by mainstream peasantry can most aptly be summarised as pragmatic and realistic: by succumbing more frequently to actions taken by the state than ever feeling to be ‘involved’, they adapt to given circumstances. Experiencing their powerlessness, they try to align themselves with the powerful as best they can. Although new concepts, such as equality of opportunity and equal rights, are not unknown, most peasants continue to let themselves be guided by traditional patterns of behaviour and values. Their reactions are in general much more often personal than collective. In short, the strategies adopted by most towards the state can be described as strongly ‘defensive’ and ‘individual.’
The civil war provided the final blow to this system. It laid bare the system’s illegitimacy and its total ineffectiveness, as well as the fact that nobody in power gave a damn about the needs of the poor. It weaned ordinary Burundians off of any belief in the old system.
The level of suffering during the war was enormous. Burundi, already one of the world’s poorest countries, became dramatically poorer still. Almost every family lost its assets, and the state did nothing about it – nor, for that matter, did the rebels. Stuck in their camps like cattle – refugee camps, IDP camps, camps de regroupement – and dependent on small amounts of outside charity, Burundians were profoundly humiliated by the war. And the politicians, in the meantime, were never to be seen: they did not suffer like the people they claimed to represent; their rhetoric of ethnic solidarity meant nothing in daily life. Burundians became angry – and it is this anger I heard in so many conversations. How different their voices sounded from twenty years earlier, when I worked in rural Burundi!
Some people described that new-found assertiveness. One of the most interesting was a priest who had been in the same rural convent for eight years. He told me that in the recent electoral campaign he had been struck by how people were more willing to give their opinions and ask critical questions. He felt this was a result of the shock of the war, which destroyed the status quo. He repeated thrice to me that for him the war was a ‘necessary evil.’
Another important change that happened as a result of the war is that the state lost its monopoly on information and organization. Until the early 1990s, Burundi was an extremely closed society. Most citizens lived on their collines and hardly ever moved away from them. The prime source of information was the government-owned radio. There were no Burundian NGOs, no critical voices beyo
nd whispered rumors, no legal opposition parties, no independent think tanks. The war knocked intellectuals out of their lethargy: it made them suffer and made them angry; it closed off jobs and forced them to become more dynamic. At the same time, the capacity of the state to control everything declined dramatically. Initially, a lot of Burundi’s emerging media outlets and NGOs were extremely biased and partial, but over time professionalism increased and new ones came into being, and smart young Burundian men and women built, piece by little piece, a totally different, pluralist civil society.
This civil society has now known a decade of growth and maturation, and it is a force to be reckoned with. It is admittedly still strongly Bujumbura-based, although outreach beyond the capital is growing. Some important civil society organizations now have a significant presence beyond Bujumbura: they are principally human rights NGOs, but also some dealing with conflict resolution and development. But far and away the most impact beyond the capital is made by the many quality independent radio stations such as RPA and Isanganiro. This means that there is a breadth of information available to all citizens now, often critical – including a lot of coverage of corruption.
Conclusion
Transitions like Burundi’s are moments of uncertainty. New institutions are developed, new entrants occupy positions on the central stage, new laws are written. Minds have been changed, hearts have been hardened, expectations shattered, networks dissolved. Much of this is not good news, but some of it contains seeds for change. At the same time, the old has not just totally disappeared: those power relations, expectations, values, and networks are still there, although they have been affected in many ways. There are factors pushing toward change, and factors pushing toward the return of the status quo, and it is not obvious which way things will go. This duality of change and continuity exists at the top and at the bottom of society.
Life After Violence Page 8