“The Anti-Politics Machine” review

Introduction

"As in the case of the Thaba-Tseka Project*, land was alienated from local farmers to make room for the Pony Project. Shortly after the new project had been started, unknown parties broke into the fenced pastures, took the entire herd of ponies, and, using dogs, drove them all off a precipice to their deaths."

Over the last few years an obsession with international “development” has taken up some of my time. However, simply explaining the term itself to my friends has become increasingly difficult, because not only the meaning of the words but my feelings towards them are changing. Is it economic progress? Improvement in living standards? And who benefits? The country as a whole, the government, the people, or even multinational corporations? “The Anti-Politics Machine” by James Ferguson is not only a book about “development” in Lesotho, but also one among many spanners that have been thrown into the seemingly beautiful and straightforward “development” system. Nevertheless, according to many reviewers of this book, thirty years after publication the system of “development” is proceeding just fine. In 2016, William Easterly complained in an interview** that one related institution, the World Bank, was incapable of learning due to endemic self-censorship. In contrast to this, other anecdotes I’ve heard suggest that aid is more “participatory” than it used to be. The project described in this book might have seemed “participatory” at first glance, but it degenerated into the sort of conflict encapsulated by the quote above. 

Before the impression is formed that the following mess is a bizarre, one-off situation, it should be mentioned that similar situations have developed in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Tanzani and Malawi, according to Ferguson. Furthermore, the document which justified the whole soon-to-be-discussed scheme had a title no less impressive than the “World Bank Country Report'' for Lesotho - this is not a freak accident, but gives significant insight into systemic problems with international development.

A summary of the Thaba Tseka project

1. The “World Bank Country Report” misleadingly claimed that Lesotho was an “aboriginal economy” - not a cash economy, and without access to markets. They also significantly downplayed Lesotho’s primary source of income - labour in South Africa.

2. This enabled CIDA, the (now subsumed) Canadian international development agency, to devise and fund a program to“fix” these economic “issues” principally by focusing on agriculture and cattle farming in particular. This occurred with no understanding of the pre-existing function and dynamics of cattle farming in Lesotho.

3. Clearly without very much consultation with locals, they tried to install shops and “introduce” farming equipment that was actually already in use, as well as educate the locals on how to farm more efficiently.

4. They ran out of money to achieve this, and the rousing success of the prototype must have then inspired the next step, which expanded the plans tenfold to do a comprehensive array of other things that sounded reasonable at face value. Nevertheless in essence the project expanded the apparatus of the state with Canadian funding.

5. The project was run into the ground by two forces: 

a) The co-opting of the project to expand personal and political power of government officials belonging to only the ruling party. 

b) The unwillingness of the people to participate, expressed by either politely assenting (for fear of the government) and later doing nothing, or anonymous arson and other destruction of project materials.

6. The project was evaluated as a success. ‘“Given the “constraints,” the Project Coordinator declared in 1983, “I think we’ve got a success story here.” As one CIDA official pointed out, with what appeared to be a certain amount of pride, the project “was not an unmitigated disaster.”’

The end result was nothing other than the following: New roads were created which allowed goods from the larger South African economy to put Lesotho locals out of business, and allowed greater government control of the Thaba Tseka region. Knowing as we do already that the government ruled partly through fear, the additional observations that the military was expanded and a prison was built should be of concern. Of course these results had nothing to do with the stated aims of the project.

Understanding the project

Please allow me to offer a mangled version of Ferguson’s main point. This project from conception to conclusion was blind to politics and social realities, which allowed the Lesotho government to easily use it to achieve their political ends. Ferguson does not state things so simply, coming across instead as nuanced, academic, and yet incisive. He presents “development” as a social reality that has a life of its own, accomplishing different ends to the ends envisaged by its architects. Interestingly, he notes that projects do not simply “fail” in a purely negative sense; rather, they actively change the landscape in which they operate. Part of his conceptual apparatus included the idea of “depoliticization” which is an assumption that the government is a simple, coherent and beneficent political entity which will operate programmatically to carry the project out to the ends desired by the development agency and the World Bank. This was the project’s fatal flaw, although as we will see below, not the only flaw.

In terms of understanding what happened, we must begin with the “World Bank Country Report”. This document was written in a particular for the purpose of justifying a project. CIDA and the World Bank were driven by a need to justify their existence and keep the funding tap running. They were unable to conduct a political reform on Lesotho, so a truthful depiction of Lesotho was unhelpful. They were, however, able to conduct a neutral technical intervention. As such, they painted a picture of Lesotho that would make it easy to justify an economic intervention - the type of project they were capable of delivering. Note - this does not mean it was the type of project that was capable of success. The idea that an organization could fixate on a vision of reality that it prefers over the actual one will sadly recur throughout this explanation. Again recalling the aforementioned interview with William Easterly, his additional observation that the World Bank is not accountable to the people it serves is quite revealing when applied here. Further, in “Aid on the Edge of Chaos” by Ben Ramalingham, he highlights the extraordinary chain of influence in aid, with some key players shown below (my version)

In Systems Engineering, this is called an “open loop system” which means that there is no feedback about the outcome. So, from right to left, players are increasingly disconnected from the reality of what occurs, and what impacts their actions have on the people that theoretically benefit from their projects and/or recommendations. Perhaps this explains the wildly inaccurate “World Bank Country Report.” However, this is no excuse, given the ready availability of scholarly material on Lesotho that flatly contradicted the World Bank narrative. 

In contrast to the “World Bank Country Report”, Ferguson’s book has a beautiful explanatory power, particularly with respect to the reasons the Basotho (people of Lesotho) might have had for distrusting, sabotaging and abandoning the project. To begin with, the project was associated with a somewhat authoritarian government, so that didn’t bode well for people who weren’t sympathizers. More centrally, development in agriculture could not have been further from the minds of the Basotho, for several reasons. The World Bank minimized the (in reality) significant role of South African mining work for the Basotho. This was their main source of income. Livestock were actually not a commodity - they were a symbol of wealth and generosity. In fact the men working in the mines often purchased livestock so that they could be seen as a pillar of society when they got back, and so that their wives could not spend the money! While they were away, the community could benefit from the milk the livestock produced, and when they returned, the men would be celebrated. Often, many gifts of livestock over many years were necessary to legitimize a marriage, from the husband to his parents-in-law. Increased sales of livestock in Lesotho actually indicated a failing economy, because these livestock were not sold unless absolutely necessary. So, for example, when farmers were invited to participate in a program wherein the weaker livestock would be culled, by and large they rejected the idea.

This didn’t stop the government from embracing the project. The disconnect between the government and the people shows a sad reality - this was not a representative government. Furthermore, the government could have carried out a number of steps that might have made success possible, such as making the aforementioned culling or destocking compulsory, but they did not want to. This is not a simple case of money being spent on the mansions of government officials. It is more subtle than that. Government officials delivered propaganda speeches at events created by the project. Through gradual erosion, the project managers found eventually that they were no longer invited to the meetings they had set up, and that the branches of government allocated completely to the project had become extensions of government power in the Thaba-Tseka region. The government labelled the non-English versions of educational materials with their acronym. Project vehicles were designated to be shared among other branches of government. In the end, the leadership structure of the project existed in the form of an official diagram, and in no other form. The technical intervention had no understanding of what was happening, because it had no working concept of political power. 

A cynical and hopeful conclusion

In the epilogue, Ferguson more clearly reveals his Marxist influences, having previously written in a more balanced and neutral way. By the end he holds out no hope for institutional development, only for ad-hoc academic or personal support for political dissidents. I am even less hopeful that he is, in a way, since I wonder whether new institutions will be any different to the previous ones. As alluded to in the beginning, this is a grim and cynical book, but beautifully written and wonderfully truthful. There may be more hope for development than suggested. I read in “Paths to the Emerging State in Asia and Africa” (edited by Keijiro Otsuka and Kaoru Sugihara)*** that the green revolution was supported and arguably sparked using the work of the Rockefeller Foundation. Recently, Tony Rinaudo’s work in Niger has instigated significant change in the landscape, turning desertification on its head. These changes suggest that technical interventions can be effective. However, the ideas and institutions of development cannot escape this book unscathed. Development has a mind of its own, operating systemically and socially at cross-purposes to institutions like the World Bank, governments and NGOs, with fascinating and often concerning results.

Notes

*The Thaba Tseka region is a mountainous region of Lesotho in which some farming occurred. Before the project it was relatively inaccessible to the reaches of the government.

**https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWRlcYU66ck

***This chapter was written by Kaoru Sugihara