The Zimbabwe Guardian (London)
Itayi Garande
13 May 2008
opinion
THE Fund for Peace's 'Failed States Index' puts Zimbabwe at Number 4â--quite a high and embarrassing ranking by any standard. Different criteria were used to rank states and one of those criteria was "Sharp and/or Severe Economic Decline" where Zimbabwe fared the worst.
Zimbabwe also fared pretty miserably on the following: Chronic and Sustained Human Flight, Uneven Economic Development, Progressive Deterioration of Public Services.
In contrast, Zimbabwe did fairly less miserably under the following criteria: Legacy of Vengeance-Seeking Group Grievance or Group Paranoia, Criminalization and/or Delegitimization of the State, Suspension or Arbitrary Application of the Rule of Law and Widespread Violation of Human Rights, Security Apparatus Operates as a "State Within a State", and Rise of Factionalized Elites.
Although the overall classification was 'high' â--at Number 4 below Sudan, Iraq and Somaliaâ--a few conclusions can be drawn from this classification.
What is immediately apparent is that Zimbabwe is classified as a failed state because of the state of the economy; something that the US has a direct input in. All the indicators where Zimbabwe fared badly had to do with the state of the economy: viz, Chronic and Sustained Human Flight, Uneven Economic Development, Progressive Deterioration of Public Services.
In essence this means that Zimbabwe is not a classic case of a failed state, as many critics would want to believe.
Interestingly, the classic definition of state failure is completely divorced from these parameters.
What is State Failure?
State failure is a complex phenomenon; but there are some widely shared tenets that indicate cases of state failure. Foreign Policy, a United States Think Tank and an 'authority' on state failure research, describes a failed state as one with, "rampant corruption, predatory elites who have long monopolized power, an absence of the rule of law, and severe ethnic or religious divisions."
This definition is significant in many ways.
Firstly, it excludes economic parameters and indicators and secondly, some countries that are considered success stories; i.e. not failed states have these characteristics.
Even if we were to consider an alternative definition of a failed state as having a high, "vulnerability to violent internal conflict and societal deterioration," there are many problems presented. Certain pertinent questions have to be asked. For instance, what are some of the triggers of that vulnerability to violent internal conflict and societal deterioration; and what about the role of external players? Would you say that Iraq is a failed state?
The problem with rankings predicated on a scoring system is that they reduce value judgments, which are inherently prone to bias anyway, to numbers, to quantification of the state of nations. Accounting bias is also not considered in such analyses thus reducing the quantification of the state of a nation to a pointless abstraction.
In any case, the results are not scientific, but are value judgments. I would argue that quantification of value judgments in order to create a comparative scientific ranking is fundamentally a waste of time.
The fact that Iraq and Afghanistan are considered failures; yet their governments have never had the chance to rule themselves, make these quantifications not only pointless, but also useless. Which state failed in this instance? A state that has never been a state, in the classic sense? Or is the occupying state, or power, that is failing?
Comparing Kenya and Zimbabwe
The choices of the terms being used to grade these states are quite obstructive and not useful. For instance who decides, and on what basis, if a state has 'borderline instability'? A country like Kenya in October 2007, for example, had a ranking of 8.4 compared to Zimbabwe's 9.7; yet in that same year it was more dangerous to live in Kenya, than in Zimbabwe. This assumption is made using the classic definition that a failed state has a high "vulnerability to violent internal conflict and societal deterioration." Kenya's vulnerability was tested at the general election of 2007, where 300 people died in pre-election violence and a further 1,000 plus people died and 304,000 were displaced in post-election crisis, according to the Red Cross.
So Kenya definitely had a higher vulnerability; and probably still has. Yet it is ranked at Number 31 against Zimbabwe's Number 4 ranking.
Even if the alternative definition was adopted, that a failed state is one where there is "rampant corruption, predatory elites who have long monopolized power, an absence of the rule of law, and severe ethnic or religious divisions," the differences in Zimbabwe and Kenya are still inexplicable.
On 31 August 2007, The Guardian (U.K.) newspaper featured on its front page a story about more than GBP 1 billion transferred out of Kenya by the family and associates of former Kenyan leader Daniel Arap Moi. According to the BBC (Feb 23, 2005) corruption cost Kenya $1bnâ--nearly a fifth of its state budgetâ--under the Kibaki administration. Kibaki's government was also revealed to have continued the looting by awarding huge state contracts to bogus companies in the so-called Anglo Leasing scandal.
Kibaki's government twisted the law and blocked, effectively, the investigation of corruption cases committed before 2003. Under the new law passed by parliament the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission will no longer be able to investigate offences committed before May 2003, when it was set up.
Kenya is, therefore a classic case of the monopolization of political power, the absence of the rule of law, and severe ethnic or religious divisions, the preconditions of a failed state, yet it is still heralded as the symbol of democracy in Africa.
Quantification is problematic in such cases. How do you compare Zimbabwe and Kenya using numbers? The Fund for Peace, the company producing the index, uses the Thomson Dialogâ-- to analyse "content from the world's most authoritative publishers, and the tools to search every bit of it with speed and precision," yet many of the sources in the so-called 'failed states' are not on the 'authoritative publishers' list. Thomson Dialog is a product of Thomson Reutersâ--a partnership between Reuters and Thomson. These companies have a US slant in reporting and are often not on the ground in many of the 'failed states'.
For example: Reuters would have less information on the Great Lakes region of Africaâ--Burundi, Uganda, Rwanda, DR Congo and more on the Arab-Israeli conflict; but to assess deaths in these two regions is no easy exercise. Many people in the Great Lakes will die unreported through ethnic fighting and cleansing; yet Iraq and Afghanistan would be rated higher.
This in itself renders the credibility of these 'authoritative publishers' suspicious.
The lack of newspaper articles is a pretty good indicator. Nobody at the Pentagon is worried about the threat posed to America by developments in the Ivory Coast, Togo or Niger. Nobody is too worried in European capitals either; yet significant deaths could be occurring in these areas.
These ratings do not have much meaning as a basis for comparison. I don't believe you can lump all the factors into a single measure. What does it tell us that Congo is 93 while Iran is 82.8? Or that Zimbabwe is 110.1 and Kenya is 91.3? Are these figures useful when the 'Axis of Evil' fares better than Sub-Saharan Africa? Can we then believe that 'Terrorism is the greatest threat of the 21st Century' when Sub-Saharan Africa tops the list.
This inconclusive number crunching oversimplifies our thinking. After all, the reasons individual states might fail vary. History plays a role. It's not a coincidence that many failed states were subdivided at the Berlin Conference of 1883 and are former colonies; yet this historical fact is not factored in the numbers used to grade the states. Almost all wars in Africa have to do with land demarcations that were arbitrarily imposed by European states in Berlin.
I think categorizing states according to the factor most likely to precipitate failure would be more useful than this sort arbitrary aggregation of very imprecise and incoherent indicators.
Even such a categorization would present problems in itself. For example saying the existence of President Mugabe in Zimbabwe is a likely reason to precipitate failure is also a misunderstanding of the Zimbabwean problem. Perhaps Zimbabwe's problems run deeper than one man, and would be on the list without him; and higher up the list for all we know.
Countries cannot be meaningfully compared along a single dimension, and if they could, the evaluations that are the basis of the ratings are highly subjective and also are correlated in ways that make adding them up silly.
Proffering solutions to the crises using this arbitrary number crunching becomes even 'sillier'. For example Somalia and Sudan total 224.8, a higher risk than Afghanistan and Iraq at 213.17; but on December 26, 2007 the US Congress appropriated 'a Boxing Day present' of $700 billion to Iraq and Afghanistan; and pledged $188.5 million to Sudan and Somalia, over three-quarters of it still unrealized four years on.
These US institutions can lump the various nations into general categories that reflect relative degrees of chaos â-- that is useful. But finer tuning of ranking simply fogs the mind to what really matters. For instance; calls for land redistribution and black empowerment in Zimbabwe, are qualitative factors that are not easy to factor into the numbers generated by Thomson Dialog. Also value judgments would make the collators trust, say the MDC more than trust Zanu PF thus rendering the final analysis, skewed against Zanu PF.
Interestingly China is also on the list as a failed state, at Number 62. By the way, why would China be on anyone's list of "failed" states (even if ranked betwen 60 and 75)? It is highly successful.
So before we over-react to Zimbabwe being placed at Number 4, let us analyze issues clearly. Before we accept, as fact, as gospel, Western-inspired computations, let us look at our own value judgments.
Surely a country that is "dependent on American logistics and military support in the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban", cannot be put on the failed state index by the same country that defends it. In any case, America relies on a "company led by a 22-year-old man whose vice president was a licensed masseur." That company is AEY Inc., which operates out of an unmarked office in Miami Beach.
If you ask me, America should be on the list of failed states considering the number of states it has failed, and is failing.
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