The impact of conflict on the socio–economic development of Africa with special reference to Burundi

Abstract

This study examines the impact of conflict on the socio-economic development of Burundi. Conflicts, underdevelopment and poverty had marred most, if not all the post-colonial and African States contrary to the expectations of the world, especially after the end of the Cold War in 1989 when rivalry between Russia and United States ceased. International and other conflicts occurred paradoxically to the United Nations' claim that considerable progress has been achieved in resolving conflicts since the end of the Cold War and the creation of the United Nations. In almost every area the individuals. · nations, international communities, regional organizations, continental and global structures are working together in attempts to set the global agenda for peace and security. Burundi is one of the African States that has drawn the attention of the United Nations in as far as conflict and underdevelopment is concerned. The ethnically motivated tension between the Hutu and Tutsi is one example where socio-economic development has been affected and the communities are suffering, especially the vulnerable ones like women and, children and old people. Building lasting peace in Burundi will require that post-conflict regimes implement strategies that are explicitly aimed at addressing the root causes of the country's . contlicts and come up with best strategies for development. Therefore I examined carefully the causes of the conflicts that occurred in 1965, 1972, 1988, 1991 and the ongoing conflict that started in 1993, drawing from the literature on the social, economics and politics of civil wars in general and on existing studies on Burundi in particular. The socio-economic decline during 1960-1972 was due to political instability and the loss of Burundi's export markets in neighbouring Rwanda and Congo following decolonisation. During the period 1972-1988, socio-economic decline was fuelled by an increase in coffee export whereby the funds were used to create inefficient state firms used by the ruling elites as a source of economic rents and massive borrowing. During the third· sub-period, that is 1988 to date the decline was due a result of three civil wars, a total economic blockade, the freezing of aid by international donors and the collapse of investment and infrastructure. The study characterizes the conflicts in Burundi as distributional conflicts in the sense that they arise from institutional failure and unequal distribution of national wealth across ethnic groups and regions. I illustrate the argument with the case of education and military, two key tools of consolidation of the patrimonial state. Institutional failure was not a result of incompetence on the part of leaders, but that it was carefully engineered by the ruling ethno-regional elite to consolidate power and privatise the state. Characterizing the wars as distributional conflicts has immediate policy implications for post-conflict recovery and peace consolidation. The analysis implies that the emphasis should be on achieving equitable access to national resources and power sharing, and that the attention should move beyond the narrow confines of ethnicity to embrace all the dimensions along which discrimination has been engineered in the past, especially regionalism. On the whole, growth and socio-economic development has been a failure because it has not been the priority of Burundi leadership. Blending traditional macroeconomic growth analysis with microeconomic, institutional and political economy approaches, the study shows that socio-economic outcomes have been endogenous to political imperatives. Controlled access to education and to the civil service and the army, the creation of a large number of state corporations, monetary policy, trade policy and a myriad of other policies were used to ensure that resources were allocated to the members of the ruling elite. The overarching objective of the leadership was the government's desire to hold its grip over the different sources of economic rents It is therefore clear that if the new Burundian leadership is serious about building peace and developing the socio-economic situation in Burundi, it must engineer institutions that uproot the legacy of discrimination and promote equal opportunity for social mobility for all members of ethnic groups and regions. In the process, the protection of human life and the socio-economic integration of all Burundians without distinction based on regional or ethnic background should be the basic principle guiding political, social and economic reforms.