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Opinions expressed in this column are those of the contributors and not necessarily those of SW. The
Precarious Nature of the Civil Society: How
Dr. W. Musa is Facing The Somali Problem From The Wrong End. By: Abdirizak Durqun <ceaser24@hotmail.com> The
term civil society has a captivating appeal of its own. It connotes with
a heightened public awareness about the problems that surround their
lives and legitimate corresponding civil initiatives that are meant to
fix these problems. These new roles have fallen to the domain of the
civil society by default, after much of the Third World states have
proven to be ineffective and sometimes oppressive. Thus, there is a
favorable degree of emancipation in the newly found role of the civil
society as they signify to us as being unautocratic entities driven by
gallant and selfless communal activists with altruistic motives. As a
result, empowering the civil society groups and betting on them became a
trendy fashionable thing to do, especially in situations where the
government is dishonored due to the lack of public policy and
corruption. The promise of the civil society organizations, among other
things, is that they can deliver in places where governments could not,
that they are more trustworthy and transparent and that they are people
friendly. Under this backdrop, it is a fad these days to confer a
swelling political importance to these none-state entities as an
alternative contact point for the development of the Third World. It is
particularly so in the African arena, as the African state is either in
progressive fold-up or in total crumble. Is the civil society that
capable, promising on the bet, and philanthropic in nature? The
answer is yes, and no. There are too many variables at play and many
things depend on the particular character of the NGO, the limitations of
its responsibilities and the scope of our expectations from it. To
operationalize the concept of civil society one must account for such
diverse entities ranging from the organization of Vaclav Havel, the
Czech human rights and democracy activist, turned president, to that of
Osama Bin-Laden the Yemeni/Saudi Al-qaeda founder and financier, turned
fugitive. Generally speaking, this in effect puts all civil society
organizations in a spectrum of –10 to +10, as NGOs are primarily a
function of demanding and initiating remedy for a particular cause, and
that is what the above two extreme examples have in common. To
some people, however, the answer to the above question is an apparent
yes. These people include Dr. Walid Musa, the European Union’s man for
the Somali Reconciliation Conference in Kenya. Reportedly, Dr. Musa is
in the view that Somali Civil Society organizations are more
representative than other parties and warlords in the conference. This
approach is in line with the established tradition of the burgeoning,
war profiteering barons in Nairobi, who would want to cruelly invest in
furthering the Somali misery for another decade. Well paying jobs are at
issue here and it is detectably what David Stevens, the then UN
representative to Somalia, may have done in Arta, Djibouti when he had
to chose between money and morality. Somalis had then a reasonable
chance of ending their quandary at Arta had it not been for the last
minute plot by Mr. Stevens and President Ismail Omar Guelleh, in giving
undue celebrity on the so called civil society and thereby sponsoring
their hollow claims of grass-root representations and noble causes. That
chance was pitilessly squandered and the outcome of Arta and its
subsequent plunders are well known to everybody.
Since they were the only organized movements, the whole Arta
conference became a launching platform for various Islamic congregations
including the notorious Al-Ittihad. Somalia is now reeling from the
adverse effects of the “Arta Project” and slowly limping towards yet
another attempt in overcoming its prolonged anguish. At this juncture,
Somalia can hardly afford another project and it is a no-brainer to even
dare try it. Dr. Walid Musa
should know better and learn from the mistakes of the past. The same
ploy can’t be pulled twice and the inherent inconsistencies of the
civil society can’t be reconciled to a workable modality of any kind. The
NGOs of the South have structural organizational flaws and are for all
intents and purposes different from their counterparts of the North. As
the old maxim succinctly says that everybody’s business is nobody’s
business, the promise of the civil society is a distressing spectacle of
minimal deliverance. It is usually the case of a perceptive trickster
with a punditry knack, curving a scoop for himself out of a put-up
projection of a local problem, for the purposes of pocketing. It is the
case where the payer at source is worlds apart from the taker at
destination. It is the case where the only person who is remotely
versatile with the realities of both worlds is the middleperson, the
likes of Dr. Walid Musa. It is the case where that middleperson has the
combined powers of the prosecutor, judge and jury. It is the case where
local NGOs are easy harvests and the middleman may sometimes unethically
collude with them as it were. As a result, Southern organizations are
captive to the Northern ones because they provide both the finances and
capacity building they desperately need for their existence. In Somalia
setting, the only civil society organizations that can operate without
Western donors are the Islamic revivalist organizations. The catch in
here being, they have Eastern funds readily available for them instead.
The term civil society is so parsimonious, so general a concept, that it
runs the risk of being a misnomer and the biggest oxymoron in
international relations. What is so precarious about the civil society? The
political theorists have provided wide-ranging and at times
contradictory definitions of the concept of the civil society.
Originally a philosophical notion, the term was subsequently used and
abused for political and ideological purposes. Civil society has at
times seen as the bulwark against anarchy, the Church, the Leviathan
state, totalitarianism and most recently against factionalism. Hence the
idea of civil society as being a counter-hegemonic force has evolved
according to the context it has been employed. For this reason, there is
no any accepted genealogy for the concept, which would provide an
analytical useful framework for the study of African polities. As it is
often the case with all other fashionable notions that become widely
used, it is difficult to know the true value of their common currency. First,
what is the distinction between society and civil society? Given that
the expression “civil” is now often employed routinely, almost as a
reflex, without thinking of its precise meaning. It is difficult to know
precisely, what the qualifier “civil” adds to our understanding.
Does it connote a certain idea of civility, and identifiable
arrangements of social activities that makes for a more ordered society?
If that is the case, might it not imply a given type of a societal
evolution, which would come dangerously close to an argument about the
comparative merits of more advanced societies where there is indeed a
“civic” civil society? Second,
what is the capacity of the social groups to come together in order to
organize politically, above and beyond existing sociological and clan
cleavages? Here, civil society would amount to the creation of the
social networks capable of transcending primordial family, kin or even
communal ties. Everybody who knows anything about Somalia knows how
difficult it is to apply this to the civil society groups of that
country. Civil society
groups of Somalia are not mass societies composed of discreet
individuals detached from their divisive regional or clan politics. It
is a traceable trend that Somali civil societies oppose or conform to
the politics of the warlords on clan basis. This in turn raises the
question of whether it is possible to consider the defense of clan or
regional interests as the legitimate political action of a country’s
civil society? If
we accept that the concept of the civil society entails the defense of
more general or collective interests, do we then admit that it includes
clientelistic networks, mafia organizations, fundamentalists and other
religious evangelism? Or, should we limit its use to the world of
officially recognized bodies, such as economic associations,
professional trade unions, and other corporate groupings wielding
considerable influence? Finally, should one restrict the notion of the
civil society to “high” or elite associations such as those of
lawyers, businessmen, doctors, journalists and academics; or to
“low” popular groupings like village associations, squatter defense
committees, market vendors, the unemployed, etc? Of all the groups I mentioned above, the Somali ones are the unemployed ones and that is why the esteemed Emeritus Professor I. M. Lewis says that the so called Arta Government included known street thugs. Stressing on the importance of the civil society in the context of Somali reconciliation is tantamount to derailment by naively expecting political deliverance from unemployed imposters seeking funds and fame. Civil society grouping of Somalia are even darker forces than the infamous murderous warlords and as a result, they can’t be utilized as a counter-balance force of the warlords. If at all they are rooted inside Somalia, chances are they owe their existence to the warlords; hence they are in bed with them. It all comes down to the choice of the lesser evil and to my mind, warlords are the known devils and therefore better than the unknown devils. |
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