Worse than a waste
How a well-meaning economic development intervention accidentally made life a lot worse in rural Lesotho
I just finished reading James Ferguson's The Anti-Politics Machine, a detailed case study of a failed attempt to bring economic stability to Thaba-Tseka, a poor, rural district in Lesotho. It's definitely one of the best books on economic development I've read so far, and well worth reading in full by anyone interested in the subject. At the same time I almost never read random books that blogs recommend to me, so here's a summary of its story of how smart, well-intentioned people setting out to "help the poor" ended up making things much, much worse.
The Thaba-Tseka Development Project (in the late 1970's and early 80's) was a joint project led by experts from the World Bank and the Canadian International Development Agency, in cooperation with the government of Lesotho. The goal, in the eyes of the project leaders, was simple: Lesotho was "basically, a traditional subsistence peasant society" untouched by modernity, who had found itself in "a situation in which the country was no longer able to produce enough food for its people." The project, based in the mountainous rural Thaba-Tseka district, would introduce a variety of modern economic developments, including cash crops and better livestock (so the people could make money, introducing a cash economy to the area), a road connecting Thaba-Tseka to larger, more developed areas (so people would have access to markets to sell what they created), and a network of "Village Distribution Points" where people could buy tools and agricultural inputs. (There is much more, but you'll have to read the book for that.)
The introduction of modern farming and herding techniques, along with access to major markets, it was hoped, would transform these "subsistence peasants" into a sustainable, flourishing community.
So what went wrong? To start with, the depiction of Thaba-Tseka I just gave (and the one the developers believed) is not even remotely accurate.
Lesotho is not a "subsistence peasant society" and hadn't been for at least a hundred years. By the end of the 1800's, Lesotho was exporting hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in cash crops, primarily aimed at South African markets. Most able-bodied men in Thaba-Tseka are not farmers, but rather laborers who worked in South African mines and sent money home. The sources of economic disadvantage in Lesotho at the time were complex, but included:
A significant amount of Lesotho's usable farmland by this time had been taken by apartheid South Africa.
South African labor law limited the number of Lesotho men who could come work in the country, and entirely banned women. (Though some still did under the table.)
A population boom meant that the country switched from being a net exporter of food to a net importer.
Lesotho is surrounded on all sides by South Africa, subjecting it almost entirely to the whims of its much larger (and, as a rule, anti-black) neighbor.
The attempt to boost Lesotho's economy was doomed from the start by the assumption that Lesotho's main focus was agriculture. In fact, while many families grew food and most families owned cattle, the food their land was capable of growing in the best of years would last three or four months, after which they would buy food and supplies using the men's mining income. Food was available to buy because, far from being cut off from modern society, Thaba-Tseka was a popular destination for South African traders, who would bring many tons of corn and other foodstuffs each year.
Second, the program to "improve" cattle herding techniques was an unmitigated disaster, in part because nobody seems to have actually talked to anybody from Thaba-Tseka before beginning the project. The Canadians believed that the lack of a thriving livestock industry was due to a combination of poor cattle quality and lack of access to markets. The first is not quite true -- many of the "high quality cattle" the planners brought in turned out to be poorly-suited to mountain life and incredibly expensive to keep alive (certainly costing more than the villagers could make by selling the cattle.) Moreover, we've already seen that the second was also false -- people did have access to markets. The real reasons they did not sell are more complex: Ferguson notes after repeated interviews in the village of Mashai that:
A typical Mashai ox sells for about M400 at the nearest market. It is not difficult to reach the market, and the people of Mashai tend to be extremely up-to-date on current prices.
Given the choice between M150 and a single ox, Mashai villagers will typically take the M150, explaining that they could really use the money.
Is this because the people of Mashai are dumb? The experts certainly seemed to think so -- they spend much of the book on "education", trying to explain things like market prices that the villagers have been aware of from the beginning, leading to no shortage of frustration on both sides.
What's actually going on is a local cultural norm Ferguson calls "the Bovine mystique", that the planners seem to have been entirely unaware of. There is general agreement among Mashai men that it is unacceptable to sell an ox you own unless it is absolutely necessary to keep your family fed and clothed. Hence, if I give you an ox, it is a nice gift, but it is not one that will help you in the near future unless you are literally starving. To make a living raising and selling livestock is simply unthinkable.
Ferguson is careful to note that this is not merely an old tradition blindly followed, but something that continues to serve some purpose (although it is hotly debated within Mashai itself):
Cattle are generally viewed as the "right" way to pay a "bridewealth", the traditional transfer of funds from a man to his wife's parents. Young men have an interest in acquiring cattle (and not selling them off) so they can be married.
Once men are "too old", they can no longer work in the mines. At this point, their main source of income is either bridewealth or selling their old cattle. In this sense, the cattle serve as a "retirement plan", since they can only be spent in either desperation or old age.
Men who are working at the mines seem to mistrust their wives and children's use of money, and therefore value a system in which their "cattle" wealth cannot be accessed by the rest of the family. Unsurprisingly, Mashai women tend to oppose the Bovine mystique system.
Men with many cattle would loan them to other villagers for things like plowing and milk, in return for either money or an implied promise of future favors. Cattle therefore formed a system of social currency, leading in part to high social status for those who had collected many cattle, and a view that selling cattle was selfish, since it deprived the village of a resource.
This is not to say that the Mashai cattle system is perfect: overgrazing is rampant, leading cattle to starve to death who could've been sold for quite a bit of money. But the people of Mashai (really the men, who had all the legal power) knew both the pros and the cons and had made a decision that did not include room for "raising cattle for profit." Explaining the cons to them as if they were children did nothing but alienate people who were already suspicious of an unsuccesful project.
(I should note that I'm using present tense here because it's easier, but I don't know enough about modern Mashai to say if things have changed since the book was written.)
Third, and perhaps most importantly, Thaba Tseka was a stronghold of opposition to a violently oppressive government. Lesotho acheived its independence in 1966 as a constitutional monarchy. The Basotho National Party (BNP) won the country's first election, winning 31 out of 60 seats (the second-place BCP won 25 seats) on a platform of anti-communist, pro-South African conservatism. The BNP put a number of white Afrikaners in positions of power, particularly in policing and judging, which upset the anti-colonialist BCP.
The next election occured in 1970, and by this time the BCP had built up strong local support. They won majority support (35 seats according to one source), but Prime Minister LeaBua Jonathan refused to admit defeat or even release final results, declaring that the elections had been sabotaged by fraud, probably due to "communists." Instead he began a campaign of terror, arresting and killing opponents, beginning a period that amounted to a one-party dictatorship.
Thaba-Tseka was originally a groundswell of support for both parties, but overall supported the traditionalist, pro-Catholic BNP in the country's early years. This changed by 1970, when the BNP's policies in the region amounted to "building more roads", something many villagers did not particularly desire. The bridle paths (which the many horse-owners preferred to use) had deteriorated as the result of poor governing, and for many the only jobs in the area were from an unpopular "food-for-work" program. At the same time, South Africans had begun approaching Lesotho's (largely white-led) police force claiming that villagers had stolen their cows, leading the police (without any evidence) to simply take people's cows away to give to wealthy farmers. The area therefore voted overwhelmingly for the BCP by 1970, at which point people saw leaders they had supported and voted for suddenly arrested and tortured for daring to oppose the ruling party.
By the time the development project arrived on the scene, the situation was tense. Most people opposed the BNP, but were afraid to say so openly -- many of Ferguson's informants describe joining pro-BNP chants in order to cast off suspicion. Resources seemed to be directed towards public BNP supporters -- including, in one terrifying anecdote, ambulances that avoided houses suspected of opposing the ruling party -- and overall trust in the government was low.
This had two implications. First, the villagers did not particularly trust a development project intertwined with a government they feared. It's difficult to gain people's trust when the roads, network of distribution points, etc. you tout are all run by an oppressive government. The government did not help this, regularly adding government propaganda to the project's educational material just before it was sent out (although this often did not appear on the English translations they gave the Canadians.)
In one story Ferguson shares, a related Irish development project built a stable of ponies they intended to distribute among villagers. They asked the Lesotho government for land for the stable, and the government obliged, confiscating a couple of families' land without any sort of compensation. (The families were promised the project would bring jobs and they'd be better off overall, but of course this never materialized.) Pretty much as soon as the stable was finished and the ponies had arrived, somebody broke in in the middle of the night and set dogs to drive all the ponies off a cliff, to their deaths. None of the villagers would admit to knowing who had done this, but few of them seemed particularly disappointed.
Second, the goals of the development agency and of the national government do not always align. From the point of view of the "developers", the project was unsuccessful: the crops still do not grow, the cattle still overgraze, and the people still go hungry.
But the project did meet key goals of the Lesotho government. In order to provide the new seeds, to build the new roads, to hand out the new supplies, the development agency and the government worked together to significantly expand the capacity of the Lesotho state. New government offices were opened, taxation became easier, and in general the power of the leaders in Maseru continued to expand. The central government now had the control it had desired over an opposition-heavy region, funded primarily by well-meaning researchers in the World Bank and the Canadian government.
This last point is, as I understand it, the primary message of Ferguson's book. In many models of development, the government is merely a tool to pass pro-economic policies, so it is a good thing to expand the reach of the government, especially if you need to stage interventions in rural or relatively un-ruled areas. But all this does is hide a political question -- should the people currently in power here be given more power? -- behind a technical one: could increased state capacity help this particular development project?
This is the titular "anti-politics machine": the process by which we reduce real political questions to technocratic puzzles, hiding questions of power behind simple calculations. The Canadians and the World Bank believed they were doing the right thing because they were asking the wrong questions: "how much state capacity is needed to get agricultural machinery to Mashai?" (a lot) or "who can run this Village Distribution Point after we're gone?" (the BNP would be happy to.)
But they failed to ask questions like "who is actually benefitting from this project?" (the BNP) or "what will the BNP do if we give them more power?" (kill people). This is a real risk when we look at any sort of altruistic intervention --- presumably we're doing good along the axes we measure. But what about the ones we don't? How are we playing into local power dynamics? Are we certain the people we're serving want what we have to offer? What don't the people we talk to feel comfortable telling us?
We definitely won't get everything right. But hopefully this failure can help us get one step closer.