Looking at sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, the mainstream international strategy of the last decade could be characterized as a twin focus on building sustainable state finance (through improved macroeconomic management and policies that “bring the state back in” to the center of national economic planning) alongside what we might call “benevolent dependency”–using international aid as a prop to improved governance. The British government’s use of direct budgetary support to what it considers the best-governed developing countries is aimed at making aid predictable over long periods of time. The NEPAD philosophy of African peer review for governance was developed on the assumption that African countries which are all dependent on the same sources of external finance would have a common interest in policing one another.

The results have been mixed. It’s probably too early to make a definitive judgment but there are good reasons to suspect that elite behavior hasn’t changed much. We can conjecture a number of reasons. Aid instruments are very blunt indeed as means of changing domestic governance. The challenge to western hegemony in Africa with the declining standing of the U.S. and the rise of Asia has further blunted these instruments.

What of Sudan, an extreme case of a predatory government? In the 1990s it was subjected to the most extreme regime of economic isolation and austerity of any country in Africa, and its survival showed the limits of an approach based on sanctions. The hope of the CPA was that expanding oil revenues, international assistance and debt relief, would combine to satisfy the appetites of the elites in both North and South. That approach has only been tried in a less-than-half-hearted manner–oil revenues have faltered and the aid/debt relief peace dividend hasn’t materialized. Moreover the Darfur crisis and the international response to it have locked Khartoum back into an ever more short-term mode of crisis management in the security, political and economic sectors.

My view is that the essential precondition for any resolution to Sudan’s national questions, including Darfur’s crisis, is consensus on a long-term formula for how to govern Sudan. Only Sudanese can achieve this. They came very close to that in 2005 but the deal has slipped almost out of reach today. We should be realistic in what such a consensus will be–all will agree that a democratic system should displace a patrimonial one, but none of the elites have any interest in changing patrimonialism, merely in altering the flows of resources in their favor. Hence the importance of the power-sharing formulae adopted in negotiations and the expanded resource flows that arise from wealth-sharing agreements. On the basis of such a consensus, the international community can provide much of the finance needed to make the system work. We should have modest expectations about transforming Sudan’s political economy: it can certainly be modestly reformed and be less predatory, more like the African norm, but that’s about it.

You state that the only solution to the problems in the Sudan (and by extension Darfur) is to reconfigure and strengthen the state’s finances. Based on the facts you have presented, is it hard to doubt the veracity of this argument. Common sense alone tells us if the system is broken it should likely be replaced. What I am curious about though is, how exactly is that you believe this should be accomplished?

The repeated source of political unrest and weakness in this area, to summarize, is that leaders are repeatedly in need of funds which they must (or prefer to) gather in the short-term, leading them to pry them from the already under-priveleged through various means. This leads to negative reprisals from the people. The new leader then comes in at a time of economic instability and political unrest, and is in a hurry to secure his position. He seeks favor from the elite, but there is still a pressing need for funds to attempt to rebuild and protect the system from the already present unrest. With few other sources of revenue, the new leader turns to plundering the people as a way of quickly building funds. Thus the cycle continues itself.

So what then is one precisely supposed to do to break it? Past leaders have attempted to court outside sources of revenue, to no avail. International aid has itself only taken on the form of tackling the short term, which has in its own way only helped to exacerbate the problem. The Sudan clearly needs to find some way to stop living in the short-term. But what is that exactly?

It seems to me that if there were some way to change the political structure itself in order to make room for leaders more connected to the very parts of society the government has formerly been so fond of pillaging, and to find a way to develop an international aid project to help be a source of long-term stabilizing funds, this could help “fix” the system and bring the Sudan out of its current vicious cycle. Although, the accomplishment of either of these goals, let alone both, would be very difficult and indeed it is even hard to visualize how they could be carried out specifically.

What about you? What are you ideas of what needs to be done?