How Britain can save a "narco state"

Frederick Forsyth was in Guinea-Bissau when the country’s president Joao Bernardo Vieira was assassinated in 2009. The thriller writer was looking for “the flavour, the odour, of a pretty washed-up, impoverished, failed west African mangrove swamp,” a search which led him straight to the former Portuguese colony. “I thought, what is the most disastrous part of West Africa, and by a mile, it’s Guinea-Bissau.”

One of the last countries in Africa to achieve independence, in 1974, the country’s history reads like a list of worst-case scenarios. A one-party state until 1991, the country is less economically developed than it was thirty years ago. During a short civil conflict in 1998, 350,000 people were displaced out of a population of 1.7 million and untold numbers were killed. The country has had a coup attempt every six years on average. In little more than a decade there have been eleven prime ministers. In recent years, it has been branded the world’s first “narco state” for its role in the global cocaine trade.

It is in this role—as a key transit hub for South American cocaine into Europe—that Guinea-Bissau has become one of the UK’s unspoken anxieties. According to the Home Office, half of the cocaine in Britain comes through West Africa. The White House has placed sanctions on the chiefs of the navy and air force, identifying them as drug kingpins, involved in trafficking cocaine from South America through West Africa to European drug markets, of which the UK is the largest.

But to think of Guinea-Bissau as a nation ruled by drugs ignores the fact that it is barely a state at all—a country where civil servants are regularly unpaid for six months at a time, and police can’t afford to fuel their vehicles. The raw cashew sector accounts for over 90% of the state’s revenues, yet the entire crop is processed abroad for lack of electricity, robbing the country of a value-added industry which could transform its economy. Similarly, mangoes litter the streets of its capital city, yet its supermarkets import Brazilian mango juice. Regular taxpayers comprise a handful of cashew tycoons.

With few revenue streams and a dilapidated civil service, Guinea-Bissau’s institutions are broken and its economy straitened. Some members of parliament are illiterate. As a consequence, the state plays an ever-diminishing role in peoples’ lives—a trend which is, for a variety of reasons, tragically being repeated across the continent. In rural areas, the concept of an organised state is fictional. This creates a fertile breeding ground for illicit activity such as the trafficking of drugs, an industry that is putting increasing numbers of British young people in hospital, demanding an ever-greater burden on police resources and keeping prisons full.

A solution to the problems of both countries lies, of course, in the awakening of Guinean statism. There are significant obstacles to this however. As with many other post-colonial states, it is still proving very difficult to subordinate the military to the government, since the army was instrumental in gaining independence from Portugal. The military acts as a quasi-state with its own health service and judiciary, while the rest of the country manages with no prisons and a single, appalling hospital.

Attempts to curb the army’s role in the drugs industry ignore the fact that the narcotics trade is more the business of Europe than of Guinea-Bissau. Bissau does not have the commercial appeal of Brighton, Glasgow or Belfast: the country is merely a pit stop. It is unrealistic to expect a country with scant resources to devote them to a problem whose consequences are mostly felt elsewhere. Increasingly, problems are emerging within the country, such as the use of drugs as a currency with which to bribe soldiers, a practice that has helped to destabilise Jamaican society.

Meaningful British engagement with Guinea-Bissau on the other hand would be advantageous to both countries. The All-Party Parliamentary Group for Guinea-Bissau can help to strengthen the country's young institutions, by providing practical support in the form of mentoring schemes and on-the-ground training. Other democracy-building organisations such as the Westminster Foundation for Democracy can also play a major role in sharing the UK experience of democratic representation and the responsibilities of government with Guinea-Bissau.

Britain can be of real and immediate assistance in the energy and power sectors, which are woefully underdeveloped in Guinea-Bissau. The current lack of access to a substantial electricity supply is the underlying cause of much of the lack of investment in the region. With this infrastructure in place, however, the country would be able to build on its valuable resources—for instance, the cashew crop. The country is well-placed in that it does not need large-scale fossil-fuel power stations. Britain has world-leading technologies in biomass and energy produced from agricultural waste, which Guinea-Bissau has in abundance. This would be an excellent source of fuel.

A reliable power supply would also allow entirely new industries to develop in the country, opening up investment opportunities for British companies. Tourism has flourished for many years in nearby Gambia, with much of this investment having originated in Britain. Now neighbouring Senegal has also developed a strong tourism infrastructure along the coast it shares with Gambia and Guinea-Bissau. It is not far-fetched to see this investment stretching further down to Guinea-Bissau's coast.

A reinvigorated state would provide greater economic opportunities for the people of Guinea-Bissau, while benefiting British investors and helping to stem the international drugs trade. The alternative is certainly less attractive. Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen illustrate how poverty breeds resentment as well as security problems that impact far beyond a country’s borders. Britain should take the drugs crisis as a long-overdue wake-up call. Peter R Thompson is the Founder and President of the Amilcar Cabral Institute, an affiliate of the University of Birmingham’s Centre for West African Studies and the Secretariat of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Guinea-Bissau.

Toby Green, a widely published historian, is in the Departments of History and Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at King’s College London. He is Director of Institutional Relations at the Amilcar Cabral Institute of Economic and Political Research.