Poverty in Nigeria, Guatemala, and Colombia
Nigeria
Nigeria experienced "Dutch disease" following a natural gas boom in Holland during the 1950s. This led to currency appreciation and undermined sectors other than energy.
Nigeria became heavily dependent on oil exports, with a significant decline in the export of cocoa, groundnuts, palm oil, and rubber.
Only 4% of Nigerian exports are unrelated to energy, indicating a failure to establish a modern commercial agriculture industry or manufacturing sector.
Nigeria received approximately $400 billion in oil revenues from the 1970s to the early 2000s but did not reinvest this money into physical or human capital, such as education.
Poverty rates increased, and development indicators like child mortality rates showed little improvement.
The oil money primarily benefited Nigeria's political elite, including ogas (Big Men) and their patronage networks.
Some ogas are descendants of traditional elites, while others are self-made men who used the political system to enrich themselves e.g. Aliko Dangote a Northern patriarch with a net worth estimated at .
State governors, such as Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, were found to own properties abroad with large sums of cash.
Politics in Nigeria is a route to riches, with little income earned through entrepreneurship and genuine value creation.
Transparency International ranked Nigeria 143 out of 183 countries in terms of perceived corruption.
Corruption-driven incompetence is evident in stories such as the purchase of sixteen million metric tons of concrete in the mid-1970s, which clogged Lagos harbor due to unnecessary orders and demurrage fees.
Corruption affects all segments of Nigerian society, exemplified by e-mail scams known as 419 frauds.
Middle-class Nigerians often put up signs stating that their houses are not for sale due to weak protection of property rights.
Violence is prevalent in the Niger River Delta due to the failure of resources to benefit the local population and the pollution caused by Western oil companies.
Nearly 1.5 million tons of oil have been spilled into the delta over the past fifty years, harming waterways and fisheries.
Insurgency and gangs sponsored by local ogas contribute to the violence, with the federal government's attempts to appease the anger often failing due to corruption.
Boko Haram, a radical Islamist group, has carried out deadly attacks in the North, targeting government facilities, churches, and the UN compound, exploiting the country's corrupt government and weak legitimacy.
Nigeria gained independence from Britain in 1960 with a democratic constitution, but democracy did not last long due to a violent and contested election in 1964, leading to a military coup in 1966.
The military coup resulted in a split between Igbos from the East and northern Muslims, leading to the Biafran civil war, which caused between one and three million deaths.
The military remained in power during the oil boom years, briefly giving way to an elected government in 1979 before another military takeover in 1983.
New democratic elections were held in 1999, with Olusegun Obasanjo becoming president, but the quality of democratic institutions remains weak.
The 2007 election that brought Umaru Musa Yar'Adua into office was marred by fraud and violence.
Nigeria's economic growth is linked to global commodity prices, with little correlation to the type of regime.
Richard Joseph labels Nigerian politics as "prebendal," characterized by rent-seeking, clientelism, and ethnicity.
The state has access to resource rents due to oil, which the elites share among themselves.
The population is divided into more than 250 ethnic and religious communities, hindering collective action against corruption.
Ties are vertical, with clientelistic networks controlled by elites who provide patronage to mobilize support during elections.
The impact of democracy on corruption and government performance is limited, with a free press and institutions like the EFCC failing to produce genuine accountability.
Elections are hotly contested due to the high stakes in accessing state resources, and anticorruption measures are often neutralized when they become independent.
In 2014, Lamido Sanusi, the central bank governor, was dismissed after noting that as much as had gone missing from the national oil company.
Ethnically and religiously based clientelism displaces broader political mobilization around ideology or public policy.
In a clientelistic political system, it is rational for voters to respond to individual rewards offered by politicians in return for their votes.
Ethnicity serves as a signaling device and commitment mechanism between patrons and clients, guaranteeing support and targeted goods and services after the election.
Nigeria's economic and social performance has lagged behind the rest of Africa.
The roots of Nigeria's development problem are institutional, characterized by weak institutions and bad government.
Nigeria's institutional deficits lie in the lack of a strong, modern, and capable state and the absence of a rule of law that provides property rights, citizen security, and transparency.
The Nigerian government's main activity is prebendal: extracting rents and distributing them to the political elite.
The Nigerian state is weak in technical capacity and moral legitimacy, with little loyalty to the nation beyond regional, ethnic, or religious ties.
Electoral laws require a president to be elected by a plurality of votes and a certain number of votes in different regions, making it difficult for one group to dominate the system.
Stability is maintained by an informal elite pact that provides for alternating rule between a northern Muslim and a southern Christian.
Guatemala
In Guatemala, descendants of Spanish conquistadors continue to hold significant economic and political power.
On January 14, 1993, Ramiro De Lean Carpio was sworn in as the president of Guatemala and appointed Richard Aitkenhead Castillo as his minister of finance, and Ricardo Castillo Sinibaldi as his minister of development.
De Lean, Aitkenhead, and Castillo were all direct descendants of Spanish conquistadors who had come to Guatemala in the early sixteenth century.
Malta Casaus Arzu identified a core group of twenty-two families in Guatemala that had ties through marriage to another twenty-six families just outside the core that had controlled economic and political power in Guatemala since 1531.
In Guatemala, those with economic and political power structure institutions to ensure the continuity of their power, leading to the persistence of extractive institutions, the same elites in power, and underdevelopment.
At the time of the conquest, Guatemala had a dense population of around two million Mayas.
The indigenous people were allocated to conquistadors in grants of encomienda: a system of forced labor.
The encomienda system gave way to similar coercive institutions, particularly to the repartimiento, also called the mandamiento in Guatemala.
The elite benefited from forced labor systems and controlled and monopolized trade through a merchant guild called the Consulado de Comercio.
The Guatemalan elite viewed the Cadiz Constitution with hostility, which encouraged them to declare independence.
Following a brief union with Mexico and the Central American Federation, the colonial elite ruled Guatemala under the dictatorship of Rafael Carrera from 1839 to 1865.
The descendants of the conquistadors and the indigenous elite maintained the extractive economic institutions of the colonial era largely unchanged.
Independence was simply a coup by the pre-existing local elite, who carried on with the extractive economic institutions from which they had benefited.
During this period the Consulado remained in charge of the economic development of the country with its own interests in mind.
The Consulado often resisted infrastructure development to maintain its monopoly, such as resisting the development of a port on the Suchitepequez coast and refusing to build roads that would have strengthened competing groups.
Guatemala was caught in a time warp in the middle of the nineteenth century due to elite dominance.
The rising incomes of people in Western Europe and North America created a mass demand for products that Guatemala could potentially produce, such as coffee.
In 1871, the dictator Carrera's regime was overthrown by a group calling themselves Liberals.
The Guatemalan Liberals were not new men with liberal ideals but the same families that remained in charge who maintained extractive political institutions and implemented a huge reorganization of the economy to exploit coffee.
They did abolish the Consulado in 1871, but economic circumstances had changed.
Coffee production needed land and labor, leading the Liberals to push through land privatization, effectively a land grab.
Between 1871 and 1883, nearly one million acres of land, mostly indigenous communal land and frontier lands, passed into the hands of the elite.
The coercive power of the Liberal state was used to help large landowners gain access to labor by adapting and intensifying various systems of forced labor.
President Barrios wrote to all the governors of Guatemala requesting all help to export agriculture.
The repartimiento, the forced labor draft, which was never abolished after independence, was now increased in scope and duration and institutionalized in 1877 by Decree 177 which stipulated that employers could request and receive from the government up to sixty workers for fifteen days of work if the property was in the same department, and for thirty days if it was outside it.
All rural workers were also forced to carry a workbook, called a libreta, which included details of whom they were working for and a record of any debts.
Many rural workers were indebted to their employers, and an indebted worker could not leave his current employer without permission
Decree 177 further stipulated that the only way to avoid being drafted into the repartimiento was to show you were currently in debt to an employer.
Numerous vagrancy laws were passed so that anyone who could not prove he had a job would be immediately recruited for the repartimiento or other types of forced labor on the roads or would be forced to accept employment on a farm.
As a result, land policies after 1871 were also designed to undermine the subsistence economy of the indigenous peoples, to force them to work for low wages.
Jorge Ubico, president between 1931 and 1944, ruled the longest and banned the use of words such as obreros (workers), sindicatos (labor unions), and huelgas (strikes).
Opposition to the Ubico regime mounted in 1944, headed by disaffected university students who began to organize demonstrations, leading to the signing of the Memorial de los 311, an open letter denouncing the regime. Ubico resigned on July 1.
The Spanish conquistadors set up an extractive political and economic system intended to persist for another four hundred years
The institutions set up changed significantly along the way, but one thing did not: the extractive nature of the institutions, the result of the vicious circle.
In Guatemala the encomienda, the repartimiento, and the monopolization of trade gave way to the libreta and the land grab, but the majority of the indigenous Maya continued to work as low-wage laborers with little education, no rights, and no public services.
Colombia
Colombia has been regarded as a democracy for the last fifty years, with regular elections held after a short-lived military government that ended in 1958.
The National Front, pact rotated political power and the presidency between the two traditional political parties, the Conservatives and the Liberals
Yet, it has a history marred by violations of civil liberties, extrajudicial executions, violence against civilians, and civil war.
The ongoing civil war has caused far more casualties than the one that preceded the military rule of the 1950s.
Since that time quite a range of insurgent groups, mostly communist revolutionaries have plagued the countryside, kidnapping and murdering.
To avoid being murdered or kidnapped in rural Colombia, you have to pay the vacuna, literally "the vaccination," which means paying off some group of armed thugs each month.
In 1981, the FARC kidnapped a dairy farmer, Jesus Castaño, leading his sons to found a paramilitary group, Los Tangueros, to hunt down members of the FARC.
The Castaño brothers were good at organizing, and soon their group grew and began to find a common interest with other similar paramilitary groups that had developed from similar causes.
By 1997, the paramilitaries, under the leadership of the Castaño brothers, had managed to form a national organization for paramilitaries called the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (the AUC-United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia).
By 2001, the AUC may have had as many as thirty thousand armed men at its disposal and was organized into different blocks.
The AUC made a strategic decision to get involved in politics, and paramilitaries and politicians courted each other.
Several of the leaders of the AUC organized a meeting with prominent politicians in the town of Santa Fe de Ralito in Cordoba where they issued a joint document, a pact, calling for the "refounding of the country" was issued.
By this point the AUC was running large tracts of Colombia, and it was easy for them to fix who got elected in the 2002 elections for the Congress and Senate through violence and threats.
Probably one-third of the congressmen and senators owed their election in 2002 to paramilitary support, which depicts the areas of Colombia under paramilitary control, shows how widespread their hold was.
The AUC expanded into large parts of the country, particularly into the hot country, in the
departments of Cordoba, Sucre, Magdalena, and Cesar.The expansion of the AUC was not a peaceful affair. The group murdered innocent civilians and terrorized and displaced hundreds of thousands of people from their homes.
In early 2010 around 10 percent of Colombia's population, nearly 4.5 million people, was internally displaced.
The paramilitaries also took over the government and all its functions, with the taxes they collected as just expropriation for their own pockets.
Paramilitary Peasants of Casanare had a agreement with the mayors of the municipalities in the department of Casanare in eastern Colombia, which lists the following rules to which the mayors had to adhere:
1) Give 50 percent of the municipality budget to be managed by the Paramilitary Peasants of
Casanare.2) 10 percent of each and every contract of the municipality [to be given to the Paramilitary Peasants of Casanare].
3) Mandatory assistance to all the meetings called by the Paramilitary Peasants of Casanare.
4) Inclusion of the Paramilitary Peasants of Casanare in every infrastructure project.
5) Affiliation to the new political party formed by the Paramilitary Peasants of Casanare.
6) Accomplishment of his/her governance program.
Estimates of land expropriated in Colombia by paramilitaries are as high as 10 percent of all rural land
Colombia is not a case of a failed state but is a state without sufficient centralization and with far-from-complete authority over all its territory.
The symbiotic relationship arises because national politicians exploit the lawlessness in peripheral parts of the country, while paramilitary groups are left to their own devices by the national government.
In 2002 Uribe ran a campaign repudiating the attempts of the previous administration to try to make peace with
the FARC.In 2006, when he was re-elected, his vote share was 11 percentage points higher in such areas.
Once elected, the paramilitary senators and congressmen voted for what Uribe wanted, in particular changing the constitution so that he could be re-elected in
2006, which had not been allowed at the time of his first election, in 2002. In exchange, President
Uribe delivered a highly lenient law that allowed the paramilitaries to demobilize which did not mean the end of paramilitarism, simply its institutionalization in large parts of Colombia and the
Colombian state, which the paramilitaries had taken over and were allowed to keep.Political institutions in Colombia do not generate incentives for politicians to provide public services and law and order in much of the country and do not put enough constraints on them to prevent them from entering into implicit or explicit deals with paramilitaries and thugs.