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Book Reviews
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Angola’s war economy:
The role of oil and diamonds
Jakkie Cilliers and Christian Dietrich (editors)
Institute for Security Studies, Pretoria 2000
On the face of it, Angola is a rich country. Yet, the rent for diamonds and oil, spent mostly on the military and distributed to the élite and privileged groups, has been of little benefit to the vast majority of Angola’s 11.2 million people. Despite favourable agricultural conditions and a population density of only eight people per square kilometre, most live in abject poverty. For every thousand people, there are only 54 radios, 91 television sets, five telephone mainlines, and one mobile phone, while there are as few as seven personal computers per 10 000 people. In terms of gross domestic product, Angola ranks 197th out of 210 countries. Over the last decade, real GDP fell from 6.2 billion to 5.8 billion, the agriculture sector decreased by 5.8%, the manufacturing sector shrunk by 6.3% and the service sector by 5.1%. The real value added per worker in the agricultural sector is approximately US $117, the second lowest in the Southern African Development Community (SADC). More than 25% of children between the ages of 10 and 14 years are employed. Although having the highest fertility rate in SADC, some 22% of children do not live to the age of five years. As John Keegan has pointed out, the emotional and human ravages of the war are far greater than the material damage and far more difficult to repair.
It is perhaps for these reasons — the continuing war and the wealth-poverty paradox — that Angola, of all the countries of Africa, is one of the more thoroughly researched. So why another book on Angola? The volume under review is not just another survey, but a detailed exposition of the interrelationship between war and economy — particularly the wealth in oil and diamonds — and their impact upon the country and its people. The study of this profound interrelationship is not new. In several European case studies, Hermann Kellenbenz and others have noted the crucial role warfare has played in the shaping of an economy, although there has been far less agreement on the nature of this role both in Europe and in Africa. Judith Matloff, a Johannesburg-based American journalist, quite recently assessed the Angolan situation in terms similar to Kellenbenz and his companions in Fragments of a forgotten war (Penguin, London, 1997).
The authors of Angola’s war economy take a different line. They argue that the war has not restricted, but has rather facilitated resource exploitation. The thesis is straightforward. Greed — access to oil and diamond fields — lies behind one of Africa’s longest wars. In the opening chapter, Jakkie Cilliers, invoking Christopher Clapham, postulates the emergence of a new type of warfare, namely resource-based insurgencies, which reflect the dynamics through which a number of post-independence wars have been fuelled. National disorder creates opportunities for political and military leaders not offered by peace and stability. And instability in the Angolan diamond fields, Christian Dietrich points out, is to the profit of both the MPLA and Unita, providing the latter with about US $500 million per year for the purchase of arms and influence. It is therefore economic opportunity and the creation of circumstances favourable to the best exploitation of resources that shape the war. Yet, although not catered for by Clapham in his typology, this type of conflict, the ‘resource’ war or insurgency, is not new. Logistic strategies aimed at the creation of circumstances favourable for the exploitation of resources and denial of the same to the enemy, have been employed from the earliest times.
Comprising sixteen chapters — the first and last forming a good introduction and conclusion — by thirteen contributors, Angola’s war economy is a stimulating and generally well-considered book detailing the origins and economic dynamics of the continuing war in Angola. Philippe le Billon sets the theoretical background in chapter 2 and this is followed by a chapter by Richard Cornwell, providing the historical setting. The fourth chapter takes the reader from 1975 to the present, negotiating the three phases of the civil war. These contributions are clear, concise and well argued.
The analysis in the subsequent chapters goes to the pith of several important issues. Assis Malaquias concludes in chapter 5 that both the MPLA and Unita have mobilised powerful ethnic forces. The first are kept in power by ethnic networks, which "must be perpetually greased with the vast oil revenues" (p 112). The latter have rallied the Ovimbundu to redress the perceived inequitable distribution of wealth and power. Malaquias calls for the harnessing of ethnicity behind "modern projects of state building" (p 112). Presently, Angola is involved in two SADC spatial development initiatives that aim to unlock the underutilised and unutilised development potential in the Lobito corridor and the Okavango-Upper Zambezi complex. These initiatives involve the transport, mining, agriculture, tourism and natural resources sectors. Yet, these and other attempts to increase economic activity and diversify development, and so also to improve living standards, seem doomed to fail as a result of the Angolan and Congolese wars and the participation in these wars by several of Angola’s SDI partners.
In many ways, the Angolan war is a total war, comparable to the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648). Both the MPLA and Unita wish not only to inflict a military defeat, but also aim at the political and economic emasculation of the opponent. Food is used as a weapon and such powerful logistic strategies — with attacks on relief convoys and food production — have an immense effect upon the population. The sieges of Huambo and Cuíto saw enormous suffering: the respective dead estimated at as many as 15 000 and 30 000. Some 90 000 Angolans have been killed or maimed by landmines, 1.7 million people have been displaced and half of the population has had to flee at least once (p 122ff). In chapter 6, Andrea Ostheimer assesses the provision of relief aid to stem this human disaster and concludes that, "without a coordinated and sustained initiative to place the whole complexity of Angola’s crisis within the political agenda, humanitarian assistance remains a fig leaf covering the absence of political action" (p 134).
Christian Dietrich, in the four chapters he wrote, has made a major contribution to the discourse on the Angolan war. He presents, in chapter 7, an inventory of formal diamond-mining in Angola. For the first time, "basic questions such as who is mining, where and in what quantity" have been answered, if only provisionally. He then uses the discrepancies between the reported and actual output as the basis for subsequent chapters on the battle for the diamond fields, diamond-smuggling and the informal diamond business under UNITA control. Jakkie Potgieter offers a striking analysis of Unita’s structures in chapter 12, while Johan Peleman and Christian Dietrich address the imposition of restrictions to combat the sale of conflict diamonds in chapters 14 and 15. These together with Duncan Clarke’s chapter 9, which addresses the relationship between petroleum and political power, form the core of this work.
Yet, as Jakkie Cilliers points out in the concluding chapter, there is no end to the conflict in sight. The belligerent parties seem unable to deliver a decisive blow upon the other — at least a blow that would end the war. Unita, with neither a navy nor the recognition of the oil corporations, cannot attempt to gain control over the offshore oilfields, the prime source of MPLA revenue. The government, on the other hand, is unable to control the vast hinterland where the diamonds are mined and concentrated in areas controlled by Unita. The latter movement, which has developed an ability to live off the land and has abandoned the road network for logistics, cannot be pinned down in the vast, open Angolan countryside. Unable to gain control over the countryside and the diamond mines, the government can only hope that the international steps taken to restrict the marketing of Unita’s diamonds will be effective.
Angola’s war economy is a timely publication. The arguments are fresh, well-documented and clearly presented. Yet, like many (perhaps most) multi-authored works, it somewhat lacks integration and the editors might have gone to greater pains. The inclusion of an index — a sad omission — would have greatly enhanced the obvious value of this volume. There are also several spelling errors: for example "precedence" (p 9) should read "precedents". The page numbers given in the Contents for the glossary of terms and details on the contributors do not coincide with the real numbers in the text.
Angola’s war economy is well-bound, contains clear and intelligent maps, and is neatly laid out. It indeed provides an apt case study of a ‘resource war’ or, in the parlance of military historians, a war fought using a logistic strategy. Scholars, non-governmental organisations and governments will be hard pressed to ignore this important contribution to the understanding of the war in Angola and its ripple through Central Africa.
Lt-Col Ian van der Waag
Department of Military History
University of Stellenbosch
To serve and protect:
Privatization and community in criminal justice
Bruce L Benson
New York University Press, New York
1998
In the last few decades, many states have withdrawn from what may be considered some of their traditional roles. Education, health services, roads, railways and postal services have been privatised or partly privatised in a number of countries. It has taken public policy makers a long time to accept that these traditional ‘public services’ can be delivered more effectively and fairly (on the principle that only the user, and not every taxpayer pays) by the market than by the state.
More difficult for policy makers to accept is substantial private sector involvement in the state’s core function: the protection of its citizens from criminals, the administration of the criminal justice system, and the imprisonment of convicted criminals. However, as Bruce Benson points out in To serve and protect: Privatization and community in criminal justice, in contrast to governments’ predominant role in criminal justice today, crime control was almost entirely private and community-based for many centuries. Government police forces, prosecutors, courts, and prisons are all recent historical developments — results of a political and bureaucratic social experiment, which Benson argues, neither protects the innocent nor dispenses justice.
Benson is an economist and a senior fellow at the Independent Institute — an American public policy think-tank that sponsors comprehensive studies on the political economy of critical social and economic problems. He has written a number of publications on the virtues of greater private sector involvement in the criminal justice system, notably The enterprise of law: Justice without the state (Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, San Francisco, 1990).
Benson argues convincingly that greater private sector involvement in a state’s criminal justice system will make such a country a safer place to live in as the range of security products and services is enhanced by the private sector. It will also be cost-effective for both the consumer (who can exploit competitive market forces) and the state (which can contract out many of its criminal justice functions to the competitive private sector).
Moreover, Benson argues that, throughout the world, government expenditure for police, courts, prisons, and other elements of the criminal justice system is at record levels. Yet, crime statistics show that state-run justice systems in many parts of the world have failed to reduce crime and make its citizens (the consumers of state-provided security) feel safer. The situation in South Africa, for example, supports this view. The amount of taxpayers’ money spent on the three core components of the South African criminal justice system (police, justice and prisons) has increased considerably in real terms over the last decade. Spending increased from R3.6 billion in 1989/90 to R24.2 billion in 2000/01, while the proportion of the national budget devoted to these three sectors more than doubled over the same period. As state spending on the criminal justice system in South Africa has gone up, so has the level of serious crime. Between 1990 and 1993, the number of serious crimes recorded increased by 16%. Between 1994 and 1999, the increase was 15%. As crime — especially violent crime — increased, so people’s general feeling of safety decreased. According to annual surveys, 73% of South Africans’ felt safe in 1994, and 16% felt unsafe. In 1999, only 44% felt safe, and 47% felt unsafe.
Because of financial constraints, policy makers are beginning to recognise that the state cannot maintain a monopoly over all the functions of its criminal justice system. It is likely that the worldwide demand for security will continue to increase. The demand will be for increasingly diverse security products and services. It is likely that state-run criminal justice systems of the future — especially those in poorer developing states — will be unable to meet these demands effectively. Governments will neither have the financial resources nor the expertise to satisfy the public’s growing demands for greater safety.
In questioning the role of government in criminal justice, Benson explores a range of private sector criminal justice solutions: from outsourcing government functions such as prisons, security and arbitration, to full-scale private justice initiatives, such as business and community-imposed sanctions, citizen crime prevention and increased private security.
Searching for the most cost-effective methods both to reduce crime and protect civil liberties, Benson weighs the benefits and liabilities of various levels of privatisation. The result is a plan that makes criminal justice more accountable to the citizenry and reduces the dangers inherent in the unchecked power of government.
In studying successful criminal justice systems, Benson shows that an effective system should have victim restitution, rather than criminal punishment, as its primary focus. Private arbitrators should be permitted, for example, to deal with criminal cases by having the authority to determine restitution awards. The market for prison labour should be expanded to cover the operating expenses of the correctional system and to enable criminals to raise the money to pay restitution awards to their victims. Benson uses Japan as an example where, prior to prosecution, most criminals bargain with their victims through a mediator, and offer to pay restitution so that the victim will not demand further punishment. While few offenders receive government imposed penalties on top of their restitution commitments, crime is lower in Japan than in any other industrialised country.
Benson argues that the choice policy makers face is not whether or not to allow privatisation and outsourcing to occur in respect of the criminal justice system. Rather, the choice is between encouraging and supporting the privatisation trend, or attempting to thwart it and thereby slowing its evolution and diverting its path, but without stopping it. Benson concedes that some cost-effective developments — such as profitable prison labour and formal private courts — can be prevented. However, in the long run, history shows that governments cannot adequately protect their citizens from crime and the public will invariably turn to the private sector and community initiatives to protect them and their assets from criminals.
Many of Benson’s proposals focus on the US justice system. This should not reduce the value of his arguments for African readers, however. It is in Africa where the modern, formal and western-type criminal justice system is a relatively new development. Before the advent of colonialism, many African societies had well-developed community structures and systems that dealt with crime and criminals on a local level without involving formal state structures. In many African countries today, where state structures are weak and underresourced, communities again have to rely on themselves to create a secure and crime-free environment. In other African states, there are vibrant private security industries that are gradually taking over many of the state’s traditional criminal justice functions. Using sound theoretical arguments and numerous case studies, Benson provides his African readers with thought-provoking ideas on how the private sector and communities can be empowered to fight crime without sacrificing civil liberties.
Martin Schönteich
Crime and Justice Programme
Institute for Security Studies
Pretoria
The sanctions decade:
Assessing UN strategies in the 1990s
David Cortright and George A Lopez
Lynne Rienner, Boulder
2000
With funding from the government of Canada, whose recent role in the United Nations Angola sanctions committee has been particularly prominent, the International Peace Academy commissioned and published this commendable study on what is effectively the efficacy of sanctions. The result is a comprehensive, readable and insightful volume written by professors David Cortright and George Lopez, two well-known experts on the issue.
During the first 45 years of its existence, the UN Security Council had only imposed sanctions twice, against Rhodesia in 1966 and South Africa in 1977. This situation changed dramatically during the 1990s, with the Security Council imposing comprehensive or partial sanctions against Iraq (1990), the former Yugoslavia (1991, 1992 and 1998), Libya (1992), Liberia (1992), Somalia (1992), parts of Cambodia (1992), Haiti (1993), part of Angola (1993, 1997 and 1998), Rwanda (1994), Sudan (1996), Sierra Leone (1997) and Afghanistan (1999). In addition, the United States and the European Union, in particular, imposed unilateral, bilateral or regional economic sanctions more than three dozen times during the 1990s. As the authors point out, this wider use of sanctions mirrored the expansion of the use of peacekeeping by the international community during this period. While the peacekeeping debate has spawned a massive international research project, substantive international literature on sanctions is more limited — making the contribution by Cortright and Lopez so much more welcome.
The book is divided into twelve chapters with the first seeking to provide a broad sketch of the sanctions era. The authors point to the fact that, during the 1990s, sanctions were employed for a diverse range of purposes, apparently reflecting policy makers’ belief of their efficacy despite the gloomy assessment dominant among sanctions scholars. These purposes included efforts to reverse territorial aggression, restore democratically elected leaders, promote human rights, deter and punish terrorism, and promote disarmament. The second chapter presents a general framework on how and under what conditions sanctions are likely to be effective. The authors adopt what they term a ‘bargaining model’ in seeking to measure the relative success of sanctions. The model sees sanctions as a "form of persuasion, a tool for encouraging targeted regimes to re-evaluate their policy options … It views sanctions not as a policy unto themselves but as part of a continuum of policy instruments from the negative to the positive, designed to encourage political compromise and spark a process of dialogue and negotiation" (p 28). Such an approach highlights the importance of both punitive and positive incentives (the carrot and the stick), but provides for what some might term a subjective set of criteria to determine the success of sanctions.
The subsequent case studies form the core of the study. The book begins with Iraq, which has been subjected to the longest, most comprehensive, and the most severe multilateral sanctions regime ever imposed that is now more than a decade old. Adopting their bargaining model framework, and contrary to conventional wisdom, the authors argue that the sanctions against Iraq have been partially effective, notwithstanding the misuse of the instrument by the major powers and the manipulation of their impact by authorities in Baghdad. The Yugoslav case, the subject of the next chapter, stands out as one of the more important for understanding the requirements for effective enforcement and the significant role sanctions can play in bargaining dynamics. Sanctions in Haiti are examined as a case in which hesitation, inconsistency and a lack of enforcement undermined the potential impact of the instrument. The cases of Libya, Sudan and Afghanistan are grouped together as examples of the use of travel bans and aviation sanctions as forms of actual or threatened coercive pressure to address the problem of international terrorism. Cambodia is presented, in a separate chapter, as an example of selective sanctions applied against a rebel movement within a country. Subsequent chapters deal with Sierra Leone and Unita in Angola where the international community sought to apply more focused coercive pressure as part of ‘smart sanctions’ policy. In each case, the Security Council set out to impose sanctions on specific leadership groups and factions, while avoiding measures that would add to the already severe humanitarian problems. In neither case were sanctions effectively monitored or enforced, however. The final case study chapter combines Somalia, Liberia and Rwanda, since all three were subject to UN arms embargoes, perhaps the least effective of the international sanctions efforts. A separate and penultimate chapter summarises the case findings. The final chapter provides a set of recommendations for what the authors term a ‘new sanctions policy’. In doing so, they warn that sanctions do not constitute an easy option, but that the imposition of economic sanctions should resemble the workings of an international regime, with standardised policy guidelines and operational principles equivalent to those that exist in other international arenas, such as humanitarian action or the use of military force. Similarly, they underscore the fact that harnessing market forces for political ends requires a substantial commitment of resources.
For some, the sanctions era of the 1990s appeared to offer the promise of effective Security Council action to resolve conflict and enforce international legal norms without the use of military force. But in Iraq, Yugoslavia and Haiti, sanctions gave way to the use of military force — a development that demonstrates the limited utility of viewing sanctions as an alternative to the use of military force. In Africa, especially Angola, Liberia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone, UN sanctions appeared to have little influence on the use of force by various national and regional parties, and arms embargoes have a particularly poor record. Only in Libya did sanctions appear to accomplish their objectives without military confrontation. Despite the use of their bargaining model, the result is an ambiguous picture, compounded by a sense of fatigue and caution towards the end of the 1990s as the suffering caused by sanctions in Iraq and Haiti generated caution about the imposition of new sanctions.
In his introduction to the volume, the former Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Lloyd Axworthy, ironically summarises what the authors see as a short-sighted punitive view of sanctions: "The focus of sanctions must be on curtailing the target’s ability to wage war and perpetuate human misery. They should harm the perpetrators, not their victims" (p x). The authors argue for a wider view. According to them, sanctions too often suffer from poor design, loose commitment from member states, inadequate monitoring and lax enforcement. Based on their case studies, they argue for cautious optimism: "sanctions appear to be more effective in gaining target compliance than is generally acknowledged …" (p 204), achieving something like a success rate of one-third. No wonder that the book sounds a note of warning when evaluating the promise heralded by so-called ‘smart’ or targeted sanctions to achieve political impact, while limiting unintended humanitarian hardship, suggesting that smart sanction strategies offer only limited alternatives to comprehensive trade restrictions.
The debate over Iraq has dominated the discourse on sanctions to the extent that it has skewed public understanding of the actual or potential value of sanctions. In seeking to ‘look beyond Iraq’, The sanctions decade contributes to a debate that is in its early stages and set to expand as the more powerful UN member states grow increasingly cautious of peacekeeping engagement.
For Cortright and Lopez, sanctions "are best considered as instruments of coercive diplomacy to persuade decision makers in the targeted state to reassess the costs and benefits associated with policies that have attracted the ire of the international community" (p 223). The use of a ‘bargaining model’ in reviewing the efficacy of sanctions is an important contribution to the thinking on sanctions, but it requires a uniform commitment and interpretation of the relative success of sanctions within the international community and between key member states. Countries differ and have different agendas in supporting sanctions, some of which may be unrelated to the stated purpose of a specific sanctions policy. This is most evident in the differences between the United States and others regarding the sanctions regime against Iraq. Cautiously optimistic, the authors believe that sanctions can serve as an effective policy tool for UN peacekeeping and peace enforcement in the future, but that much remains to be done in this regard. The book is a well-researched and welcome contribution to a complex debate.
Jakkie Cilliers
Institute for Security Studies
Pretoria
Arms procurement decision-making:
Chile, Greece, Malaysia, Poland, South Africa and Taiwan — Vol 2
Ravinder Pal Singh (editor)
Oxford University Press, Oxford
2000
Defence procurement systems are notoriously complex processes involving the intersection of political, economic, military and, in some cases, personal considerations. No country, be it developing or developed, is exempt from the intricacies of procurement decisionmaking and any study of the field requires, as such, a detailed understanding of the organisational, sociological, military, economic and behavioural features of the country concerned.
Recent developments in South Africa have demonstrated the extent to which a public debate on and broader understanding of procurement processes is needed in developing democracies, in general, and African democracies, in particular. The capital intensive nature of such procurement, the opportunity costs lost in the process of procuring expensive equipment types and systems, and the rationalisation provided for the purchase of such weapons require a much broader level of public participation than has hitherto been the case.
It is against this backdrop that the second volume in the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s (SIPRI) series on the arms procurement decisionmaking process is most welcome. Conceptualised by SIPRI in 1993, the primary objectives of the project were, firstly, to develop appropriate norms for ensuring greater levels of public accountability in the arms decisionmaking process and, secondly, to ensure that arms procurement processes are conducted in such a manner that legitimate national security requirements are balanced against the imperatives of democratic oversight, accountability and good governance.
The first phase of the study included countries such as China, India, Israel, Japan, South Korea and Thailand, while the second phase of the study focused on Chile, Greece, Malaysia, Poland, South Africa and Taiwan. The rationale for choosing these countries was fourfold:
- their regional significance in terms of strategic influence, economies and population;
- their relevance as purchasers of major conventional weapons systems;
- the lack of information on their procurement decisionmaking processes; and
- the current democratisation processes in each of the countries concerned and the implications of these processes for the management of their defence procurement processes.
The volume is useful not only as a compilation of individual country case studies, but also for the comparative analyses that emerge from a study of all the countries involved in the project. It is here that the relevance of this book as a tool for legislators, policy makers and public representatives emerges for it is against this backdrop that the application of the book’s insights can best be applied.
The book highlights the qualitatively different approaches towards threat assessment and long-term force planning that apply in each of the countries surveyed. Accurate threat assessments form the basis upon which the procurement process should theoretically be predicated. Yet, it is significant that, of the six countries surveyed, it is only in two of the countries, Greece and Taiwan, that the possibility of external aggression is taken as the starting point for the procurement decision making process (Turkey and China).
Motivations for procurement processes differ vastly in the other four countries surveyed. These range from the maintenance of threat independent deterrent capabilities (South Africa and Malaysia), the requirement to participate in regional security arrangements (Poland) and the need to couple military capabilities to the country’s foreign policy profile (Chile) as being the primary motivation for the maintenance of their armed forces and for their respective procurement programmes.
A critical aspect of the decisionmaking process is the intersection between de facto and de jure power transmission belts that exist within the state, political society, civil society and the armed forces. Notwithstanding the existence of formal decisionmaking processes in each of the countries surveyed, a plethora of formal, informal, de facto and de jure decisionmaking processes underpinned the entire procurement process. In South Africa, the process of defence restructuring and the transformation of the parliamentary political terrain have provided a high level of cohesion and public participation in the defence policy debate.
In Greece, a high degree of political and personal influence tends to dominate the procurement process, while in both Chile and Taiwan parallel hierarchies, a high level of service autonomy and conflicting political and institutional perceptions of the strategic force planning process affect the rationality of the final procurement decisions. In Malaysia, ethnic tensions and the nascent threat of a rural insurgency have resulted in high levels of secrecy pervading the defence procurement process — a system in which only a small group of individuals are privy to the intricacies of the procurement process.
Co-ordination between foreign policy objectives and defence objectives is a critical element of all defence policy processes and is vital if a realistic assessment of a nation’s equipment requirements is to be made. Notwithstanding the existence of the structural mechanisms for co-ordination in all the countries concerned, such co-ordination, in effect, is weak. Reasons proffered for this include rigidity of bureaucratic culture (Chile), underdevelopment of mechanisms for the co-ordination of both foreign policy, in particular, and national policy, in general (South Africa), and overcentralisation of the decisionmaking process (Greece). Indeed, it is only in Poland that a higher degree of co-ordination exists, given the central role that the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) plays in both its foreign policy and defence policy deliberations.
The ongoing influence of both the armed forces and the military-industrial complex over the procurement process in the different countries surveyed varies considerably. Although the armed forces in all countries are subject to civil control and oversight, some do retain a high level of formal influence over the procurement process for historical and political reasons (Chile and Taiwan). Other countries such as South Africa and Malaysia, however, enjoy a situation where the armed forces are limited to a narrower and more western definition of political engagement (most via the accepted constitutional, executive and legislative channels) and where the role of civilian and non-military defence actors in the policymaking process is more pronounced.
A perennial theme in the various analyses of the efficacy of both executive and legislative oversight over the procurement process is the underdevelopment of the latter in the decisionmaking process. Notwithstanding the existence of potentially powerful legislative systems (South Africa), an inadequate tradition of parliamentary oversight, the underdevelopment of skills among parliamentarians and civil society representa-tives, a high turnover of parliamentary personnel, and the technocratic complexity of the procurement debate effectively limit the oversight role these institutions can play.
The study concludes by making a broad series of recommendations on how best to improve oversight over defence procurement processes in future. These include defining the appropriate constitutional checks and balances whereby scrutiny of such processes can be upheld, more effective co-ordination between the different policy sectors of the country concerned, empowering civilians in the various ministries of Defence, developing the capacity of civil society to interrogate procurement decisions and processes and opening the procurement process to broader public debate.
The study is an invaluable overview of an area of defence policy that, historically, has tended to be underresearched. It is a fascinating study of the complexity of the procurement process in what are vastly different political cultures. A number of weaknesses do emerge from a reading of the book, however.
The first is the underdevelopment of policy recommendations in the concluding chapter. What is required in addition to general policy recommendations is a systematic strategic consideration of how these recommendations can be operationalised. A second weakness is the absence of a strategy required to popularise the book among those stakeholders who would benefit most from its insights. A series of workshops in each of the countries surveyed may ensure that the book avoids becoming yet another academic study with limited policy impact.
A third weakness is the fact that elements of the study have dated since the original studies were commissioned. While procurement processes in five of the six countries surveyed have remained largely constant, in the South African case, they have undergone substantial reorganisation. Indeed, the current debate pervading South African civil and political society regarding the country’s US $6 billion arms package may well provide the basis for a fuller and more open debate on the procurement process than has been the case in most democracies.
Rocky Williams
Security Sector Transformation Programme
Institute for Security Studies
Pretoria
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