Memories of 1978: Rwanda conflict and stalled economic reform in Tanzania

What is instructive about it is that there is a Silver Jubilee of the war that fell in 2003 without anyone marking it especially. Ten years later, this unheralded date is likely to be marked, not in memory but through another war, in which case the lessons both of the causes and results of the 1978 war shall be clearer.

There is a rule about warfare which is also applicable in sentimental relations of any sort … that no two combatants have the same moral leverage in the conflict, and ordinarily, the one with a weaker moral leverage tends to lose out.

At times, though, depending on the historical condition, there is a new order being created in a zone, in which case a bestial winner destroying everything on his way comes up, and peaceful peoples found in his path are swept underneath. When such a situation is not at issue, moral leverage in a war becomes essential, for its economic duration.

Moral leverage is vital in a way because all war is costly, not only for procurement of materials and payment of soldiers and compensation of their families in case of fatalities, but war also heightens taxation so that these additional costs are borne with relative ease.

At the same time, war tests a country’s economic infrastructure or modality, where a country with a vibrant market economy can easily fight a war as it just makes higher orders in military procurement, on the basis of an efficient array of industries waiting to produce war material. If it is inefficient it can’t do so.

That is why the current confrontation with Rwanda with regard to the M23 rebel group in the Congo, were it to escalate or take on an unduly long time, has the potential to finally bring Tanzania to make a fresh inventory of the lessons of 1978.

The language adopted after the 1978-9 expedition, with the economy in dire straits, was that the war had caused problems. Definitely that was true, but more significantly, the war put an end to Ujamaa a’the rational choice,’ by the title of an influential paper by Mwalimu Nyerere a few months after the 1967 Declaration.

While the Tanzanian economy in 2013 is much better organized than the motley socialist ‘state-owned’ system of 1978, there are likely to be cracks that would be exposed in case the contention with Rwanda continues for too long.

For instance, it can be ruled out that Tanzania can conduct an expedition in the Congo that in a way resembles the Kenyan expedition in Somalia, because the Kenyan economy is more or less based on a competitive market context. When there is need for higher amounts of various goods in military procurement, the private sector brightens up.

The reason is that there is capacity to be used in whatever sector of the economy, its costing is low and the taxation levels aren’t too high, in which case government has some leverage to increase taxes slightly to cover increased costs. In that way reporting on the Kenyan economy over the past year doesn’t contain an inkling that the country is effectively at war in Somalia, whereas there wasn’t much else to talk about this side of the border after the brief expedition to dislodge Gen, Amin. So while history doesn’t repeat itself in identical ways, structural defects will show up.

One reason is that so that a war, if efficiently financed without becoming a burden to a country’s economy, a company that is supposed to render materials for the war effort is expected to obtain loans at low credit rates, and this be added as part of the public debt.

When an economy is efficient, war-related lending would only marginally influence interest rates, as plenty of other areas remain for lending, and such procurement doesn’t crowd out lending needs in other sectors. In Tanzania it is habitual that Treasury bills crowds out the private sector, and this, without a war.

A country that moves into a war or significant expedition that takes up substantial resources available to the military and does not have a banking system that lends to private procurement agencies and merely be paid annual interest while the war is going on, would find the going tough.

It would have to pay upfront by printing its banknotes, escalating inflationary tendencies and if it comes to the worst, makes the currency useless. In West African countries of Sierra Leone and Liberia, at the height of their pagan civil wars (hacking limbs, tearing apart expectant mothers and other signs of Africa’s gods at full splendour), banknotes were worthless.

As they still had to be used, currency was not counted but weighed, in buying goods. Much of Ujamaa was already being financed by printing banknotes; the Uganda war hence tended to worsen the situation. No one expects that this will remotely be the case at present, but there are cracks of budgetary ceilings that can’t absorb prolonged engagements, and a few Machiavellian analysts in Kigali who know this.

Already reports contained in non-confidential briefing papers or country missions of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) indicate that Treasury mandarins were pleading with the IMF to raise the debt ceiling that allows it to be permitted to borrow on the international bond market.

The crucial issue was TANESCO debts to independent power producers, and heavy furnace oil purchases. That is also why the pipeline from Mnazi Bay to Kinyerezi is a lifeline for government finances, as otherwise it would soon have to move to an IMF-based structural adjustment plan.

Exhausting the three-nation intervention force in north-east Congo is basically an issue of how far the force can be drawn into hostile forest territory without M23 losing track of their zones of support and supply lines.

As M23 is a disciplined force with a chain of command, they cannot fight just as hit and run groups that harrass the peace enforcement troops until they leave, but if it comes to the worst they can dissolve the force into that sort of hit and run guerilla engagement, not a war of defending towns and bridges. It is this sort of war that invaders love to fight.

The most pointed element in the recent battles that should send a warning to those in charge of logistics at the defence forces command here is that M23 left their bases without a semblance of a ‘principal battle.’ According to German battlefield expert Gen. Carl von Clausewitz whose forces continually fought French legendary marshal Napoleon Bonaparte, a commander should not put his troops into a major battle, or the principle battle of a war or a unit in a war, which he is not assured of winning. When an army or a key unit fights such a battle and loses it can’t regroup.

The M23 did not fight a major battle before leaving their more advanced positions, or well known urban centres and strongholds to the vicinity of Goma, in which case they left with their forces more or less intact. If they draw the UN force to outer limits of their zone of influence, or conquer other areas without well positioned militia or an articulate presence of the Congolese military, UN enforcement plans could start unraveling. In case the US and their allies do not supply everything, no capacity for extending that engagement deep inside the Congo is possible this side.

There is of course a difference, in proto-Marxian terms, that 1978 was purely a way within neocolonial contentions, without major Cold War interests being involved, thus stood no chance of being bankrolled by ‘imperialism.’ In that case the current expedition in the Congo is entirely different as it falls within a US global matrix in fiscal, logistic terms. But it potentially has a local fiscal downside.

The core problem is not the depth of risk that Tanzania can expect in its Congolese expedition, but how sensitive the budgetary ceilings are likely to be, were it that a substantial portion of the costs are to be locally borne.

For one thing it is unclear if it really was a UN or US initiative that some ground engagement be set up against an increasingly arrogant M23 leadership and its kingpins in Kigali or it was mainly a Tanzanian foreign policy initiative, in like manner as its intervention (along with the Sudan, an ally purely of circumstance) in the Seychelles. Nor is it clear how the field costs in the Congo are covered between the US, South Africa and Tanzania.

So far there is definitely no cause for alarm, as the 2013 expedition into the Congo is more berthed in ‘imperialism,’ that is ‘Pax Americana’ than was the 1978 thrust into Uganda, which was entirely ‘self reliant’ in character and thus lead to the ruin of Ujamaa as an economic system.

Fiscal mandarins should cross their fingers that there is no cash flow impact of the current thrust in the Congo as room for eroding the country’s import cover for four or five months so as to finance the Congolese expedition could raise new problems with the IMF. It is a bit of tighrope logistics.

Perhaps the proof that the military incursion on the outskirts of Goma not far from the Tanzanian border is well cushioned is Malawi’s acceptance to join the fray, as it skipped two clear hurdles which ordinarily would have hindered its being involved.

The first evidently is that it has no borders with the Congo, and owing to its rather scant industrial base, might not be pursuing any markets with that urgency, to wish to place troops to clear the zone of irritating insurgencies. But at the same time it was embroiled in a war of words with Tanzania about something a bit perplexing, that the boundary on Lake Nyasa could conceivably be on the shores, to the east. That it put aside its pride and lack of interests to join speaks a lot as to its logistics.