4 - Chad

Summary

John Dunn offers some particularly relevant remarks about Sahelian political entities:

The states of the interior, the southern fringe of the Sahara…are highly distinctive political formations. Some of the least viable states in the world, weakly integrated into the world market because endowed with so few resources worth exploiting, they have also endured in the last decade an ecological trauma in the shape of drought and famine of a highly distinctive character. The most placid and optimistic observer of post-colonial political capabilities will hardly escape a measure of dismay in the face of this experience… it takes today a real ideologue, whether of the right or of the left, to see with any confidence a happy political future for the Sahel.

Being neither a placid and optimistic observer nor really an ideologue, of whatever tendency, and having studied Chadian politics for some years, I emphatically agreed with this diagnosis when I read it for the first time. Today, about ten years later, the Chadian experience attracts even less in the way of boundless enthusiasm or blind commitment. Since the publication of West African States, Chad has almost disappeared from the political map, and even in 1988 doubts about its survival as a political entity are not without foundation, in spite of the patient's slow recovery over the last few years.