Is Guinea Bissau a failed state?

It is hard to say anything about Guinea Bissau without being swept with a deep feeling of despair. As most people will know its former president, Nino Vieira, fell victim to assassins hours after the death of the head of the national army. The two events were not unconnected. In the aftermath the president of the national assembly took interim command, charged with supervising and arranging the elections which the constitution say must be held within sixty days of the death of a president.

But there's one big problem here: Guinea Bissau can't afford to hold elections. It's one of the poorest countries in the world, with hardly any infrastructure, apart from a few roads and shabby buildings left by the Portuguese thirty-five years' ago. Anyone who ever witnessed the impact of decades of Salazar's rule on parts of Portugal like the Alentejo will hardly be surprised that those far-flung fiefs of the Lusitanian empire fared no better.

Democracy's a high-sounding ideal, but it takes money. Not a lot, and certainly there is no excuse for the mountains of waste associated with election campaigns in the west, but in a country with few roads how do you get the ballot papers out to the polling stations? Possibly more important, how do you get them back? and what do you do with them then? You have to pay people to count the votes. Seems unenlightened but if you don't and the counters are starving what s there to stop them from declaring that the winner is the guy who offered them the biggest piece of bread?

The country may be dirt poor but it is awash with money - dirty money being spread by drug couriers anxious to get their cargo from Latin America to the affluent young professionals of Europe. The army seldom gets paid but they have guns and they are more than likely to prove friendly to drug lords, whether to turn a blind eye or to rough up anyone brave enough to speak out about what's happening in the country. That's what happened to a would-be presidential candidate in the last few weeks.

The west may turn away in horror at what is happening in a country so insignificant and non-strategic as Guinea Bissau, but it is a problem of the west's creation.