WHILE its richer and grander neighbours quarrel and cheat, modest Mali looks askance at Côte d'Ivoire (struggling to reunite a divided country) and Nigeria (making a hash of democracy again), as it makes quiet progress. As a result, on April 29th its people re-elected their president, Amadou Toumani Touré, for a second five-year stint in office. Meanwhile, Mali's almost equally poor and sandy neighbour to the west, Mauritania, has had a similar success, with its first free election since independence in 1960.
Political progress apart, their economies both have a very long way to go. Ranked third from the bottom in the UN's world human-development index, Mali is a tough place to live. Infant mortality is among the world's highest, adult literacy among the lowest. Some 12m-strong, Malians on average earn less than $400 a year. Although most farm, only a quarter of the land is productive—and is being eaten away by the Sahara desert as it creeps south. To make matters worse, Mali has been hit by drought and a plague of locusts. Its cotton industry is fading. Civil strife in Côte d'Ivoire has disrupted its main outlet to the sea.
Still, other things have been improving. Mali's election was the fourth in a row after decades of dictatorship. Mr Touré, who seized power in a coup in 1991 before handing power back to civilians a year later, avoided politics for a decade before returning to power in 2002.
Since then, known simply as ATT or more grandly as “the soldier of democracy”, Mr Touré has fostered a system of government by consensus. He belongs to no party but is supported by a coalition of 44 of them. His seven challengers all have representatives in government. “We think that when all the players are brought together we can avoid useless politicking,” he declared before the election. “Western confrontational democracy would not be a good thing in our country because it risks degenerating into regionalism, factionalism and ethnicity.”
Not everyone in Mali agrees—and the notion that adversarial politics means chaos has often been cited as justification for dictators elsewhere on the continent. Mr Touré's opponents have cried foul, complaining that soldiers were told who to vote for, ballot papers were floating around before election day and voter lists were inaccurate, with many dead still on the register. But most foreign and local observers said the poll was fair enough.
With its cotton industry withering, Mali is now Africa's third-biggest producer of gold. It also hopes, in the next five years or so, to produce oil. Mr Touré, a champion of mechanisation, wants to increase Mali's output of cereals from 3m tonnes today to 10m by 2012. Donors are rewarding Mali's quiet progress with hundreds of millions of dollars of aid. In the forefront is the United States, which sees Mali as a key ally in its war on terror in the region.
Coups d'état are frowned on these days in Africa. But the one in Mauritania seems so far to have turned out nicely, even for those who were rudest about it at the time. Nineteen months after he ousted President Maaouya Taya, who had clung on to power for over two decades, Colonel Ely Vall graciously left office a month ago.
Most of sand-blasted Mauritania's 3m inhabitants are also dirt-poor, despite their country's abundance of iron ore, fish and, more recently, oil, though their GDP per head, at $530, is higher than Mali's. They are now looking to their new ruler, Sidi Ould Sheikh Abdellahi, to improve their lot. The election he won in March was Mauritania's first free one since independence 47 years ago. Hope has risen in a Saharan country that, like Mali, straddles Arab and black Africa.
Governments in Africa, Europe and America voiced their disapproval when Colonel Vall took power in a bloodless coup in August 2005. But he kept his promise to hold an election in which no coup leader would compete. The transition has been smooth, authoritarian rule has been softened and the polls—free and fair—took place earlier than originally planned.
The United States lambasted the military takeover. But John Negroponte, its deputy secretary of state, was on hand last month to praise both the colonel and the new president, promising to renew aid and to bump up military co-operation, not least because Mauritania—like Mali—is an ally in America's war on terror in Africa.
Mauritania's new president promises to tackle poverty and injustice. Under a calm surface, social tensions are strong. Mauritania's conservative ruling class has a poor record. Vast villas behind high walls in the capital, Nouakchott, testify to the wealth of the country's Moorish elite. Bubbling frustration in the slums, particularly among black Africans, may boil over if things do not improve. Mr Abdellahi, who hails from the long-dominant white Moorish establishment, may struggle to convince people he will break with the past.
“It was good the soldiers came and went,” says Amadou, a taxi driver sipping sweet mint tea.
“They say they will change things—but we will see.” Mauritania's full diplomatic relations with Israel are popular in Washington but less so back home. Clashes between African and Arab Mauritanians in 1989 and 1990 led to tens of thousands of blacks fleeing or being deported. It is unclear whether Mr Abdellahi will let them back.
His trickiest task will be to tackle slavery, which has resisted three attempts at abolition. The last law, in 1981, banned it but failed to criminalise it. However much it is denied, an ancient system of bondage, with black slaves passed on from generation to generation, still plainly exists.
Copyright © 2007 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.
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