Since the attempted bombing of an American passenger jet on Christmas Day was
traced to al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in Yemen, the Yemeni
government has been trying to convince foreign donors that it requires extraordinary
financial assistance to stay afloat in the face of the al-Qa’ida threat. The Yemeni
economy is in dire straits and this year, requests for aid have ranged from $US1.2
billion to a staggering $US44.5 billion over five years, or over half of the country’s
current annual national budget every year for the next five years.
The West is right to worry about Yemen’s ability to contain the conflict that is
intensifying within its borders and has responded with a set of policy prescriptions
aimed at stabilising the regime. This paper argues that the stabilisation approach
may actually aggravate Yemen’s problems more than ameliorate them because it
seeks to strengthen existing power hierarchies rather than find incentives to make the
power elite more responsive. The stabilisation strategy also removes blunt power
politics from the equation, and views politics through the lens of the government’s
capacity to deliver services while glossing over the unsustainable basis of the
political settlement.
Instead, the Yemeni regime must see an incentive to fundamentally alter the way that
it rules the country and thus build a climate that attracts foreign investment and
educates its people. Absent such a watershed, Yemen will continue on its internally
painful and externally destabilising trajectory. Western donors need to understand the
political barriers to economic regeneration in Yemen, and reframe their engagement
in a way that makes those barriers the starting point. In other words, foreign financial
assistance needs to be aimed squarely the political obstacles to growth before it can
hope to have an impact on the technical impediments to growth. This is in the West’s
interests, the Yemeni people’s interests and, ultimately in the regime’s long-term
interests.