 My name is Mamoudou Gazebo. I am from the University of Montreal, but I'm Nigerian, so a very close neighbor, not so close, but we are all in the Echoas community, so I feel like at home. Thank you, Daniel, for your presentation, because what I am going to do is completely in the same line, because Benin is one of the positive African democratic countries, and what I'm going to do is to look at the positive side of consolidation, the deepening of democracy in Benin. So I have six points. First, I will briefly give you a background on the Benin case, because I wrote another paper maybe seven, eight years ago on transition and foreign aid in Benin. Second, the argument, the data, and maybe the substance of the presentation, the three remaining points, foreign aid, and its changing pattern in Benin, donor and democratic consolidation efforts, and I will finish with some concluding remarks and some recommendations. So the background first, as you know, Benin has been presented in the 70s as a very difficult case in Africa, because they used to have military coups every six months. And then in the 90s, things changed, and Benin became what somebody called the Laboratory of Democratization in Africa, because they had this national conference which has been replicated in many other countries. And as I told previously, I studied the Benin case in a paper published in 2005. And what I saw at that time was that foreign aid had a crucial role in helping Benin to do its transition from authoritarian regime to a democratically elected president. So the transition in Benin is clearly linked to the donor's role. So they played a crucial role in supporting Benin, whether through budget support or other kind of supports. But when it comes to consolidation, it's a difficult and different matter, because consolidation, as Daniel told it, is very complex. It's a long-term process. And the challenge is to make sure it is to look at what donors do and what role they played in this phase of democratization, which is consolidation. And also what I will try to do is to show how donors' intervention in Benin changed in the 20s because of internal and external events, turning points, that impacted their behavior regarding their intervention in Benin. So what we can see also is that if you look at the transition and the political aspects of democratization, foreign aid played a crucial role. But when it comes to the deepening of democracy, I think the achievements are much more mixed, in particular when you look at governance and corruption and so on. So the argument is that while foreign aid has been effective in certain areas such as elections, civil society promotion, the impact is very weak when you look at other aspects of democratization, of the deepening of democracy like good governance, the rule of law, and accountability. And the second aspect is that although Benin is a very positive case, donors are frustrated with the lack of democratic deepening. And some of them, like Denmark or Switzerland, are even tempted to withdraw their aid. And this is unfortunate because I think it's just like a vicious circle. The Benin has, I think, so many efforts to do to promote, to improve governance. And because of the lack of successions on some points, donors want to withdraw. And this, I think, ultimately can affect Benin's equality of democracy in Benin. So this is why I will end with some propositions, some recommendations because I think if we don't think about some new, some innovative policies, Benin will maybe will no longer be the positive example we used to see. So the paper is completely based on qualitative research. And the main, most of the data I collected come from aid data. But this is the case, I think, with all the papers, some from other sources. But ultimately, aid data was the main source of data. And also, maybe the most important aspect of the paper is that it is based on field research I conducted in June in 2011, 2011 in Benin. And I met foreign embassies, donor community, and so on. And also, the approach to consideration, but I will not talk about it because Daniel did a very good job. It's based not only on procedures, but also on institutions and the substance. Because usually, authors make the distinction because between democracy as a procedure and democracy as a substance. So because the paper is focused on deepening democracy in Benin, it focuses not only on procedures, but also on deeper aspects of democratization. So foreign aid in Benin, I think, has changed because in the 90s, Benin was seen as the laboratory of democratization in Africa. And someone said that Benin received foreign aid as East Germany. It's like the same proportion in the 90s. But things have been changing, I think, in the 2000, because of what I said, the lack of progress in some areas of democratization. And also, but this is not like a uniform trend because it depends on the donors you focus on. If you look at bilateral donors, for example, France has been traditionally Benin's most important donor. France's presence has been constant. But the US, for example, changed. For example, the democracy assistance project has been stopped because of this lack of assistance. And also, if you look at the other donors, the multilateral donors, for example, some of them are not involved in democracy promotion at all. So what is going on on the political landscape does not affect their intervention. But others like the European Union have a very different kind of intervention. They focus on democracy promotion. And this, if you look at what they are doing since the 2000, things have, I think, changed a lot. And also, the other aspect I wanted to show when I did the field research is that sometimes we just look at the big donors like the European Union, France, and so on. But sometimes those who do the best job, I think, when it comes to democracy promotion are not always the big country. Denmark or Switzerland or Holland are sometimes much more involved in democracy promotion in Benin than the bigger countries like France, which has all these kind of links and these interventions sometimes is greeted also by internal political models. So this is why the classification of donors between big and multilateral is misleading because you have to go through what is going on and see really what each actor does. And also what you see in the case of Benin is that from the 2000, you have like a volatility of aid. If you look at these two figures, for example, you can notice that in 2001 and 2002, from 2000 to 2002, foreign aid dropped significantly. And this is the same from 2006 to 2008. And this is because generally in Benin, donors' intervention changed depending on the political climate. In post electoral, when post electoral tensions occur, for example, like in 2001 and 2007, or when you have scandals, corruption, and so on, you see that foreign aid and, in particular, democracy had turned to drop. And this is, I think, a problem because it's sometimes in the very period when the country needs to be assisted, that donors withdrew. And I think this is a very problematic situation. And this is the same if you look at the budget aid. But there are many other issues explaining why you can see this donors fatigue in a country which is considered as one of the most positive cases. So there is a fluctuation. And this is something which is very preoccupying, I think, in the case of a country like Benin. And also what we have to look at is that donors, and I said it before, are not necessarily involved in democracy promotion because democracy promotion, as Daniel said, it is one aspect of foreign aid among many others. So I try to focus particularly on democracy promotion, but sometimes you can't avoid talking about other kinds of aid because they are linked. It's not so easy to disaggregate between democracy promotion and other kind of foreign aid. But if you look at democracy promotion in particular and the efforts to promote consideration, some multilateral agencies like the EU or the UNDP or some bilateral countries like Denmark, the Netherlands, France are much more involved on these kinds of issue. So if we concentrate particularly on donors and democratic consideration, of course, as Daniel told it, if you focus on the positive side of consideration, it means that you focus on the deepening of democracy. And because Benin is considered like an electoral democracy, they don't have the same kind of problems like Togo or I don't know Zimbabwe and so on, the question is how to deepen what is already there. So I will just focus on some specific points like the budget aid and how foreign aid tries to help Benin consolidate central institutions so that the state can better manage what is going on. If you look at this, you have many foreign donors like the European Development Fund, the UNDP, Denmark and so on who are really involved in this kind of support to strengthening central institutions because one thing we tend to forget, only five minutes, so I will try to go fast. An aspect on which we don't insist enough is that democracy is possible only when you have a strong state. When I think I talk about a strong state, it doesn't mean a strong man, it means strong institutions, it means procedures, it means that the state can fulfill its task. So this is why this aspect is very important although we tend to neglect it. And civil society also, as Daniel Toilet, is one of the main democracy assistance program and Benin is a perfect case from this point of view. You have many civil society organizations, many groupings supported by donors and I think this is very important because if you look at the electoral cycles in Benin, what is amazing is that usually NGOs and citizens are very confident about the issue, about how it will end. So I think this is important because civil society has been supported and they are very strong, they have created many original, I think institutions like these peace infrastructures, we can discuss about it later. And also many other programs in which target media, gender programs or the unions. Second, the other very important, I think arena is elections. And with civil society, this is the, I think the arena where you can see the best example of how democracy promotion can work. And here you have a table with the last, during the last election, Benin experimented an electoral list and it has been supported by donors and I think it worked. Even though they had many problems, the opposition was not very happy about it but I think at last it's better than the system they had before. Also the other point is political parties and party system. And you know it, if you don't have a stable and functioning party system, democracy can't work. And this is another arena which is very difficult for donors because they just don't know how to deal with it. So party volatility is very high in Benin. Sometimes as you know, some parties, they don't have more than five, 10 people. And so it's very difficult to have programs that work. And also people are not very confident about political parties in Benin where I conducted this field research. It's very clear that political parties are not very popular in Benin. So another aspect is in the positive side of democratization is strengthening accountability. And this is another very, very difficult issue because it's a matter of internal domestic affair and donors they can't, they cannot but being involved in it because their funds are involved. But it's very difficult because Benin is also one of the, I think countries which were corruption is a very preoccupying issue. But what some countries try to do, and I think this is very important, this is why I put it in red, the Netherlands, for example, the corporation is entirely targeting what they call checking mechanism and institutions. So all the funds they have are put to strengthen those institutions like anti-corruption institutions, like in the ministries they have inspections and so on. So all they do is try to focus on this kind of institution to make sure that they are strengthened and able to fulfill their task. Or the financial chamber of the Supreme Court, for example, which is supported by many donors and in particular by the Netherlands or Denmark. Okay, so what, the result which comes out from the, the purpose is that Benin can be considered as a electoral democracy and even many others considered Benin as a consolidated democracy. But this is from the procedural perspective. If you look at the more, the deeper aspect of democracy like consolidation, like the quality of democracy, they have a long way to go because the success which we can see in the framework and the procedures are not replicated when it comes to the substance, corruption, lack of responsiveness, and so on. And this is why I tried in the paper to propose some recommendations. For example, one of the recommendation I think is that they need, Benin needs a national consensus on electoral issues. I talk about the electoral list, the informatized electoral list, it is good, but it lacks a consensus, a national consensus. And donors usually when it comes to elections, they just wait until the electoral year and they put some money, UNDP generally functions as the umbrella to how to use the funds. And I think they have to change the perspective and see as Daniel told it, elections as a process are not as a specific event. Second aspect is I think, and this comes from what I saw in what the Netherlands does. I think we have to strengthen these kind of institutions that focus on checking of what government does. So these kind of mechanisms and institutions that monitor governance issues I think should be strengthened and foreign aid, foreign donors can play a very important role I think with regard to this. Another aspect is that what I saw is that donors usually have training programs, they have seminars and so on, but usually these are not cross cutting initiatives. They took take the journalists for one session and then the unions and so on. I think they need to have another kind of perspective because consideration and the deepening of democracy is very complex and is multifaceted and people need to know all the faces of it. And finally, I think I said that foreign aid tend to fluctuate depending on the political climate. This is unfortunate because the consideration and the deepening of democracy, if you look at Latin America or even developed countries is very complex and we need to see it as a long-term process and not something which we evaluate only, we forgot what happens in the year or during an election. Thank you.