African states found the governance model of the integral era impossible to defend. Public employment had soared, both in the government bureaucracies and state-owned enterprises. Partly this reflected a genuine expansion of social services, particularly the educational system, but much was simply a response to huge pressures for employment; to cite but one example, in Ghana the Cocoa Marketing Board payroll had doubled to 100,000 over the decade stretching from the mid-60s to the mid-70s, but the amount of cocoa being exported had dropped from a 1965 peak of 557,000 tons to 320,000 in 1977.83 In a number of countries, university graduates were guaranteed government employment; in the mid-70s when I was teaching in Congo-Kinshasa, this was the only career path sought by university graduates. Egypt maintained such a guarantee into the new century, offering employment utterly devalued by nominal pay and meaningless work.
In many countries by the 1970s, governments met budget deficits by inflating the currency, which in turn undermined its exchange value. The standard response of exchange controls invariably failed, becoming an engine of corruption as well as black markets. Countries in the French-managed Communaute financiere d'Afrique (CFA) franc zone were shielded from unconvertible currencies and high inflation but often responded to budget shortfall by delaying payments to the public service. In other polities, high inflation savaged the real earnings of civil servants, driving many into survival pursuits and corroding the competence of the bureaucracy. The parastatal sector was enormous; again to cite a single example, Kenya—ostensibly a capitalist state—had accumulated 150 state-owned enterprises and had large shares in 200 more.84 Across the continent only a handful of parastatals were profitable; the Egyptian Suez Canal Company was an exceptional case of continuous competent management and positive balance sheets. More characteristic was the uneven performance of Algerian scandal-ridden hydrocarbon parastatal SONATRACH, Africa's largest enterprise with a 2010 income of $47 billion.85
The response to African pleas for indulgence and self-directed reform, embodied in the 1981 Lagos Plan of Action prepared by the OAU and UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), from the Washington Consensus was stern: there was no alternative to structural adjustment and the impaired sovereignty it implied. Though few denied the need for some reform, many were skeptical of the imposed reforms. Publics at large at first were intensely hostile. Regimes tended to respond by accepting the accords but then only selectively and partially applying the terms. Over the course of the 1980s, economic impasse deepened. African states blamed SAPs; the donor community responded that they had not been fully implemented.86 But both sides had evolved in their thinking. On the international financial institution side, there was a recognition that the difficulties were far more intractable than had been imagined at the outset of structural adjustment. A few simple prescriptions such as getting prices right and achieving short-term stabilization fell far short of what was required. A less dogmatic approach was needed, one that acknowledged a difficult external environment for African economies and the particularities of the sociopolitical environment. Greater flexibility and more attention to negative social impacts on key groups was necessary. But beyond these changes in perspective, a broader conclusion emerged. The venal and autocratic nature of most extant regimes was an insuperable obstacle to success. Accountability and transparency were indispensable components of recovery. Political as well as economic liberalization was indispensable. Thus democratization came to be seen as critical therapy for ailing African states. By 1989, the concept of “governance” had crept into official discourse, denned by the World Bank as including “a pluralistic institutional structure, a determination to respect the rule of law, and vigorous protection of freedom of the press and human rights."87 By 1990, major Western donors were expressign a shared commitment to promoting democratization in their assistance programs.
This conceptual evolution coincided with and was reinforced by a wave of popular protest against the patrimonial autocracies ruling most states, beginning with the October 1988 street riots in Algeria that unhinged the regime and forced abandonment of the FLN political monopoly. In Benin another resonating drama opened in late 1989; the urban street in effect seized power, snatching sovereignty from the incumbent regime through the national conference mechanism. Elsewhere most regimes were compelled by the confluence of internal and external pressures to concede political opening, competitive elections, and in most cases new or largely revised liberal constitutions.
These developments produced a moment of consensus among both internal and external actors. The form of state resulting from the decay of the ntegral model was neither sustainable nor desirable. The political aspects of the ascendant global normative state won broad acceptance, whatever the uncertainties about their realization. Many also conceded the necessity of a slimmed but more effective state: “moins d'état, mieux d'état,” in the oft-cited slogan of former Senegalese president Abdou Diouf. Some elements of the state apparatus shared much of the economic premises of the neoliberal state, especially top cadres in central banks and finance ministries, many of whom had worked for a time in international financial institutions. Although elements of the intelligentsia remained suspicious of the new orthodoxies, the discrediting of socialist orientation that accompanied the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991 denied them a ready ideological counter to dominant prescriptions. As in former Soviet lands, “really existing socialism” yielded a daily, lived experience bearing no relation to the ideological visions.
In addition, the thesis of autocracy as necessary shortcut to progress also fell into disrepute; the abysmal performance of the African version of patrimonial autocracy bore telling witness to the shortcomings of authoritarianism. Democratization was more than a distant ideal; political liberalization was crucial remedy for state decline. Almost overnight, at the beginning of the 1990s, at least ostensible democratic transitions swept the continent. The democratic wave began to recede a few years later, and many liberalized experiments lapsed into semidemocracy (or semiauthoritarianism); however, the constitutional democratic regime remained at least nominally the continental norm. In the international realm, the formal appearance of democratic institutions became the coin of respectability.
THE LIBERAL POLITY AS NORMATIVE STATE
The dominant state model after the crisis decade thus became the liberal democratic state based on a market economy. Neoliberal economic doctrines remained contested, but the political aspects of the model were much less debated. Indeed, the African commitment to the electoral component of the normative state became codified in the charter of pan-African institutions; the African Union (AU) and its regional counterparts deny recognition and participation to those seizing power by extraconstitutional means. Their active engagement in the political impasses created by such acts in Kenya (2007), Comoros (2008), Niger and Madagascar (2009), and Ivory Coast (2010) attest to this commitment.
In the external side, there was further evolution in the content of the Washington Consensus. Its stipulations became more flexible and reflected greater sensitivity to the political requirements of effective economic reform. A 2008 World Bank report characterizes the doctrine as diagnostic rather than prescriptive; its core elements are described as achieving “reasonably good” governance, maintaining macroeconomic stability, stimulating saving and investment, and providing market-oriented incentives.88 Transparency and accountability are also mentioned as essential traits of effective governance.
The remaking of the African polity along the contours of the normative liberal state required wrenching adjustments. Credible commitments to the protection of property rights were indispensable but had received short shrift from the integral state. Anne Pitcher found that thirty-eight of the forty-eight current sub-Saharan constitutions, nearly all revised or rewritten after 1990, contained important new provisions offering property guarantees.89 The terms of engagement with the globalizing economy also required crucial institutional changes to facilitate investment. Indigenous cap
ital, of slender consequence during the first developmental state phase and deeply suspect under the integral state, now merited nurture. Privatization of at least the potentially viable portion of the sprawling parastatal sector was a necessity but strewn with hazards: clientelistic allocation of assets to political cronies, inappropriate pricing, disgruntled state employees facing layoff.90
The wide range of outcomes in the third cycle of African state evolution has been underlined in chapter 1. The state crisis years left a number of countries with badly depleted capacities for effectively managing liberalization. Chad, Central African Republic, and Liberia are cases in point. Rentier states with high oil revenues (Angola, Nigeria, Algeria, Libya) had little incentive to vigorously pursue liberalization. A few (Guinea, Guinea-Bissau) were vulnerable to penetration by criminal narcotics combines. Some were so permeated by predatory and neopatrimonial practices by the political class that nominal liberalizing commitment was overwhelmed by everyday practice. A 2005 UN Development Program (UNDP) report on Arab country governance acidly characterized the Arab state as a black hole “which converts its surrounding social environment into a setting in which nothing moves and from which nothing escapes,” a colorful judgment perhaps a shade too harsh.91 On the other hand, Pitcher makes a compelling case that Mozambique managed its transition from Afromarxism to the liberal state with impressive skill. The varying political trajectories in the neoliberal era are examined in more detail in chapter 6.
New economic ideological currents may well emerge from the procrustean bed of populism, following the deep 2008–10 global crisis that originated in the heartland of neoliberalism, the Anglo-American world. British prime minister Gordon Brown announced the death of the Washington Consensus in the April 2009 G20 summit. The requiem may be premature, but the theses of market fundamentalism were damaged. The major Chinese engagement with Africa is another new factor challenging the supremacy of the liberal democratic state as normative model. Another moment of transition in state forms may emerge.
CONCEPTUAL DEBATES
Having sketched my own perspectives on conceptualization of the state and its evolving normative models, I now turn to exploration of the theoretical debates surrounding the postcolonial state. Recently these have centered above all on variants on the neopatrimonial theme. A second main focus concerns the issues surrounding state decline, weakness, and failure. These are central themes in the chapters that follow. However, the first accounts of the post-colonial state focused on its most visible Africanized institution, the political party; bureaucracies still had many Europeans in key posts, and rulers spoke through the parties they led.
Party and State
At the hour of independence, leading Africanists perceived African destiny as bound up in parties, as the sole agency that could lead nation-building, “the primary preoccupation of the leadership of new states” as well as of analysts.92 But the metamorphosis of political parties from organizational weapon in mobilizing social energies in anticolonial action to instrument of domination on behalf of the independence leadership fundamentally altered their relationship with state and society. The absorption of the dominant parties into the fabric of rule produced party-states in which a rapidly Africanizing bureaucracy and political machinery at the service of the ruler tended to fuse. The sharp distinction drawn in initial postcolonial analysis between “revolutionary-centralizing” and “pragmatic patron” parties lost much of its meaning. The rhetorical engagement with “revolutionary transformation” and pan-Africanism of the once-mass parties lost much of its luster, particularly when some of its most compelling spokesmen, such as Kwame Nkrumah, Ben Bella, and Modibo Keita, were unseated by military coups. Tanzania is a partial exception; President Julius Nyerere even left office for several months after independence to devote himself entirely to the building of his party (and did so again in 1985), and its ideological discourse plunged deep and unusually durable roots. More broadly, the radical mobilizing movement heritage of the decolonization moment migrated to the liberation movements of the Portuguese territories and southern Africa, where its revolutionary discourse continued to inspire.93
Neopatrimonialism
But the bridge between party-centered analysis and neopatrimonial concepts lay in the role parties came to play as channels of access to state favor: they were essentially political machines of the Chicago type. “The machine,” Aristide Zolberg wrote four decades ago, “maintains solidarity among its members by appealing to their self-interest, while allowing for the play of factions."94 Managing the expectations generated by the promises of decolonization was an immediate challenge for the new states. During much of the 1960s, relatively favorable fiscal conditions and new external aid flows adding to the continuing assistance from the withdrawing powers did permit a substantial expansion in social infrastructure. However, the individual pressures for advancement opportunities weighed heavily; party channels for such requests offered a less rule-bound avenue than the bureaucracy. Employment and contracts were key currency in these linkages; those who commanded local influence or had a clientele to offer enjoyed some advantage.
Rulers of necessity wanted to centralize control over the more important favors at the disposition of the state. In this way, a network of allies in key institutional sectors at the center and distributed through the countryside might be established, rooted in reciprocal advantage. These networks were in constant flux; the ruler needed to create a sense of insecurity in the would-be allies about their relationship. Resources never sufficed to satisfy all claimants. Invariably there were an array of disgruntled influentials pressing for entry or recently ousted from favor. In the 1980s, when in many countries parties were largely eclipsed by “big man” rule, the concept of neopatrimonialism achieved wide currency as the defining property of the African state.95
Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle well capture the essence of the neopatriomonial state: “Relationships of loyalty and dependence pervade a formal political and administrative system, and officials occupy their positions less to perform public service, their ostensible purpose, than to acquire personal wealth and status. Although state functionaries receive an official salary, they also enjoy access to various forms of illicit rents, prebends, and petty corruption, which constitute a sometimes important entitlement of office. The chief executive and his inner circle undermine the effectiveness of the nominally modern state administration by using it for patronage purposes and clientelist practices in order to maintain the political order."96
The immensely influential and complex portrait of the African state sketched by Jean-François Bayart, although avoiding the neopatrimonial terminology, adds a compelling metaphor in its characterization of the polity as a “rhizome state,” through which networks of reciprocity based on family, ethnicity, locality, religion, or other affinity operate both vertically and horizontally to connect the formal institutions and their presidential summit with the social base. Resource leakage from the state is an essential dimension. Official monopolies of formal media notwithstanding, the flow of social communication along these channels is intense.97
Although the the notion of state as mere shell for neopatrimonial politics has force, especially in relation to the 1970s and 1980s, it goes too far in erasing the state's formal structures. The caveat of Médard is pertinent here: “In neo-patrimonial societies, although the state is a façade compared to what it pretends to be, it is not only façade, for it is able to extract and distribute resources. For legitimation it refers to public norms and universal ideologies."98 Alongside neopatrimonial practice there continued to exist segments of the state that operated according to formal administrative norms that are the very heart of the state. Ministries of finance and central banks in particular not only tended to concentrate many of the ablest talents within the bureaucracy but also were subject to the external scrutiny of international financial institutions and the external donor community. Nicolas van de Walle in his seminal critique of African state
economic performance notes that “the central bank and key economic ministries can be run with great efficiency even as social ministries are allowed to fall prey to extensive patronage."99 The massive monograph on the Bank of Uganda by Ugandan historian Phares Mutibwa refutes any supposition that this central bank functioned only by neopatrimonial logic.100 The debt crisis overwhelming Africa by the late 1970s could never have occurred had external lenders believed that the polity was incapable of rational action, even if widespread venality was well understood.
The top echelon of bureaucrats often had absorbed the culture of administrative probity in the centers of advanced training in Africa or abroad; the portrait by David Leonard of a number of senior Kenyan public servants offers compelling evidence of bureaucratic competence and dedication.101 Thus the permeation of state operation by clientelism and corruption did not always expunge alternative norms, even if many yielded at times to pressures from above, gave priority to their own kin obligations, or acted on immediate incentives to monetize their office. Higher education was another domain where professional norms and the distinctive culture of the university in many instances persisted in the face of a demoralizing environment, resulting in deteriorating material conditions for the professoriate and political pressure to alter academic outcomes.102 The complexity of legal process likewise renders the judiciary a sphere in which a premise of neopatrimonialism is inadequate. The judiciary is subject to political intervention and to corruption; the Kenyan aphorism “Why pay a lawyer when you can buy a judge” expresses the widespread lack of public confidence in the integrity of the judiciary. Yet legal norms have stubborn resilience in a sometimes hostile environment; Jennifer Widner in her moving biography of Tanzanian jurist Francis Nyalali provides a compelling example.103 Peter VonDoepp and Tamir Mustafa offer additional evidence of the partial autonomy of judiciaries and their dedication to legal norms.104
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