The internal security organs are another sphere where efficient operation persists even in states otherwise in disarray. Michael Schatzberg in his monograph on Mobutu's Congo quotes the judgment of sometime regime potentate Nguza Karl-i-Bond: “If there is one thing working very well in [Congo] it is the security police.” Schatzberg validates this assertion; the security agency, he concludes, effectively gathers and relates information, as well as intimidates the populace. “In performing its tasks so well, it stands out as a beacon of efficiency in a sea of disorganization and mismanagement."105 Yet neopatrimonial logic intrudes as well; a competent security agency was a danger as well as an asset. Its control was assured by leadership bound to Mobutu by ethnic ties, and its personnel were disproportionately recruited from his region. The Congo-Kinshasa case illustrates a general phenomenon.
There were other ways in which neopatrimonial realities coexisted with public performance of state norms. Successive regimes compulsively drafted new constitutions to conform to universal standards. National elections regularly were scheduled since 1990 in almost all polities; Swaziland and Libya were rare exceptions. Even in the authoritarian era, competition within the ruling party was sometimes permitted. In countries such as Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Malawi, Congo-Kinshasa, Sierra Leone, and Ivory Coast, competing candidates could stand under the banner of the single party in individual constituencies; invariably, a large proportion of incumbents were ousted.106 Considerable resources were invested in these rites of legitimation; citizen participation was often astonishingly high for presidential balloting that was merely plebiscitary in nature. External presentability weighed on African states, especially by the 1980s as the continent labored under an increasingly negative external image. All the more necessary were regular performances of stateness through enactment of the rituals universally associated with the contemporary liberal polity.
The Hybrid State
The postcolonial state was thus a hybrid creature, and its hybridity took three forms. First, combined within its frame were residues of the colonial state joined to practices of ruling group management of power that drew on customary repertoires. Schatzberg perceptively sketches the cultural dimension of rulership in what he terms the “moral matrix” of state legitimacy: the ruler was a father figure who had parental obligations to nurture and discipline, and power was like “eating"—the president functioned as consumer-in-chief but the populace and bureaucracy were entitled to feeding.107
In a second form of hybridization, neopatrimonial practice permeated the political realm, engaging in a predatory extraction of public resources and severely compromising state capacity to function according to normative state precepts. Yet segments of the state do operate following the dictates of Weberian statecraft. The state as public spectacle does perform many of the rites of a civic collectivity, exhibiting a partially and sporadically operative legal order, but parallel structures of reward and punishment function in purely arbitrary fashion.
Though differently inflected forms of neopatrimonialism hybridized with varying degrees of stateness, the proportions varied across time and space. Some time elapsed after independence before new practices of power management took shape; thus monographs from the 1960s do not employ the patrimonial concept. In cases such as Kenya or Ivory Coast, neopatrimonialism became extensive only in the 1980s; until then the common perception of effective governance and impressive developmental performance was well grounded. In Senegal, the pattern was visible earlier, emerging in the tradition of clan politics, but neopatrimonialism never entirely encroached on the state domain. In long-stable polities such as Tanzania, the neopatrimonial dimension was likewise subdued. In some other cases—by the 1980s, in both Congos, Sierra Leone, Central African Republic, for example—neopatrimonialism all but swallowed the state. In a few well-governed polities—Botswana, Cape Verde, Mauritius—neopatrimonialism was virtually absent and can all but be set aside as analytical instrument.
The third version of the hybrid state privileges the blend of democratic norms ostensibly embraced by the state and the reality of a range of authoritarian practices that limit their scope. The emergence by the mid-1990s of the notion of “semidemocracy” or “semiauthoritarianism” as common descriptors reflects this emerging pattern and by 2010 could be said to describe political practice in a majority of African states. Aili Mari Tripp makes deft use of this version of the hybrid state concept to frame her analysis of the Museveni regime.108
Even though in most countries a clearly dominant party exists, the opportunity for open electoral competition significantly alters the rules of the game. Staffan Lindberg persuasively argues that repeated competitive elections “foster liberalization and have a self-reinforcing power” and “facilitate the institutional deepening of actual civil liberties,” even with a dominant party.109 Multiparty regimes also enhance the importance of representative institutions. In a comparative study of African legislatures, Joel Barkan shows that overall they are “more powerful and autonomous today than at any time since independence,” even though only about a dozen have become major players and effective centers of countervailing power to the executive.110
State Weakness
A somewhat different approach to grasping developmental disappointments insists on the weakness of the state. With the dissolution of the Somali state in 1991 and a wave of civil wars that all ravaged states in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Congo-Kinshasa, and Angola, the possibility of state collapse entered the register of outcomes, and the notion of “state failure” entered analytical vocabulary. Even if only a few states collapsed, few would dispute that many if not most African states remain in weakened condition. There are a number of clear exceptions, especially on the northern and southern edges of the continent: the Mediterranean tier of Arab states, South Africa, Namibia, Botswana. Most would view Rwanda and Eritrea as strong states. But varying degrees of weakness characterize most others, a product of severely limited domestic revenue sources and the corrosive legacy of patrimonial autocracy.
Some influential works trace governmental weakness to the colonial state. Though I offer a contrary view in my African colonial state volume, there is some merit in the arguments advanced. Frederick Cooper suggests the contemporary state is best understood as a gatekeeper, whose colonial predecessors had “weak instruments for entering into the social and cultural realm over which they presided, but stood astride the intersection of the colonial territory and the outside world.” The postcolonial successor lacked the ability of the colonial state to summon force from the metropole if needed (with the exception of a handful of French intimates in the Françafrique zone); its operation depended on “collecting and distributing resources from the gate itself,” notably export-import taxes and foreign aid.111 The gatekeeper metaphor resembles Robert Jackson's argument that the African state is primarily constituted by its external sovereignty, kept afloat by international recognition rather than the capacity to govern its territory.112 Jeffrey Herbst takes the weak state argument further, claiming that it began with a colonial apparatus of limited ambitions, a thin presence on the ground, and slender fiscal capacities. Beyond these legacy limitations, the postcolonial successor faced difficult political geographies and relatively dispersed populations, making full administrative occupation of the terrain difficult. Further, the state-building impetus so central to European states, wars, and external security threats was largely absent.113 The suggestion that more frequent and violent interstate conflict in Africa would have stimulated more effective states in the face of the other factors corroding African states is open to doubt, and I differ with Herbst on the weakness of the colonial state; his other arguments, however, are persuasive.
Another major theme in arguments propounding state weakness is a perceived incapacity to penetrate and control rural society. Goran Hyden advances the most comprehensive explanation in suggesting that an “uncaptured peasantry” lay at the heart of developmental failures. Neither state nor market had incorporate
d rural producers in a nationally oriented nexus of exchange. The “economy of affection” based on the social reciprocities of the local community insulated the peasantry from the penetrative projects of the state. Whether all rural populations so effectively eluded the embrace of the state as those of Tanzania on which the theory was erected might be debated. But undoubtedly the process of state decline in most areas by the 1980s weakened the governmental hold on the countryside and drove more of the production into an informal economy.114
A related avenue to grasping state limits and limitations is through focus on societal linkages. The autonomy imperative can never be fully realized; the state is necessarily a part of society, incorporates its cleavages, and is partly shaped by it. In the words of Joel Migdal, Atul Kohli, and Vivienne Shue, “States may help mold, but are also continuously molded by society.” A state's effectiveness in turn is a function of the varied forms in which state-society relations are interwoven.115 Catherine Boone ably demonstrates the varying capacities of rural areas to resist the hegemonic and extractive drives of the state apparatus depending on the strength of local notables and communal structures.116
A parallel argument points to the relative weakness or absence of an African capitalist class necessary both for state and market. As Richard Sand-brook argues, “Increasing state power and capitalist expansion have long been intimately linked."117 The need for property protection and nationally integrated markets ties bourgeois interests to state construction. But the emergence of an African capitalist class was blocked in colonial times by imperial economic interests, European settlers, and immigrant mercantiles from South Asia and the Mediterranean. Even when this blockage eroded after independence, social mobility for the first postcolonial generation was sought through public sector employment. The state itself became the primary instrument of African class formation; the initial ascendant category was an essentially bureaucratic bourgoisie. The road to wealth was through political power or access to state favor.
Though in a few countries (notably Kenya, Ivory Coast, and Nigeria) post-independence state ideologies permitted the growth of African capitalism, the more common pattern was hostility to the emergence of an African business class. The long dalliance with socialist orientation in many countries generated a perception that the African private bourgeoisie was a political threat. Preventing its emergence proved well within the capabilities of many states, and at the same time a parasitic neopatrimonial accumulation through diversion of public resources or use of state power to acquire private property achieved growing momentum. In the pungent phrase of John Iliffe, “African governments have shown that they can prevent capitalism; they have not yet shown that they can replace it with anything else that will release their people's energies."118 However, a substantial but often crony African capitalist class has emerged in recent years. Much of it owes its prosperity to privileged access to state favor: contracts, rigged sales of former parastatals, credit from state-owned or influenced banks.
In a carefully constructed quantitative analysis, Pierre Englebert locates African state decline in a deep deficit of legitimacy. This originates in the exogenous origins of the state and is intensified by poor economic performance. Although he recognizes a large range of variation in developmental outcome, his analysis shows a strong correlation between positive economic management and legitimacy. What might be debated is whether the legitimacy deficit was a causal factor or mainly a consequence of developmental failings.119
For a large part of the African intelligentsia, state weakness is indissolubly related to external imposition of SAPs. Its sovereignty diluted by international conditionalities tied to financial advances, the state is stripped of its legitimacy-building capacities. In the eloquent phrasing of Achille Mbembe, “Almost everywhere, the state has lost much of that capacity to regulate and arbitrate that enabled it to construct its legitimacy. It no longer has the financial means, administrative power, and, in general, the sorts of ‘goods’ that would have enabled it to resolve politically the conflicts that have erupted in the public domain and led, almost universally, to violence previously containable within more or less tolerable limits."120
Beyond dispute is the political liability, especially in the urban sectors, of the elimination of price subsidies for basic commodities such as fuel and grain and enforced reductions in government payrolls. Mbembe's observation makes clear why economic reform programs were often reluctantly, half-heartedly, and incompletely adopted by a number of African states. Left unanswered is the matter of how to resolve the fiscal crisis of the state, which is what compelled African states to reluctantly appeal to international financial institutions in the first place. Monetary ruin was the likely alternative for most in the 1980s. A less apocalyptic reading would concede that a number of states found ways to navigate structural adjustment, with beneficial results for government capacity and effectiveness in recent years.121
Near the outer limits of state weakness and neopatrimonial analysis lies the thesis of Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz, reducing the political process to the instrumentalization of violence and disorder.122 In this reading, states are ineffectual not only because of institutional deficiencies but also above all because political elites are mere predatory agents, employing the façade of a government to control and divert resource flows. Deeply personal political relations lie at the heart of seeming formal structures, producing an informalization of governmental action. With disorder a prime resource, political agents have little incentive to nurture institutionalization. Though their volume contains much penetrating observation and reasonably describes Congo-Kinshasa of the 1990s or Nigeria under Sani Abacha from 1994 to 1998, its dismissal of the hybridity of most states goes too far, as I have suggested. Were their analysis as broadly applicable to sub-Saharan Africa as they claim, meaningful development would be unattainable. Yet in the last two decades improved state performance in a number of polities suggests a less pessimistic perspective.
At its farthest extreme—well illustrated by Sierra Leone and Liberia in the 1990s—is what William Reno terms a shadow state. The ruler seeks direct personal control over the rents generated by key productive activity, especially minerals such as diamonds, that normally fund state activity. In return, he endeavors to redeploy these resources exclusively through neopatrimonial channels. To preempt “free riders” who might benefit from state outlays without providing personal loyalty and deference in return, shadow state rulers have an incentive to undermine if not destroy the formal channels of government action. The Reno model, originally based on his compelling exegisis of the political economy of the informalized Sierra Leone diamond trade, helps trace the ultimate logic of unbridled prebendalism, though neopatrimonialism in most instances stops short of the shadow state model.123
State Failure
Africa since the 1990s offers several examples of outright state collapse and failure, at least for a time (Somalia, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Congo-Kinshasa, Comoros, and arguably Uganda and Chad earlier). In these instances, a regime able to assert authority across most of the territory ceases to function. What remains of a center no longer controls regional agents. Violence and security are privatized, with warlords emerging controlling local militias, in effect operating protection rackets. Exportable high value resources come under the control of mafia networks; external trade enters the informal sector. A residual state apparatus lacks resources and capacity to maintain public services, which survive if at all on de facto privatization.124
Even failed states are capable of revival. Of the examples listed, only Somalia remained in totally collapsed status for more than a decade. Partly this revivalism reflects the preservative instincts of the international community; in 2010 no less than one hundred thousand UN troops served in various African peacekeeping missions. Unlike a bankrupt corporation, whose assets are subject to liquidation, the failed state continues to exist in international law. The international system abhors a vacuum, particularly in the age of t
errorism; thus active external nurture soon sets in to restore some form of state. In Liberia, Sierra Leone, Congo-Kinshasa, and Burundi sustained external diplomacy, backed by UN peacekeeping forces, played an indispensable role in restoring a government with generally acknowledged legitimacy. In Comoros, a direct AUmilitary intervention in 2008 restored a more feeble regime threatened by the attempted secession of one of its three main islands.125
REGIME AND RULER
Finally, the search for conceptual capture of the African state must grapple with its instability. Frequent power seizures by the security forces or fragments within them, as well as the periodic transitions to restored constitutional order, meant a regular reordering of the basic rules of the game, geographic balances, and dominant coalitions: in other words, regime change. Although the state remained, its nature might alter, even fundamentally. The logic of reproduction of the state as an enduring entity might well conflict with the exigencies of regime survival. Practices that might enhance a given regime—ambitious nationalizations, the reshaping of regional balances, heavy borrowing, patronage practices—could undermine the state over time. Perforce the hunt for the state must accommodate the subsidiary notion of regime.
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