Nor is acknowledgment of a regime concept sufficient. The potent trend to personalize authority that set in soon after independence introduced yet another dimension: the ruler's imperative. The annals of personal rule make even clearer the possible, even likely, contradiction between reason of state and the calculus of a president. Neopatrimonialism precisely embodies this conflict: the diversion of public resources to lubrication of prebendal networks directly subtracts from the material capacity of the state to meet its own operative imperatives. The powerful disposition of incumbents—undimmed by the democratic openings of the 1990s—to seek to remain in office indefinitely, known as the Robert Mugabe syndrome, was in the long run almost always destructive of the reproductive health of the state.
Regimes
I understand “regime” to refer to a given set of rules of the game that structure political authority and process and define the claim to legitimacy.126 When political systems remain stable over extended periods, the difference between state and regime dissolves. But in Africa, regime change began almost immediately after independence, and so the change in ground rules, the configuration of power, and the ideological claims legitimating its exercise are crucial. Only in Botswana, Mauritius, Swaziland, and arguably Morocco has regime type been permanent throughout the postcolonial era.
Until 1990, successions of heads of state via established constitutional process were rare: examples include Somalia in 1967, Botswana in 1980, Mauritius in 1982, and Senegal in 1980. (Apartheid South Africa did have successions, but its exclusionary racial order denying participation to the African 85% of the population places it outside the roster of decolonized African states.) In a couple of instances, military regimes permitted a transition to democratically elected regimes (Ghana in 1969 and 1979, Nigeria in 1979, Benin in 1964 and 1972, Burkina Faso in 1970 and 1977) or were compelled by popular uprisings to do so (Sudan in 1965 and 1985), but these successions were in all cases very short lived. Thus a ruler was most frequently displaced through military intervention, inevitably resulting in a change of regime, as those seizing power normally changed the rules of the game in several respects. Often new constitutions were introduced, validated by plebiscites that gave the appearance of legitimacy. Ideological discourse was recast, which permitted the new regime to discred the old one and to issue promises of a new dawn for a disillusioned citizenry. The informal structures of power altered because a new ruler constructed a clientele network whose personal loyalty was rewarded with high office or other governmental favor. When new rulers had different regional provenance, ethnic balances shifted. Regime change thus frequently reordered the political landscape.
Partly for this reason, regimes gave first priority to their own preservation and reproduction. The calculated pursuit of regime self-perpetuation could well conflict with reason of state. The need for resources for neopatrimonial distribution deprived the state of the means to fulfill its normal functions. The urgent quest for entry legitimacy on the part of a new regime of illicit origin gives it incentive to expose, even magnify, the nefarious practices and corrupt habits of the ousted leaders and to claim that a new order is being created; with repetition, the catalogue of denunciation corrodes the credibility of the state itself. Armed forces, before 1990 by far the most frequent launching pads for power seizure, required restructuring to ensure the personal loyalty of inner command circles. Regimes thus normally apply what Cynthia Enloe terms an ethnic security map; regions with communal attachments to the ruler are favored recruitment grounds, while those perceived as opposition strongholds are carefully scrutinized, especially individuals in those areas in the senior officer ranks.127 The inner security core is likely to have more immediate kinship ties to or related personal affinity with the ruler. The visible application of an ethnic security map carries costs to the morale and competence of the armed forces and breeds disaffection in disfavored regions. Thus regime preservation tactics may over time undermine long-term state security imperatives.
Analysis of regime in Africa has most frequently been framed in terms of typologies. Initially, party system was the primary basis of regime classification. With the swift ascendance of single-party systems, apparent distinctions between them in organization and ambition became the prime diffentiator (pragmatic-pluralist versus revolutionary-centralizing, for example;)128. Ruth Collier turns to colonial origin and regime durability as key categorizations in Regimes in Tropical Africa. During the ideologically intense 1970s, I suggested regime developmental doctrine as the primary classification basis in Ideology and Development, sorting countries into Afromarxist, populist socialist, and African capitalist. John W. Harbeson, Donald Rothchild, and Naomi Chazan propose a more elaborate typology incorporating more than three decades of postcolonial state experience that categorizes by mode of political operation; their tabulation includes administrative-hegemonic, pluralist, party-mobilizing, party-centralist, personal-coercive, populist, and regime breakdown entries.129
Rulers
The final conceptual category inviting brief inspection is ruler. From the earliest postcolonial moments the central role of the political leader became apparent. Heroes of the independence movement, the first generation of rulers in many cases wore the mantle of charisma: winning popular adulation through their flamboyant and often courageous challenge to the colonizer. Kwame Nkrumah, Léopold Senghor, Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda, Félix Houphouët Boigny, Patrice Lubumba, Habib Bourguiba are all luminous personalities, who embodied in their leadership the theatrics of triumphant anticolonial struggle. Once cast in the ruler role, a subtle metamorphosis took hold, with power consolidation and reproduction supplanting mobilization and struggle. In pursuit of the ruler's imperative, leaders sought to concentrate authority in the presidency; this might be termed “presidential monarchy,” to borrow the phrase of Clement Moore, writing of Tunisia.130 Security services began to whisper of conspiracies taking form, reinforcing tendencies to preempt opposition by denying them sites of challenge. Analysts began to notice that the theoretically parliamentary regimes of decolonization soon exhibited what were initially termed “presidentialist” tendencies, referencing their institutional dimension. As the formal institutions of representative democracy gave way to single-party dominance, restraints on aggregation of personal power shriveled. The exercise of power became increasingly personalized as clientelist networks that evoked the concept of neopatrimonialism began to emerge; Juan Linz and H. E. Chalabi, borrowing another Weberian concept, take the notion one step further in suggesting as conceptual tag “sultanistic” regimes.131
Rulership accordingly became far less defined by the formal legal powers enshrined in a constitution than by the skillful deployment of personal ties of clientelism. The “big man” model of politics came into view; the leader as supreme political entrepreneur engineered channels of diverted state flow to reward the loyal and punish the deviant while deploying the coercive apparatus of the state to intimidate and repress.132 Thus the ruler's imperative cast the leader in a paradoxical role as both state builder and state destroyer. With uncertain legitimacy, the ruler was driven to weaken the state by diverting its resources and corroding its integrity. At the same time, the apparatus of the state was indispensable to ruler survival; thus state-building projects continuously reappear.
Kinship terminology was frequently evoked to convey the personalized nature of the leader role: father of the nation, provider to the following.133 Wealth was indispensable to fulfilling the expectations of ruler as benefactor; official tours were normally the occasion for distribution of “gifts” to the populace—a school or some other facility or a more immediate means of consumption. Such outlays required resources outside normal budgetary process, inevitably originating in the rents of power. King Hassan II of Morocco and Houpouët-Boigny of Ivory Coast created costly gargantuan religious palaces (the Casablanca mosque and Yamoussoukro cathedral) that were portrayed as their personal gifts to a grateful nation. The strategic use of the resource
s at the individual disposition of the ruler was an art form. As Howard Wriggins writes, “The unknowns are so numerous that a ruler's choice of one course as against another depends in substantial part upon his own inner dispositions and his own conceptions of the reality with which he deals."134
The first generation of rulers began with the party machinery of decolonization, political mobilization and electoral organization, and the reasonably functioning bureaucracies bequeathed by the colonial state. Over the course of the first independence decades, the bureaucracies often lost some of their administrative edge, bloated by rapid recruitment, bypassed by patrimonial transactions, demoralized in a number of countries by relative loss of wage value owing to inflation. As parties transformed into instruments of regime and ruler authority, they lost much of their institutional capacity as well. With the wave of military overthrows of the decolonization regimes, especially beginning in 1965, new military rulers had to improvise mechanisms of rule and legitimation. Given the illegitimacy of their ascent to power, the personal character of rule perforce assumed greater importance. Carl Rosberg and Robert Jackson have developed an influential model of personal rule as a political system. They write that “a personal political system is not structured by impersonal rules that exist to uphold some conception of the public interest or the common good. Personal rule is a system of relations linking rulers not with the ‘public’ or even with the ruled (at least not directly), but with patrons, associates, clients, supporters, and rivals, who constitute the ‘system.’ If personal rulers are restrained, it is by the limits of their personal authority and power and by the authority and power of patrons, associates, clients, supporters, and—of course—rivals."135
The primacy of personal rule established in most countries by the late 1960s exposed the state in extreme cases to great perils. During the 1970s, in three countries singularly tyrannical rulers came to power and inflicted lasting damage on their states: Francisco Macias Nguema in Equatorial Guinea, Jean-Bedel Bokassa in Central African Republic, and Idi Amin in Uganda. All three utterly lacked credentials for rulership, and their resulting paranoia led to them to engage in ever more extreme acts of atrocity to instill fear in the populace. In Equatorial Guinea, Nguema instituted a reign of terror within months of independence, ordering the murder of nearly half the pre-independence cabinet, two-thirds of the National Assembly, and many senior civil servants; the majority of the population had fled the country by the time of his 1979 overthrow. The lethal character of Amin's rule took longer to emerge but gathered force in his later years; his disastrous rule drove many skilled elites into exile and decimated state institutions. Bokassa was less murderous but more megalomaniacal; his regime became a theater of the absurd. His self-coronation as “emperor” in a lavish 1976 ceremony cost $30 million, a third of government annual revenue at the time.136
This African nightmare ended in 1979, when all three were overthrown: Nguema by his trusted nephew Teodoro Obiang Nguema (who remained in power three decades later) assisted by the Moroccan military, Bokassa by French military intervention, and Amin by the Tanzanian army. The younger Nguema, after relying on Moroccan troops to perform the execution of his ousted uncle that no Equatorial Guinean dared carry out, established a more conventional form of personal rule, venal and inept.137 The discovery of offshore petroleum in the 1990s and rapid rise of Equatorial Guinea to third largest sub-Saharan oil producer placed a gusher of revenue in the hands of the ruler and his inner circle of fellow clansmen (the clan of Mongoma), whose regime is widely regarded as one of Africa's most corrupt. Central African Republic has remained unstable and conflict-prone ever since the Bokassa ouster; only Uganda recovered after several painful years of interregnum and civil war, restoring something resembling a functioning developmental state by the 1990s.138 Though personal rule remains a component of African political practice, no further instances of such grotesque tyranny have appeared.
Another contradiction between reason of state and a ruler's imperative lies in the capacity of a single person to make economic choices exposing the polity to high risk. An important element in the debt crisis that emerged in the 1970s was the number of large development projects, financed by external debt, that were promoted by external contractors and interested consulting firms and abetted by their respective embassies. The seeming attractiveness of these ventures to the ruler was enhanced by the high rents he and his inner clique might collect on the contracts. A prime example was the Inga-Shaba $2 billion dam and eighteen-hundred-kilometer-long direct current power line to Katanga launched in 1972 in Mobutu's Congo-Kinshasa, which is examined in chapter 5; such projects were subject to huge cost overruns and long delays in completion. The external partners and Mobutu made their profit on the transaction; the state and citizenry bore the risks and heavy costs. Such ventures were a prime trigger of the debt crisis emerging in the later 1970s, sending the country into a downward spiral from which the economy has never recovered.139
The disposition of incumbent rulers to perpetuate their hold on power, unless constrained by the rules of the game, is a near universal axiom of politics; monarchy was the primary model for the early state. An equally strong axiom is that regular succession of leaders is crucial to the health of the state. Here as well we encounter the conflicts between ruler interest and state logic. By the 1970s life presidencies came into view in Africa, as a number of rulers made clear their intent to cling to power indefinitely, and constitutional or other political mechanisms for circulation of elites vanished with the consolidation of single parties or military regimes. The operation of neopatrimonial rule, along with repressive autocracy, rendered rulers over time increasingly vulnerable to charges of corruption or atrocity. With few exceptions, before 1990, death, exile, or prison were the only exits from top office for nearly all heads of state. Those personal rulers who chose retirement in safety, even retaining a measure of public respect and affection, were rare: Senghor (1980) and Nyerere (1985) are the main examples.
CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS
By way of conclusion, I offer a few reflections on the vital need for a performing state. In a recent collaborative edited volume, drawing together the contributions of specialists from Africa and the former Soviet Union as well as North American scholars, Mark Beisinger and I conclude:
The crises of the state in postcolonial Africa and post-Soviet Eurasia are a crisis of stateness itself. They revolve around the capacity of public institutions to rule effectively, to create security within their orbit of territorial sovereignty, to generate legitimacy for their operation, to assure a revenue base adequate for their functioning, and to supply the conditions for a prospering economy and welfare of citizenry. . . .
In the long term, the question that will haunt most of Africa and Eurasia is not whether unreformed autocracies will be forced to initiate change or even whether collapsed states can be pieced back together into weak but intact varieties through skillful statecraft. Rather, it is whether the transitions from state weakness to state effectiveness, from semi-democracy to genuine democracy, and from protracted economic decline to sustained economic growth can be made.140
In a thoughtful historical and comparative exegesis of the longue durée processes of state-building, Matthew Lange, Dietrich Rueschmeyer, and their collaborators stress not only the indispensable role of an efficacious state, capable of acting in a coherent, corporate way, but the extended time horizon required to achieve such a state. Competent institutions, a supportive normative culture, the coordination of many different actors, the resolution of conflicts, and the overcoming of stalemates are necessary components of a performing developmental state, which can consolidate only gradually.141 In its 1997 annual development report, the World Bank identified state reconstruction as the central challenge to African development.142
I remain persuaded of the thesis that there is no path to a better life for African societies that does not pass through the efficacious state. The somewhat improved economic growth rates
for African states overall since 2000 reflects in part better governance for a significant number. Trajectories of decline can be reversed by political and economic reforms; Ghana and Uganda since the 1980s and Liberia since 2007 are striking cases. But state restoration after protracted decline is no simple matter; the continuing dysfunction of the Congo-Kinshasa state is eloquent illustration. Neopatrimonial rule over extended time frames deeply embeds corrupt practice in the behavior of the political elite, who come to assume impunity. In addition to Congo, Nigeria, Kenya, and Cameroon are leading examples—not failed states but, in the apt phrase of John Campbell, “dancing on the brink” of the precipice.143
In my reading, some form of synthesis between three essential ingredients of viable and sustainable stateness needs to occur. The universal norms of an idealized vision of an effective state, which derive from an evolving composite model drawn from the most widely admired and best performing polities of the age, are one point of reference. Its elements include universally recognized human rights, constitutional democratic rule, and a liberal economy. This normative state, however, cannot simply be imported. Rather its institutional forms and political operation need rooting in the cultural heritage of a given society to be legible to the citizenry. Finally, the lived experience of a given polity enters the picture. History cannot be erased; societal memory, even its negative and painful dimensions, supplies instructive lessons in statecraft.
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