In Ghana and Nigeria, where democratic attachments were not easily stamped out, military rulers sought interim legitimation in the claim that they were in the process of organizing a new elected civilian regime through extended constitutional preparation and broad civil society consultation. In both countries during the 1970s, the military pushed hard to win public assent to a permanent institutionalized role for the military in governance. In Ghana, this took the form of a civil-military diarchy, labeled UNIGOV. Such a scheme never gained tractio, and gave way in 1979 to one of the few honestly conducted if temporary democratic restorations during the era of autocracy.
In Nigeria in the early 1970s, top military officers were sent on speaking tours around the country to promote the notion of army rule as the most suitable form of energetic developmental rule in African conditions. Future president Olusegun Obasanjo in one such sermon in 1972 summarized this brief for military leadership: “[The soldier is] no longer regarded merely as a guntoting robot. It is his lot to create a world community devoted to stability and socio-economic progress. . . . [Africa should recognize] his role as a nation-builder, his commitment to modernization.43
I recollect attending such a lecture by one Brigadier Rotimi, a respected officer, at the University of Ibadan in January 1972. Rotimi drew extensively on the academic literature of the day celebrating the role of the military in political development. The hostile reaction of the student audience mirrored the reception this message received elsewhere in Nigeria. Both the sheer political complexity of Nigeria and its entrenched political culture of democratic attachment posed an enduring problem for legitimation of military rule, even though the army held power more or less continuously from 1965 till 1999 (there was a brief interlude from 1979 to 1983 in the military’s reign).44 The military response was a permanent claim to transition to civilian rule, through a succession of constitutional committees and preparatory electoral consultations.
Whether the ruler was of civilian or military origin, the mechanisms of partial civilianization of army rule over time blurred the distinction between the original form of single-party systems and their military-led counterpart. Presidents of military provenance tended to assure the security apparatus a somewhat greater role, though in nearly all cases, especially after regime consolidation, civilians mostly occupied ministerial and territorial administrative positions. The Arab tier of countries in northern Africa went furthest in constructing national security or mukhabarat states, which located the security apparatus at the very center of power. Their policing mechanisms were particularly effective in sustaining regimes until the 2011 “Arab spring.” The overriding commonality in all regimes of military provenance was the authoritarian practice of governance. By the 1980s, patrimonial autocracy and life presidencies were firmly established norms, whose consequences I explore in the following chapter.
SUMMATION: THE SIX IMPERATIVES
By way of summation, let us return to the half dozen state imperatives set forth in chapter 2. Hegemony of the new states, through the 1960s, was subject to serious challenge in only three countries: in Nigeria during the civil war, in southern Sudan during the separatist insurgency, and in Congo-Kinshasa, when Katanga seceded in 1960, and during the 1963–65 rebellions. These cases are examined in chapter 7, which covers civil warfare; for the moment we may note that in all three instances central authority prevailed in the form of military action in Nigeria, externally mediated negotiation in Sudan, and decisive intervention by the UN, Belgium, and the United States in Congo-Kinshasa. Independent states in arid and remote areas with small and dispersed pastoral populations that were not economically attractive to the colonizer and subject only to minimal, preemptive administrative control sought without success to extend their effective hegemony; northern Chad, northeastern Uganda, and the Sahara fringes of northern Mali and Niger are examples. But within the zones of effective control in late colonial times, administrative routines continued without serious discontinuity or challenge.
The means by which African countries pursed autonomy altered substantially. The colonial state, by its external nature, enjoyed substantial internal autonomy over the subject populations, who retained a capacity for evasion but little ability to alter policy direction. Anticolonial political mobilization had linked independence movements closely to their supporters, and government agents were far more subject to social pressures, particularly from those with some communal affinity, than their colonial predecessors. The central dynamic this chapter examines consisted of the quest for renewed though differently textured state autonomy. Single-party systems and the autocratic mechanisms deployed by both civilian and military regimes responded to the autonomy imperative. Foreclosure of competitive politics, restoration of arbitrary restrictions and punishments on the unruly, control of the means of communication, central discipline on the parties—these among other measures marginalized civil society.
In its external dimension, the capacity for autonomy quickly proved more circumscribed. The shield formerly provided by the metropolitan power that served as a filter for external influence was gone. Ideological self-assertion and collective protection under the umbrella of the third-world movements and pan-African solidarity served some purpose, but nonalignment offered only limited protection from the active pursuit of clienteles by the great powers, nor was the tactic of playing off West against East a sure guarantee of meaningful autonomy. Countries in the francophone orbit, save Guinea and Mali, were too dependent on France for aid, budgetary support, guarantees for the convertible currency, and security backing to stray far from the chasse gardée of Françafrique. Still, cold war competition was less acute in the 1960s than later, the debt crisis had not yet appeared, and the weakening of state fabric that became so apparent by the later 1970s was not yet visible; thus an appearance of a degree of external autonomy persisted.
The nature of the security imperative altered fundamentally after independence. The withdrawal of the metropolitan security blanket placed small and weak African constabularies in a vulnerable situation. External threats within Africa at this juncture were not the issue, though there were a number of instances of minor border disputes and a pair of major ones between Algeria and Morocco and Ethiopia and Somalia. The last two led to brief wars in the early 1960s, and then to a much larger one in 1977–78 between Ethiopia and Somalia. But the swift commitment to maintaining, even sacralizing, the colonial boundaries was instrumental in usually forestalling any sense of direct external security threat. In southern Africa, later to become a vortex of security dilemmas, South Africa did not yet perceive itself under direct threat, protected by the buffer of white-ruled territories to the north; thus the aggressive destabilization projects that so threatened the security of its neighbors by the 1980s were far in the future for it. Pan-Somali irredentism posed a threat to Kenya, Ethiopia, and Djibouti that was contained by pan-African diplomacy and international hostility to any dismemberment of these states.
The anti-imperialist sentiment common to most African nationalisms instilled, particularly in the more radical states, a sense that external security threats were very real. The Congo crisis was a searing memory for many African states, illustrating their potential vulnerability to powerful world forces; the Katanga secession, deeply wounding a new state, received support from Belgian, British, and French colonial interests, suggesting that imperialist conspiracies were alive and well. Even more dramatically, the Lumumba ouster and subsequent assassination, accomplished with the help of Belgium and the United States, sent a shock wave through Africa. For the more moderate states, the belated efforts by the Soviet Union to provide military supply to Lumumbist forces was also threatening. Though at this juncture in the 1960s only Algeria and Egypt could respond with accelerated purchase of heavy armaments, in most cases a reflex reaction of accelerating Africanization of the officer corps was visible.
But the main thrust of the security imperative was internal, directed at the consolidation of hegemony. The in
herited colonial constabularies were entirely erected with this objective in mind. But one of the happier legacies of the colonial state was a disarmed population. Only in the few cases of protracted armed liberation struggle had there been a significant influx of weaponry, a situation that stands in striking contrast to the proliferation of armaments by the 1990s.
Response to the legitimation imperative initially rested on the achievement of independence and the promises of expanding social amenities of a prosperity to come encapsulated in the classic Nkrumah pledge to make Ghana a paradise in ten years. Much of the legitimation energies were rhetorical: five-year plans, showcase projects, celebrations of the nation, presidential tours. Gradually shrinking was the aura of governmental rectitude produced by respect for constitutional procedures, as the single-party monopoly took form and the zone of autocracy expanded. Though the novelty of independence soon faded as a legitimating stimulant, and many new rulers lost some of their aura, the legitimacy of the state itself was not at issue, save in the secessionist zones of southern Sudan, the Igbo zone of eastern Nigeria, and Eritrea. The wave of military coups from 1965 on were directed at the salvation of the state, a project of relegitimation, not rejection.
The revenue imperative did not at first seem to seriously constrain African states. Chapter 1 explains the extraordinary fiscal boon that coincided with decolonization; the last colonial decade witnessed a historically unique multiplication of revenue flows, created by the price surge for most African commodity exports, and the meaningful influx of metropolitan public capital. Favorable price regimes continued for many African commodities through much of the 1960s before turning unfavorable in the following decade. The withdrawing colonial powers maintained most of their assistance, and new aid funds became available from the Western donor community, often in grant form at first. However, some ominous clouds appeared on the distant horizon.
The dynamic of state expansion that began in the terminal colonial period redoubled its pace. The expanded pace of social amenity provision, the burgeoning ranks of the civil service, the new parastatal venture to foster industrialization, the reinforcement of security forces—urgent necessities and solemn promises—soon began to outrun revenue capacities. Further, the inherited structure of taxation had liabilities. For most states, the majority of state revenue derived from taxes on foreign trade, particularly export taxes. These in turn had a large impact on agricultural commodities and hence rural producers.
At the time, many development specialists and African leaders firmly believed that industrialization was the key economic growth. The “surplus” needed to fund industrialization could only be found through transfers from the agricultural sector. Thus commodity export revenues had to be increased by control of producer sales by state marketing monopolies, a pattern already set in late colonial times and reinforced after independence. Enhancement of state revenue could be accomplished both through the export tax and by fixing the producer price at a level well below the international market value. The farmers were well aware of the effect of these levies on their incomes, and they were a key source of the discontent that led to the overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah.45 In interviews with Ugandan farmers in 1966–67, I found that respondents recognized and resented the scale of the fiscal take on their coffee and cotton.46 Robert Bates in his succinct and masterful 1981 study shows how this revenue reason of state—the belief in the necessity of transferring resources from the rural to a nascent industrial sector combined with a legitimation-driven preoccupation with satisfying the urban sectors whose voice weighed more directly on the political process—wound up defeating its own purposes by undermining over time incentives for production.47
With respect to the accumulation imperative, the early independence years in the 1960s were a decade of moderately positive performance. Table 4.2 clearly shows that at first there was no marked discrepancy in economic growth between Africa and other low- and middle- income countries. The table was perhaps set for the difficulties that became apparent in the 1970s and for the outright crisis years of the following decade. Indeed, a seemingly satisfactory performance was far from enough to satisfy the ambitions of African leaders; the time was at hand for a vigorous expansion of the state.
The first signs of a developing divergence between reason of state and logic of regime and ruler began to appear. In the realm of security, especially after the advent of the institutionalized military coup, regimes became very sensitive to the ethnic balances in their armies and above all to the immediate personal loyalty of the top officers. Merit became secondary to political reliability and even kinship affinities. Governments that came to power through coups were driven to assemble a catalogue of iniquities of their predecessors; particularly with repeated use, such stratagems for regime preservation came at some cost to the legitimation of the state. As rulers became committed to remaining in power permanently, the fusion of person and state came at a price for the latter. Construction of personality cults around the president became the central focus of legitimation efforts, providing a perilous diversion from state-building. The growing need to channel public resources into prebends for henchmen and into secret funds for extrabudgetary presidential allocation began to weigh on the state revenue imperative.
All these trends were beginning to attract analytical notice by 1970. They were not yet of a scale to shape overall perspectives on the African state. Although the hour of full-fledged Afropessimism was still in the future, a clear mood of disappointment was evident at the end of the first postcolonial decade.
TABLE 4.2. African and Other Developing Areas Average Annual Growth Rates, 1960–70 (percentage)
Countries GNP GNP per capita
Low income countries 4.2 1.8
Sub-Saharan Africa 4.2 1.7
Asia 4.2 1.8
Middle income countries 6.0 3.5
Sub-Saharan Africa 4.8 4.3
Middle East/N. Africa 3.6 1.1
East Asia and Pacific 7.7 4.9
L. America/Caribbean 5.7 2.9
SOURCE: World Bank, World Development Report 1980 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 99.
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Anatomy of State Crisis
It is not possible to live in a state where there are killings all the time. We practically have no state.
—Antonio Armando, Guinea-Bissau teacher, 2009
The state is in a phase of deliquescence. The state has been dismantled.
—Carlos Vamain, former justice minister, Guinea-Bissau, 2009
Already in September the drug traffickers had started moving out of Guinea-Bissau. The drug traffickers need a certain stability. They don’t need a failed state. They need a weak state.
—Antonio L. Mazzitelli, UN Office on Drugs and Crime, Dakar, 2009
Débrouillez-vous (Fend for yourself ).
—Article 15, Mobutu Congo-Kinshasa Constitution (popular version), 2009
A central postulate unanimously shared by political elites, planners and advisers is that the state must organize and direct the development effort. Agricultural growth will not come from the occult workings of an invisible hand, but through the guidance and stimulation of the political and administrative structures.
—Crawford Young, 1971
FROM REVOLUTIONARY EXPECTATION TO FAILED STATE: GUINEA-BISSSAU
At the zenith of state expansion in 1974, Guinea-Bissau had been a lodestar for African hopes.1 Its remarkable liberation struggle from 1961 to 1974 had all but defeated a Portuguese army that peaked at fifty-thousand. Its extraordinary leader, Amilcar Cabral, won global admiration for his revolutionary doctrines, rooted in empowerment of rural society and a summons to the petty bourgeois political elites to commit “class suicide.”2 In the latter phases of the liberation war, when Portuguese detachments had been driven back into garrison towns, PAIGC, the revolutionary movement, had created liberated zones in much of the country, establishing people’s stores, schools, and clinics. These avatars of triumphant revo
lutionary transformation attracted admiring commentary from veteran observers of African liberation movements, such as Basil Davidson and Gérard Chaliand, as well as young scholars, who were invited to tour the liberated areas by PAIGC.3 The state, once torn from colonial grasp and reshaped as revolutionary instrument, could fulfill the guiding mission I and many others anticipated at the time.4
But by the end of the 1980s, the illusory nature of transformation projects led by a state incarnating the potent force of the revolutionary liberation movement was clear. A rural civil society, argues Joshua Forrest, had indeed been empowered by the Portuguese loss of authority. But the unusually weak colonial state had never succeeded in fully subjugating peasant society or incorporating its local leadership.5 The project of rural civil society was local autonomy, not state-led development. The aura of liberation faded and the liabilities of a state with minimal revenue possibilities beyond initially generous external aid, a very slender infrastructure, and unstable politics became evident. Such iconic undertakings as the people’s stores had proved to be corrupt, inefficient, even extortionate liabilities rather than vehicles of rural uplift. By 1982 expenditures rising at 19% annually were twice domestic state revenue; the fifteen thousand government employees were 61% of all salaried workers. The array of newly launched state light industrial enterprises were headed for bankruptcy.6 By the turn of the century, the state became prey to narcotics trafficking and was a prototype of the failed state.
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