B009THJ1WI EBOK

by Young, Crawford

  The reproduction of the legal order and the ability to perform routine law enforcement and conflict regulation were likewise diminished. Though its routine operation might be surprisingly persistent, and while the normative force of a judicial culture provided a degree of insulation, its personnel felt the same survival pressures as other state agents.49 Thus the administration of justice became more subject to monetary intervention or social power disparities. Police were particularly prone to venal practice, since their daily role as law enforcement agents was so readily monetized.

  In the security domain, one frequent consequence of fiscal crisis was budgetary triage for army units. Those close to the capital, whose reliability was most critical, were paid and supplied first; the less favored units, deployed in outlying areas, were last in line for provisions. In effect, as in medieval times, they were forced to forage for food and money. Their uniforms and weaponry facilitated this task but at high cost to the core state function as security provider.

  The loss of capacity of the crisis state led to a sharp decline in its everyday competence. The vast array of responsibilities assumed by the expansive state now weighed heavily. The huge state enterprise sector became a heavy drain; often parastatals had acquired heavy debts and could not pay their suppliers, which were frequently other government corporations. It became possible to more easily evade price controls over major consumer items, the issuing of which was a frequent state function dating from colonial times. Goods migrated to the black market. Extensive licensing systems were created as external debts, and trade deficits produced currency crises; regimes sought to maintain exchange value by rationing imports. Such systems created opportunities for top officials issuing the licenses to secure lucrative rents. Port administration and customs services were other key revenue-producing agencies that suffered from a deflation of competence by depriving the state of resources and discrediting it through the high visibility of corruption.

  A less competent state meant that the everyday routine encounters with it that few citizens could avoid were more frustrating. Sooner or later there was need for an identity document, a property title, a market license, a driving permit, a vehicle registration, or some other government-issued certificate. Long office waits, the search for the authorized agent, protracted delays, informal fees to accelerate the process: these sharp increases in transaction costs in any interaction with government bred resentment.

  Another symptom of a loss of competence was the growing phenomenon of ghost workers on the state payroll in a number of countries, particularly in the educational sector (a huge employer) and the security forces. With centralized payroll systems, if local officials or military commanders managed to retain on the personnel rosters those who had died, retired, or departed or even create fictitious entities, sums of money that were intended to compensate such agents might pass into the hands of those administering salary payments. The ghost-worker phenomenon entered public conversation only in the 1980s, though it may well have originated long before.

  The crisis state also faced reduced credibility. Expectations concerning state performance diminished; one may cite as representative of a general pattern the popular rendition of the acronym of the Nigerian Electrical Power Authority, NEPA, as “Never Electric Power Again” or the Congo-Kinshasa adaptation of the state highway office title Office des Routes as Office des Trous (Pothole Office). Fear of the random depredations of its security forces might remain, but confidence in the protective effectiveness of the police and army vanished. Ideological doctrines and charismatic heroes that once supplied a legitimating aura to the state lost their popular hold.

  Nicolas van de Walle offers perceptive summary of these processes of decline, concluding that “twenty years of crisis have resulted in a bigger state that does less for its citizens, particularly its poor and rural ones.”50 He adds that evidence suggests that the “capacity of African governments to design, implement, monitor, and evaluate policy actually declined between the early independence eras and the 1990s.” The African Governors of the World Bank in a 1996 analysis of state capacity confirmed this conclusion: “Almost every African country has witnessed a systematic regression of capacity in the last thirty years; the majority had better capacity at independence than they now possess.”51

  DEEPENING NEOPATRIMONIALISM

  As part of the political dimension of state crisis, neopatrimonialism became increasingly central to state operation, along with its twin partners of nepotism and corruption. I have discussed neopatrimonialism as a modality of rule in chapter 2, and there is no need to retrace those footsteps. Suffice it to recall that abstract Weberian norms of bureaucratic rationality erode in favor of personalized loyalties and monetization of favor. The currency of clientelism was reciprocity of favor: personal loyalty in return for material reward. Rulers selected their key subordinates on a calculus of their personal fidelity. Ethnicity or more immediate kinship was one criterion leaders used when choosing the innermost circle of henchmen on the assumption that they could trust individuals who were related by blood or clan; for the necessary national network of acolytes, prebendal allocation of office assured a hierarchy of cronies whose contingent loyalty depended on a leasehold of authority translatable into personal gain. Presidential control of the neopatrimonial networks relied on maintaining uncertainty among the chain of subordinates; office was never permanent and depended on ever-renewed proof of loyalty to the leader. The very essence of prebendalism was illicit income derived from abuse of office; thus the prebend holder was vulnerable to prosecution for corruption. Gazing into the windows of power were large numbers of aspirant clients. For those who fell from patrimonial grace and faced ouster and even sanction, any temptation to turn to the opposition was mitigated by the tantalizing possibility of a return to favor.

  The ascendancy of neopatrimonialism by the 1980s was evident in most countries, along with the inevitable counterpart of state weakening. Rulers of exceptional longevity, such as Eyadéma Gnassingbé of Togo, Paul Biya of Cameroon, Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Ivory Coast, and Omar Bongo Ondimba of Gabon, became masters of neopatrimonial manipulation. Mobutu Sese Seko of Congo-Kinshasa was a particularly skilled practitioner. From 1965 to 1975, of the 212 persons holding ministerial positions or membership in the party political bureau, only 41 lasted five years, and none but Mobutu stayed in office over the ten-year period. Of the 212, 29 went directly from office to prison on political or corruption charges. An additional 26 lost office on grounds of disloyalty or dishonesty, with penal sanctions. Few stayed in jail very long, and many found ways back into high office.52

  Although the 1980s pattern of state political weakening extended throughout the continent, including South Africa, it was less pronounced in most of the northern tier of states. Particularly in Morocco, Tunisia, and even Egypt, the institutionalization of a bureaucratic tradition was deeper. Above all, the overdeveloped security apparatus of these states did not experience comparable decay, nor was the loss of administrative control of outlying regions as clear. The mukhabarat (state security) core to these states became more evident, and the term came into popular use to characterize these polities. Except for Morocco, the rulers by the later 1980s all originated in the security services.

  OTHER ASPECTS OF STATE CRISIS

  In the social sphere, state crisis brought decay across the board to government services. Schools and health facilities deteriorated, and their irregularly or ill-paid personnel became demoralized. To some extent, these social amenities could still be provided with private support from religious institutions or, in some places, corporate firms. They also might survive through user fees; local communities often tried to pay teachers in cash or food, and those in urgent need of medical attention might raise modest funds from kin or neighbors. But road maintenance was problematic, and key public utilities had declining service levels. In the 1960s, at least in the towns and cities, power outages were unusual. By the 1980s, they had become daily fare in many count
ries; aging and poorly maintained equipment could not keep pace with expanding needs as urban populations multiplied. In turn, the operating parastatals found revenue collection more difficult, as customers rebelled against poor service. Power-reliant enterprises had to operate costly private generators.

  The slowly accumulating social discontents regarding state performance exploded only at the end of the 1980s, becoming a pivotal factor in the continental clamor for democratization. Even earlier, in the mid-1980s, they became a catalyzing factor in the urban popular mobilization in South Africa that made some large cities almost ungovernable. The animosity of most of the population toward the state in this instance was related to the racial oppression of apartheid rather than state ineffectiveness, but the widespread refusal to pay housing rents, utility charges, and local taxes to the state was central to the sense of township ungovernability that shook the confidence of the state. The assortment of “civics,” or emergent civil society bodies loosely coalesced in the UDF, became a potent proxy for the banned ANC, eluding the repressive capacities of the South African state, despite a declaration of a state of emergency in 1986, and signaling an imminent end to the apartheid regime.53

  The economic dimension of state decline in 1980 was its most visible aspect, especially to the external world. The external debt in the 1970s soared from an inconsequential level to over $300 billion, and for most countries was well beyond their capacity to service much less repay; as a result, further external capital was beyond reach. Also, though the economic growth shortfall was recognized, the full nature of state decay was not; nonetheless, the expansionist state left disabling doubts among investors as to property rights or contract guarantees and the credibility of commitments governments might make.

  The international financial institutions, especially the IMF and World Bank, turned to the challenge of designing rescue programs for bankrupt African states. New currents of economic doctrine, later known as neoliberalism, were achieving ascendancy, in the form of the SAPs that both IMF and the World Bank devised to underpin foreign exchange advances or new lending. IMF and World Bank assistance came with extensive policy reform requirements, or “conditionalities,” ostensibly agreed on by mutual consent but in reality all but imposed. These included currency devaluation as a means of moving toward convertibility, reductions of budget deficits, elimination of administered prices for consumer goods and agricultural prices so as to provide farmers better returns and curb urban subsidies, and privatization of the state enterprise sector.

  Structural adjustment quickly became unpopular among most urban populations. Devaluation led immediately to higher prices for imported goods. An end to price controls for basic commodities had the same effect. The requirement for budgetary reform necessitated sharp reductions in expenditure; given the high percentage of state outlays in many countries devoted to public sector compensation, wage and hiring freezes and layoffs were an inevitable result. The benefits of SAPs in terms of inflation reduction, currency conversion, economic stabilization, and higher farm prices were slow to materialize, while the costs were felt immediately. Students, unions, intellectuals, and segments of the state apparatus, nursing a residual attachment to socialist orientation, economic nationalism, and residues of dependency theory, developed a forceful critique of structural adjustment. They were much less successful in proposing a plausible alternative.

  In the economic realm, thus, many African states were caught in a vice: “hemmed in” was the telling title of an incisive collective analysis by leading scholars.54 The financial situation of many was desperate by this point. Yet accepting the conditionalities of SAPs carried substantial political risks, even if the patrimonial autocracies of the epoch were not accustomed to sensitivity to public opinion. The response in most cases was predictable; IMF and World Bank assistance was accepted, but the conditions were only briefly or half-heartedly respected. The African states could not afford to sever the official participation in structural adjustment, partly because the Western donor community now made such cooperation a requirement for continued aid and in part because the Soviet bloc was clearly withdrawing its support from African states. The international financial institutions had too much invested in rescuing Africa from economic catastrophe to abandon the commitment, even if the terms of partnership had been only partly respected. Thus a series of renegotiated programs marked the 1980s, with African critics claiming failure and the external parties desperately searching for evidence of some success beyond the mere averting of catastrophe.

  The emergent consensus view at the end of the decade was that the original SAPs were too shaped by an uncompromising neoliberal ideology and by an excessive confidence in the market mechanisms to quickly heal African economies; as John Ravenhill remarks, “Short-term stabilization and getting the prices rights was a totally inadequate foundation on which to reconstruct Africa’s economic trajectory.”55 The IMF and World Bank acknowledged that the social costs of adjustment had been seriously underestimated and that further reform programs needed rethinking to take account of negative impacts on low-income groups.

  One of the most contentious aspects of SAPs was the insistence on privatization. The huge size of the state enterprise sector that was a product of state expansion by the 1980s was a major liability. Parastatals were vulnerable to overstaffing, were given unclear and unfunded social mandates, were subject to political pressures, and were often managed by regime cronies. Their external debt was a significant fraction of the African total; domestic bank balance sheets were burdened by nonperforming loans of state-owned enterprises. Interenterprise debt paralyzed many operations, and their accumulated deficits weighed heavily on the state. A survey at this time in a dozen West African states showed that 62% of the state-owned enterprises had net losses and that 36% had negative net worth. Kenya, though it housed more profitable parastatals than almost any other country, had by the early 1980s a net average return of 0.4% on them, even though it had invested $1.4 billion in them. The state-owned enterprises faced irresistible pressures to employ excess staff and were often compelled to charge “social prices” for their output. Thus the pressure to reduce the size of this sector was bound to increase.56

  Though most African policy makers were disposed to shrink the parastatal sector, privatization had numerous hazards. A number of the enterprises were bankrupt and unviable and really needed to be liquidated. Regime cronies often became beneficiaries of those with profitable prospects via fire-sale privatizations. Sale to foreign interests carried political risks if the terms were seen as excessively favorable. Accordingly, action on this front was sporadic and half-hearted at best.

  RISKS OF THE GIANT DEVELOPMENT PROJECT: INGA AND AJAOKUTA

  The very nature of the patrimonial autocracy predominant in the 1970s and 1980s rendered states vulnerable to catastrophic economic choices. Decision making was often concentrated in the hands of the ruler, whose voice eclipsed even the narrow circle of intimates who had access to the presidential palace. Gigantic development projects could be undertaken, especially in the early 1970s when loan capital was available, on the basis of data provided by those parties that stood to profit or benefit from its implementation. Lucrative rents accrued to the ruler and a handful of cronies; the foreign contractors received payment up front, with the eventual bill coming due at some future time. Embassies vigorously promoted their national enterprises positioned to participate in the project. The deals were structured so that the participants—the ruling clique, the contractors, the external consultants, the foreign ambassadors—all derived their profit or benefit from the transaction, while all the risk was placed on state and society. African presidents of that time rarely had the economic sophistication to closely calculate the risks, but they were swift to perceive the immediate benefits: the hefty rents and the political attraction of a spectacular development achievement. The critical importance of mega-projects gone awry in the larger pattern of economic decline justifies a detailed examination of a
pair of examples. These two instances, the Inga hydroelectric project in Congo-Kinshasa and the Ajaokuta steel complex in Nigeria, well illustrate the huge risks of the giant project.

  The ambitious Inga project consisted mainly of two stages of dam construction, a steel mill near Kinshasa and an eighteen-hundred-kilometer-long direct current transmission line to Katanga, linked to major copper mine expansion at the terminus. A number of other hypothetical industrial developments were also promised that never materialized, notably, a large aluminum smelter, repeatedly announced before disappearing from view. There was indeed seductive appeal in the phenomenal energy potential in the three-hundred-meter drop of the vast Congo River between Kinshasa and the port city of Matadi, especially considering that the river at this juncture had a nearly uniform water flow throughout the year. The falls held some 13% of the world’s unexploited hydroelectric potential, and there were an array of dry valleys that parallel the river course into which the water flow could be diverted and dammed. Nearly a century before, in the 1920s, the Belgians had explored the possibility of a dam but concluded that the undertaking would be unprofitable. After World War II, the project was resurrected, and an initial, modest dam of 350 megawatts was officially announced in 1957 but then postponed by the drama of belated decolonization.

  Mobutu, on seizing power in 1965, immediately dusted off the plans, and by 1968 ground was broken for a first phase of dam development at the Inga site in lower Congo. This project, completed in 1972, was mainly intended to serve the Kinshasa region. Its cost of $140 million was primarily financed by the state development budget and was not burdened by the scale of side payments that accompanied Inga 2. Although the rapidly growing Kinshasa metropolis did provide an immediate market for much of the power, initially over one hundred megawatts was intended for a steel mill upriver from the capital, at Maluku.