B009THJ1WI EBOK

by Young, Crawford

  Since by the 1980s life presidencies became increasingly frequent, in a number of cases there was a turning point at which the ruler began to appear primarily predatory. In a case like Congo-Kinshasa under Mobutu, I would date this moment to about 1979; until that point, although he had amply enriched himself and his henchmen via their control of the state, he appeared to cling to the illusion that he could at once realize the grandiose dreams for the country that he ceaselessly proclaimed in his frequent travels and divert large sums to his clientele and his individual retirement account. Past that point, personal rule became what Juan Linz, borrowing a Weberian term, labels “sultanism,” whereby “personalistic and particularistic use of power for essentially private ends of the ruler and his collaborators makes the country essentially like a huge domain.”76

  Sierra Leone under Siaka Stevens (1967–85) is another apt example. William Reno elegantly documents the progressive evisceration of the formal state and its replacement by what he terms a “shadow state” erected on personal control of the revenues generated by an illicit diamond trade. Stevens was elected in 1967 with broad support on a populist reform platform. However, in the process of consolidating control and sidelining regional big men, he was increasingly driven into an alliance with Levantine and Afro-Lebanese mercantile operators through whom diamond marketing and export took place, increasingly outside official channels. Over time, diminishing levels of rents from diamond exploitation entered the state treasury; by 1984, formal state spending was only a quarter of the 1979 level. The ransom of the Stevens’s strategy of exercise of personal rule mainly through a “shadow state” was the decade of violent civil war in the 1990s.77

  Yet another dimension of ruler interests in conflict with state welfare lay in the potent motivations to cling to power arising from personal security fears. Driven from office, an ousted president is acutely vulnerable to charges of corruption, political assassinations, or other abuses of power. Rare were the Nyereres or Senghors who left office voluntarily in these years and could safely remain inside the country.

  SUMMATION: THE SIX IMPERATIVES

  Let me again return to the half dozen state imperatives as a device for summary. On the hegemony front, the state expansion era implied setting one’s sights higher in order to achieve a more comprehensive subjugation of society. For a time, these ambitions appeared to be on the road to fulfillment; however, the developmental impasse evident by the end of the 1970s soon took its toll on the scope of dominance. As stagnation and decline defined a growing number of polities, there was an uneven but visible shrinkage of state capacity. Even if its roster of public employees remained stable or even increased, their ability to perform the basic functions through which hegemony operated diminished, especially in the periphery. A silent triage operated; the requirements of the capital and the central regions, most critical to regime survival, came first. Society for the most part reacted by disengaging and retreating into the informal economy rather than by directly challenging the state. South Africa was an important exception in the 1980s, as the hegemony of the apartheid regime was undermined by unprecedented levels of civil society mobilization. The growing contradiction between regime and ruler vital interests and state imperatives, first noticed by Bates in 1981, was a major factor; the dilemmas were frequently posed in the ambiguous responses to the economic reform programs imposed by the international financial institutions as a condition for emergency injections of funds.78 Fully applied, such programs frequently conflicted with more immediate exigencies of regime or ruler survival. With relatively few exceptions, the fabric of state hegemony unraveled during the 1980s.

  With respect to autonomy, most expansionist states by the 1970s had perfected and institutionalized systems of patrimonial autocracy. The single-party system, through forcing civil society into corporate structures within the party apparatus, for a time effectively stifled voice. The pressures from below primarily flowed through clientelistic channels, and states were largely insulated from collective claims. But this artificial internal autonomization of the institutions of rule eventually contributed to state decline, as governments lost the affective links with civil society required for stable politics over the longer run.

  The early 1970s witnessed the high-water mark of African assertion of its external autonomy aspirations. In this springtime of third-world self-assertion, African states pushed back against the economic dominance of the industrial world on several fronts. The orbit of effective economic sovereignty expanded through the wave of nationalizations of Western mining and other firms and via indigenization programs targeting immigrant mercantile communities. On the diplomatic front, African states were active players in the formation of the Group of 77 whose purpose was to defend third-world economic interests and to achieve liberation of remaining colonies and white-ruled territories. Politically, the sudden collapse of the Portuguese colonial regime brought overnight independence to five new countries.

  By the end of the decade, external debt and domestic fiscal impasse sharply contracted the possibilities of external autonomy. The necessity of seeking financial relief from international financial institutions and the Western donor community as the Soviet Union and China by the 1980s began withdrawing from African aid commitments forced the African state into demeaning rounds of bargaining over conditions for economic rescue. The narrowing of economic options restricted the extent of external autonomy.

  On the security front, during the prosperous 1970s, most African states had expanded their armed forces. Some did so as a consequence of major security threats. In particular cases, such as Nigeria and Sudan, internal wars combating secessionist forces drove dramatic army expansions. In Ethiopia and Somalia, conflicting territorial claims, as well as the Eritrean independence struggle in the case of Ethiopia, brought huge enlargements in security force numbers and weaponry; the Ethiopian army peaked at 520,000 in the late 1980s, compared to 41,700 in 1974.79 Moroccan claims to Western Sahara and Algerian shelter and support for the Saharan independence movement had a similar impact. South Africa, perceiving a growing threat from what was termed “total Communist onslaught” from the north as the Portuguese buffer zone evaporated, likewise reinforced its security apparatus, in turn threatening neighboring states through an aggressive destabilization policy targeting those nearby states sheltering ANC insurgents. Libya invested an important part of its large oil revenues in advanced weaponry; the unusually large size of Egypt ian security forces was driven above all by the repeated warfare with Israel.

  These important exceptions aside, for most African states the challenge to security was only internal. In a number of instances the military held power and was thus in an unencumbered position to prioritize its presumed needs. For most, a reliable and expanded security apparatus was a necessary pillar of patrimonial autocracy. The cold war and arms sale competition among major powers made credit for weapons purchase readily available into the 1980s. Thus, until that time the general pattern was military expansion; notable exceptions were the two countries whose rulers enjoyed the most intimate ties with France, Ivory Coast and Gabon. These countries had only small, almost ceremonial, forces. Their security was in effect subcontracted to France, whose military was immediately at hand in local garrisons and whose intelligence services assured effective surveillance of opposition activity and restive officers.

  Further, the state crisis decade witnessed a decline in the effectiveness of many African militaries. The empty state treasuries could not assure the maintenance of the heavy equipment acquired in better days, which often fell into disrepair. An American defense intelligence officer describes the lamentable condition of many militaries by the end of the 1980s: “Most African state armies are in decline, beset by a combination of shrinking budgets, international pressures to downsize and demobilize, and the lack of the freely accessible military assistance that characterized the cold war period. With few exceptions, heavy weapons lie dormant, equipment is in disrepair, and training is almost
nonexistent. . . . [T]he principal forces of order are in disorder in many countries at a time when the legitimacy of central governments (and indeed sometimes the state) is in doubt.”80

  The quest for legitimation was ideologically driven in the 1970s, with formulations ranging from populist nationalism to Afromarxism to an early version of populist Islamism. Alluring promises of rapid development and large public investment programs, given credibility by the short-lived revenue windfalls from periods of high export prices and easy access to external credit, still had appeal into the mid-1970s. Expansion of basic social provisions also continued at first. As the 1980s wore on, the credibility of the ideological themes diminished along with the states themselves. By late in that decade, the basic legitimacy of most regimes came into question. States became derided as predators, pirates, or vampires. The broad-front deterioration of the public sector and pervasive corruption of the realm drove the public to a mood of cynical despair. The disabled state or its local fragments might still evoke fear; its often unpaid security forces turned to scavenging local communities for their livelihood. Its local agents could still invoke state writ to extort money for a bewildering array of taxes. But these encounters only intensified the fundamental legitimacy crisis confronting many states.

  The revenue imperative was the key to all other dimensions of the state crisis. The dramatic inability of most states by the late 1970s to secure an adequate revenue flow from domestic taxes or external aid left rulers with dwindling options and, as Bates has argued, drove many to predation to ensure their own survival, a certain recipe over time for state failure.81 For many, internal revenue was heavily dependent on customs receipts and other charges on exported commodities; as such, its flow was tributary to fluctuating world market prices. Though there were some periods of very favorable price regimes for many key African commodities (coffee, cocoa, oil, copper, for example) in the early 1970s and again at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s, thereafter through the decade world markets were mostly unfavorable. The rapidly swelling external debt required growing amounts of foreign exchange merely to service. Africa was indeed cornered financially, and that had negative consequences for its meeting all the other imperatives.

  Inevitably, on the accumulation front all the indicators turned negative. Across the continent, growth rates, anemic in the 1970s, deteriorated further in the crisis decade. The burden of external debt weighed heavily on domestic budgets, as did the civil service payroll; there was nothing left for public capital investment. The visible deterioration in state performance measures and rise in predatory behavior by rulers and state elites drove away potential foreign investors, save those who were partners in predation. The optimistic claims of the promoters of SAPs that the magic of the marketplace and “getting prices right” would be immediate remedies proved far from the mark. With few exceptions, by the end of the 1980s the African state faced a far-reaching crisis.

  HARBINGERS OF A NEW ERA

  Suddenly and unexpectedly, long dormant civil society reacted. The first burst of thunder occurred in Algeria in October 1988, described in chapter 1. A wave of urban street rioting shook the regime to its core; hundreds were killed and many more wounded.82 The mystique of the Algerian revolution had long since lost its hold, especially on a deeply disaffected youth, which had no memory of the liberation struggle, An even more astonishing turn of events, prefiguring the coming surge of democratization, unfolded in Benin. Long-time ruler and quondam Afromarxist Matthieu Kérékou was at bay; a cornered Kérékou meekly assented to a power seizure by civil society through the mechanism of a “national conference.” A new era opened, rendered problematic by the enfeebled condition of the African state. But the events of Algeria and Benin sounded the requiem of patrimonial autocracy as unchallenged mode of rule.

  The disparate outcomes that followed are the subject of the chapters 6 and 7. One harbinger of the dangers lurking, little noted at the time, was the crossing into Liberia of a small militia of 250, trained in Libya and led by Charles Taylor, in December 1989. At the time, many Liberian elites regarded him as a deliverance from the venal incompetence of despot Samuel Doe; however, he proved a sanguinary and destructive warlord who brought ruin to most Liberians and to Sierra Leone as well and by 2008 faced a lengthy catalogue of crimes-against-humanity charges before an international criminal court, for which he was ultimately convicted in 2012.

  But there were more hopeful omens as well. By 1990, Ghana and Mozambique were well on a path to restored health. They stood as exemplary models of an avenue of state rehabilitation that could be chosen, validating the African proverb that “no condition is permanent.”

  6

  * * *

  Democratization and Its Limits

  The national conferences appeared as the revelation of a new spirit, a flashing rocket, a luminous signal that propels us into the future[,] . . . the most important event of our conscious history[,] . . . the beauty of something unique, incomparable.

  —F. Eboussi Boulaga, 1993

  THE THIRD WAVE OF DEMOCRATIZATION

  When the urban street erupted in Algeria in October 1988, shattering the seeming revolutionary élan of a once-invincible regime, few realized that this was the opening scene of a momentous transformation of the African political landscape.1 But a short two years later the surge of democratization appeared irresistible, and it spread across the continent. Samuel Huntington captured the supremely mimetic, interactive nature of this dynamic in his memorable metaphor of a “third wave” of democracy, following on earlier such moments at the turn of the last century and in the immediate aftermath of World War II.2

  The sheer scale of the democratic surge washing over the continent was stunning. In my reading, only Libya, Sudan, and Swaziland swam against the current; their respective personalist populist, Islamist and royalist autocracies were little altered, though Sudan and Swaziland did feel constrained to stage meaningless elections. Initially, the wave lapped more weakly on the shores of Arab North Africa, before arriving with a vengeance with the 2011 “Arab spring.”3 As chapter 1 argues, for a brief, euphoric moment the elixir of democracy seemed to offer a means of resurrecting the African state.

  But these hopes soon proved illusory. The more canny autocrats gave ground before the storm and became adept at managing a transition from patrimonial autocracy to neopatrimonial semidemocracy. Of the incumbent rulers at the beginning of the democratization surge, no less than seventeen were still in power in 2004. Some projected transitions in key countries (Algeria and Nigeria) soon derailed. In other cases, polities dissolved in disorder and civil war (Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone) or were unhinged by ethnic violence linked to the transition (Burundi, Rwanda). By the late 1990s, the most common outcome was what became known as “semidemocracy,” a notion given conceptual elaboration by Marina Ottaway: semidemocracies are “ambiguous systems that combine rhetorical acceptance of liberal democracy, the existence of some formal democratic institutions, and respect for a limited sphere of civil and political liberties with essentially illiberal or even authoritarian traits.”4 Others characterized the posttransition polities as “hybrid” regimes or as “semiauthoritarian.”5

  But the rules of the game had changed. Undiluted patrimonial autocracy was permanently discredited. Weakened African states were in desperate need of external presentability; the price of respectability was now at least nominal embrace of democratic norms. The AU, formally launched as a replacement for the OAU in 2002, included in its charter a commitment to democratic governance; member states that experienced coups were suspended from the organization.

  Two decades later, some transitions appeared stable and durable, having survived one or more successions of parties or at least rulers (Ghana and Benin are the clearest examples). The most far-reaching of all, South Africa, was a mostly peaceful and truly remarkable constitutional revolution through which real power was transferred to the long-excluded racial majority. But a number of others had been
reversed or had had their content eroded. Gambia, one of the three surviving original decolonization democracies, was ousted by a military coup in 1994 and remained trapped in the bizarre despotism of Yahyah Jammeh. However, Botswana and Mauritius, the other two, continued in their stable path; indeed in Mauritius in 1982 and again in 1995 opposition alliances won all sixty-two directly elected seats in parliamentary elections.6 At the other extreme, Somalia stayed locked in its unending anarchy. In short, after three decades of largely parallel trajectories, African states began to follow widely divergent itineraries.

  SURVIVAL OF DEMOCRATIC NORMS

  Democratic norms, despite the failure of nearly all decolonization constitutional settlements, never completely disappeared from Africa. Sudan experienced meaningful though short-lived restorations of democratic rule from 1965 to 1969 and then again from 1985 to 1989. Senegal accepted limited multiparty politics in 1976 and then a fully open field in 1981. Military rulers in Ghana acceded to popular pressures for democratic restoration and held genuinely competitive, close-fought, and well-conducted elections in 1969 and 1979, but in each case army intervention subsequently overturned the civilian regime. The Burkina Faso military permitted democratic elections in 1970 and then again in 1978 but soon restored army rule. Nigeria stands out in the tenacious hold of democratic values on the public mind, even though the military held power thirty-two of the thirty-six years between the initial coup in 1965 and a transition back to civilian rule in 1999. Throughout this protracted period, the military rulers found no road to legitimacy save the claim that they were engaged in organizing a transition to democratic rule.7 “Permanent transition,” Paul Beckett and I have observed, “turns on the paradoxical situation—visible over many years—in which Nigerian military rule is legitimated by a sense of progress toward creating its own alternative: civil democratic governance.”8