Brazil as well has in recent years begun to fulfill the promise implied by its resource base and continental scale. Perennially hampered by incoherent politics, formless and personality-driven parties, weak national economic management, repeated bouts of hyperinflation and military interventions, Brazil long lingered in the ranks of the underperforming polities. Consolidated democracy, improved political structuration, and effective national leadership since the 1990s, especially under the presidencies of Fernando Cardoso and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, have given new standing to the Brazilian polity as major international actor and developmental state. India and Brazil now rank as major “emerging economies,” whose prospects appear well above those of most of Africa, although the Afro-optimist might suggest that the recent surge of a number of African economies after decades of stagnation is a harbinger for at least some African states.
Indonesia is a particularly pertinent case for African comparison; its cultural complexity, regional imbalances, and colonial origins as a territorial entity closely resemble the profile of larger African states. In 1976, I joined with Indonesian specialist Donald Emmerson in organizing a course and seminar comparing Congo-Kinshasa and Indonesia, whose postcolonial itineraries at that moment seemed closely parallel. Both countries experienced a disorderly decolonization and an initial high instability. In the mid-1960s, both suffered cataclysmic violence: the wave of rebellion in Congo examined in chapter 7 and the mass killings of alleged communists in Indonesia. In the wake of these trauma, military rulers seized power in 1965 in both countries, pledging recentralized authority and establishing the “new regime” and “new order,” respectively. Both Mobutu and Suharto won initial admiration for restoring peace and seeming prosperity, even though by 1976 clear symptoms of corrosive corruption afflicted both regimes.
From that point forward, the pathways dramatically diverged in ways that we did not foresee. Rent seeking and crony capitalism pervaded both countries; by the 1990s Suharto’s fortune was estimated at $16 billion, dwarfing the $5 billion attributed to Mobutu at his peak.21 Yet in spite of high levels of corruption over the following decades, Indonesia sustained an impressive level of growth, industrialization, and economic diversification, while Congo entered a prolonged period of state decline, leaving a polity in ruin when Mobutu was finally ousted in 1997 at almost the same time as Suharto. Indonesia experienced an acute economic crisis in 1997–98 but engineered a prompt recovery and a successful democratic transition; the post-Mobutu political order managed to achieve constitutional redemption and successful national elections only after an eight-year civil war and without a concomitant restoration of effective stateness.
Lewis contrasts the Indonesian performance, however flawed, with Nigerian outcomes. Even though Nigeria had a far more functional state than Congo, its record nonetheless compared unfavorably with Indonesia. Lewis concludes:
Beginning from very similar foundations, the two countries deviated sharply in the 1970s and 1980s, as Indonesia recovered from early economic crisis, successfully adjusted from the leading distortions of the resource windfall, and embarked on a period of sustained growth and competitive development. By the middle of the 1990s, Indonesia appeared to be a promising economy with prospects of sustained high performance, an evaluation supported by the enthusiastic responses of international investors to the Indonesian market. Indonesia’s dynamism was starkly contrasted by Nigeria’s path from modest recovery after the civil war to the pathologies of the 1970s oil boom, through the post-windfall crash of the 1980s and the predatory decline of 1990s. Nigeria’s sustained decline pushed the country to the margins of the global economy as investment diminished, non-oil production withered, growth slowed, and poverty mounted.22
Lewis attributes the difference to the inability of Nigeria to sustain effective economic governance, make credible commitments to the private sector, and constrain rent seeking. Though crony capitalism pervaded Indonesia, a proficient technocratic core to the state apparatus was better able to assure effective management of the political economy. Another differentiating factor was the role of the large entrepreneurial community of Chinese ancestry, whose Indonesian presence is often generations deep. Of the 140 top businesses in 1997, only 40 were controlled by indigenous Indonesians, 16 of these by the Suharto family. The economic calculus of Sino-Indonesians is inevitably influenced by the resentment they encounter, and their resultant insecurity; they nonetheless contribute precious entrepreneurial skills.23
Some broad parallels with Latin American evolution in the last half century may be discerned. A wave of populist nationalism influenced by dependency theory shaped political economies, while the roster of liberal democratic regimes shriveled in the 1960s; Costa Rica is the sole Latin American regime with uninterrupted democracy since 1948.24 The ascendant mood of state expansion was frequently manifest in military juntas constructing bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes on corporatist foundations, a trend for which some writers perceived a colonial state legacy.25 Like Africa, after strong growth in the 1960s Latin America experienced a decade of economic crisis and stagnation in the 1980s, discrediting the populist authoritarian path. After Spain, Portugal, and Greece, Latin America was the primary site for the swelling wave of democratization in the 1980s, which became global by 1990. Political liberalization there, unlike in Africa, was relatively enduring, with democratic process rooted in growing numbers of stable and institutionalized party systems.26 The shift to more outward-looking market economies produced modest improvements as well.27
A recent major collaborative inquest into African developmental performance in the first four decades of independence, sponsored by Harvard University and Oxford University, drew together a team of distinguished analysts, with extensive experience in the international financial institutions. Its problematic was the same as that of this chapter: how to assess the disappointments of African performance in comparison with other developing regions.28 They conclude that “the record is profoundly unsettling. Non-African growth consistently outpaced African growth after 1960, with the result that Sub-Saharan real incomes fell by over 35 percent relative to incomes in other developing regions and by nearly half relative to industrial countries. . . . Africa’s cumulative progress was insufficient, by 2000, to reach the levels of human development the rest of the developing world had already attained.”29
TABLE 9.1. Sub-Saharan African Economic Growth in Comparison, circa 1960–2000
Annual growth (%), real per capita GDP Adult illiteracy (%), 1970 Adult illiteracy (%), circa 2000 Life expectancy at birth (years), circa 1960 Life expectancy at birth (years), circa 2000
Sub-Saharan Africa 0.56 55.8 41.2 41.1 47.8
Latin America 1.44 17.4 11.1 56.4 70.8
South Asia 2.10 55.5 45.2 45.3 63.8
East Asia and Pacific 3.41 20.4 11.4 50.6 69.6
Middle East, North Africa, Turkey 2.61 42.3 27.8 51.7 70.6
SOURCE: Data is drawn from Benno J. Ndulu, Stephen A. O’Connell, Robert H. Bates, Paul Collier, and Chukwuma C. Soludo, The Political Economy of Economic Growth in Africa, 1960–2000, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 1:4.
The authors take due note of some major environmental constraints imposing differential disadvantage on Africa. Many African nations suffer from difficult political geography, a constraint underlined by Jeffrey Herbst in his diagnosis of state crisis.30 Fifteen are landlocked, and many have inadequate transportation infrastructure. Electricity shortfalls and blackouts afflict many, even the relatively prosperous such as South Africa. Malaria, tuberculosis, and other devastating diseases overwhelm deficient health facilities. Africa has been especially cursed by the HIV-AIDS epidemic, which has sharply reduced life expectancies in the most afflicted countries. At the same time, pressures mount on the population front, which has expanded fourfold in a number of states since 1960. Only North Africa (especially Tunisia) has begun to experience the demographic transition to longer lives and smaller families. The limited range o
f export commodities for most renders them vulnerable to sudden price shifts on global markets.
The prevalence of internal war, especially in the 1990s, is an evident block to development. When localized in a peripheral region, as in Senegal, Mali, Niger, and even Uganda, its economic impact may be limited. Even in these circumstances, though, precious resources are diverted into defense expenditures, as table 9.2 suggests. But Angola, Sudan, Congo-Kinshasa, Liberia, and Sierra Leone experienced severe developmental damage. Civil peace is an obvious facilitating condition.
The authors conclude, however, that deficiencies of governance are a major factor in African developmental disappointments. Although authoritarianism characterized East Asian regimes until the late 1980s, its effects were less harmful. The high discretion in deployment of state resources available to African rulers freed of institutional constraints opened the door to large amounts of those resources being diverted, both to support neopatrimonialism and to enrich the inner presidential clique. The negative impact was multiplied by the command role attributed to the state and the scope of the economy in government hands at the peak moment of integral state visions.31
An extended debate on the possible link between ethnic diversity and developmental performance opened in 1997 with an influential article by William Easterly and Ross Levine suggesting that high orders of ethnic fractionalization were closely correlated with flawed policies.32 Their data was drawn from Soviet measures from the early 1960s that imposed a highly primordialist template on the identification of ethnic diversity. They reason that ethnic diversity produces competitive rent seeking and struggles over shares of the “national cake” that divert resources from the common pool available for developmental purposes. Ethnic groups as collective actors are inherently self-aggrandizing.
There is little doubt that cultural diversity in Africa is exceptionally marked, and as chapter 8 argues the territorial units with few exceptions were arbitrary products of the colonial partition lacking a historical narrative. The accommodation of racial, religious, and ethnic diversity requires state acknowledgment of difference and distributive policies that recognize that relative equities of state action find measure in many eyes in communal shares. However, there are a wide range of policy choices that can contribute to this end, once models of ethnic dominance or homogenization goals are set aside.33 The fractionalization index has been queried, as has the assumption that sheer numbers of groups necessarily correlate with instability. Two of Africa’s most stable polities, Tanzania and Zambia, have high fractionalization figures. Cultural pluralism challenges statecraft, but in my reading it cannot be the prime explanation for developmental disappointments.
Comparing State Performance
By way of organizing an overall comparison of state performance, I draw on the half dozen imperatives of state reproduction outlined in chapter 2. These broadly framed parameters during the era of patrimonial autocracy become operative at the level of regimes or rulers; as chapter 2 stresses, choices made in these dimensions of state action may reflect survival calculations of autocrats—Mobutu and Mugabe are prime examples—that are destructive of the long-term health of the polity. The political opening around 1990, when the ultimate equilibrium was democratic or even semiauthoritarian, tended to resituate the logic of reproduction in the state itself.
Hegemony
In terms of hegemony, the first disposition of new states was to seek its reinforcement, often with initial success, as chapter 4 records. The first postcolonial rulers were at once newly conscious of the perils of sovereignty and determined to demand discipline of the subject. The colonial state was satisfied with the passive deference of the subject to its authority; its successor insisted on the active loyalty of the citizen.
The excesses of the command state and its inability to expand its most valued social services at the rate promised by anticolonial nationalism led to the beginnings of disaffection. So also did perceptions that ruling parties favored regions that had provided them support while marginalizing others and restricting their access to the state. The limits to effective hegemony of the weakest states, such as Guinea-Bissau or Central African Republic, were evident within a few years of independence.34
The prolonged state crisis of the 1980s produced a contraction of the reach of government. It concentrated its resources more on the capital and a few core areas; in the periphery, its agents were bereft of operational resources—means of transport and office supplies—and often only irregularly paid. They were thus driven to local predation as a survival mode. Sensing abandonment, civil society rechanneled its energies into the underground economy, illicit cross-border trade, artisanal mining, and other productive activities based on evading residual state hegemony. Rulers, meanwhile, increasingly diverted public resources into parallel prebendal networks, even at the cost of eviscerating the hegemony of the formal state in favor of the “shadow state” illuminated by William Reno.35 Although far from all regimes evolved in this direction, for a time it was the dominant pattern.
The differentiated itineraries after 1990 in the more successful polities—Ghana, Uganda, Benin, Tanzania, among others—permitted some restoration of state authority. Hegemony appeared robust until the 2011 protest wave in the Arab tier of states in the north, as well as in southern Africa. In the lands between, the broad weakening of the fabric of state hegemony and the loss of the monopoly of the means of coercion through the weapons influx opened a breach of state authority through which insurgent militias found room for operation. The virtual absence of the state in a number of regions, a social backdrop of generalized disaffection, and innovations in resourcing and arming insurgencies created new possibilities for revolt.
Security
The postcolonial security imperative was inward looking. Interstate warfare was remarkable for its absence, save only in the Horn of Africa, the brief Algerian-Moroccan conflict, and the Egyptian battles with Israel in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973. The only large-scale interstate wars pitted Somalia in irredentist battle with Ethiopia in 1976–77 and Ethiopia in bitter warfare with Eritrea over disputed territory from 1998 to 2000. The logic driving creation of most security forces was the threat of internal disorder. Most were of modest size, as table 9.2 shows, supplied with armament mostly appropriate for infantry units. The main exceptions were armies issuing from liberation struggle, apartheid South Africa, post–civil war Nigeria, the Horn, and Egypt. For most, the extreme constraints imposed by the meager revenue flow limited the size of security forces. The small offshore island states, facing a minimal external security threat, operate with the tiniest of armies.
The internal security equation was modified when the military coup be came, starting in 1965, the major vehicle for regime displacement. Rulers of military derivation were instinctively self-aggrandizing actors who expanded army budgets and were prone to purchasing costly high-end equipment such as fighter jets, advanced tanks. Whatever prestige ensued was often offset by the incapacity to assure maintenance or replacement parts. All leaders found close attention to the ethnic security map indispensable and sought immunization against coups by establishing personal affinities, securing the loyalty of key commanders, and restricting recruitment in regions of suspect fidelity. The lurking threat of a military coup persuaded a number of longtime rulers to distrust their armies, leading them to keep the armies relatively small; Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Ivory Coast, Omar Bongo Ondimba in Gabon, and Zine el Afidine Ben Ali in Tunisia are cases in point. Ben Ali relied primarily on a huge internal security apparatus of secret police, informers, contract enforcers and thugs numbering 600,000 according to Henry and Springborg, eclipsing the mere 35,800 military in 2007.36 The North African states all stood out for the sprawling dimensions of their security police.
In some cases, the security imperative was partly outsourced to foreign protectors, especially during the cold war when the major powers sought strategic clientele. During the first independence decades, the intimate partners of Fr
ançafrique could count on French garrisons that had been placed in Senegal, Ivory Coast, Gabon and Djibouti as well as on the efficient French intelligence networks on site to forestall conspiracy. The United States had long-standing intimate security ties with Liberia, Congo-Kinshasa, Egypt, and (until 1974) Ethiopia. The Soviet Union partnered with Cuba in providing major security assistance to Angola and Ethiopia under the Derg; the proficient East German security service trained domestic intelligence forces in several Afromarxist states in the 1970s and 1980s.
Although external security was infrequently subject to serious threat, southern Africa became a zone of insecurity from the moment that the 1974 Portuguese coup dissolved the colonial protective barrier insulating apartheid South Africa from African liberation forces. Suddenly ANC guerrillas, once safely remote in Tanzania, had access to neighboring states. South African securocrats, believing that a “total Communist onslaught” was at hand, launched aggressive destabilization campaigns directed at any neighboring state sheltering ANC insurgents.37 In Angola and Mozambique, active supply and encadrement was provided to UNITA and RENAMO. The security obsessions of South Africa, along with their consequences for neighboring states, finally dissolved only with the Namibia settlement in 1989 and withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola.
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