The wave of civil wars in the 1990s brought the security imperative to the fore in much of Africa. The French disposition for engagement diminished; Paris declined to intervene to reverse the first military coup experienced in Ivory Coast in 1999. The end of the cold war ended interventionist logic for the United States, and the Soviet Union vanished; marines remained just offshore when American client Samuel Doe was assassinated in 1990. But the spectacle of the macabre violence attending some of the internal wars and the fear of contagious insecurity led to international intervention through the UN and AU in a striking number of cases. Interventions of international forces had taken place in no less than sixteen countries by 2010, which included twelve UN operations since the 1980s.38 The interpenetration of a number of civil wars with neighboring country political dynamics and frequent use by rebel militias of bordering territories for shelter further complicated the security dilemma. Still, in 2008 sub-Saharan African states spent only 1.51% of their GDP on defense.39
TABLE 9.2. African Defense Expenditures, 2007
Country GDP ($ billions) 2007 Defense expenditure ($ millions) Armed forces (numbers)
Algeria 131 3,690 147,000
Angola 48.3 2,290 107,000
Benin 5.7 57 4,750
Botswana 12.3 283 9,000
Burkina Faso 7.2 101 10,800
Burundi 1.0 46 35,000
Cameroon 20.1 324 14,100
Cape Verde 1.4 8 1,200
Central African Republic 1.8 18 3,150
Chad 7.5 72 23,350
Comoros NA NA NA
Congo-Brazzaville 10.6 97 10,000
Congo-Kinshasa 9.1 181 134,484
Djibouti 0.8 17 10,950
Egypt 130 3,040 468,000
Equatorial Guinea 10.8 NA 1,320
Eritrea 1.4 NA 201,750
Ethiopia 16.6 330 138,000
Gabon 11.2 NA 4,700
Gambia 0.8 1.6* 800
Ghana 14.8 104 13,500
Guinea 4.8 52 12,300
Guinea-Bissau 0.4 16 9,250
Ivory Coast 20.5 300 17,050
Kenya 25.5 355* 24,120
Lesotho 1.6 34 2,000
Liberia 1.0 NA 2,400
Libya 56.9 807 76,000
Madagascar 7.8 385 13,500
Malawi 2.4 21 5,300
Mali 7.1 162 7,350
Mauritania 3.8 19 15,870
Mauritius 7.9 20 2,000
Morocco 71.8 2,470 195,000
Mozambique 8.1 57 11,200
Namibia 7.2 248 9,000
Niger 4.4 47 5,300
Nigeria 136 988 80,000
Rwanda 3.3 62 33,000
Sao Tome NA NA NA
Senegal 13.5 173 13,620
Seychelles 0.5 10 200
Sierra Leone 1.7 25 10,500
Somalia NA NA NA
South Africa 277 3,840 62,334
Sudan 44.8 579 109,300
Swaziland NA NA NA
Tanzania 15.1 173 27,000
Togo 2.6 43 8,550
Tunisia 35.2 500 35,800
Uganda 11.6 226 45,000
Zambia 11.3 243 15,100
Zimbabwe 3.1 155* 29,000
* 2006 figures
SOURCE: Data drawn from International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance 2008 (London: Routledge, 2008).
Autonomy
Like security, the autonomy imperative has both external and internal dimensions. Externally, the primary weapon was the doctrine of sovereignty, enshrining a normative entitlement to unencumbered and exclusive right to command within a state’s borders. The blessing of international recognition confirms external sovereignty. Although in theory this is conditioned on the capacity to rule the people and the territory enclosed in a sovereign unit, the Somalia case examined in chapter 7 demonstrates that a fictive state subsists in international law even though for two decades now it has had no empirical existence. Even before Somalia, analysts who were puzzled by the persistence of weak states even in the face of their practical failure to provide effective government suggested that many African polities were merely juridical states, not empirical ones.40
In the first two postindependence decades, before such weakening was detected, forceful assertion of sovereignty dominated state discourse. Active African engagement in anti-imperial third-world forums such as the Afro-Asian solidarity conferences and Group of 77 reflected this commitment. So also did the foundation of the OAU, whose core vocation is to foster continental liberation and solidarity.
Regimes and rulers following the script recited in chapter 4 pursued internal autonomy with equal vigor. As the ruling elite claimed exclusive knowledge of the secrets of development, they at the same time imposed single parties and military regimes to restrict the public at large to the duty of acclamation of decisions taken. The corporate structures of civil society—trade unions, merchant chambers, lawyer associations, and others—were forced into the framework of the single party. Government monopolies on the media held public debate within narrow limits. For a number of years, states enjoyed a substantial autonomy from society at large. Perhaps more than anything else, their underlying economic weakness set growing limits on state autonomy. This was magnified by the state expansion project of the 1970s.
The severe limits that the slender revenue base imposed on many states became fully evident at the end of the 1970s. Earlier, most former French-ruled countries had accepted the constraints of the franc zone and accompanying Paris fiscal tutelage in return for the guarantee of a convertible currency, which was a valuable shield against the hyperinflation that often took place elsewhere. However, by 1980 African external debt had reached unsustainable levels, leaving international bankruptcy as the only alternative to accepting the SAPs imposed by international financial institutions and backed by the Western donor community. In the first decade of such programs, which were ideologically rooted in the most rigorously neoliberal version of the “Washington Consensus” on an economic reform template, the conditionalities on budget discipline were severe, forcing painful cutbacks in government expenditure, including social provisions.
Although by 1990, international financial institutions realized the necessity of buffering the social costs of adjustment, even with an easing of the terms the limits on autonomy imposed by the continuing debt burden were substantial. Further, a substantial number of countries became habituated to very large and enduring aid flows, which provided half or more of their resources; Senegal, Ghana, Uganda, and Mozambique are examples. The shackles of structural adjustment have not entirely foreclosed state avenues for autonomous escape. Nicolas van de Walle documents the extent to which many states have evaded the conditionalities through selective observation or half-hearted application.41
Another measure of the limits to state autonomy is their circumscribed capacity to monitor the financial transactions of foreign corporations; a recent study by Global Financial Integrity shows that between 1970 and 2008 the staggering sum of $850 billion was lost to Africa by diverse tax evasion schemes engineered by external economic operatives. If all transfer pricing devices and mispricing of trade in services were included, the loss to Africa might total $1.8 trillion; even the smaller figure is twice the amount of aid received. The director of Global Finance Integrity adds that “this massive flow of illicit money out of Africa is facilitated by a global shadow financial system comprising tax havens, secrecy jurisdictions, disguised corporations, anonymous trust accounts, fake foundations, trade mis-pricing and money laundering techniques. These figures dwarf the capital loss to Africa through clandestine export of corruptly obtained funds by top government officials.”42
Legitimation
The legitimation imperative found its first response in independence itself. “Seek ye first the political kingdom,” Ghana leader Kwame Nkrumah famously declared, and all else will be added unto you. He spoke for a generation in claiming that the dream of independence that powered the anticolonial nationalist movement would be self-fulfilling. But legitimati
on was also built on a negation: the colonial state, with its multiple vexations, inexpungible racism, and barriers to African advance. A discourse of development soon broadened the language of legitimation, in many cases completed with a patina of vaguely defined socialist aspiration.
The military power seizures that followed a few years later recast the negation of colonialism by repudiating the policies and practices of the regimes they ousted. A host of evils was discovered in their actions: corruption, tribalism, incompetence, and servitude to foreign interests were frequent entries to the articles of indictment, which commissions of inquiry were swiftly appointed to document. Especially for the first episode of military intervention, denunciation of the ousted regime often sufficed to secure entry legitimacy, when the military claims to integrity, national commitment, discipline, and efficiency had not faced a reality check. But entry legitimacy was only that, a wasting asset soon superseded by the sterner test of performance. In a number of instances, successor rulers for a few years confirmed these hopes; Yakubu Gowon and later Ibrahim Babangida in Nigeria, Juvenal Habyarimana of Rwanda, even Mobutu are examples. But over time, above all in patrimonial autocracies that lack rules for succession, other modes of legitimation are necessary.
In the 1970s, a renewed and more systematic recourse to socialist orientation served this purpose. In its most advanced Afromarxist forms, the ideology had important appeal to intellectuals and students, habitually in the forefront of vocal opposition even under the constraints of neopatrimonial authoritarianism. Diverse indigenization projects transferred resources to the autochtonous; these projects rewarded the immediate beneficiaries and responded to widespread popular resentments of the Levantine, South Asian, and other Mediterranean mercantiles who dominated large commercial sectors.
By the 1980s, a deep deficit of legitimation was woven into the fabric of state decline and crisis. Patrimonial autocracy as modality of rule had run its course. In the face of deteriorating well-being for most of the populace, a change of military rulers could no longer secure even entry legitimacy. The turn to democratization was a cathartic shift, at its peak seeming to sweep the tables clean and open the polity to a new and more stable path to legitimation. Negation once again was an integral part of the process: witness the painstaking briefs of the misdeeds of the antecedent regimes assembled by the national conferences. But liberalization promised an entirely new political dispensation that would be rewarded by a renovated legitimation. A moment of enthusiasm attended the constitution writing and competitive elections that heralded a democratic rebirth.
Though the political rebirth of the African state examined in chapter 6 proved enduring in a modest number of instances, the more frequent outcome was semidemocracy with an entrenched ruling party or else a partial autocratic restoration. Even if there was more political space for civil society action and opposition expression, the relegitimation of the democracy wave faded, and a palpable popular disengagement took hold. Two decades after the 1990 political earthquake, even though African state performance had shown some improvement in the aggregate, undercurrents of unease tinging on disaffection flowed in many lands, underscored by the wave of protest in North Africa in 2011.
Spanning these periods are elements of the compelling portrait of African concepts of legitimacy sketched by Michael Schatzberg, derived from a careful reading of popular culture in what he terms middle Africa. Authority is viewed within a metaphoric template of the family writ large on the nation in what he terms a “moral matrix” of legitimation. The ruler in the popular mind takes on the attributes of the father-chief. “As long as he nurtures and nourishes, his legitimacy is maintained. The father-chief may eat, but not while people are hungry. In providing for his political children, he is entitled to gratitude for the debt incurred.”43 At the same time, the father-chief is not entitled to perpetual rule; eternal power is inherently illegitimate, and some mode of alternation is indispensable.
Recasting this aspect of the moral matrix, one might suggest that an implicit distinction lurks in the public mind between the nation-state as a permanent entity, on the one hand, and rulers and regimes, on the other. The massive disaffection encountered by most rulers by the late 1980s was a repudiation of regime but not state. Alternation as a thinkable political event opens the possibility of a new order in which the normative vision of state as impartial and efficacious provider of security and social provisions might be achieved. Even in long troubled lands like Somalia or Congo Kinshasa, such a state still abides in the social imaginary, however remote in empirical reality. This observation applies with even greater force to the remarkable popular attachment to the territorial nation, even in the face of prolonged dereliction of the really existing state. I reflect at length on this paradox in chapter 8, joined by a number of other analysts. Pierre Englebert in his critique of African state performance notes that “students of African politics share a common puzzlement at the success that African countries have demonstrated at developing national identities in contrast to their failure at constructing actually functioning states.”44 Patrick Chabal adds that “there is little doubt that Africans do identify, never more strongly than when football is at stake, with their country of origin. Whatever differences may separate individuals within a particular country, there is clearly a vibrant bond that joins them together when it comes to expressing or defending national interests.”45
Revenue
The fifth imperative, revenue, is central to grasping the African state crisis of the 1980s, and the ongoing constraints it imposes. The ceaseless quest for revenue is “the bedrock postulate of state behavior.”46 Robert Bates broke new ground in identifying the revenue imperative as core driver to postcolonial politics.47 The search for money is the shorthand answer to the classic query by Goran Therborn: what does the ruling class do when it rules?48
Initially this did not appear problematic. Chapter 3 details the exceptional revenue expansion across the continent in the 1950s, whose momentum carried through much of the first independence decade. New access to external aid and continuing public capital flows from the withdrawing colonizer kept treasuries afloat. Well into the 1970s, international banks and donors lent Africa into the debt crisis. Ever since, serious revenue shortfalls have plagued the African state, with destabilizing consequences: inflation, inability to compensate civil servants, the starving of social and other infrastructure. The bitter medicine of often harsh SAPs was the ransom of temporary relief from the international financial institutions.
The impasse originates in the revenue patterns inherited from the colonial state. The primary central sources of government finance were levies on external trade, weighted to bear heavily on rural African incomes. On the import side, products aimed at Africans often carried higher duties than those destined for Europeans.49 On agricultural products, African producers bore both the customs duty plus “stabilization” charges aimed at generating a reserve to maintain the state-fixed producer prices when international markets were unfavorable but in reality usually diverted to other uses. In addition, different forms of capitation taxes, used mainly to fund local government in the late colonial period, though apparently small, could be a significant fraction of a peasant cash income; one careful study in Uganda demonstrated the small rural producers paid half their cash incomes in one form or another.50 Expatriate sectors of the economy were relatively lightly taxed.
Naturally, colonial fiscal arrangements came under challenge after independence. Use of state agricultural marketing monopolies as an instrument to generate developmental resources was challenged over time; by the 1990s such practices had largely disappeared. Embattled regimes gradually abandoned the capitation tax. Meanwhile, the larger commercial sector, immigrant or indigenous, proved difficult to tax. Income taxes on prosperous merchants or leading politicians are beyond the capacity of most states to collect. This leads some to experiment with a value added tax.
Rents on high-value commodities whose export channels can b
e readily monitored do produce substantial revenues; oil is the prime example. The emergence of Africa as a major oil producer is entirely postcolonial; only a small beginning was made in Algeria, Nigeria, and Angola before independence. Reliability of mineral rents on more readily smuggled commodities (diamonds and gold, for example) is more problematic. African states lack the technology to organize the exploitation of most minerals on their own. The urgency of securing the revenue flow reduces their leverage in bargaining with external corporations on terms of exploitation; long tax holidays, customs exemptions, and limited royalties have been the frequent result.
In the recent conflict zones or in circumstances of extreme state weakness, operational risks become too high for mainstream international corporations, who are arguably more likely to follow conventional protocols in their arrangements with African counterparts. In these circumstances, a horde of buccaneering operatives, willing to operate outside the normal rules, accept high risks in the expectation of comparably large returns while contributing little to state coffers. Congo-Kinshasa has been a particular magnet for such enterprises in recent years. Their activities are a significant element in the dispiriting figures reported by Global Financial Integrity.
But the critical overriding fact is that most African states have a pathetically small domestic revenue flow. The best endowed government, South Africa, ranked only thirty-first in a world ranking by state internal revenue in 2007. At that time, only thirteen African countries appeared among the top hundred globally in this respect, mainly either North African states or major oil exporters. Most African states cluster at the bottom end of the world scale. Only fourteen countries had government outlays exceeding the $4 billion 2010 budget of the University of Wisconsin System. In dramatic contrast stands the paltry domestic revenue that Congo-Kinshasa has at its disposal to govern its nine hundred thousand square miles and over sixty million people: $2 billion in 2005, over $3 billion in 2010.51
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