Accumulation
The limits to the accumulation capacities of most African states with the exception of northern Africa and South Africa is thus evident. The pathetically small domestic revenue base of the more impoverished African states provide little scope for public investment except from external sources. The major oil producers that do enjoy ample revenue appear singularly susceptible to corrupt diversion of the oil revenues entering state coffers; Nigeria, Angola, Equatorial Guinea, and Algeria all rank near the top in Transparency International corruption perception scores. They also tend to have large militaries, equipped with high-end weaponry, a further constraint on resources for public investment (see table 9.2).
The global discredit of socialist orientation by the late 1980s and the failure of the integral state as instrument of accelerated development produced a far-reaching recalculation of the avenues to accumulation. With the global recasting of developmental doctrine and the emergence of the period of predominance of neoliberal policy reason, most African states accepted the premise of a market economy (although Seychelles clung to socialist orientation until 2009). By the late 1990s, access to foreign capital improved, an important factor in the modest enhancement in developmental measures. In the following decade, the massive Chinese influx of mineral investment, often accompanied by funds for major infrastructure projects, altered the profile of foreign capital. Tourism was another significant sector for foreign investment. A number of countries negotiated major write-downs of their external debts, reducing the crippling burden of debt service. As Nigerians were quick to point out, the sums paid in mere service of the debilitating debt that reached $37 billion well exceeded the original value of the borrowed funds; a 2005 deal forgave $18 billion in return for a payment of $12 billion, reducing the external debt to a manageable $7 billion.52 In 2010, Congo’s $13 billion external debt originating with the Mobutu regime was mostly written off.
Measures of State Performance
In the 1990s and 2000s, a number of indices emerged permitting a ranking of African state performance on various important criteria. One of the most ambitious and interesting is sponsored by Sudanese billionaire Mo Ibrahim, whose fortune of very recent vintage is rooted in his leading role in the spectacular spread of cell phones in Africa, especially in the first decade of the twenty-first century.53 He commissioned a working group led by Robert Rotberg in 2006, who developed a scoring system combining some fifty-seven variables, whose main components included sustainable economic opportunity, human development, safety and rule of law, political participation, and human rights. The resulting annual index attracts great attention in Africa and elsewhere. Table 9.3 lists the top and bottom performers in 2010.
Table 9.4 undertakes a variant of this exercise by combining along with the Mo Ibrahim Index four other rankings that endeavor a measurement of important aspects of state performance: Freedom House’s Freedom in the World; UNDP’s Human Development Index (which measures social factors such as life expectancy, school enrollments, and adult literacy), Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, and the Failed State Index, developed by Foreign Policy and Fund for Peace and based on a dozen indicators tapping instability, delegitimation, conflicted elites, refugees, and external interventions. For the Freedom House scale, the lowest score means highest level of freedom; for the other measures, the higher figures record more virtuous performance according to the respective criteria of the scale. The fifty-three African states are listed in the table in the order of their overall average ranking across these five comparative scales.
TABLE 9.3. Top and Bottom Ten Countries, 2010 Mo Ibrahim Index
Top 10 Bottom 10
Mauritius Ivory Coast
Seychelles Guinea
Botswana Equatorial Guinea
Cape Verde Central African Republic
South Africa Sudan
Namibia Eritrea
Ghana Zimbabwe
Tunisia Congo-K
Lesotho Chad
Egypt Somalia
SOURCE: Africa Confidential, 8 October 2010.
A number of limitations to this exercise are apparent from the outset. To begin with, there is some overlap in the contents of the indicators used to construct these indices; the overall ranking conveys at best only an approximate portrayal of relative performance. Further, in the middle part of the rankings the differences in score are small; thus the real significance lies at the upper and lower ends of the scale.
More important questions arise concerning the most highly ranked North African states, whose dysfunctions became fully evident only when mass up risings suddenly appeared at the end of 2010. The macro-indicators appearing to demonstrate a performing state failed to capture the flaws so starkly revealed, for example, in the protest movement against the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia. Other seeming anomalies appear in the rankings. For example, Comoros, widely regarded as an infirm, unstable, and feeble polity, implausibly ranks above Kenya, Rwanda, or Uganda, although its standing perhaps reflects the first democratic transition since 1975 independence in 2006, and significant improvement in IMF evaluations of its economic governance. Liberia seems more highly ranked than its still dilapidated condition might justify; clearly here the indices are partly capturing improvement under President Johnson-Sirleaf from a very low base.
Notwithstanding these limitations, a number of pertinent observations arise from contemplation of table 9.4. Perhaps the first striking correlation is size of polity and overall performance. With the exception of Comoros, the small offshore island polities all rank near the top. Only Mauritius has highly salient ethno-racial diversity among this group; I return below to the particulars of this case. All but “partly free” Comoros dwell in the “free” category of Freedom House, and all earn high scores on the human development index. Cape Verde, Mauritius, and Seychelles have enjoyed high stability. Insulated by their geography, they require only tiny security forces.
At the other end of this spectrum, the largest African states appear encumbered by their sheer scale and human complexity, contrary to conventional wisdom that bigger is better. If one sets aside relatively homogeneous Algeria, much of whose geographic expanse is little populated, the three giant polities are Sudan, Congo-Kinshasa, and Nigeria. All three have been theaters of civil war and high ethno-regional tensions. Internal war raged in southern Sudan for thirty-nine of the fifty-four postcolonial years and recently spread to Darfur; its breakup is imminent. Congo struggles to overcome a failed decolonization, the predatory rule of Mobutu, endemic violence in its eastern regions, and a debilitated state. Nigeria navigates from one crisis to another, despite its high oil revenues; though often remarkable political ingenuity has held the polity together in spite of the multiplicity of ethnic and religious fracture lines, its performance ranks in the bottom third of table 9.4. Herbst and Mills point out that in 1999, these three had a per capita GDP of less than $300, compared to $2,200 for countries with less than two million inhabitants (the island polities plus the microstates of Gambia, Equatorial Guinea, Djibouti, and Swaziland). The giant states also fared poorly on the Human Development Index.54
TABLE 9.4. Comparative African State Performance, 2009
Country listed in order of average of rankings in in the five scales Freedom House 2009 Mo Ibrahim 2009 Human Development Index 2009 Transparency 2009 Failed State Index* 2009
Mauritius 1.5 82.83 0.804 5.4 53
Seychelles 3.0 77.13 0.845 4.8 49
Cape Verde 1.0 78.01 0.708 5.1 40
Botswana 2.5 73.59 0.694 5.6 48
South Africa 2.0 69.44 0.683 4.7 51
Namibia 2.0 68.81 0.686 4.5 43
Ghana 1.5 65.96 0.526 3.9 52
Tunisia 6.0 65.81 0.769 4.2 50
Sao Tome 2.0 60.23 0.651 2.8 42
Morocco 4.5 57.83 0.654 3.3 41
Benin 2.0 58.20 0.492 2.9 44
Lesotho 3.0 61.18 0.514 3.3 32
Senegal 3.0 55.98 0.464 3.0 46
Gabon 5.5 53.92 0.755
2.9 45
Madagascar 5.0 58.37 0.543 3.0 33
Tanzania 3.5 59.24 0.530 2.6 34
Algeria 5.5 58.36 0.754 2.8 36
Zambia 3.5 55.30 0.481 3.0 30
Mali 2.5 54.55 0.371 2.8 39
Egypt 5.5 60.09 0.703 2.8 23
Libya 7.0 53.69 0.847 2.5 47
Malawi 3.5 53.03 0.493 3.3 17
Swaziland 6.0 49.43 0.542 3.6 31
Gambia 5.0 55.13 0.456 2.9 38
Comoros 3.5 48.58 0.574 2.3 28
Burkina Faso 4.0 51.58 0.389 3.6 21
Djibouti 5.0 46.04 0.520 2.8 37
Mozambique 3.5 52.38 0.402 2.5 35
Liberia 3.5 44.92 0.442 3.1 20
Kenya 4.0 53.74 0.541 2.2 9
Rwanda 5.5 48.53 0.460 3.3 24
Togo 4.5 40.83 0.499 2.8 27
Uganda 4.5 53.57 0.514 2.5 12
Mauritania 5.5 50.57 0.520 2.5 25
Sierra Leone 3.0 48.91 0.365 2.2 19
Nigeria 4.5 46.46 0.511 2.5 10
Angola 5.5 41.02 0.564 1.9 29
Niger 4.5 46.59 0.340 2.9 13
Congo-B 5.5 42.79 0.601 1.9 18
Ethiopia 5.0 45.59 0.414 2.7 11
Cameroon 6.0 47.00 0.523 2.2 15
Equatorial Guinea 7.0 39.39 0.719 1.8 26
Guinea-Bissau 4.0 43.50 0.396 1.9 16
Eritrea 7.0 36.96 0.472 2.6 22
Burundi 4.5 45.27 0.394 1.8 14
Ivory Coast 5.5 36.61 0.484 2.1 8
Central African Republic 5.0 35.00 0.369 2.0 6
Sudan 7.0 33.45 0.531 1.5 3
Guinea 6.5 40.41 0.435 1.8 7
Zimbabwe 6.0 31.29 NA 2.2 2
Congo-K 6.0 33.25 0.389 1.9 5
Chad 6.5 29.86 0.392 1.6 4
Somalia 7.0 15.24 NA 1.1 1
SOURCE: www.freedomhouse.org/uploads/fiw/FIW.2010_Tables_and_Graphs.pdf, accessed 28 May 2010; Mo Ibrahim Index www.moibrahimfoundation.org/en/section/the-moibrahimindex/ scores-and-ranking, accessed 28 May 2010; United Nations Development Program Human Development Index, Jeune Afrique, special issue 24, May 2010, 88–168; Transparency International www.transparency.org/policy.research/surveys.indices.cpi/2009/table; Failed State Index, Foreign Policy May–June 2009. I am indebted to research assistants Brandon Kenthammer and Laura Singleton for the initial data collection and conceptualization of this table and to Estelle Young and Eva Young for assistance in its construction.
The countries at either end of the continent fared distinctly better than others in the rankings; all lay in the top half. In the southern African complex (South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland), they all fall in the Freedom House “free” category and rank highly in the Mo Ibrahim index, except for Swaziland. South Africa since the transition to majority rule and Namibia and Botswana since independence have been stable democracies that perform well on all measures.
The Arab tier of northern African states reflect a different profile. Their relative rankings owe nothing to democratic virtue; only Morocco , which has relatively open and competitive elections and is a mostly law-abiding state, fits the “partly free” category. At the center of the law, however, is the palace, the fount of authority and ultimate manager of the political realm. The other four Arab tier countries (Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt) have been mostly authoritarian states. They also have revenues that vastly exceed those of most sub-Saharan states. All but Libya have tolerated some impotent and divided opposition groups and periodic but mostly sham elections. The regimes were frozen in power, protected by a powerful security apparatus, surrounded by predatory sycophants and greedy families.55
Libya is a category of its own. During his four decades of highly personalized autocracy, Muammar Qadhafy offered an extraordinary blend of sultanism, revolutionary populism, and idiosyncratic Islamism.56 His jamahariyya doctrine essentially gave ideological cover to an mukhabarak state like its northern African counterparts, differing above all in the institutionally personalized nature of power exercise. Although he entirely monopolized authority, he used no formal title of office, other than his military rank of colonel and his favored informal designation as “guide” of the “Libyan revolution.” Al though he drew on traditional norms of rural Libyan tribal culture in his patrimonial rule, his legitimating ideology was an original blend of anti-imperial nationalism, popular socialism, and his distinct exegesis of Islamism. As chapter 3 explains, Libya began independence with a virtual vacuum of governance; the Italian colonial state left little behind after it was extinguished in World War II.57 However, vast oil revenues, providing Libya with the third highest state revenue in Africa, and a small population of six million assured the means for four decades of Qadhafy’s quixotic personal rule. His paradoxical antipathy to state-building combined with his destruction of the private economy created a bizarre polity, entirely patrimonial at the summit but statist at the base, with housing, food distribution, and retail trade left in government hands.58 Oil revenues also funded Qadhafy’s shifting but extravagant ambitions in the international realm from early ventures in Arab state unification (Egypt, Tunisia) to trans-Sahara expansion (a short-lived ambition to annex Chad) to more recent pan-African ambitions (his role in launching the AU and leadership aspirations, his self-appointment as “king of kings” at an assembly of African chiefs). His costly penchant for a visionary and revolutionary African and global role led to his hosting in the 1980s a wide range of insurgents, from the Irish Revolutionary Army to the rebel leaders in Liberia and Sierra Leone, to his seeking nuclear weapon technology from North Korea (a project he abandoned in 2003), to his downing of American and French passenger aircraft. To these reckless actions one may add the multiple interventions in violent conflicts in Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Uganda, Mali, Niger, and Chad. Nonetheless, sufficient resources remained to earn Africa’s highest rating in the UNDP Human Development Index. Still, the scale of the 2011 uprising that overthrew him revealed the depth of popular antagonism toward his dictatorship.
The authoritarian pattern dominant in the North African states was not in itself necessarily a barrier to developmental performance in other respects. Tunisia in particular by economic measures appeared to be an effective state, whose growth rate had consistently averaged almost 5% since independence. The poverty rate had diminished from 75% to 3% and per capita GDP multiplied tenfold.59 The initial ruler, Habib Bourguiba, was never interested in wealth and lived a modest life. His plan for transforming Tunisian society was ambitious; he insisted on universal education; when he left power, almost all adults were literate and all children were enrolled in school. Within three months of his accession, he had promulgated a remarkably progressive family code, assuring the equality of women and education for girls; he arranged for his tomb in Monastir to bear the inscription “liberator of the Tunisian woman.” Although Tunisia has only small hydrocarbon revenues, a competent bureaucracy had effectively managed available resources and the substantial external assistance its positive image and careful diplomacy had assured. However, the increasingly sclerotic autocracy of Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, who ousted Bourguiba in 1987, and the immense mercantile empire seized by his family had been a source of intense frustration for the intelligentsia; regime critics long decried an inequitable distribution of the fruits of growth.60
Any inference of a correlation between authoritarian rule and positive developmental performance vanishes on examination of the countries in the bottom half of the rankings. Some may be classified as semidemocratic and others as in the midst of precarious democratic transition following civil war (Sierra Leone, Liberia, Congo-Kinshasa), but most are primarily authoritarian. The utter discredit of neopatrimonial autocracy below the Sahara by 1990 is not reversed by any observable performance in the last two decades. There is in contrast a striking correlation between degree of democracy and positive performance.
Another relationship worth noting concerns those polities with high levels of oil export. Even in notoriously corrupt countries whose rulers are beneficiaries of high levels of off
shore wealth, such as Equatorial Guinea or Angola, the UNDP’s Human Development Index figures are well above those of the most debilitated states. Even after a predatory levy has been collected on the oil revenues at the summit, enough remains to better sustain social expenditures than in the revenue-deprived polities.
LEADERSHIP AS VARIABLE
Turning to other differentiating factors explaining relative state performance, I would place leadership high on the list. The pervasive presidentialism of the postcolonial regimes multiplied the impact of the leader on the polity. Perhaps this vector operated with special force in the founding years; the most remarkable leaders created an enduring array of norms governing state behavior and a pattern of voluntary withdrawal from power that path dependency reproduced in succeeding rulers. Among noteworthy examples, I would mention Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Léopold Senghor of Senegal, and Nelson Mandela, hero of the South African transition.
Nyerere and Senghor both made consequential miscalculations in developmental orientation, drawn for a time into the temptations of the integral state. Forced villagization in Tanzania and rural animation in Senegal were unsuccessful policies. But the leaders came to recognize the failings of this model and did not oppose policy changes by their successors. The single-party monopolies they erected provided more channels for voice than most others. Their framing of socialist orientation as rooted in African heritage was far from universally convincing, but it was less denatured by unrestrained oppression and visible predation under a socialist façade than in many other countries. Two peaceful constitutional successions have taken place in Senegal and South Africa, three in Tanzania. Nyerere, Senghor, and Mandela especially are inscribed in popular memory as revered founding fathers who all left office voluntarily. All of them bequeathed to their countries a secured national identity.
Some others might be added to the roster of able and effective leaders who left a legacy of prosperity; many would include Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Ivory Coast, president for thirty-three years. Especially during his first two decades, the country enjoyed remarkable economic success, and his paternal autocracy was never as harsh as that of many of his contemporaries. However, his successors, especially Laurent Gbagbo, have not proved worthy of his legacy.
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