The South African sociologist, Omar Badsha in his book, Amulets and dreams: war, youth and change in Africa (2002) has drawn attention to a dilemma facing radical scholarship on Africa. For him the question is this: ‘… how does one represent Africa without extending the pervasive influence of Afro-pessimist?’ (p. 3). By embarking on a critical reflection on 50 years of the nation state and governance in Africa, one runs the risk of being trapped in the web of another ‘African pathology’ and the risk of reinforcing pejorative external perceptions that Africans are incapable of governing modern states effectively. Yet, not to speak out against the failure of leadership in Africa would not only reiterate the objectification of African leadership, it can also invite the accusation of collaboration with those who created the conditions that made it impossible for freedom of expression to prevail, human rights to be respected and economic liberation to be realised. To some extent the dilemma is false and self-imposed by a social science, which Alvin Gouldner (1962) has described as a Minotaur, based on labyrinthian logic that seeks ‘objectivity’ and ‘neutrality’; and what the late Nigerian political scientist, Claude Ake (1982) has referred to as ‘the most pernicious form of imperialism’.
The burden of the nation-state project
The 1960s has been described as the decade of African independence, and as the wind of change blew across the continent, scores of countries emerged from colonial bondage, starting off with Cameroons under Ahmadou Ahidjo on 1 January 1960 (earlier South Africa, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, Ghana, Guinea Conakry and Sudan had gained their independence). By the end of the decade there were no less than 41 independent African states, mainly former British and French colonies; Portuguese ‘ultra colonialism’ had a strong hold on its African territories, awaiting the tide of the national liberation movement, which itself would bring an end to the Estado Novo regime of Salazar and Caetano in 1974. In the past year and a half, a number of countries have been celebrating their golden anniversary, including: Cameroons, Mauritania, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Tanzania (see Bangura and Shivji's and the other Tanzanian contributions to this volume). On 1 October 2010, as Nigerians celebrated the golden anniversary of independence, home-grown terrorists from the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) detonated a large bomb in the nation's capital, Abuja, killing several civilians. Not to be outdone by MEND, in 2011, another terror group, the Boko Haram (literally, ‘Western education is taboo’) bombed the head office of the United Nations in Abuja, killing scores of civilians.
Nigeria, the giant of Africa (one out of every four Africans is a Nigerian) continues to be plagued by ethnic, religious and regional identities, which had resulted in the bloody civil war from 1967–70, in which over a million lives were lost. The politicisation of religious and ethnic identities in Nigeria (and many other African countries) connects with the failure to address the all-important question of citizenship: in short, who is a Nigerian? The failure to address this fundamental question of the nation-state project led to the ‘Shugaba affair’ in Nigeria in the early 1980s, when a leading opposition figure, who had become a thorn in the side of the government led by Alhaji Shehu Shagari, was unceremoniously deported to neighbouring Cameroons because it was alleged that he was not a Nigerian, as his mother hailed from that neighbouring country, part of which voted to leave Nigeria to join Cameroons at the time of independence in 1960. This undemocratic action soon produced a counter discourse by opposition forces, who suggested that the leader of the Second Republic himself was not a Nigerian, as he was born in a village (Shagari) in neighbouring Niger. Years later, President Frederick Chiluba of Zambia, in an attempt to ward off electoral defeat following years of poor performance, decided to disenfranchise ‘the father of the nation’, Kenneth Kaunda, by suggesting that he was from Malawi.
In a number of African countries, citizens from one region of the country are rendered as second-class citizens by being denied certain employment rights, because they are not ‘indigenes’ of the region or ‘state’ they have chosen to call home. Furthermore, certain ethnic groups are disqualified from land rights in one part of the country, whilst at the same time land is now being mortgaged in the biggest land grab sweeping through Africa, as multinational juggernauts and sovereign wealth funds from the ‘old’ and ‘new’ imperialist centres intensify the latest stage of accumulation by dispossession. Clearly the purchase of land for biofuels or the production of crops for the export market has potentially serious implications for domestic food production – in a continent that is already a net importer of food – and for global environmental change (Simon 2011). Rapid land alienation could worsen an already serious unemployment situation in a continent with high unemployment amongst its young people; and could be a threat to political stability, particularly in post-conflict societies.
Despite this flouting of rights to citizenship, African political actors have professed to be constructing an African version sui generis of the Westphalia project, in which citizens and rights of citizenship are at its core. In his critique of the inheritors of the postcolonial state, Basil Davidson (1992) has pointed out that they turned their back on traditional African institutions and elected instead to institute the European/Westphalia project of nation-statism. For Davidson, the crisis that Africa faces is a crisis of institutions. In his view, that African nationalism had been transformed into nation-statism is indeed a recipe for disaster. He argued that whilst initially nation-statism looked like liberation and really began as such, not only did this liberation peter out, but:
In practice, it was not a restoration of Africa to Africa's own history, but the onset of a new period of indirect subjection to the history of Europe. The 50 or so states of the colonial partition, each formed and governed as though their people possessed no history of their own, became 50 or so nation-states formed and governed on European models, chiefly the models of Britain and France. Liberation thus produced its own denial. Liberation led to alienation. (Davidson 1992, p. 10)
Corruption and Africa's two publics
In addressing the issue of corruption and Africa's dual public (Ekeh 1975), the late Nigerian pan-Africanist and activist, Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, drew a parallel between the members of the Yoruba elite, who he argued would have no qualm in raiding the national treasury, but in whose care the collective dues of the Yoruba Parapo 1 will be totally safe even to the last penny (Abdul-Raheem 2008). The relevant questions here are: what is it that gives the Parapo sanctity and protection from predation of the faithful, which the state cannot attract? Is it to do with deterrent and punishment, which is easily understood by the membership, giving the fact that in some African states those who pillage the national treasury are never sent to prison, even when found guilty? Or is it simply that they respect the Parapo, with whom they share an affinity and common Weltanschauung? If the latter is the case, then the successors of the colonial state may have missed an opportunity to appropriate traditional institutions to discipline society.
In many African countries, the agricultural sector has been starved of investment (Winrock International and USAID, 1991), and the peasantry continues to produce raw materials for export, as victims of forced savings via merchant capital, with no serious attempts to transform them into manufactured goods. In a final attempt to render the peasantry irrelevant to the developmental effort, rather than boost production of local staples, African states sought solutions in the massive importation of food items, including American PL480 rice and maize in direct competition with local producers, unleashing taste transfer and impelling involution as peasant producers took evasive actions by retreating into subsistence production. This neglect of the rural sector had ripple effects on African development, as precious foreign exchange was expended on food importation, thus denying employment possibilities to local workers. These critical issues of economic mismanagement, corruption and poor governance formed the core of the ‘African crisis’: political instability, balance of payment problems, indebtedness, stagflation, high incidence of HIV/AIDS and malaria, and high mortality rates, particularly among children. Indeed, it is doubtful if the Millennium Development Goals can be met.
African crisis, structural adjustments and the lost decades
For many African countries, economic performance in the early years of independence has been described as ‘a story of modest progress’, with ‘human development indicators show[ing] a decided improvement’ (Ndulu and O'Connell 2012), and the emergence of a small manufacturing sector. This consisted mainly of an import-substitution sector producing light manufacturing goods such as textiles, candles, beverages and plastic goods; and the more developed economies such as Nigeria's actually had car assembly plants, steel industries and actually exported some of the light consumer goods to neighbouring territories. However, the sector was plagued by many problems, including: competition from regions with lower production costs (‘dumping’); dependence on capital-intensive technology with negative impact on employment and the balance of payments situation, leading to indebtedness. According to Samir Amin (1974), this sector was geared towards the luxury- and export-goods sectors, thereby ignoring the mass domestic market. Following the oil crisis of the 1970s and 1980s, and as a consequence of the glut of petrodollars, numerous unsavoury loans were foisted upon African governments, a large proportion of which was directed to overseas banks by Africa's vampire rulers. The net effect was indebtedness and widespread macroeconomic imbalance in the balance of payments.
As African governments trooped to the international financial institutions (IFIs) in the 1980s for assistance to deal with their balance of payments problems, they encountered a new genre, neoliberalism, which had seized the developed world, privileging the market whilst seeking to roll back the state, directing traditional state functions to Northern-based non-governmental organisations. In return for loans to help African governments overcome their growing deficits, they had to sign up to highly deflationary and destructive conditionality (not too dissimilar to what is now being foisted on the Greek people), which can only be imposed successfully by non-democratic regimes, a task many African leaders were initially unwilling to undertake. Thus one of the most brutal dictators of the era, who was given much leeway with the conditionality and who utilised the cover of structural adjustment to intensify looting and privatisation of state assets (Zack-Williams 1995), observed:
A few years ago, world recession and a sharp fall in the value of our main exports caused us financial difficulties. The IMF offered to assist us, but requested in the first place that we should devalue our currency by a fairly appreciable extent. This would have greatly increased our cost of living which, in a country like ours, is largely determined by the cost of imports, such as fuel and … essential foodstuffs. Naturally, I was reluctant to support measures which would have had such an adverse effect on the lives of the vast majority of our people … I felt that devaluation would hardly stimulate our exports, or make them more competitive, as it would have done in the case of an industrialised country. As regards our diamond exports, the only beneficiaries of devaluation would have been the international brokers, enabling them to buy our gem stones at a lower price in terms of hard currency without necessarily stimulating the world market by reducing prices to the end consumer. (Stevens 1984, pp. 67–68)
Whilst the aim of SAPs was to rectify macroeconomic imbalances and remove inefficiency within African state bureaucracy, the policy recommendation was a standard recipe, regardless of causation and the elasticity of demand for African exports. It called for a massive devaluation of the local currency; major cuts in public expenditure, causing massive unemployment in countries where the public sector remains the driver for modernisation; lifting of protective trade barriers to expose ‘infant industries’ to ‘dumping’ and unfair competition; removal of subsidies on essential products, thereby leaving the poor exposed to the market. In order to institute a new start, unprofitable state enterprises were to be liquidated and profitable ones had to be privatised, sold to individuals and corporations from the capital-owning North. Through SAPs, neoliberalism instituted a new experience of underdevelopment in Africa, as large sections of the continent's manufacturing base disappeared, physical and social infrastructure collapsed, indebtedness grew, and African states were exposed to challenges from social movements, resulting in bloody civil wars in many countries. Paradoxically, the solution to ‘Africa's crisis’ worsened the African condition, as SAPs imposed an atmosphere of permanent austerity, which is anathema to economic growth and development.
This time for Africa?
In spite of the turbulence in North Africa which has resulted in the departure of three of the continent's notorious dictators (Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Hosni Mubarak, and Muammar Gaddhafi, who was murdered with the help of imperialist forces)2, and the arrest of Laurent Gbagbo by the International Court of Justice in The Hague, the outlook for Africa looks bullish, as good economic indicators continue to come out of the continent. Political stability is now a common feature of the African political landscape. Most countries on the continent have either returned to, or are planning a return to, constitutional rule. Many African countries have now successfully held elections, in which incumbent administrations have been unseated – for example, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Zambia and Malawi, Kenya and Ivory Coast. In other cases, whilst incumbency has triumphed, it has not resulted in a military coup or civil strife.
In terms of economic policies, whilst many African countries continued to implement neoliberal policies, such as SAPs and their successor, Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), there has been a certain degree of new realism in many of these policies as reflected in low indebtedness, and greater attention to agricultural production in order to bolster output. In 2009, sub-Saharan African economies were in deep recession, but by 2010 aggregate GDP grew by 4.7%, and the forecast for 2012 is 5.3 to 5.8%, as opposed to 4% forecast for the world as a whole. For African oil-exporting countries the figures are higher, at 6 to 7% in 2012 (Seria and McGregor 2011). The spur to the current African economic performance has been the export of minerals, largely as a result of China's entry into the African commodity market; and these developments are taking place at a time when the economies of the developed centre are all forecasting low growth rate for the immediate future. Does this mean that Africa has now put the unfortunate past behind it? That remains to be seen.
Articles in this issue
The contributions by Bangura and by Shivji, Saul and Cliffe directly address issues of the golden jubilee of the decade of African independence. Bangura looks specifically at the rather unfortunate postcolonial experience of Sierra Leone, once described as ‘the Athens of West Africa’, which at independence (with a relatively independent judiciary and efficient civil service) was considered as a country with much hope for economic development and sustainable democracy, a position critically addressed by Zubairu Wai in his critique of the neo-patrimonial paradigm. However, within two generations the country had been transmogrified to the poorest of the poor, due to poor governance, corruption and the impact of SAPs. Bangura draws attention to the wasted opportunities of the postcolonial years for a country which at independence in 1961 had a GDP per capita of US$142.92, higher than those of South Korea (US$91.63), India (US$86.23), China (US$75.87) and Botswana (US$56.17) (Zack-Williams 2012, p. 248). Bangura's contribution, which was initially addressed to policymakers in Freetown, contains invaluable policy recommendations, such as how to harness mineral resources for economic transformation; rebuilding and expanding human capital and the politics of transformation.
We have seen how the inheritors of the colonial state turned their back on indigenous political institutions as they sought ‘modern tools’ of governance. Nonetheless, as Shivji has argued in the case of leaders such as Nkrumah of Ghana and Nyerere of Tanzania, who interrogated the core of Western liberal ideology and ethical individualism, they were able offer philosophical and ideological alternatives – Nyerere's ‘ujamaa socialism’ and pan-Africanism, Nkrumah's Consciencism and pan-Africanism – to give hope and ensure peace among their people. Shivji points out that for Nkrumah, Ghanaian nationalism and sovereignty were ‘a momentary expression in the struggle for pan-Africanism’, as is embodied in his famous maxim, ‘Seek ye first the political kingdom’, and his assertion that Ghana's independence was meaningless without the liberation of the rest of the continent. In the philosophies of both leaders, the state has a major role to play in social transformation, which put them (Nkrumah in particular) on a collision path with the emerging anti-dirigisme of Western liberal ideology. Nkrumah, in particular, was distrustful of the local bourgeoisie, who he feared could become a comprador class, working as agents for foreign governments. The paucity of their size and their dependent nature meant that they could not fulfil the historic role of a bourgeoisie, thus, like Nyerere, much premium was placed on the state as a vehicle for economic transformation. Both emphasised the top-down method of revolutionary transformation by the state with the support of the peasant and workers, a strategy which tends to obfuscate the ideas of the masses, with the risk of alienating them from the party and state, which became the same under both leaders.
The concern over political and social unrest in these unstable states has been a major worry for the postcolonial rulers in Africa: initially the focus was on the military, the most organised sector of society, which was prepared to defend its interests at all costs when this was perceived to be under threat, leading to a series of coups stretching back to 1960 with the coup against the Congolese patriot Patrice Lumumba (see below) by Joseph Mobutu, and his untimely death at the hands of the United Nations forces.3 In 1963 Sylvanus Olympio of Togo was overthrown and murdered in a military coup, and this was followed by a series of coups in Zanzibar in 1964, Nigeria and Ghana (both in 1966), Sierra Leone in 1967, and by the end of the millennium there was hardly an African country that had not been affected by a coup or mutiny. However, by the late 1980s, as the Cold War was drawing to an end, a new source of challenge to the state emerged, that of social movement.
It is this phenomenon in the context of South Africa that Friedman examines in his contribution to this issue. He observes that despite the growing impoverishment of the masses in South Africa as a consequence of the current economic crisis, this has not resulted in ‘organised mobilisation by working people and the poor for a new economic order’. Friedman draws attention to two causal factors: first, the fact that the poverty of the African population predates the current economic crisis; second, the fraternal relations between the ruling African National Congress (ANC), the South African Communist Party and the trade union movement. In his view the lack of sustained challenge to existing power inequalities is a structural problem symptomatic of the manner under which the poor are mobilised. Indeed, he is scornful of any role that the formal trade union movement could play in posing a challenge to the ruling class, since this limitation on the trade unions reduces their bargaining power. This raises the fundamental question of the relevance of the trade union movement as a vehicle for mobilising the aspirations of the workers, given its articulation with the ANC. In his view, social movements are ‘unable to play the role once played by unions’ and are no longer in a position to unleash effective campaign for the redistribution of power and resources, or even policy change.
Friedman goes on to explain the reasons for this change in fortune of the labour movement as ‘social movement’: their alliance with the ANC which blunted their revolutionary edges; and the atomisation of production thanks to the growth of post-Fordism, which reduced the organic composition of labour whilst increasing the organic composition of capital, thus reducing the spatial concentration of workers. This form of production – including the modern cottage, or ‘putting out’, system of women in the Cape Province working from home – also tends to reduce employers' reliance on labour. However, Friedman was cautious in dismissing the labour movement in South Africa as irrelevant to the project of economic and social transformation by pointing out that it is possible that ‘they could be playing that role but without appreciable success thus far’. The membership may not be desirous of change, but may simply want to extract resources from the system. Friedman draws attention to the successful campaign of Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) in obtaining antiretrovirals for HIV/AIDS sufferers, pointing to the fact that unions may no longer be the key drivers of redistribution politics, and though social movements' growth may be limited by organisational constraints, they have obtained constituencies beyond the reach of the unions.
Zubairu Wai's paper is a methodological critique of what he calls ‘the dominant Africanist discourse on African state forms and its relationship with what is seen as pervasive state failure on the continent’, namely neo-patrimonialism, which seeks to historicise state rationality based on the Western ideal liberal state by presenting a ‘vulgar universalism’, which ignores specific experiences. He argues that within this paradigm the African state is presented as demonstrating an undifferentiated state rationality and political behaviour defined by rent-seeking activities, as obstacles to the reform-minded activities of the IFIs and other Western agencies. Drawing from the work of Mudimbe, Wai asks whether it is possible to theorise from the throes of a universalism that claims to transcend all transhistorical lines and variations, when the template of ‘universal’ is demonstrating signs of ‘ethnocentric biases’ in the face of ‘very specific localism’. Furthermore, Wai berates attempts by neo-patrimonialists to excuse colonial rule from contemporary conflicts, political unrest and state failure. Whilst this is not a call for a return to the mechanistic syndrome of the dependency theory of old, nonetheless, it is a warning that the need to incorporate African agency within any serious analysis of the crisis of the African state should not mean that imperialism should be let off the hook.
Ben Nwosu's contribution is also a methodological critique of Huntington's Third wave: democratization in the twentieth century, as further developed by Jaggers and Gurr in the tracking of the third-wave transition to democracy by a wave of non-democratic polities. He notes that the study reveals ‘uninspiring promises’ for democracy, which in his view is not surprising since ‘the analytical tools of the study are rooted in the procedural third wave discourse on democracy’. Furthermore, such tools cannot explain why most of the third-wave states in Africa are generating defective versions of democratisation. He then goes on to argue that ‘the third-wave procedural discourse is not only an inadequate formulation, but it is also one of the sources of the perverse forms which democratic transitions are taking in several African states’. He warns that attempts by liberal-democracy theorists such as Huntington and Schumpeter to reduce democracy to elections run the risk of losing the social contract element of citizen claims on the state, which as we have seen is the Gordian knot of nation-state building in postcolonial Africa. As he observes: ‘This analytical thrust abandons the idea of people (demos) and privileges system reproduction. But de-emphasising people in favour of system or procedure theoretically reinforces political alienation’. Inspired by Macpherson's critique of attempts to equate democracy and the market society, Nwosu warns against such a reductionist approach:
The procedural model treats democracy as a market mechanism in which voters are consumers while politicians are entrepreneurs…. Consequently, the formal equality it professes at the political level of structure is empty because it is a carry-over of the principle of competitive equality in unequal market conditions. Protection of rights therefore means protection of the market ethos of competition and contract regime.
… the epistemology is part of the hegemonic project that reifies capitalist modernisation and conflates it with democracy. It has a strong effect on the democratisation discourse with confinement of the meaning of democracy to only the easily measurable procedural referents. These referents, such as elections and regime of rights, fail to integrate the substantive elements that are related to socio-economic conditions which create social citizenship.
Weldehaimanot offers a brief historical analysis in order to refute the revisionists' challenge, pointing to the process of incorporation of Eritrea into the Ethiopian federation with the resulting resistance to such a process, starting with the Muslims in the lowlands, who in 1961 founded the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF). The incorporation led to further repression and growing resistance, plus a counter discourse among Eritrean nationalists which has continued into the post-independence era. He emphasises that the problems of Eritrea are not simply a reflection of identity, and believes that the issues of the dictatorship and future relations with Ethiopia need to be addressed through political processes of negotiation.
Gavin Capps' contribution on the platinum mining industry in South Africa draws attention to the phenomenal growth of this industry since the mid 1990s to become the largest component in the mining sector, both in terms of value-added and employment provision. This article, which is the first part of two connected articles4, seeks to contribute to the political economy of platinum mining by pointing to the crucial role that the apartheid mineral property system played in its principal accumulation strategy in the years leading to the current platinum boom. Capps points to the different and complicating forms of ownership in the former Bophuthatswana and Lebowa Bantustans, their geopolitical location under apartheid, and how the reproduction of these strategic mineral property relations was secured during the political transition to the benefit of the white platinum corporations. The abundance of deposits in the country and the booming price of platinum have produced the unintentional effect of turning the industry into a major target for ANC reform legislation of the sector.
Henning Melber's paper reminds us of another anniversary – that of the death of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld of Sweden, who served as Secretary-General from April 1953 until his tragic death in a plane crash in September 1961. According to Melber, Hammarskjöld was head of the UN at a critical time for that organisation: not only did his tenure mark the height of the Cold War and the emergence of the Berlin Wall, but it was a period of transition for the UN body as it moved from being an almost exclusively Western organisation after the Second World War towards a global governance institution, which also saw the growing membership of African states. Indeed, to observe the death of the cosmopolitan Swede, who fought for the neutrality of the world organisation in the face of politicians who sought to turn the organisation into their poodle, we also have to pay tribute to Patrice Lumumba, that patriot of the Congo, who met his death at the hands of imperialism as he fought for the rights of his people to be governed by leaders of their choice. Indeed, the untimely and brutal death of Lumumba at the hands of UN forces that were sent to protect him has cast a long shadow over the Democratic Republic of Congo throughout its postcolonial history as one leader after another is assassinated and civil war continues to be perpetuated by those who seek to rape and pillage the resources of this nation at the heart of the continent.
Promoting an ongoing debate evaluating Tanzania's jubilee
One notable 50th anniversary, mentioned above, was the recent anniversary in December 2011 of Tanzania's independence on 9 December 1961. Seen by many as a beacon offering signs of hope and lessons to be learned for Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, it also gave specific inspiration in the founding of ROAPE. In a special section, three contributors associated with the editing of the Review from its outset offer their differing memories and reflections on this history, especially the first decades. These are offered as a first chapter in the more thorough deconstruction that the Tanzania experience deserves, and they do point to a possible agenda of questions for debate. We hope that potential contributors will be moved to submit views, challenging these and other perceptions, to bring the story not only up to the recent decades but also to consider the implications of this legacy for Tanzania's future options.