Debates on African politics , governance and development have been located within the search for socio-economic and political transformation of the continent, especially since the wave of independence that started in the late 1950s. In attempts to contextualize the challenges faced by African countries, scholars have established a link between the nature of politics, economy and governance from pre-colonial through colonial to the postcolonial periods (Herbst, 2000; Chabal and Daloz, 1999; Mamdani, 1996; Ake, 1981; Rodney, 1981).
Mamdani (1996) shows how the pre-colonial institutions of governance were rearranged, altered and recreated to serve the immediate needs of the colonialists . In a bid to institute and establish their authority over their subjects, the colonialists changed the structure of power by deposing chiefs and traditional rulers and arbitrarily appointing compliant natives who were inclined to do their bidding. The constitution of these new levels of power had implications for the exercise of power, the legitimacy of political authority as well as for peace, harmony and cohesion of the colonized societies. Over the course of time, African politics have evolved with varied experiences across different parts of the continent.
Discourses on African politics have centered around state formation , its capacity to deliver public good, the development and entrenchment of institutions, the role of the state in the economy as well as the nature and the character of political elites (Joseph, 2016; Englebert, 2009; Herbst, 2000; Chabal and Daloz, 1999). Herbst (2000) compares Africa with Europe and concludes that the processes of state formation in Africa have not followed those in Europe due in part to the failure to develop bureaucratic capacity and institutions for tax collection. He notes that the state in Africa never had to make political concessions to its citizens . This leads to a situation where there is no functioning political institutions such as parliament . Even in the post-independence era, the state still functions essentially as an instrument of extraction by the political elites . This simplistic explanation of Herbst on political power and the state in Africa was challenged by Robinson (2002) who convincingly argues that external factors such as long years of trans-Atlantic slave trade and colonialism contributed to the weak capacity of the state in Africa. Fukuyama (2010) identifies three important categories of political institutions that are necessary for the delivery of public good in any society. These include the state, the rule of law and accountable government. These three institutions have not been obviously present in many African countries post-independence and their absence has created room for the preponderance of patrimonialism, in which government officials use the state as a means of personal accumulation. Bratton and van de Walle (1994: 61) put this in contextual perspective thus:
In patrimonial political systems, an individual rules by dint of personal prestige and power; ordinary folk are treated as extensions of the ‘big man’s’ household, with no rights or privileges other than those bestowed by the ruler. Authority is entirely personalized, shaped by the ruler’s preferences rather than any codified system of laws. The ruler ensures the political stability of the regime and personal political survival by providing a zone of security in an uncertain environment and by selectively distributing favors and material benefits to loyal followers who are not citizens of the polity so much as the ruler’s clients.
Fukuyama (2010) amplifies this position when he notes that impersonal modern states are difficult institutions to both establish and maintain, since patrimonialism—recruitment based on kinship or personal reciprocity—is the natural form of social relationship to which human beings will revert in the absence of other norms and incentives and that the most universal form of human political interaction is a patron–client relationship in which a leader exchanges favors in return for support from a group of followers. With the particular case of Africa, Fukuyama notes that, although most people would prefer to live in a society where government is both effective and accountable, only few governments are able to provide these qualities because of weak , corrupt, incapacitated or absent institutions. Scholars such as Young (1994) and Joseph (2013, 1987) argue that the prebendalizing of the public realm created a state that was incapable of effective macroeconomic management. This is because patrimonialism has a self-destructive nature with strong debilitating consequences for the capacity of the state. Despite the popularity of this concept among Africanist scholars in the West and the influence that their position has had on the donor community in their assessment of the socio-economic situation in Africa, recent scholarship has queried the utilitarian benefit of the concept to the African economic condition . For instance, Pitcher et al. (2009) argue that the current usages of the term patrimonial in the context of Africa are conceptually problematic and amount to a serious misreading of Weber. They argue that, contrary to the broad-brush usage of the concept to describe economic performance in Africa, Weber’s usage of patrimonialism indicates a legitimate type of authority , not a type of regime. It also included notions of reciprocity and voluntary compliance between rulers and the ruled. Given this relationship, the reciprocities enabled subjects to check the actions of rulers , which most analyses of neopatrimonialism overlook. Mkandawire (2015: 4) takes this argument forward when he notes that:
The location of the economic challenges of the 1980s within the purview of the marriage of traditional practices and modernity in Africa is only one side of the argument, which serves the interests of the World Bank and its neoliberal apologists. The idea of developmental patrimonialism has also been used to describe outliers such as post-genocide Rwanda and, increasingly, Ethiopia .While patrimonialism can be used to describe different styles of exercising authority , idiosyncratic mannerism of certain individual leaders and social practices within states, the concept offers little analytical content and has no predictive value with respect to economic policy and performance.
Apart from the patrimonialism school and its variant, neopatrimonialism, scholars argue that the state in Africa is also weak because of corruption. In an attempt to describe the nature of the state in Africa, especially in relations to its dysfunctionality, various epithets have been used: “sovereignty and sorrow,” “politics of the belly,” “prebendal,” “leviathan,” “kleptocratic,” “predatory,” “disorder as political instrument,” and “patrimonial,” among others (Englebert, 2009; Chabal and Daloz, 1999; Bayart, 1993; Joseph, 2013, 1987).
While these descriptions may be apt, many of the inventors of these epithets fail to take into consideration the role of external forces in the shaping of the state in Africa. Adebanwi and Obadare (2010: 387) put this counter-argument this way:
While the struggle has been less than satisfactory as these authors argue, other scholars have established the fact that, in the first decades of independence , the state in Africa performed relatively creditably, even as it became involved in established enterprises, expanded the bureaucracy, thereby generating employment for the teeming population (Olukoshi, 2004; Soludo and Ogbu, 2004).The disorder-as-a-system-of-order thesis that governs many approaches to African realities often misses the historical nature of the order that the positive Other—that is, the social forces committed to the transformation, or, at least, reformation has been attempting, before and since independence , to impose on the African state . Yet, that the result of the struggle has been less than satisfactory or even visible must be conceded.
One of the most visible expressions of the disconnect between external actors’ policy prognosis and the reality of African conditions was the Berg Report of 1981, which the World Bank adopted as its policy framework for Africa. The report had identified the state as the main hindrance to economic development and recommended that African countries (that were already in throes of economic problems) should be compelled to adopt various measures, which include the Washington Consensus prescriptions such as market liberalization , inflationary macroeconomic stabilization and other market-based and private-sector driven policies. As Augustine Fosu (this volume ) notes, other recommendations of the Bretton Woods Institutions (BWIs) include:
These policy presc...strict debt management; effective control of budget deficits; massive privatization of state-owned enterprises; and curtailment of government spending, including severely limiting government subsidies for consumption goods and social services. Particularly salient among the proposed policies were currency devaluation and trade liberalization intended to achieve an economically healthy and stable external balance. These proposed reforms refer to ‘economic governance’.