Political Order and Political Decay (46 page)

What these deviant cases demonstrate is that human agency matters a great deal in institutional development. Costa Rica could have ended up like El Salvador or Nicaragua but for certain good political choices made by leaders in the late 1940s. Argentina, by contrast, squandered many natural advantages because its elites had exaggerated fears of social change, and because of the behavior of its early leaders. Counterfactual histories are very easy to imagine in all of these cases.

Latin America and the Caribbean were the oldest non-Western societies colonized by European powers. We will now turn to sub-Saharan Africa, the region where colonialism began centuries later and failed to leave nearly as deep an institutional imprint. If Latin America's problem was that early Spanish and Portuguese institutions left a legacy of authoritarian government, inequality, and class polarization, Africa's problem was that the colonial authorities wanted to exercise dominion on the cheap and failed to leave behind much of an institutional legacy at all. If states in Latin America were weak and failed to evolve into modern Weberian bureaucracies, in sub-Saharan Africa states were often missing altogether.

 

19

STORMS IN AFRICA

Why sub-Saharan Africa's situation is today not as bad as commonly perceived; how certain nations there nonetheless are near the bottom of global development rankings; how the central obstacle to development is lack of an effective state; how and why the Europeans colonized Africa

During the 1990s and early 2000s, Western audiences were bombarded with pictures of starving African children and appeals from figures in the entertainment world like Bono and Angelina Jolie to support debt relief and foreign assistance to impoverished countries there. It is ironic that this campaign was reaching a crescendo just as Africa was effecting a major turnaround in its fortunes. Following a long period of decline, the countries of sub-Saharan Africa as a whole achieved economic growth rates of more than 4.6 percent per year in the period from 2000 to 2011, according to the World Bank.
1
Some are resource-rich states including Angola and Nigeria that rode a commodity boom in the 2000s driven by demand from China and other emerging market countries. Economist Steven Radelet points out, however, that even if one excludes these highly corrupt countries, there is still a core of about seventeen states that have not only grown economically but have also been governed democratically, holding reasonably free and fair multiparty elections. There are obviously countries with very bad records either with regard to economic growth or democratic government, such as Somalia, Zimbabwe, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. But just as Asia encompasses countries performing at widely varying levels, from Singapore and South Korea on the one hand to Burma and North Korea on the other, so too the African story is a complex one that does not fit current stereotypes of a continent of starving children.
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Sub-Saharan Africa's recent turnaround should not, however, obscure its disastrous overall performance in the generation that stretched from independence in the 1960s to the mid-1990s. The story told about Nigeria in chapter 14 is not typical of Africa; Nigeria had a particularly bad case of a disease afflicting many countries in the region.
Figure 15
traces per capita GDP for sub-Saharan Africa compared to the developing countries of East Asia. It shows, first, that incomes in the latter region went from being a fraction of Africa's to a level nearly four times as great, and that from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s African per capita incomes actually dropped.

FIGURE 15.
Sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia, Per Capita GDP, 1960–2011

SOURCE
: World Bank

These aggregate statistics mask, moreover, the misery of life for many Africans in this period. Somalia, Liberia, and Sierra Leone fell apart entirely and were taken over by warlord gangs that drugged child soldiers and turned them into pathological killers. Independence from Portugal triggered long civil wars in Angola and Mozambique fueled by outside powers. Sudan fought a long war with its own south, which finally became an independent country in 2011, while committing atrocities against the population of Darfur. South Sudan itself collapsed into civil war soon after independence. Uganda, Equatorial Guinea, and the Central African Republic suffered under grotesque dictators, while the Democratic Republic of Congo went from kleptocratic bankruptcy under Mobutu Sese Seko to breakdown and a prolonged internal conflict that has killed as many as five million people. Many of these conflicts were driven by global demand for African commodities such as diamonds, copper, cobalt, cotton, and oil, and were facilitated by weapons and mercenaries provided by developed countries.
3

Africa's poor economic performance in this period and its troubled political institutions are clearly linked. Countries will obviously not grow if they are racked by bloody conflicts. For this reason, economist Paul Collier and a number of other Africanists have spent their academic careers studying conflict and ways to mitigate it. But as Collier himself would be the first to admit, conflict is itself driven by weak institutions. If a country has legitimate, strong, and effective political institutions, the discovery of diamonds or oil on its territory will not tempt rebel groups to grab them or foreign powers to meddle in their exploitation. Norway did not fall apart when it discovered offshore oil. In a similar vein, many people blame ethnic divisions for creating conflict. But Collier and others have found that ethnicity is often a tool that political leaders use to mobilize followers, rather than a fundamental source of conflict in itself. Switzerland with its strong institutions has grown rich despite its internal ethnic differences.
4

AFRICA'S WEAK STATES

Even though Africa encompasses a wide variety of political regimes from stable democracies to authoritarian kleptocracies to failed states, there are certain generalizations that can be made about many of them. There is an African mode of governance that characterizes many states on the continent, and it is distinctly different from those found in Latin America or East Asia.

Political scientists have labeled this type of governance “neopatrimonialism.” Throughout this book I have used Max Weber's term “patrimonial” to refer to governments staffed by the family and friends of the ruler, and run for their benefit. Modern governments, by contrast, are supposed to be staffed by officials chosen on the basis of merit and expertise, and run for the sake of a broad public interest. A neopatrimonial government has the outward form of a modern state, with a constitution, presidents and prime ministers, a legal system, and pretensions of impersonality, but the actual operation of the government remains at core a matter of sharing state resources with friends and family.
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The first characteristic of African neopatrimonial rule is its personalism. In the wake of independence, politics centered around the figure of the president or Big Man (virtually all African postcolonial political systems were presidential rather than parliamentary, and all presidents were male), to whom individuals owed loyalty. While leaders set up political parties, these were far less well organized and important than in Asia and Europe, where ideology was an organizing principle. African leaders cultivated images that were part father figure and part Mafia boss: Mobutu of Zaire wore a leopard-skin hat and sunglasses, and carried a ceremonial stick; Julius Nyerere of Tanzania had himself referred to as “the teacher”; President Gnassingbé Eyadéma of Togo was said to have occult powers. The authority of presidents was enormous and not shared with legislatures, courts, or ministers, regardless of what the constitution said.
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Moreover, very few African presidents until recent times observed term limits or were willing to peacefully turn over power to successors, as George Washington did after serving two terms. Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia served for twenty-seven years, Mobutu for thirty-two, Jomo Kenyatta for fourteen, Sékou Touré of Guinea for twenty-six, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana for fifteen, Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia for seventeen, Paul Biya of Cameroon for thirty-two, Teodoro Obiang of Equatorial Guinea for thirty-five, Yoweri Museveni of Uganda for twenty-seven, and Eduardo dos Santos of Angola for thirty-five (Biya, Obiang, Museveni, and dos Santos are still in power, as of this writing). Among the reasons that Nelson Mandela, the first black president of South Africa, stood out among revolutionary African political leaders was the fact that he voluntarily relinquished the presidency after a single five-year term.

A second characteristic of African neopatrimonialism was massive use of state resources to cultivate political support, which resulted in pervasive clientelism. To an even greater degree than in nineteenth-century America, presidents distributed offices and favors to their supporters in a particularly blatant way, which resulted in the immense expansion of executive branches. Mobutu's Zaire, for example, had six hundred thousand names on the civil service payroll, when the World Bank estimated it needed no more than fifty thousand. The central bank alone employed half again as many people as the entire private banking sector. Mobutu initially used nationalized Belgian properties to build his political base, according to journalist Michela Wrong:

Mobutu, of course, did best out of the share-out, seizing fourteen plantations which were merged into a conglomerate that employed 25,000 people, making it the third largest employer in the country, responsible for one fourth of Zairean cocoa and rubber production. Members of his Ngbandi tribe were the next to benefit, their plum positions in the newly nationalised companies and prime enterprises making up for all those jibes about rural backwardness. But Mobutu was careful to ensure all the major ethnic groups whose support he needed profited. The social class known as the “Grosses Legumes” (Big Vegetables)—a term used by ordinary Zaireans with a mixture of resentment and awe—was born.
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Zambia had by one estimate 165,000 people in public administration in the 1990s, while state employees in Kenya grew from 18,213 in 1971 to 43,230 in 1990. During the boom years of the 1960s and '70s when commodity prices were rising, these rapidly expanding state sectors could be supported, but Africa as a whole was thrown into a severe debt crisis as commodity prices collapsed in the 1980s, and bloated public payrolls became unsustainable.
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For all of the size and symbolic authority of neopatrimonial governments of postcolonial Africa, however, the single most important characteristic, as Jeffrey Herbst has argued, is their underlying weakness.
9
Using again the Weberian definition, the strength of a state is measured by its ability to make and enforce rules over a defined territory, something that is a matter not just of physical coercion but also of legitimate authority. While African leaders could jail and intimidate political opponents, the basic capacity of their states to deliver basic public services like health and education outside of cities, to maintain law and order and adjudicate disputes, or to manage macroeconomic policy was often nonexistent.

State capacity, if measured by the ability to extract taxes, was lower in sub-Saharan Africa than in Latin America, and a fraction of what it is in the developed world. Many of the region's poorest countries extract no more than 7–15 percent of GDP in taxes, and many of those taxing at higher levels do so only because of natural resource wealth.
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The types of taxes collected also reflect weak state capacity: they are overwhelmingly customs duties and indirect taxes of various sorts (now often value-added taxes, following recommendations of foreign donors) rather than more difficult to collect personal income taxes. State budgets therefore have had to be financed from other sources. For some countries, like Angola, Nigeria, and Sudan, those were resource rents; for many of the others, foreign aid has become a major source of budget support. At the nadir of Africa's decline in the 1990s, funding from foreign donors amounted to anywhere from 8 to 12 percent of GDP, and in many cases represented a majority share of total government budgets.
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As we have seen, state capacity can also be understood in terms of whether the government exercises a monopoly of force over its own territory. Sub-Saharan Africa after independence has been subject to a host of civil wars, separatist movements, rebellions, coups, and other internal conflicts, many of which are ongoing. Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Somalia all experienced total state failure and collapsed into warlordism during the 1990s. Zaire had a large army that looked impressive on paper, but when the country was invaded from the east by troops of the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire in 1996, its military collapsed overnight. The army did more damage to the Congolese population than the invading forces as it fled and stripped whatever assets it could steal. The new government of Laurent Kabila proved no better and was unable to defend the country from a range of predatory militias and soldiers from neighboring countries. This failure to control violence is endemic to Africa's weak states.