Dunn and Englebert Chapter 4 - The Practice of Power in Africa

Dunn and Englebert Chapter 4

The Practice of Power in Africa

(review provided by Kubra Dagtekin and Nur Ozcan)

 

 

In this piece, we will be discussing the general mechanisms through which African states function, and African rulers keep themselves in power. While examining the power relations in contemporary African politics, we will first look at the term “neopatrimonialism”, then political parties and military regimes in Africa, and lastly, we will examine the typical workings of an African government.

Neopatrimonialism

Neopatrimonialism is the most frequently used word in describing the practice of power in Africa. The term comes from patrimonialism, a concept invented by the German sociologist Max Weber. Patrimonialism is a system in which all power relations between the ruler and the ruled are informal personal relations. Family and family roles are at the core of the patrimonial system.

Patrimonial authority is very similar to the traditional authority a father has over his children. It is caring but absolute. The decisions made by the father are unquestioned. The patron uses his authority and legitimacy, to grant positions and resources in exchange for loyalty. Those who receive these positions use them for their own profit and also extract gains for the patron. In Weber’s argument, the subjects consider these practices as legitimate in the exercise of authority. He also wrote that these traditional patriarchies could be found across the world in premodern societies, especially in precolonial Africa.

In post-colonial Africa, similar features of the traditional patrimonialism are still observable. Big men rise to power and call themselves the fathers of their nations. Patrimonialism is the main concept used to explain both decentralized chaos and the rise of centralized authority. But the African regimes are not just patrimonial. Post-colonial Africa also displays some elements of what Weber called the rational-legal rule. There exist formal institutions, laws, and administrative routines. Of course, there are various levels of the rational-legal rule in the continent, for example, Botswana and Senegal display higher rational-legal rule, yet Chad, Congo, and Zaire display lesser. All post-colonial African states are more than patrimonial systems. They include visible elements of modern statehood. Neopatrimonialism was invented to address this combination of patrimonialism and rational-legal authority.

Neopatrimonialism works as a complex web of patron-client relations, parasitically attached to state offices and resources. At the core of the system is an all-powerful leader, and his clients are ministers, generals, and governors. They are assigned their positions due to being from the president’s region, ethnic group, or family. In this way, neopatrimonialism consumes the pie of state resources, or in Nigerian terms, the national cake. The clientelism functions as a redistributing agency of wealth. Sometimes entire regions or ethnic groups are left out of this kind of vertical redistribution, which results in inequality and political instability.

There are two theories on why Neopatrimonialism is common in Africa. One is the tribal past of the societies that valued kinship and centered around the chief, and the other explanation is a political-economic necessity. The neopatrimonial rule can be arbitrary and abusive, but it provides the states with much needed political stability. Unfortunately, this kind of stability has a very high price. Neopatrimonialism leads to inferior development, poor governance, and structurally depends on corruption. African governance is not conventionally developmental, but it is good at serving as an integrative function. Thus, attempts to promote developmental policies and institutions threaten the very core of the foundations of African regimes and entail political costs that are often neglected by those who design these policies.

In the end, “Neopatrimonialism” is a word and not a theory. It is a shortcut to describe the features of the typic. At one time or another, scholars have labeled nearly every

African government as patrimonial or neo-patrimonial. Yet Weber did not mean patrimonialism to describe dysfunctional or deviant types of governments. The regime type and state development do not depend on or indicated by neo-patrimonialism.

Political Parties

 

Parties have existed in Africa since the early twentieth century, but most of them were founded after 1945 when the decolonization began to unfold. Following independence, many of the nationwide political parties turned into single parties. These single parties became the foundation of the one-party rules in most neo-patrimonial states. These were not truly all-encompassing mass parties, but rather institutional appendages to personal rulers. In most countries, the other parties are either banned outright as in the military regimes of Burkina Faso, Ghana, and Uganda or assigned a minimal role. The elections continued to be held, but with little more intent than to legitimize the authoritarian ruler, as was the case in Benin, Gabon, and Kenya. The exceptions were very few: Botswana, Gambia, and Mauritius were the only countries to consistently tolerate multiple parties over the 1960–1990 period. Botswana and Mauritius have been consistently democratic since independence, but even so, Botswana has never witnessed a change of party in power. In countries with pre-independence factionalism, as in Nigeria and Congo, there were military takeovers, which usually banned parties altogether.

The end of the Cold War challenged the single-party systems. Western donors who were long tolerant of authoritarian regimes began demanding democratic reforms. The number of political parties exploded almost everywhere on the continent. For example, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, more than 200 parties registered within months after Mobutu introduced multiparty politics in April 1990. In most countries, many minuscule parties soon disappeared. But in some countries, the number of parties has remained extremely high. As of 2007, there were 130 recognized political parties in Côte d'Ivoire, 103 in Burkina Faso, 94 in Mali, and 41 in Nigeria.

This multiplicity contributes to fragmentation rather than democracy. Many African parties are based on ethnic or regional loyalties, and ethnic politics is damaging democracy's development. Another characteristic of African parties is their relative lack of political programs. African democracies are essentially "choiceless"—that is, there is a very limited range of policy choices. It is not in the best interest of parties to offer anything new in terms of policy. If their goal is to unite ethnic groups or ethnic coalitions, any reference to specific policies could be more divisive than useful.

They also suffer from very limited institutionalization and funding. The lack of organizational structure of African parties correlates with their patronage features. The loyalty to the leader generates a deficit of democracy. The internal debate is lacking or repressed. Party members are composed of young men looking for patronage, rather than dues-paying members.

Moreover, there exist severe imbalances between the party in power and those in opposition. The ruling party dominates, uses the state funds and government structures. The lack of party system competitiveness is diminishing government accountability and responsiveness.

In the end, African parties have deep relations with neopatrimonialism. While lacking formal strength, they are nevertheless anchored in society through informal patron-client relationships. Clientelism and patronage provide legitimacy for party leadership and can even contribute to the stabilization of a democratic regime.

 

Militaries

Although African states wage war against each other relatively rarely, militaries have been ubiquitous actors in African societies since independence. Ever since the 1960s, Africa has had a history of military intervention in politics, with a greater propensity for coups d’état and military regimes than any other continent. By 2019, Africa had seen at least 200 coup attempts.

Research note that as of the end of 1985, Africa had experienced 61 successful coups and 73 failed attempts. More importantly, studies suggest that military intervention has remained widespread on the continent despite post-1990s democratization. However, coup behavior in sub-Saharan Africa exhibits no clear increasing or decreasing trend.

The continued use of military coups suggests that democratization might have altogether de-legitimized the practice. Positive popular reactions to coups in places like Mauritania in 2005, Guinea in 2008 or Niger in 2010 indicate that Africans sometimes see military intervention as a solution to political deadlocks at the beginning.

Some of these coups were examples of a new breed of military intervention, post-1990, that we might label the “democratic coup”. The first instance of such kind of the military taking power from a dictator probably took place with the overthrow of Moussa Traoré in Mali in 1991. It is hard to make sense of coups without taking into account the dynamics of the regime that is being overthrown. Once the military intervenes to put an end to a regime, however unjust, it sets a precedent that undermines control of the armed forces by civilian authorities, thus keeps hostage subsequent elected governments.

But, why do African militaries intervene? One hypothesis is that low or negative growth undermines the legitimacy of incumbents. Beyond poor economic performance, however, there is also a more fundamental propensity for military coups inscribed in the very functioning of neopatrimonialism which produces factionalism and regime instability. What motivates military conspiracies are the opportunities for access to resources brought about by political office. In the end, it turns into a form of rent-seeking behavior, as the revenues from foreign aid and natural resources are “rents to sovereignty” that coup plotters might seek to appropriate.

Not all military interventions result in military regimes. Some actually usher in transitions toward electoral democracy whereas others bring in a military ruler who later runs for office himself, in sham or honest elections, or merely civilianizes his regime over time. Apart from bullying people and stealing from them, African military regimes are rarely good at anything. They do not have a better governance record than their civilian counterparts, nor are they able to create order, despite their theoretical comparative advantage in this domain. Even when not directly in power, African militaries often contribute to the low quality of African governance. Rulers tend to keep them at a safe distance and prefer to protect themselves with presidential guards that are directly accountable to them. As a result, militaries are deployed all over the country and often left to their own devices.

The Branches and Practice of Power

African executives are characterized by a high degree of centralization and presidentialism. Authority and resources tend to be concentrated within the central government, with relatively little autonomy for local branches. In addition, within the central government, most of the authority is concentrated in the person of the president. The relative powers of the president and of the central government continue to dwarf those of other institutions even in the regimes that have democratized and in which decentralization reforms have taken place. In addition to being centralized, African governments are rather large. The average cabinet in 2018 numbered around thirty members, for contrast, France’s has twenty two. Despite their large governments, African executives do not have excessively large bureaucracies, at least if one considers formally employed civil servants. Although many countries lack data, government spending hovers around 20 percent of GDP, which is comparable to government spending in other regions. In the question of what they actually do, in comparative terms and on average, African governments suffer from rather weak capacity to govern and administer including public policy design and implementation. Although this is certainly not true of all governments at all times, weak administrative capacity might also derive from a degree of institutional mimicry of the practices of former colonial powers, which exists in several African countries. Similar ministries, agencies, and codes are created, and the trappings, ranks, statuses, and privileges of official functions are reproduced, without necessarily responding to specific policy needs. Weak capacity also results from grassroots administrative practices. Compared to the large number of more or less abstract studies of the state in Africa, there is actually relatively little scholarship on the day-to-day functioning of African administrations.

In addition, corruption is a dominant theme in studies of African administrations. Some of it is high-profile and plagues the highest reaches of executive authority. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, President Joseph Kabila and his entourage set up largely fictitious companies in the British Virgin Islands, to which the state then sold mining rights at a deep discount, which the companies then resold to genuine mining companies. A British All-Parliamentary Group on the Great Lakes Region of Africa estimated the loss of Congolese people at more than 5 billion dollars in 2011. Although it is certainly not unique to the continent, corruption is a hallmark of African civil service and of its relations with citizens and firms. An average of 27.8 percent of African firms, as opposed to 22.5 percent of firms worldwide (including Africa), expect needing to give gifts to public officials to “get things done”.

What are the causes of the relative inefficiency and weakness of Africa’s public administrations? There are some straightforward but very partial explanations, such as the material precariousness of often unpaid or irregularly paid civil servants, or the general lack of sufficient human capital in countries with limited educational opportunities and few schools of public administration. But there are also more structural factors, with external and domestic origins, that impede the progress of African administrations. Among the former, it is necessary to single out the colonial roots of African administrations and their original design as instruments of command and control more than of public service.

The problem could be summed up as whereas in Europe modern bureaucracy developed more or less in parallel to the emergence of citizenship and democracy throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, in contrast, in Africa it has gone hand in hand with inequality, violence and contempt, in the absence of any real civic or egalitarian tradition, even since independence.

In terms of governance by nonstate actors, an increasing number of nonstate actors have become involved in the provision of these services on the continent, sometimes on their own, sometimes in partnership with the state. Thus, a research agenda focused on “effective governance” has developed that studies how public services and collective action are organized “for real” at the local level. This literature stresses the hybridity of governance and its negotiated nature among different state and non-state actors. A consequence of shared governance has been the blurring of the public-private divide among African institutions and the rise of more ambiguous “twilight” institutions.

While most African legislatures were for a long time little more than the rubber stamps of personal rulers, many of them have taken on a new life and more significant roles in the wake of the democratization trend of the early 1990s. A research project on African legislatures in “emerging African democracies” has explored their features in Benin, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and Uganda and found that, within this sample, legislative power is not correlated to a country’s overall degree of democracy. Research on African legislatures generally indicates that both citizens and MPs tend to place a higher emphasis on representation and constituency service than on legislating and government oversight, reflecting the clientelistic nature of African politics.

The judiciary branch of the government tends to be much less significant in African politics. This is partly because of the more informal nature of power in Africa, the degree of presidential centralization, and the prevalence of personal rule, all of which reduce the influence and autonomy of judicial institutions. Neopatrimonialism is largely inimical to the rule of law. As a result, African courts have not typically evolved as checks and balances on executive power.