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| ANOTHER COUP: In practically every country where there was a change of government via a military coup, a popular uprising, an election upset or via an armed insurgency, the newcomers accused incumbents of corruption, dictatorship, tribalism and economic mismanagement. |
How governance in Africa reflects structural imperatives,
not the personalities of our leaders
THE LAST WORD | Andrew M. Mwenda | Recently, someone posted an article on our WhatsApp chatgroup about the persistence of “corruption” in Africa. It said on June 13, 1988, Pini Jason Onyegbaduo, a popular Nigerian columnist, propounded a “Hypothesis of Corruption.” In it, he argued that Africans are roughly bifurcated into two: the “ruling wicked; and the “waiting wicked.” Apparently, Onyegbaduo’s article led to his thesis being named `Jason’s Law of Corruption’ (JLC).
Onyegbaduo argued that the “decibel of an average African’s
public outcry is directly proportional to his distance from the opportunity to
do exactly what he condemns. The difference between many a vociferous, sanctimonious
and pontificating African and the villainous, itchy-fingered kleptomaniac is
probably the absence of the opportunity to steal. In all probability, should
the opportunity occur, yesterday’s moral crusader, is more likely to crumble
and disappear under the weight of corruption.”
Explained in simple terms, JLC “maintains that the farther
the distance between an African and power-authority position, the higher the
noise he makes against acts of corruption; the nearer he is to the position,
the lesser the noise he makes. When in the position (of power), the noise
ceases completely.” The commentator on the article concluded saying “suffice to
say that Pini’s corruption hypothesis has never “failed” the test when applied
in the analysis of the “bizarre behavior of Africans in power.” This is the
reason it was appropriately upgraded to the status of a “Law of Corruption.”
The reason many African intellectuals fell in love with
Pini’s argument is because it echoes our deeply held assumptions about our leaders
and governments. These assumptions are borrowed from the idealised governance
in Western countries. We use Western intellectual lenses to understand and
explain ourselves to ourselves. This way, we indulge in out-of-context
moralising about governance in our societies. Our lack of analytical rigour
about our situation is the greatest triumph of the colonial project.
Colonialism and its child, neocolonialism, could not have succeeded without
controlling how we think. Bob Marley called this “mental slavery”.
Pini’s observation is correct. The anticorruption crusader
in opposition politics in Africa today becomes a kleptomaniac the next day when
he captures power. But this is not because he is wicked. It is because he works
under circumstances that make corruption the only affordable, cost-effective
and cost-efficient strategy of managing power relations in a poor country.
I have read politics in Africa since my adolescent years. In
practically every country where there was a change of government via a military
coup, a popular uprising, an election upset or via an armed insurgency, the
newcomers accused incumbents of corruption, dictatorship, tribalism and
economic mismanagement. With very few exceptions (I can only think of
post-genocide Rwanda, and even here President Paul Kagame’s opponents would
disagree), all our governments have been accused of the same ills.
Should we, therefore, say Africans are inherently corrupt,
dictatorial, tribalistic and terrible managers of their economies? Many
Africans who make this argument are regurgitating racist propaganda. And this
construction of Africans is not innocent. Western powers need to dominate
Africa for purposes of advancing their interests. They cannot do this by
relying on force. They need to first capture our minds. So, they propagate
ideas of our leaders being wicked. This serves to justify their interventions
in our affairs; with economic policies that benefit their corporations, with
political recommendations that allow them to penetrate and direct our politics,
or with military interventions like they did in Libya.
Instead of dealing with the structures of our societies and
how these promote particular governance strategies, the analyst, the journalist,
the academic and the politician attribute everything to the personalities of
leaders: they are evil, wicked, selfish, stupid, don’t care about their people
etc. The governance strategies African leaders use to govern our societies are
imposed on them by the structural circumstances of our societies. That is why
various changes in government over a period of 60 years in 54 countries have
not brought about a fundamental change in these governance strategies. African
elites draw their understanding of governance from Western textbooks. Yet these
textbooks do not deal with politics as it plays out in practice even in Western
societies. Rather they posit the ideal.
The ideal governance structures of the West are rarely
practiced to the letter in those societies. But even if they were, their
success would be because of the structural circumstances of a fairly
homogenous, highly educated, high income and urban structure of their
societies. African countries are poor, ethnically fractionalised, agrarian with
low levels of education. The only way to understand how to manage such a
society is to look at the governance strategies of Western societies when they
were at the same level of per capita income, per capital revenue and per capita
spending.
Most African countries today are at the level of development
(in income and social structure) of European countries in 1820. And what were
the governance strategies of Western countries when they were exactly like
Africa today? Without exception, they relied heavily on corruption (patronage)
and repression (dictatorship) to manage power relations. There was no
distinction between the private resources of the king or duke and the public
wealth of the state. Public officials were recruited based on whom you knew
rather than what you knew (social connections as opposed to merit).
Were Europeans leaders of that time wicked and anti-people?
Certainly not. Were they ignorant of the values of merit-based recruitment and
democracy? Most elites had read the works of Greek scholars on democracy and
Chinese texts on meritocratic recruitment. Regardless of all the idealistic
statements in the U.S. Declaration of Independence (1776) and the French
Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789), it took both countries two centuries
to move towards the governance ideal stated in those two documents. And this
governance ideal came near to reality as a result of the structural changes in
their societies and the incomes that came with it.
Western leaders of yesteryears governed through a combination
of corruption and patronage because those were the only effective and
affordable means they had given the structural conditions of their countries
and the revenues available to the state. Why then present African leaders of
today as wicked for employing governance strategies typical of managing
politics in poor agrarian societies? In fact, I would like to write a book
titled: Weapons of the Poor: Governance Strategies in Developing Countries. The
aim would be to demonstrate that leaders in Africa are not pathological but
reflections of the circumstances of their societies.
*****
amwenda@independent.co.ug
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