AFRICA: The Challenge
Of State Building
by
Ojo Maduekwe
culled from THIS DAY, November 21,
2004
The year was 1966. The clouds of
civil war were on the horizon. I had just enrolled as a Freshman Law Student at
the University of Nigeria, soon to be renamed University of Biafra. The
highlight of the Law Students Annual Dinner was a scheduled lecture by the
already highly acclaimed man of letters and law, Justice Chukwudifu Oputa who
had just been appointed a High Court Judge after surprisingly giving up a very
lucrative private practice.
Justice Oputa's reputation for scholarly oratory was already part of the
intellectual landscape of the era. An advocate in the finest tradition of the
bar, our advertised guest speaker mesmerized his audience of young students
itching for action in the war front with the depth of his scholarship and over
all sense of connectedness to issues. It did not matter to us that like former
United States Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, and then a young
Harvard Law student before the American Civil War, our first test was more
likely to be under artillery fire in combat than forensic fire of opposing
advocacy. We listened with rapt attention to a speaker who was an awesome
expression of the Renaissance Ideal in his effortless blend of several
disciplines with legal scholarship. His presentation during that eerie evening
of 1966, unknown to any soothsayer, was an accurate anticipation of the mandate,
which York University Centre for Public Policy was to adopt twenty years later
in July 1986.
As stated in the letter of September 28 from Professor Bruce Ryder, Director
Centre for Public Law and Public Policy of York University, the Centre's mandate
“is to address itself to the research, study and public discussion of the role
of law in the formation and expression of public policy and its impact upon
society." I admit that so overwhelming was Justice Oputa's periclean delivery
that not a few of us planned on a lifetime project of imitating him! It must be
clear by now that I must have made such a poor job of following this great
jurist's footsteps that barely few years of leaving the Law school, the
seductive chant of politics carried me off to other endeavors. Perhaps my
appearance here this afternoon will be a modest but acceptable atonement for the
faltering of the resolve to walk the path of the remarkable Justice Chukwudifu
Oputa, especially since 38 years after his lecture at Enugu Campus of the
University of Nigeria, one of his listeners is here in Canada to share thoughts
on how Africa can avoid the mistakes and miscalculations that led to the
Nigerian Civil War.
I proceed however only upon first discharging the obligation of saluting the
organizers of this important initiative. I also bring greetings from President
Olusegun Obasanjo who warmly approved that I make this trip to Honour Justice
Oputa whom he regarded highly enough to have appointed him to chair the Human
Rights Investigation Panel very early in the life of his Administration.
The Nigerian President as you are probably aware of regards with utmost
importance, the extraordinary potential which Nigerians in Diaspora possess in
helping to turn things around at home. If the Chinese-Americans,
Indian-Americans, and much earlier, Jewish-Americans could be pivotal for
gigantic leaps of development in their countries of origin, there is no
justification for Nigerians in North America not to make a difference in
Nigeria.
It was obviously a very difficult time to leave home, as the second phase of a
major strike was underway. This strike was at the instance of the central
leadership of the trade union movement, which had declared itself official
opposition to the Government, since in their view, regular political parties who
lost to the ruling PDP (People Democratic Party) were either unwilling or unable
to perform the tasks of an opposition. When you add to that, the unrest in the
Niger Delta by groups that had mobilized armed militia against the nation,
disturbing echoes of Biafra by some young men who were not born during the Civil
War, together with other dissonance in the system, it was not the most
auspicious time for me as the Adviser to the President on Legal and
Constitutional Matters to travel overseas. But happily, Nigeria is
work-in-progress.
Few weeks earlier, precisely on September 30, it had been my honour to deliver
the 44th Independence Anniversary Lecture titled LEST WE FORGET. I had warned in
a speech that was televised in full several times on national television that
"recent events such as the
eruption in Plateau and Kano states of Nigeria, and the new assertiveness of
well-armed militia in Niger-Delta of Nigeria coupled with fiscal
irresponsibility of some elected officials who also terrorize those who elected
them with new structures of authoritarianism, coupled again with the visionless
and highly divisive debate about 2007, against the background of incendiary
calls for a sovereign national conference ( a prescription normally reserved for
collapsed states) all these strongly suggest that unless crucial strategic moves
within the polity and economy are undertaken in the months ahead, the nation is
at risk of slipping back around 2007 to a failing state or even a failed state
status with severe consequences, not only for all our people, but for the whole
sub-region.”
As I reflected on the theme of my remarks this afternoon, it became more and
more obvious that the Nigerian scene was representative enough of the current
African crisis of state capacity and state building. How well are new African
democracies equipped to deal with the pressure cooker syndrome in which the
removal of the lid of oppression originally put in place by previous
authoritarian regimes tends to be followed by spasms of violence? This is not
merely an African problem with the consequences limited to the continent because
the epidemic of failed States, which can result from leadership incompetence in
dealing with these issues, has global implications in an Age of Terror. Failed
States are the best breeding grounds for the exportation of terror, and after
September 11, 2001, civilized humanity is unified that this constitutes the
simple biggest threat to a stable international order so vital to peace and
sustained economic growth without which the poor countries of the world, most of
which are in Africa, will be mired in more poverty and misery. Nigeria’s role is
particularly pivotal here as every fourth African is a Nigerian, and it is safe
to say that whichever path Nigeria goes, determines the way Africa would go. The
leadership role which the country is currently engaged with international
acclaim in bringing peace and stability to other African countries such as
Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sudan, and even previously Rwanda and Burundi, and its
historic effort in the dismantling of apartheid, all these are factors that
reinforce the essential status of the Nigerian state in the African equation.
The central challenge of African politicians and decision makers is how to
create and enhance state capacity in the continent. African states are weak and
not a few are in danger of becoming failed or collapsed states. The implication
for the international community of having a few more Somalis, Sudans, Sierra
Leones, Liberias, and Rwandan scale of blood letting challenge friends and
leaders of Africa to compel a return to the drawing board. That is the message I
bring.
A brief explanation as to how we came to this sorry state should be in order.
Several decades after independence, many African countries could not move
substantially from statehood to stateness. Statehood is about flag independence,
whereas stateness relates to the capacity of the nation-state to function as an
efficient bureaucratic entity that could apply and enforce laws across the board
without patrimonial diversions, evincing at all times political will to maintain
order, police its borders, avoid capture by interest groups in the society, and
mobilize for modernization. State capture has been the principle objective of
African political parties, not state development, and this has led to further
delegitimization of the Western model of the state in the eyes of African
societies because of the kind of leadership thrown up by the process.
There has been a progressive decline of the African nation-state in the
attributes of stateness. This is the explanation for the prevalence of
corruption, ethnicity, violence and general misrule. As one African government
minister described it: "when we gained power, the country was at the edge of the
abyss; since then, we have taken a great step forward." Seen from the
perspective of a decision-maker and practitioner who is still in government, I
consider it useful not to wait for my memoirs before I ask the question of how
adequately African governments are dealing with the challenge of state building,
good governance, democracy, market reforms, development, globalization,
environment, culture and terror? Is there hope for Africa and from Africa? What
is the African Identity? In sum, whither the African state as a creator of
wealth, social stability and cultural progress and significant contributor to
world peace and the march of civilization in the 21st century? How do we move
beyond song and dance and progress from entertaining the world to real
empowerment of our people who look up to us, the political elite?
As I lay in my hotel room in London upon arrival from Nigeria en route to New
Zealand from where I have come to make this presentation, the British
Broadcasting Corporation presented a graphic account of the 20 years anniversary
of the Ethiopian famine during the Mengistu years that saw millions dead until
the intervention of Bob Geldorf’s BAND AID. I was startled to hear there are
today more hungry mouths in Ethiopia than at the time of the Ethiopian Famine of
the 70's. Such stories and several other disasters elsewhere in Africa tempt
even the most robustly optimistic to a position of despair.
In his book of this year, ‘WHAT WENT WRONG WITH AFRICA,’ Noel Van Der Veen has
aptly summarized the grim situation thus: "However we define poverty, it is
clear that on average; people's lives have improved all over the world on every
continent except Africa. Africa (more specifically sub-Saharan or 'Black
Africa") is the only large contiguous region left out of the worldwide rise in
prosperity over the past fifty years. The percentage of Africans living in
poverty has not dropped but risen. In nearly all Africa, the average income has
fallen since de-colonization, which took place around 1960 in most cases. Even a
confirmed optimist would hesitate to predict that life in Africa will get better
in the years ahead. Alongside poverty, the troubling hallmarks of the continent
today are misrule, violence, corruption and AIDS. The human development figures
speak volumes; so also the tales of travellers who returned to Africa in the
early twenty first century after visiting around the time of independence. The
writer Paul Theroux, revisiting many parts of the continent after forty years
wrote: 'Africa is materially more decrepit than it was when I first knew it -
hungrier, poorer, less educated, more pessimistic, more corrupt.'
Many scholars and decision makers have been at a loss to find adequate
explanation as to what really happened. Yet a few attempts deserve some
attention. Let us look at just two:
From Samuel P. Huntington (Harvard Government Professor of the CLASH OF
CIVILIZATION fame):
"In the early 1990's, I happened to come across economic data on Ghana ad
South Korea in the early 1960's, and I was astonished to see how similar their
economies were then. These two countries had roughly comparable levels of per
capita GNP; similar divisions of their economy among primary products,
manufacturing, and services; and overwhelming primary product exports, with
South Korea producing a few manufactured goods. Also, they were receiving
comparable levels of economic aid. Thirty years later, South Korea had become an
industrial giant with the fourteenth largest economy in the world, multinational
corporations, major exports of automobiles, electronic equipment and other
sophisticated manufactures, and a per capita income approximating that of
Greece. Moreover, it was on its way to the consolidation of democratic
institutions. No such changes had occurred in Ghana, whose per capita GNP was
now about one-fifteenth that of South Korea's. How could this extraordinary
difference in development be explained? Undoubtedly, many factors played a role,
but it seemed to me that culture had to be a large part of the explanation.
South Koreans valued thrift, investment, hard work, education, organization, and
discipline. Ghanaians had different values. In short, cultures count"
From Noel Van Der Veen (formerly of the Dutch Foreign Ministry):
"Compare an arbitrarily selected pair of countries, one in Africa and one in
Asia: Zambia and South Korea, for instance. When the Zambians became independent
in 1964, they were on average twice as wealthy as South Koreans. By the turn of
the century, the South Koreans were on average, a fully twenty-seven times as
rich as the Zambians. Or take Kenya and Singapore, which thirty years ago were
just about equally poor. Now Singaporeans earn an average of about 24,000 euros
a year, while the average Kenyan earns about 340 euros a year, or
one-seventeenth of that amount. If we take any comparable pair of countries, one
African and one Asian, and look at what has happened to them over the past few
decades, the difference is always stunning, and the Asian country always comes
out on top. It would be absurd to attribute such huge differences to the
international economic environment, which was essentially the same for all these
countries."
Just in case you think I am glossing over my country, Nigeria, in this litany of
missed opportunities, I present again Van Der Veen:
“…African countries did not generally suffer from a lack of aid. The crucial
factor, however, was what was done with the money, how profitably it was put to
use. Here lay the great difference between Asia and Africa. Domestic
circumstances in African countries were such that extra money would not have
made any essential difference. A case in point is Nigeria, which for decades had
several billions of "extra" income from oil. The Nigerian elite became both
extremely rich and extremely large by African standards. The result was a host
of states within the Nigerian Federation, each with a local elite and
clientelist networks of its own, and internecine power struggles. This brought
about chronic domestic instability. The billions of extra dollars did nothing at
all to raise ordinary people's living standards. When Nigeria became independent
in 1960, about twenty five percent of the population was below the poverty line.
By 2000, the figure had risen to around seventy percent."
As one that is currently engaged in the political trench warfare for bringing
about the desired change in the continent of Africa, I am leaving the business
of analysis of the history or even evidence of our failure to scholars and
researchers. I did not come to Canada to tell you what you already know about
Africa. I am more inclined to heed the advice of Bernard Lewis who once observed
that "when people realize things are going wrong, there are two questions they
can ask. One is 'what did we do wrong?" and the other is 'who did this to us'?
The later tends to conspiracy theories and paranoia. The first question leads to
another kind of thinking. “How do we put it right?” In the second half of the
twentieth century, Latin America (Africa) chose conspiracy theories and
paranoia. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Japan asked itself “How
do we put it right?”” I frankly prefer we place ourselves as decision makers in
Africa in the position of the question that Japan asked itself in the second
half of the nineteenth century. My reason is simple: the world is tired of
excuses for African failure.
We cannot in one breadth talk of equality of races and nations, and in another
play the eternal victim who must be perpetually assisted to get on its feet. For
a continent that is the home of mankind and cradle of civilization, it is time
to grow up! We must display a new can – do spirit that clearly affirms we have
got our destiny in our hands and that we can turn the corner. It is all about
leadership, and a new paradigm for development - a paradigm I shall call MEKARIA,
an Igbo word for persistent reach for excellence. The MEKARIA spirit, a new
performance ethic, is what African leadership needs to get to work and inspire
our people to produce and compete. It is a new Productivity Paradigm which would
be our response to the crisis of debilitating poverty, the outcome of a mental
attitude towards wealth and production.
The essential challenge of our time is therefore one of production. How can we
both as leaders and followers move from the ethos of corruption and ostentatious
consumption and waste to the ethos of production and investment? How can we
substitute a preference for "to work in order to live" to that of "to live in
order to work."? How do we begin to internalize the concept of work, especially
efficient, continuously improving, work into the existential affirmation of our
individual meaning and communal reality?
Is it true that the state has failed in Africa? If so, why is it so? What can
African politicians do to reverse the trend? What are we doing even now to deal
with this challenge? What are the prospects? I am convinced that of all
explanations for African failure, what makes most sense to me is the failure to
evolve an Idea of the African State both before independence and after.
We inherited the contraption called the nation-state, which the colonizers put
together for commercial/administrative convenience and failed to breathe life
into it from the standpoint of some ideological commitment to an African success
story. The few occasional flashes of such concern or capability was during the
period of left-wing flirtation with socialism, but even that became subverted by
Cold War rivalries and the greed of those African leaders who mouthed Marxism
but reached for maximum personal enrichment from the national till. And this,
together with the lack of rigour on the part of African social scientists and
social philosophers on issues that are African have left us with an intellectual
black hole concerning a mobilizing idea of the African nation-state. Such an
Idea would have crystallized issues of development, production, role of the
individual, rule of law, human rights, and even democracy within an African
experience and meaning.
What I intend to do here is to draw attention to a few core problems and attempt
some solutions.
The picture that presents itself in Africa is generally disturbing -
• Over half of the 600 million people who live in Sub-Saharan Africa live below
poverty line.
• Infant mortality (children under 5) is at the rate of more than 100 per 1000
in at least 28 countries, the highest in the world. In fact in Sierra Leone, it
is 335 per 1000.
• Population growth rate is almost 3 percent, which is about four times the rate
in high-income countries. This neutralizes the marginal gains being expected
from ongoing reforms.
• More than 50 percent of women are illiterate in not less than eighteen
countries.
• More than 50 per cent of the adult populations of at least thirteen countries
are illiterate.
• The gap between the rich and the poor is one of the worst in the world. The
most affluent 10 percent account for over 47 percent of income in South Africa,
Zimbabwe and Kenya, and about 43 percent in Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone and
Senegal.
• The severe structural weaknesses of democratic institutions and cultural
resistance to global best practices.
• The HIV-AIDS pandemic has become Africa’s 21st century equivalent of the
bubonic plague that decimated medieval Europe.
We can no longer blame all these on colonialism, not only because four decades
after the exit of colonial masters who left more functional institutions than
the ones we have mismanaged, we should have found our feet, but because in
virtually every other corner of the world where there was a colonial experience,
that did not eternally weigh them down to misrule and persistent governance
collapse. I agree with Lawrence Harrison, Senior Fellow at the Harvard Academy
for International and Area Studies that “the statute of limitations on
colonialism as an explanation for underdevelopment lapsed long ago.” The issue
is about leadership - leadership that can take the high moral strategic road to
see that persistent African failure scandalizes all of us, wherever we are, and
no matter how much wealth and comfort we enjoy, legitimate or illegitimate. In a
world that still echoes William Du Bois’ observation that "the problem of the
twentieth century is the problem of the colour line and the relation of the
darker to the lighter race of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands
of the sea", images of Africa on Television screens that speak of famine,
HIV-AIDS, corruption, ethnic cleansing, and elite incompetence and misrule would
reinforce racism, discreet or overt. The colour of state failure need not be
African. Political leadership can make a difference, as exemplified in the cases
of Singapore, Malaysia and even the African state of Botswana or indeed, as
indicated in the quiet revolution currently taking place in Nigeria.
A major point of departure which more creative leaders ought to begin to look
again is the role of culture both as a facilitator or inhibitor of economic
progress especially when concept of progress is hinged on high productivity.
Africa must be led by its leaders to the work place. We must produce, and not
merely consume what the rest of the world is producing. We have a challenge to
drop or revisit those aspects of our "culture" that elevates consumption over
production, waste over thrift; expenditure over savings, and today over
tomorrow. We must begin to reject at the polls, leaders and political parties
that symbolize those negative aspects of our culture that have been anti-growth
and anti-development. We need leaders who symbolize a new paradigm of
productivity - what I call the MEKARIA principle - Igbo word for "pressing for
excellence". By factoring in new values of productivity into our attitudes,
thinking and reflexes, a sea change is possible within a generation. Max Weber
was definitely right when he said over a century ago that “if we learn anything
from the history of economic development, it is that culture makes almost all
the difference."
In the evolution of a new productivity paradigm, democracy, both of the
marketplace and political participation is key. It is the flourishing of
individual creativity and innovation, so difficult in repressive authoritarian
environment that is the critical ingredient for economic development. Such a new
paradigm of productivity also requires a revision by the elite of underdeveloped
societies as to what really constitutes wealth. As Mariano Grondona, Professor
of Government at the Law Faculty of the National University of Buenos Aires
describes it: "in societies resistant to development, wealth above all consists
of what exists. In favourable societies, wealth above all consists of what does
not yet exist. In the underdeveloped world, the principal wealth resides in land
and what derives from it. In the developed world, the principal wealth resides
in the promising processes of innovation."
The bold economic reforms contemplated and indeed being implemented by many
African countries will not succeed unless we revise our thinking on the
continent on our notions of distributive justice. Societies that are unable to
develop are usually where distributive justice is mainly concerned with those
who are alive today. It is only about winning today's elections and adopting
populist measures that will pander to the masses, whether on the issue of
subsidies on petroleum products as in the case of Nigeria, a matter which the
Trade Union movement has threatened to bring down the government, or in
protectionist measures elsewhere in the continent that discourages foreign
investment so vital for real economic growth. This obsession on the here and now
is also indicated in a "propensity to consume rather than to save."
Societies that have developed, particularly the Asian miracle economies of the
past three decades of momentous leap, have been those that perceived
distributive justice to also involve generations yet unborn; that saved for a
rainy day; that did not treat finite resources (such as oil) as beneficence or
God's gift to be consumed by those alive today, who would take Maynard Keynes
out of context by saying since "in the long run we are all dead," let us make
merry and be happy today" In those kind of self-denying and self-restraining
societies, preference is for saving over consumption.
WHAT IS REQUIRED?
What is required is as follows:
• Serious commitment on the part of African leaders to institution building that
is adequate to carry the various reforms on the continent.
• Debt forgiveness by the G-7 countries tied up to specific state-building
projects in Africa and as a strategic positioning to deny African leaders the
most trumpeted excuse for failure to deliver on development.
• The forging of coalition at the continental level for the sustenance of
ongoing reforms so that they do not depend in each country, on the chance
availability of one strong, committed leader, say, like Obasanjo in Nigeria.
• Urgent re-tooling of the justice sector to enhance independence of the
judiciary and cutting-edge professionalization of police and other security
agencies.
• Greater percentage allocation to Educational sector.
• Recognition of HIV-AIDS pandemic as a time-bomb ready to wipe off all the
economic gains being expected in the short and medium term.
• Bill of Rights in all African countries strong enough to protect minority
rights, enhance and emphasize citizenship over indigenous claims, facilitate
pluralism, and local autonomy for multi-ethnic societies where there is demand
for such.
• Evolve comprehensive Diaspora projects that will encourage a reverse brain
drain and/or facilitate re-inflows of incomes from African Diaspora back to the
continent.
• Evolve and implement a continental masterplan for both transportation and
environment that will both integrate the continent and rationalize the use of
its unique resources.
• A continental coalition that would declare corruption as Africa’s Public Enemy
No. 1 and fights it as such.
I am convinced that if the necessary vision and political will are mustered
throughout the continent in this direction, the spectre of state failure and
institutional collapse will give way to the emergence of healthy and more viable
states of real economic promise and political progress.
• Paper presented by Ojo Maduekwe (Legal Adviser to the President of the Federal
Republic of Nigeria), at the Justice Chukwudifu Oputa inaugural lecture on
Governance in Africa held at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Ontario,
Canada on Friday, November 5th, 2004.
