Conclusion: an African renaissance
So fear not, my friend.
The darkness is gentler than you think.
Be grateful for the manifold dreams of creation, and the many ways of the unnumbered peoples.
Ben Okri, ‘To an English friend in Africa’,
in An African Elegy (1992)
The African experience to date has produced a post-coloniality that indelibly imbues insecurity. There are palpable feelings of a job left undone, of failed dreams of modernity, of frustration at the incompletion of the nation-state project, of self-serving ‘ethnicized’ governing apparatuses and of an uncaring and xenophobic outside world that subjugates and alienates the majority of Africans from their rightful place at the table of human and social development. In short, there is a lack of pride, trust and confidence in that most visible of institutions of Africa, the post-colonial state. There are exceptions, of course, and it would be contentious to start naming any here. In retrospect, however, Fanon’s notion of renovating violence, that real freedom for Africans could be won only by destruction, true liberation only through fire, has proved to be an ultimate perfidy. Violence in Africa has begotten more violence. The outcome is the culture of corruption, brutality, destitution and despair, some of the many facets of which we have addressed in the pages above. Yet the challenge for Africa remains immense. This book has explored the complexity and diversity of the continent and has sought to contextualize and problematize the issue of why and how African states have evolved in the ways they have. We have avoided unicausal explanations where possible and each chapter is intended to provide further interlinked analysis that emphasizes the relational and dialogical nature of politics, power, conflict and development in Africa. This final short chapter is, then, not intended as a definitive summing up, arriving at a neat conclusion to the multiple challenges.
Yet there is some value in restating several factors whose general incidences provide a theme on which the variations are constructed. The problem of stability and order – political and economic – remains a central one. There is a paradox here. In one sense, the state in Africa is immensely strong. It is monopolistic (Aron 1966). The state is the major source of employment, the major source of finance and the major partner in most economic enterprises; the existence of well-armed and numerous police, paramilitary forces and the army itself adds to that appearance of strength. Yet, in so many other senses, the state is weak. It cannot always provide the people with what have become thought of as the necessities of life, such as education, health facilities, a public transport network, employment and the affluence associated with vibrant development; that is an obvious sign of weakness. In many countries, the government cannot even implement its policies. It lacks the capacity to transform its rhetoric and policies into practical actions in the rural areas or among the underprivileged people of the sprawling urban centres. There is a gulf between the theoretical power of the state, as expressed in constitutions and statutes or proclamations, and the real power of the state as represented by effective field officers, widespread political support and economies growing in line with government expectations.
The trust that permits political actors reasonably to assume a set of self-restraining behaviour patterns by other actors has hardly anywhere been assured. The extractive and instrumental assumptions of players in the political arena are critical prerequisites for the unabashed readiness to use power to its full, which is such a predominant feature of the continent. Ibo proverbs graphically illustrate this point: ‘I am against people reaping where they have sown,’ a character in Nigerian author Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart (1958) says. ‘But we have a saying that if you want to eat a toad you should look for a fat one.’ Yet one must not ‘take away more than the owner can ignore’. The moral of Achebe’s story is that the restraints, which in other systems are provided by ideology or party loyalty, are absent and the result is the chronic instability and powerlessness so evident on the continent. The inequalities, which did not begin in the imperial years, but were extended, entrenched and reinforced, have become cumulative; the competition for scarce resources remains liable to be structured along ethnic lines; and the instrumental values of the polity reduce to a minimum that degree of party or national loyalty which enables unpopular measures to be accepted with a degree of equanimity.
So what is Africa’s future? Dire predictions of the impact of climate change suggest that in the next fifty years Africa’s problem with food security and dependency on food aid will reach new extremes. Continued levels of high population growth will continue to expand the population of young people on the continent. Young people, even while most will have some literacy, will not find formal employment and are disillusioned by a life on the land. They will be ever-expanding dispossessed mobs ready and primed for mobilization by the Big Men and Women who continue to live on the spoils of the state. With a lack of positive and progressive national identities, ethnic and religious fragmentation will continue to further fracture the continent. Intellectual and ideological alternatives are present and creative, but still weak, confined to the margins of public discourse, while pernicious forms of religious colonialism, both Christian and Islamic, exploit the desperation of many for a more hopeful future.
Governments, despite heavy inflows of aid, have failed to provide significant coverage of basic services and infrastructure; the recent decades of anti-state globalization have undermined the dream of the post-colonial paradise. Without a visible state providing some safety net, the family remains the site of security and dependency. With large extended families and high expectations of family responsibility, combined with high levels of inequality, then those who do succeed are often suffocated and compromised by familial demands.
It is fascinating that in the depths of the current recession no mainstream British political party has suggested that international aid should be cut. The United Kingdom Department for International Development now has a budget touching Ł8 billion per year. There have always been dissenting voices on aid, but they are gaining new strength and diversity.
Rwanda, a country heavily dependent on aid, has become a source of criticism both from Rwandan president Paul Kagame, who praises the ‘no strings attached’ infrastructure investments of the Chinese, and Paul Rusesabagina (of Hotel Rwanda fame), who lambasts Western governments (particularly the British) for continuing to pour in aid while turning a blind eye to the corrupt excesses and territorial ambitions of the Kagame government.
We certainly agree that it is time to question the mantra of ‘more and better aid’. The UK Department for International Development spends increasing resources on cajoling a marginally interested British public to develop an ‘understanding’ of global development (under the banner of development awareness), but we are in danger of seeing only the ‘emperor’s new clothes’.
Two recent books have focused on the effectiveness of aid. Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo, in her book Dead Aid (2009), blames aid for the dependency and corruption of African states and sees salvation in capital markets and microfinance and NGOs. Yet her analysis does not really offer anything new. Such ‘solutions’ have been the battle cry for twenty years of neoliberal aid conditionalities.
Jonathan Glennie’s The Trouble with Aid (2008) offers a more nuanced account, tracking both the positive and negative impacts of aid. He counts the positive direct impacts often aligned with MDG targets as the increase in numbers of children accessing school. However, he also charts the indirect impact of aid, such as the conditionalities that force poor economies to open up their markets, which has led to the destruction of local industries and reinforced dependence on the aid-givers. Glennie also questions the rhetoric of ‘good governance’, which has led to only marginal reductions in poverty, some disastrous privatizations benefiting mainly the elites and an excuse for governments to pass responsibilities conveniently to ‘the people’.
Aid has become focused on policy reform, which does little more than produce extensive shopping lists and policy documents. Rather than encouraging governments to be accountable to citizens, it tends to vest power and accountability in the donors. It encourages reactive rather than proactive government. Aid fundamentally undermines the social contract between government and citizens, but as Glennie says, from the point of view of the donor, aid is easy and buys friends. That is much easier than really attempting to tackle the global inequalities and post-colonial history that have shaped and created Africa.
However, Glennie too has a blind spot (given his employment in international NGOs). He singles out government aid in his analysis and his conclusion points to a growing role for NGOs. However, they are equally as capable as government of creating dependency, supporting corruption and elite capture and imposing conditionalities, albeit on a smaller scale.
However, his general conclusion that Africa needs less and better aid is valid and he is right that, in tackling poverty in Africa, a far more serious and complex discussion is required concerning the role of trade, migration, climate change and taxation. All of these are major global transboundary challenges with no simple solutions. The power of the former colonial masters is itself waning and perhaps they rush to increase aid spending as they watch the influence of new players such as China and India extend their reach on the continent.
What is a more positive future? We have hinted at the long shadow of colonialism throughout this book and argue that there has been a colonialism of the mind and of expectation that has come to express itself as a defensive anti-identity framed by reaction against an ancient oppressor. We need an alternative vision and discourse for African politics that, unencumbered by the weight of policy ‘doublethink’, engages with the relationship between the state and family, changing forms of family formation, and the challenge of mobilizing and incorporating the youth in a new future.
At the heart of this must be the reinvigoration of an African intellectual tradition capable of theorizing the interface of multiple and diverse African cosmologies with a global narrative on rights, governance and democracy. Presidents Mbeki, Obasanjo and Wade, together with other African leaders, welcomed in the twenty-first century as the century of Africa, heralding an African ‘renaissance’. The New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) and a rejuvenated African Union (AU) were supposed to reflect and direct this optimism. Yet the rhetoric so far has been little else but that articulated through vague aspirational targets associated with the equally vague and aspirational Millennium Development Goals. These have been accompanied by little in the way of achievable plans or properly funded projects that have the enthusiastic support of all stakeholders, including the much-elided and much-misunderstood mass of the population. The gross inequalities and lack of opportunities that perpetuate low morale, poor productivity, emigration and lack of association with, and pride in, national identity are still in place and continue to widen.
The answer, then, must lie within. While African communities, be they states, nations or ethnic groups, urban or rural, try to compare and contrast themselves with their peers elsewhere, particularly in the West, the result is likely to be a continuation of the current malaise and disillusionment. In order to do better, an individual must feel good about him- or herself. The same surely applies to political, cultural or economic communities. Given that the state is likely to be the most influential stakeholder among the other types of community mentioned, the need for positivity must start in that institution.
Nevertheless, while it is true that the state in Africa has certainly not been a helpful tool in economic or social development, it is also the most likely tool for motivating and catalysing such development in the future.
The barriers are all too clear – low skills, poor training, ephemeral tenancy of holders of influential policy-making posts, inappropriate selection criteria, inadequate funds from within (fiscal collection), external pressure on policy-making that is not often related to internal needs, to name but a few. The current barrage of ‘capacity-building’ components to development projects aimed at developing world governments do not help. This is partly because they are largely uncoordinated and have different, often competing, agendas. It is also because most are funded and, despite all the ‘bottom-up’ and ‘grassroots’ rhetoric, directed by Northern agencies and donor bodies that still aim to mould institutions in the image of themselves. Capacity-building is so often aimed at governments and policy-making bodies that donor and NGO bodies realize have to be negotiated in order to execute projects and programmes, not helping the situation. This is different from specific capacity-building in governance, which should become a main plank of activity, directed by the stakeholders in governance with help from those who have the experience and skills to train and teach, but whose aspirations, agendas and interests coincide with those of the most important stakeholder, the populations served by governance institutions, be they supranational (such as the AU), regional (such as the Economic Community of West African States, ECOWAS) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC), national or local.
In stressing this imperative, it is accepted that strong, effective and representative governance is key to social and economic development, from which human development is likely to ensue. However, in order to become proactive agencies of progress, institutions of governance have to be seen to be in possession of sovereignty and authority and able to make decisions on behalf of their constituents. The current climate of domination by external powers in policy- and decision-making will not relieve the increasing inequalities that are a root cause of dissatisfaction and low morale in contemporary Africa. This is not a recommendation for autocratic dictatorship. Neither does it say that liberal democracy, described here as a Western-centric ideology attached to the functioning of the capitalist world economy, is wholly inappropriate for Africa. Africans love voting when given the chance and when they believe there is something worth voting for.
A start to the process is the acceptance, both internally and externally, that much, though admittedly not all, of what is wrong with the post-colonial state in Africa is as a result of its inputs, both past and present. This, then, is the realization that the expectations, particularly of state governments in Africa, did not and have still not taken into account what was left behind at independence and what the inputs have been in the half-century or so since. These inputs include policy-making skills and experience in governance. Institutions of governance are not built overnight and cannot be created by politicians whose tenancy in their positions is likely to be short. In the European model, there is normally a permanent functioning civil service that actually processes the work of governance and advises politicians what is possible and what is not. This is where the experience and skills really lie. In Africa, even where a strong civil service exists, such as in Botswana and Senegal, such a body of experience is lacking and is prevented from forming by economic constraints, partly imposed from outside.
The second point that needs to be accepted is that Africa, particularly sub-Saharan Africa minus South Africa (which is fast becoming a new neocolonial force in its own right across the continent), and its people have never been given access to a level playing field in any arena. Politically, economically and socially, Africa and Africans have always had to fight against unfair barriers and pejorative and xenophobic treatment, not just from the usual white European and American culprits, but also from Africans who share a sense of otherness and lack of confidence in their own achievements and potential. This is a condition of post-coloniality that exists as a mindset, a construct that encourages belief in the idea that Africans do not do things as well, quarrel unnecessarily, and are not as industrious as their Northern counterparts. The point of significance is that the erroneous perceptions described here are held not just by outsiders, but also by Africans themselves. This lack of confidence, imbued so indelibly during colonial times, has to be expunged with alacrity if Africa is to gain its rightful place on the geopolitical and socio-economic map of the world.