Nationalism, One-Party States, and Military Rule
Following the reintroduction of multi-party politics in Africa in the early 1990s it is easy to assume that topics such as the one-party state and military rule are no longer relevant. After all, these were the subjects that Africanists studied in the 1980s when authoritarian rule was ubiquitous and there was little to celebrate. What relevance could such issues have for the era of democratization? In fact, the legacy of authoritarian rule continues to loom large on the continent. The prospects for long-term economic development and democratic consolidation are shaped by whether or not a country was a one-party state or a military regime, was governed by a benign ‘philosopher King’ or a unscrupulous dictator, or experienced relative stability or endemic conflict. Nationalism, one-party states, and military rule thus remain important topics because they help us better to understand both the past and the present.
This chapter has three main aims. The first is to demonstrate the lasting significance of nationalism to African politics. Nationalism has consistently exerted a powerful hold on the continent’s trajectory, from the fragmentation of nationalist movements in the 1960s, which contributed to the emergence of one-party states and military rule, through to the continued use of nationalist discourse by political leaders, most notably Robert Mugabe, in the contemporary period. The second is to show that not all authoritarian regimes were the same. In fact, Africa has witnessed a broad range of undemocratic governments that have varied dramatically in terms of their commitment to human rights and political participation. Some, such as Mobutu Sese Seko’s brutal military dictatorship in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo – DRC) denied citizens any meaningful political rights. Others, though, such as Julius Nyerere’s one-party state in Tanzania, prohibited opposition parties but allowed citizens to enjoy a degree of free speech and to participate in elections in which they could choose their local representative, if not their government.
The third and final aim of the chapter is to trace the legacies of one-party and military rule, in order to show how they continue to influence political developments today. It is not possible to understand fully the international and domestic resonance of the power-sharing model of government – a form of inclusive government with no opposition, which has often been introduced as a way to end periods of conflict – without first recognizing that the one-party state was the most stable form of government in the years that followed independence. It is also not possible to fully understand the scepticism of many Africanists towards American plans to channel increasing resources to the continent’s armies through the recently formed US Africa Command (AFRICOM) without first appreciating the record of African militaries in power since independence.
Nationalism and After
The fight against colonial rule is often remembered across the continent as a moment of great national unity; of course, in many ways it was. Consider the proud history of the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa. Formed in 1912 as the South African Native National Congress (SANNC), the ANC fought a struggle that was impressively inclusive of different black African ethnic groups, coloureds, Asians, and whites. This was remarkable because the apartheid government elected by white voters in 1948 employed a range of divide-and-rule strategies that were deliberately designed to prevent the emergence of a united opposition. By creating separate ‘homelands’ for black ethnic groups, the National Party sought to strengthen individual group identities and thus make it harder for a united black nationalist movement to emerge (Lodge 1983). By transferring modest amounts of patronage and power to black African leaders willing to engage with the state, the apartheid regime also hoped to create a tier of conservative black figures who would find it in their interests to defend the status quo.
This strategy was not without success. For example, having established the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) in 1975, Inkosi Mangosuthu Buthelezi, son of the Zulu Chief Mathole Buthelezi, became the chief minister of the ‘semi-autonomous’ KwaZulu homeland. Although the ANC initially accepted the new party, radical nationalists soon accused Buthelezi of being an apartheid collaborator (Mare and Hamilton 1987). For his part, Buthelezi recognized that his privileged status depended on the ongoing support of the apartheid government; his power was therefore threatened by the prospects of majority rule. As a result, following the negotiations to bring an end to apartheid rule in the early 1990s, Buthelezi initially refused to participate in democratic elections and only agreed to stand after ANC leader Nelson Mandela and National Party leader F.W. de Klerk had promised that they would recognize the special status of the Zulu monarchy after the polls.
However, although such fissures existed, the ANC proved able to win and retain the loyalty of the vast majority of the black population over some 100 years. Despite being banned and forced into exile by one of the most effective authoritarian states in sub-Saharan Africa, the message of the movement’s Freedom Charter – that South Africa belongs to all those who live in it, black and white – continued to resonate. The hold of the party over the South African political imagination shows no signs of abating: after 20 years of multi-party elections, the ANC’s share of the vote has yet to drop below 62 per cent.
Yet the notion of the late colonial period as a time of African unity was also a necessary myth, valuable to leaders in both colonial times and the post-colonial era because it allowed those in power to gloss over internal schisms and to obscure competing visions of how power should be distributed. As the case of the ANC and IFP suggests, even the most effective nationalist movements contained deep divisions (Hodgkin 1956). The boundaries of African states had been drawn not with respect to the location and history of different ethnic groups, but according to a geo-strategic logic. Even if European cartographers had been more sensitive to local context, they would have struggled to design states that made economic and cultural sense: the average African polity is at least twice as ethnically diverse as New York or London, and the high number of small ethnic groups in countries such as the DRC, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Uganda would have made it impossible to design polities that would have been both ethnically homogenous and large enough to be viable. It is therefore unsurprising that African states group together a range of different communities with little sense of a common identity, and that subsequent inter-communal relations have often been characterized more by competition than by a sense of solidarity.
Prior to independence, ethnic identities were reified and entrenched by colonial practices of codifying groups and mapping the location of ethnic groups, appointing and solidifying the role of chiefs over distinct ethnic communities, and playing divide-and-rule politics. Taken together, these policies served to institutionalize identities while simultaneously providing Africans with incentives to organize as ethnic communities to be better able to press their demands on the colonial regime. Following Ranger, one might say that colonial governments believed in tribes, and Africans gave them tribes to believe in (see Ranger 1983, 1993). In turn, more politically salient ethnic identities made it less likely that political movements would remain united – a major problem for nationalist movements but a boon for authoritarian incumbents seeking to defend their positions after independence (see Lynch, this volume).
Inter-ethnic tensions were also fostered by the impact of the colonial era on local political economies, which varied within countries as well as between them. The communities that lived near sites of colonial settlement usually suffered the greatest disruption as a result of occupation, but were also the groups that benefitted the most from the opportunities colonial rule had to offer. Mission education may have provided the basis for self-advancement, but it was proximity to wage labour and positions in the colonial administration that facilitated the emergence of a new elite. Because the communities that suffered the most painful consequences of colonial rule, such as land alienation, often also enjoyed higher levels of education, know-how, and capital, their leaders typically had both the motivation and the confidence required to campaign for a rapid transition to independence. The Kikuyu of Kenya illustrate this pattern well. The reservation of land in the Rift Valley for white settlers helped to radicalize the Kikuyu community, ultimately leading to the violent Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s (Anderson 2005b).
Simultaneously, high levels of missionary education and the greater employment options available in Nairobi ensured that the Kikuyu community assumed an economically privileged position. Many Kikuyu did not join Mau Mau, but rather became ‘loyalists’ and worked for the colonial regime (Branch 2009). As a result, the Kikuyu were both strongly represented within the colonial administration and were at the forefront of the nationalist movement: it was predominantly leaders from the Kikuyu and Luo communities that in 1960 established the Kenyan African National Union (KANU) to push for the speedy end of colonial rule, confident that they had the necessary skills and opportunity to reap the benefits of independence.
By contrast, economically and politically marginal communities faced a more uncertain future. For such groups, independence promised not a new set of freedoms, but rather the prospect of being dominated by their rivals. In Kenya, the Nandi, Maasai, and coastal communities were numerically smaller and less economically advanced than the Luo and Kikuyu. They thus established their own ‘nationalist’ organization, the Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU), which pushed a far more conservative agenda. Encouraged by European settlers – who also had good reason to fear majority rule – KADU campaigned for a more gradual transition to independence and for the introduction of a majimbo (regionalist) constitution that would allow Kenya’s communities a degree of local self-government (Anderson 2005a). Subsequent competition between KANU and KADU split the nationalist movement in two and resulted in considerable inter-party violence.
While a number of more homogenous countries, such as Botswana, did not have to face these challenges, Kenya was far from alone in struggling to manage the tension between the need for unity within the nationalist movement and the desire of sub-national communities for a degree of self-government and protection against the threat of the tyranny of the majority. These internal contradictions meant that the struggle against colonial oppression was often more messy – and divisive – than official narratives of nationalism allow. Such fissures proved to be particularly significant in the post-colonial period because, when mishandled by post-colonial political leaders, they formed the foundations of civil conflict and unrest.
In addition to the internal contradictions within many nationalist coalitions, there was a deep tension in the ideas that motivated nationalism. On the one hand, the cry of freedom resonated everywhere. In East Africa, the nationalist struggle was known as the battle for uhuru (freedom). In South Africa, the ANC’s Freedom Charter guided successive anti-apartheid campaigns, including that of the United Democratic Front (UDF) in the mid- to late 1980s. Freedom was a particularly effective rallying call because it could mean all things to all people: freedom from colonial oppression, freedom from poverty and unemployment, freedom to fulfil one’s aspirations.
However, the demand for freedom went hand-in-hand with a call to unity. In the eyes of philosopher-kings such as Leopold Senghor of Senegal, unity had instrumental value because internal divisions would weaken the effectiveness of African nationalism. It also had intrinsic value, though, because it reflected a common African heritage and culture that needed to be preserved against the challenges that would come from within and without. The call to unity took a variety of forms. In the hands of Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s influential independence leader, it became a message of pan-Africanism – a call to move beyond colonial borders and to celebrate the continent’s common history and needs. Other founding fathers, such as Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya, were rhetorically supportive of pan-Africanism but in practice were more concerned to ensure domestic unity, which they saw as being necessary first to secure independence and later to meet the challenge of nation-building (for a full discussion see Khadiagala, this volume).
These two key goals of freedom and unity continue to exert a great hold over the political imagination, yet they have existed in perpetual tension. Post-colonial regimes typically viewed disunity as the forerunner of civil conflict and responded by promoting unity at any costs, even when this meant imposing significant constraints on the freedoms of ordinary people to speak and act freely. As a result, the quest for unity frequently gave rise to the emergence of an authoritarian form of politics that often has been viewed as more acceptable by domestic and international actors because of its rhetorical roots in the nationalist struggle.
Especially where the liberation struggle was longer and more violent, as in Angola, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe, governments have been particularly concerned to maintain the unity that was essential to the success of their former guerrilla/military operations in order to establish political hegemony. Some former liberation movements have managed to maintain a balance between the quest for control with a respect for civil liberties, as in Namibia and South Africa, but in cases in which former liberation parties have suffered a decline in popularity but were unwilling to contemplate losing power, they have often proved adept at manipulating the memory of the liberation struggle in order to depict opposition groups or dissenting individuals as ‘sell-outs’ and ‘traitors’, and thus as legitimate targets of state violence. The response of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) to the threat posed by the Movement of Democratic Change (MDC) opposition is a classic example of the use of ‘patriotic history’ to cow dissent (Tendi 2010). Although the quest to maintain political order did not always lead to such repressive consequences, in the struggle between freedom and unity it was typically the latter that won out.
Authoritarian Rule
Chris Allen (1995) has described how, following the victory over colonial rule, many of the nationalist coalitions began to fragment under the weight of their own contradictions. Across the continent, leaders struggled to hold their alliances together as competition over power and patronage intensified both between and within ethnic groups. As leaders scrambled to maintain order, they drew on the nationalist rhetoric of unity to justify the extension of political control, paving the way for the marginalization of rival parties and the steady erosion of political space. The consequence was a decade of democratic backsliding and political unrest.
However, as Allen points out, there was no single ‘African’ experience. Instead, two main trajectories emerged. In those states where ruling parties had a national reach, and the executive was able to retain control of the party machinery, the nationalist crisis was resolved by the construction of one-party states, in which power was centralized under the president and democratic institutions were downgraded. It was not always feasible to establish a one-party state. In countries where no party was able to establish a dominant position, ethno-regional divisions were pronounced, trust among the political elite was low, and leaders found it far harder to consolidate their rule and maintain political order. In turn, mounting instability and the descent into what Allen calls ‘spoils politics’ de-legitimated democratically elected governments, generating a power vacuum that facilitated the entrance of the military onto the political stage.
These trajectories were important to later developments, because while in many military regimes political participation was all but eradicated, in some one-party states elements of representative government lived on, albeit to varying degrees. Different experiences of authoritarian rule therefore shaped the political landscape within which the transition to multi-partyism in the 1990s took place.
One-Party States
The one-party state proved to be one of the most durable and common forms of government in Africa after independence. At various times, Angola, Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, the Central African Republic (CAR), Chad, Comoros, Congo-Brazzaville, Côte d’Ivoire, the DRC (then Congo-Kinshasa), Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Niger, Rwanda, São Tomé and Príncipe, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, and Togo all claimed single-party status. In many of these countries ‘one-party rule’ meant little more than the creation of a façade of a political organization to legitimize what was in effect a brutal military regime. However, a small but important sub-set of one-party states evolved out of civilian regimes that initially won power at the ballot box and retained their legitimacy over the first decade or so of independence. For example, in Côte d’Ivoire (1960), Kenya (1969), and Senegal (1966) de facto one-party systems emerged after opposition to the ruling party collapsed, disbanded, or was banned.
Ruling parties in Tanzania (1965), Zambia (1972), and Kenya (under second President Daniel arap Moi in 1982), went a step further, establishing de jure single-party systems through constitutional amendments that rendered opposition parties illegal, but only after their parties had won large majorities in open elections. As a result, the single-party systems established by the likes of the Democratic Party of Côte d’Ivoire (PDCI), the Tanzanian African National Union (TANU), the Kenya African National Union (KANU), and Zambia’s United National Independence Party (UNIP), initially had a strong claim to be the legitimate representation of the national will. Of course, not all civilian one-party states remained politically open. In Ghana, the single-party system of Kwame Nkrumah became increasingly intolerant of opposition until he was deposed in a coup in February 1966. However, it was those one-party states that were able to combine participation and control that proved to be the most stable and durable.
Control was maintained through the centralization of power under a dominant executive, the downgrading of representative institutions, such as the legislature, and the effective (if not official) prohibition of criticism of the executive. Where opposition to the system emerged, it was typically repressed through the targeted use of intimidation, exile, and in extreme cases, assassination. In Kenya, Pio Gama Pinto (1965), Tom Mboya (1969), J.M. Kariuki (1975), and Robert Ouko (1990) were allegedly killed because they posed too great a threat to the incumbent cabal.
At the same time, ruling parties typically expanded their reach to regulate an increasing proportion of political and social activity. As part of the broader centralization of power, the TANU constitution emulated the image of mass socialist parties by making provision for a party youth league, women’s section, and elders’ section. By co-opting trade union and youth leaders into the party hierarchy, Nyerere and Kenyatta brought potentially destabilizing groups to heel. However, for other regimes where unions were larger and better organized, as in Zambia, this strategy proved to be difficult to implement.
The extension of control was legitimated by the maintenance of avenues of political participation, most notably through one-party elections in which voters could choose between candidates from the ruling party. Although it is impossible to be certain, these elections appear to have been mostly free and fair, at least in the first decade of independence, and they allowed voters occasionally to give the government a bloody nose. In Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda replaced presidential elections with a referendum that allowed the electorate to accept or reject his candidacy. In the 1978 election, a strong ‘no’ vote in many areas, including the Southern and Northern Provinces, forced UNIP leaders to think up ever more imaginative ways to secure a healthy majority for the president, such as using widely despised animals like the hyena as the symbol for the ‘no’ option on the ballot paper.
In most other one-party states, presidential polls were abandoned and elections were restricted to first-past-the-post constituency polls in which constituencies were able to vote for their member of parliament (MP) from a list of candidates approved by the ruling party. These contests served many purposes for the government. Significantly, they legitimated the regime and facilitated elite rotation, enabling younger political leaders with new ideas to enter parliament. One-party polls also created mechanisms of local accountability that kept MPs on their toes: elections typically resulted in around half of all sitting MPs losing their seats. The willingness of voters to reject candidates who paid them insufficient attention encouraged legislators to focus on constituency service and to raise locally sensitive issues on the floor of the House (Barkan, this volume). However, the rapid turnover of MPs also had a downside as it undermined the level of expertise within the legislature and so further empowered the executive to control the parliamentary agenda.
Unsurprisingly, single-party elections developed their own distinctive dynamics. Because all of the candidates belonged to the same party, and elections focused on the constituency level, they became obsessively local. This reduced the potential for divisive open competition between larger ethnic and regional communities, and so made it easier to maintain national unity. It also reduced the importance of a candidate’s ethno-regional background because most rural constituencies were fairly homogenous and the vast majority of constituencies were rural: as a result, most contests occurred between candidates of the same ethnicity. Consequently, voters were unable to differentiate between candidates on the basis of communal identity (unless constituencies were split into rival clans or kinship networks), and so had to find other ways of distinguishing between aspiring political leaders. Under these conditions, a candidate’s record and personal qualities became of central importance.
Ironically, the main challenge for most civilian one-party rulers was not so much maintaining national unity as sustaining the ruling party itself. The absence of a common enemy against which to mobilize support, and a chronic lack of resources, typically resulted in an atrophy of members and office holders after independence. For example, although Kaunda claimed that it ‘Pays to Belong to UNIP’ and that the party was supposed to be the vehicle through which the government and the Zambian people communicated, by 1984 UNIP had a remarkable 172,930 unfilled posts. Presidents typically responded to this process of institutional decline in one of two ways. In Kenya, Kenyatta was not a party man and was suspicious of the more radical leaders who had created the party during his incarceration by the British. He was therefore happy to allow KANU to decay and instead to rule through his powerful patron-client networks and the prefectural structure of the Provincial Administration that he inherited from colonial rule. Consequently, Kenya soon evolved into a ‘no-party’ state centred on Kenyatta’s personalized rule.
More typically, leaders attempted to extend the life of their parties by fusing them with state structures. For Nyerere and Kaunda this served two purposes: allowing them to use state resources to fund the ruling party; and to radicalize the bureaucracy to nationalist ends (Nyerere 1961). In Zambia, this development resulted in a bureaucratic/party hybrid that was given the unfortunate name of the Party and Its Government (popularly – or perhaps more accurately, unpopularly – known as PIG). The conflation of party and state structures kept UNIP from complete collapse but only at the cost of creating bloated committees, unclear authority structures, and institutional blockages, as technocrats and party officials competed for supremacy. Although in principle this system generated more avenues through which people could engage with their rulers, in reality the labyrinthine world of committee systems was often so unresponsive that ordinary citizens began to lose faith in the value of political participation.
Military Rule and Politics Without Politicians
In the DRC (1960), Benin (1963), Congo-Brazzaville (1963), Togo (1963), CAR (1966), and Ghana (1966), independence was quickly followed by a military coup. These were not isolated examples: by 1980, more than two-thirds of sub-Saharan African states had experienced some form of military rule. Coup leaders typically justified their actions by invoking the national interest and promising to rectify the economic and political failings of the civilian regimes that they replaced (First 1970). However, such rhetoric often masked a more self-interested reality. As Samuel Decalo has argued, military intervention in the 1970s and 1980s was typically triggered by threats to the status of the military itself, such as government proposals to reduce the terms of service of the security forces, to sideline particular factions within the officer class, or to promote a dominant ethnic group via privileged access to state resources (Decalo 1990). Despite this, the rhetoric of coup leaders was often taken at face value. Indeed, some early commentators talked up the potential of the military to act as a transformative force capable of delivering unity and modernization, and domestic and international actors frequently welcomed coups as a positive development (see Mazrui 1976 for an interesting discussion).
In the wake of the harrowing and violent legacy of Idi Amin’s rule in Uganda, it is easy to forget that the coup that brought Amin to power in 1971 inspired celebrations in the streets and was initially welcomed in the metropole. Following the uncertainty and authoritarianism that had characterized the government of Milton Obote, Amin’s coup encouraged Ugandans to dream of an efficient, orderly, and responsive government. Indeed, Amin went out of his way to cultivate these expectations, publishing a list of 18 failings of the Obote regime that his government would put right, including the use of forced labour and thuggery, the denial of freedom of speech, and the failure to hold free and fair elections.
Although Amin’s criticism of Obote was well founded, the failure of multi-partyism in Uganda served to facilitate, rather than inspire, his seizure of power. Amin’s real motivation seems to have been self-protection: he knew that Obote planned to replace him as Commander of the Army, which would have left him vulnerable to prosecution over his alleged involvement in the murder of Brigadier P.Y. Okoya, who had been Amin’s main rival within the military. As in Benin, the CAR, and Ghana, military leaders in Uganda were above neither the self-interest nor the petty squabbles that frequently undermined their civilian predecessors. Given this, it is perhaps unsurprising that there was little that was distinctive about the achievements of military governments, which often proved to be more venal and authoritarian than the regimes they replaced.
In Uganda, Amin’s increasingly paranoid and violent rule wholly undermined the basic institutions of the government and resulted in over 100,000 deaths, with some estimations as high as half a million. This pattern was repeated elsewhere, as indicated by several African countries’ poor ratings on political rights and civil liberties. Evaluated on the basis of a 1–7 scale in which lower scores denote ‘more free’ countries, Nigeria, Mauritania, and the CAR all averaged over 5.5 from 1975 to 1990 (Freedom House 2012). The performance of military regimes on issues such as corruption and the economy was not much better. In Nigeria, General Ibrahim Babangida, who took power from General Muhammadu Buhari in a palace coup in 1985, appears to have misappropriated over US$6 billion of state funds despite his pretensions to order and discipline (Diamond et al. 1997). Meanwhile, authoritarian rule in the CAR was as ineffective as it was corrupt, resulting in an average rate of gross domestic product (GDP) growth of just 1.16 between 1975 and 1990.
While there was nothing unique about the record of military regimes, they did face a distinctive dilemma in government. Like their civilian counterparts who established one-party states, military leaders associated inter-communal tension with multi-party competition. However, unlike single-party states where the ruling party lived on (at least in principle) as a vehicle of popular participation, military leaders were often distrustful of the political class and so limited their presence in the government. Military leaders were also reluctant to maintain elections because competition, even at the local level, was unpredictable and had the potential to exacerbate pre-existing tensions, endangering the unity of the military itself.
Nigeria provides an apt example. The period of coup and counter-coup that marked the demise of civilian rule was in part the product of a struggle for power within the military between Hausa-Fulani and Igbo officers: to re-engage with political leaders even at the regional level threatened to intensify existing divisions. Practising politics without politicians brought its own problems, however. Most notably, it made it harder for governments to legitimate themselves and to anticipate shifts in public opinion. Military leaders thus faced a difficult choice between engaging in representative government and endangering the unity of the armed forces on the one hand, and banning politicians and elections at the risk of not being able to anticipate the public mood on the other.
Henry Bienen’s research in Western State in Nigeria in the early 1970s illustrates the difficulty of conducting the day-to-day business of ruling a territory in the absence of politicians. Having come to power via the second coup of 1966, General Yakubu Gowon initially set out to establish a technocratic administration in order to complete the job of nation-building before handing power back to civilian leaders. However, the need to maintain the legitimacy of his regime, especially in the context of the Nigerian civil war, encouraged Gowon to compromise and incorporate more civilian figures within the government. To this end, in June 1967 he announced that a civilian Federal Executive Council (FEC) would be established to share executive authority with the Supreme Military Council (SMC). The civilians appointed were called commissioners because Gowon believed that his countrymen ‘were not anxious to see those who in recent years participated in politics back in ministerial seats’ (Bienen 1978: 211). Similar reforms were introduced with some variations in each of Nigeria’s 12 states.
However, this technocratic/hybrid failed to resolve the challenges facing the Gowon government. The attempt to generate a more responsive political system without engaging with politicians was largely unsuccessful because many of the ‘civilians’ appointed to the FEC (and its regional equivalents) had previously been political leaders. They therefore saw themselves as representing specific parties, whether these organizations officially existed or not. Consequently, civilian commissioners began to engage in a disorganized form of party politics, which undermined the ability of the military to claim political neutrality and thus threatened to bring broader social tensions into the very heart of the military. At the same time, although they operated as very much political animals, the military’s civilian representatives failed effectively to connect the government to local communities. The small number of commissioners and their lack of an effective party machine rendered it nigh on impossible to reach out to the grassroots.
This failure had significant consequences in Western State, where Bienen (ibid.) finds that the lack of information on public opinion resulted in the failure of the government to anticipate a widespread wave of riots in 1968 and 1969 in which farmers refused to pay taxes. Once the riots had started, the absence of effective political structures further hampered attempts to identify the source of the dispute and broker a resolution. Consequently, the military was forced to utilize increasingly coercive strategies in lieu of effective systems of representation and participation. Subsequent Nigerian military regimes struggled with the same conundrum and typically also resorted to repression to compensate for inadequate mechanisms of representation.
Authoritarian Legacies
Variations in the institutional structure of authoritarian rule in the 1970s and 1980s shaped the pathways different countries took to multi-partyism. In the mid-1990s Bratton and van de Walle (1994) argued that the more participation and competition there had been in the ancien régime, the better the prospects for democratic consolidation. Their logic was that more participatory forms of authoritarian rule were more likely to have fostered strong civil society groups, inculcated norms of electoral representation, and produced active and democratically conscious societies. By contrast, more competitive forms of authoritarian rule were more likely to have developed norms in favour of representative government and institutions capable of maintaining their independence from the executive. Given this, they predicted that former one-party states and dominant-party systems would enjoy the smoothest transition to multi-partyism. The fate of the continent’s one-party and military regimes provides some support for this intuition. The existence of norms of accountability, electoral systems, and judiciaries that occasionally demonstrated the capacity for independent action in countries such as Senegal, Tanzania, and Zambia, paved the way for slow but steady processes of political liberalization.
The legacy bequeathed by less participatory and more coercive military regimes was often far less positive. Take the example of the CAR, where the military government of Colonel Jean-Bédel Bokassa gradually undermined both the capability and independence of the state and the space for dissenting voices to be heard. After seizing power in 1965, Bokassa effectively dismantled the state and castrated the bureaucracy. Fearful of losing power following a series of coup attempts between 1974 and 1976, Bokassa systematically purged his administration of individuals of talent and factions that he feared could pose a potential threat to his own position. By the time he was overthrown in 1980, Bokassa had effectively destroyed the country’s representative institutions and replaced them with the foundations of a political landscape in which power was understood not to derive from the popular will, but from control over coercive forces. Ever since, the CAR has failed to overcome the twin challenge of establishing representative government and sending the military back to barracks. Attempted transitions to multi-partyism in 1981 and 1993 were both ultimately curtailed by coups. Although the CAR is an extreme example, it reflects a wider trend in which military regimes across the continent have struggled to re-civilianize politics.
Yet although institutional legacies are often critical to understanding the state of democracy in a particular country, it is important to keep in mind that many countries have moved between categories over time, blurring the distinction between different types of regime. In Benin, President Mathieu Kérékou, for example, effectively transformed a military government into a civilian one-party state. By contrast, in Malawi, President Banda’s regime was officially a one-party state under the Malawian Congress Party (MCP), but in reality the weakness of party structures meant that it was closer to a personal dictatorship wholly reliant on a vast array of security forces to maintain control. The implications of the institutional legacy of Benin and Malawi therefore take some time to unpack.
At the same time, the long and contingent nature of processes of democratization, in which political trajectories may be radically altered by unanticipated crises and the idiosyncratic decisions of individual leaders, means that the hold of institutional legacies is likely to fade over time. It is therefore not surprising that while former one-party states such as Senegal, Tanzania, and Zambia have remained stable under multi-party rule, others have witnessed the emergence of civil strife and political disorder, as in Côte d’Ivoire and Kenya. Similarly, while many former military regimes have struggled to establish a genuinely civilian form of government that respects the independence of civil society, as in the CAR and Nigeria, some, such as Ghana, have emerged as among Africa’s leading democratic lights.
Conclusion
The political systems and ideas developed in the immediate post-independence period continue to reverberate in Africa today. Although Posner and Young (2007) find that the number of leaders leaving power through a coup, overthrow, or violent assassination has dropped precipitously, it is also true that the military remains a central political actor in many African states. Most obviously, coups have yet to be eliminated. Over the past two decades civilian regimes have been unseated in countries such as the CAR, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, and São Tomé and Príncipe. Second, in many countries civilian governments are staffed by military figures who have taken off their uniforms but rarely sever their ties with the army. Of the 91 presidents and prime ministers that have held office on the continent in civilian regimes since 1989, fully 45 per cent could boast some form of military experience (see Table 1.1).
Country |
Name |
State military (S)/Rebel & non-state (RNS) |
Angola |
Jose Dos Santos |
S |
Botswana |
Ian Khama |
S |
Burkina Faso |
Blaise Compaore |
S |
Burundi |
Pierre Nkurunziza |
S |
CAR |
François Bozizé |
S |
DRC |
Joseph Kabila |
RNS |
Equatorial Guinea |
Teodoro Obiang |
S |
Ethiopia |
Girma Wolde-Giorgis |
S |
Guinea-Bissau |
João Bernardo Vieira |
S |
Mali |
Amadou Toumani Touré |
S |
Mozambique |
Armando Emílio Guebuza |
RNS |
Namibia |
Sam Nujoma |
S |
Nigeria |
Olusegun Obasanjo |
S |
Rep. of Congo |
Denis Sassou-Nguesso |
RNS |
Rwanda |
Paul Kagame |
RNS |
South Africa |
Jacob Zuma |
RNS |
Tanzania |
Jakaya Kikwete |
S |
Sudan |
Omar al-Bashir |
S |
Uganda |
Yoweri Museveni |
RNS |
Zimbabwe |
Robert Mugabe |
RNS |
Note: Only civilian regimes holding elections are included in this table.
The dividing line between military and civilian rule is therefore less clear in practice than it is in theory. This is important, because while governments of all stripes have engaged in democratic backsliding, there are good reasons to think that regimes infused with military figures are more likely to respond to criticism by seeking to close down political space. Militaries are based on strong hierarchical structures and are imbued with cultures that prioritize obedience. The rebel movements that came to power through post-conflict elections in countries such as Angola, Burundi, and Mozambique were not set up to facilitate discussion or formulate economic policy, and had little time to re-establish themselves as civilian organizations prior to elections (Curtis, this volume).
Moreover, leaders schooled in a military environment may find it harder to accept the principles of open participation and free speech that are central to democratic government. In Botswana, one of the most long-standing African democracies, critics of President Ian Khama – who was trained at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst (UK) and was a Commander in the Botswana Defence Force – claim that he has ‘militarized’ the government, reducing the scope for debate and proposing legislation that would restrict the civil liberties of the Batswana (Good 2010).
It is against this background that the increased funding currently being channelled to African militaries is a cause for concern (e.g. Abegunrin 2007; Keenan 2008). The aim of AFRICOM is to boost the capacity and professionalism of African security forces so that they can promote development and better protect their own citizens and, perhaps more importantly, so that they can better protect Western allies against terrorist networks (Menkhaus, this volume). In line with AFRICOM’s raison d’être, American expenditure on military training in Africa has increased dramatically over the past decade. Under the George W. Bush Administration, the value of US arms deliveries and training programmes increased from about $100 million in 2001 to around $700 million in 2008. At the same time, the State Department’s expenditure on International Military Education and Training (IMET) and Foreign Military Financing (FMF) increased from $20.6 million in 2008, to $23.6 million in 2009, and $33.1 million in 2010.
There can be no doubt that many African militaries are in dire need of greater training. Organizations such Amnesty International and the International Crisis Group continue to expose criminality and human rights violations – including drug smuggling, rape, and murder – by armies across the continent (e.g. Amnesty International 2012). The question is whether or not these reforms can be done in a way that professionalizes African militaries in the long term, and so ensure that the greater firepower being transferred to the armed forces is used responsibly.
In this regard there are three main dangers. First, and most obviously, strengthening the capacity of militaries effectively increases the coercive capacity of African governments. Given that many of the continent’s multi-party systems are already guilty of using the armed and security forces for political purposes (van de Walle, this volume), there is a real danger that sooner or later the military’s greater strength will be used against ordinary African people rather than active terrorists. Second, the more generous funding accruing to military leaders from external sources may render them less accountable locally, because such international transfers often bypass legislatures and domestic political processes. Moreover, the more revenue militaries receive, the more likely they are to emerge as strong political players vis-à-vis civilian factions within a government.
Finally, there is a danger that the scope of military activities will expand, transforming the balance between civilian and military power. One of the ways in which AFRICOM initially sought to legitimize itself was by pledging that it would do more development work, and would empower African militaries to do the same. Yet militaries are not skilled at development projects, and critics fear that allowing the functions performed by the military to expand will only serve to further blur the line between military and civilian actors (Abegunrin 2007). Although initial criticism of these plans to further link security and development resulted in AFRICOM pulling back on some of its initial pronouncements, ‘mission creep’ remains a possibility.
The shadow of the one-party state also continues to fall across the continent. Most notably, the perception that multi-party competition represents a grave danger to social harmony, and that inter-communal conflict is best managed by reducing competition and promoting inclusive forms of participation is still popular among political elites and donors. Indeed, contemporary strategies of ending political crises through the creation of power-sharing ‘unity’ governments in which there is no formal political opposition have all but reintroduced one-party states in a number of African countries, if only temporarily. It is therefore important to learn the right lessons from Africa’s authoritarian experience. One-party states were comparatively stable and often did a good job of maintaining, but they also blunted accountability, facilitated corruption, and became chronically inefficient. Power-sharing may therefore be necessary in some cases, but it is rarely desirable (Mehler, this volume). The past thus remains an important, if incomplete, guide to the future.
Bibliography
Abegunrin, O. (2007) ‘AFRICOM: The U.S. Militarization of Africa’, ACAS Bulletin 78, http://concernedafricascholars.org/bulletin/78/abegunrin/ (accessed 2 June 2012).
Allen, C. (1995) ‘Understanding African Politics’, Review of African Political Economy 65(22): 301–320.
Amnesty International (2012) ‘“If You Resist, We’ll Shoot You”: The Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Case for an Effective Arms Trade Treaty’, www.amnestyusa.org/research/reports/if-you-resist-well-shoot-you-the-democratic-republic-of-the-congo-and-the-case-for-an-effective-arm (accessed 13 June 2012).
Anderson, D. (2005a) ‘“Yours in the Struggle for Majimbo”: Nationalism and the Party Politics of Decolonization in Kenya, 1955–64’, Journal of Contemporary History 40(3): 547–564.
Anderson, D. (2005b) Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire, London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson.
Bienen, H. (1977) Kenya: The Politics of Participation and Control, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Bienen, H. (1978) ‘Military Rule and Political Process: Nigerian Examples’, Comparative Politics 10(2): 205–225.
Branch, D. (2009) Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil War and Decolonization, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bratton, M. and van de Walle, N. (1994) ‘Neopatrimonial Regimes and Political Transitions in Africa’, World Politics 26(4): 453–489.
Bratton, M. and van de Walle, N. (1997) ‘Neopatrimonial Regimes and Political Transitions in Africa’ World Politics 46(4): 453–489.
Cooper, F. (2002) Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Decalo, S. (1990) Coups and Army Rule in Africa: Motivations and Constraints, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Diamond, L., Kirk-Green, A. and Oyediran, O. (eds) (1997) Transition Without End: Nigerian Politics and Civil Society Under Babangida, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers.
First, R. (1970) Barrel of a Gun: Political Power in Africa and the Coup d’État, London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press.
Freedom House (2012) ‘Freedom in the World’, www.freedomhouse.org/report-types/freedom-world (accessed 11 July 2012).
Good, K. (2010) ‘The Presidency of General Ian Khama: The Militarization of the Botswana “Miracle”‘, African Affairs 109(435): 315–324.
Hodgkin, T. (1956) Nationalism in Colonial Africa, London: Frederick Muller.
Keenan, J. (2008) ‘US Militarization in Africa: What Anthropologists Should Know About AFRICOM’, Anthropology Today 24(5): 16–20.
Lodge, T. (1983) Black Politics in South Africa Since 1945, London: Longman.
Mare, G. and Hamilton, G. (1987) An Appetite for Power: Buthelezi’s Inkatha and South Africa, Bloomington, ID: Indiana University Press.
Mazrui, A. (1976) ‘Soldiers as Traditionalizers: Military Rule and the Re-Africanization of Africa’, World Politics 28(2): 246–272.
Nyerere, J. (1961) ‘One Party Government’, Transition (2): 9–11.
Posner, D.N. and Young, D.J. (2007) ‘The Institutionalization of Political Power in Africa’, Journal of Democracy 18(3): 126–140.
Ranger, T. (1983) ‘The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa’, in E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds) The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ranger, T. (1993) ‘The Invention of Tradition Revisited: The Case of Colonial Africa’, in T. Ranger and O. Vaughan (eds) Legitimacy and the State in Twentieth Century Africa: Essays in Honour of A.H.M. Kirk-Greene, London: MacMillan.
Tendi, M. (2010) Making History in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe: Politics, Intellectuals and the Media, Oxford: Peter Lang.