5. Governing Cheaply

“Great, so the state helps the state, but what does the state do for us? What does the state do that is of any use? Our kids don’t study, they are undernourished, what does the state do for us? We don’t actually know what the state does.”

—CONGOLESE WOMAN AT BORDER CROSSING¹

The poverty of poor governments means that they provide fewer and lower quality services to their populations, whether in terms of security, justice, health, or education. Many people pay no income taxes, receive no services, and have only occasional contact with the government. How then can poor governments maintain the acquiescence, if not gain the support, of such people? How can poor governments govern territories where they have no ability to maintain much presence?

We often imagine that simply organizing a democratic election will be sufficient to create popular support for a government; in fact, this was one mistake the Coalition made in Afghanistan. But for those who are very poor, it is not clear that democratic idealism will be enough. It is interesting to note that in a survey of Africans asked to identify the single most essential characteristic of democracy, about a quarter of respondents picked “Government narrows the gap between the rich and the poor,” roughly the same percentage as those who identified democracy with freedom of expression.² It was the most common answer given by people who had no formal schooling.

In chapter 1, I argued that poor governments, like all governments, use a variety of strategies to win support or compliance. However, constrained by poverty, the mix of strategies that poor governments use is different than the mix used by rich liberal democracies. They rely on older, cheaper strategies than the twentieth-century conception of governance that relies on the legitimacy conferred by democratic elections, rule of law, and the supply of public goods and services to the entire population.

Three common strategies on which poor governments rely are patronage, clientelism, and repression. Patronage is a personal relationship in which a patron offers a client protection, status, and economic benefits in return for loyalty and favors. Clientelism is a less personal relationship in which politicians in democracies offer private benefits to supporters in return for their votes. Repression involves the use of force to suppress dissent or compel obedience. There is an abundant literature in political science and regional studies analyzing these and other strategies of governance, and it is not my intention to summarize the literature here. Interested readers can find some key works in the notes.³ Instead, this chapter gives a little bit of the flavor of what these strategies can look like on the ground, with an emphasis on patronage.

Just as the reliance on disfavored strategies of raising revenue has undesirable side effects, so does reliance on these strategies of governance. Reliance on patronage puts people in government jobs who do not have the skills or the incentives to perform them, encourages and facilitates monetization of government positions, and undermines the government’s ability to implement policy. Reliance on clientelism makes politics a winner-take-all contest, sidelining public policy and the public interest. Reliance on repression to govern inevitably involves human rights violations. And to the extent that these practices are illegal under domestic law, reliance on these strategies is in tension with the rule of law, a tension that will be explored more thoroughly in chapter 6. People who must then engage the government to obtain a service must navigate through the resulting informality and illegality.

Patronage and Clientelism

The patronage relationship is a voluntary personal relationship of mutual obligation in which a more powerful patron provides protection and support to a client who responds with loyalty and obedience. It is more than an impersonal economic exchange. The word “patron” has its roots in the Latin “pater,” or “father,” and echoes a familial relationship even where there is no tie of kinship.

Except where displaced by impersonal government institutions—a historically recent and geographically limited development—patronage relationships are one of the basic building blocks of human society. The same person may be a client of a more powerful patron, while also acting as a patron to his or her own clients. These interconnected relationships can form patronage networks spanning government, business, religious institutions, and other civil society organizations. Together with other social relationships such as family relationships, social networks form a structure of power that is an alternative to and in the case of poor governments, often more important than the formal organizational structure of government.

Under the Western governance ideal, the public goods and services provided by the government are allocated to all citizens according to clearly defined impersonal criteria, such as income, disability, or place of residence. Citizens receive benefits under clearly defined procedures because they are entitled to them. The receipt of benefits does not imply any reciprocal personal obligation by the recipient to the government actors who supply them. To get service, you don’t need to know the government officials’ names, and you don’t expect to see them again or owe them anything.

By contrast, governance through patronage is a government of individual deals based on the distribution of private benefits. It allows leaders to leverage the power of elites who in turn deliver the support of their own clients. Refusal to accept a patron’s offers of protection and favors can be seen as an insult, if not a challenge to the existing governance structure. Those who are courted with offers by the existing regime and refuse to participate may be excluded from any form of government job or benefit, imprisoned, or threatened with violence.

Patronage is a very old strategy of governance. The words that we use for this relationship—“patron,” “client,” and for the benefits given by the patron to the client, “patronage”—date from the Roman Empire. European feudal governments were built on this type of personal relationship, in which the king was the ultimate patron.

 

The king kept his nobles sweet by grants of honours, lands, pensions, appointments, and the power to distribute minor appointments to their followers. In their turn these great nobles dispensed these favours to their dependents, high and low, like so many Mafia “Godfathers,” and so guaranteed the Crown their allegiance and service.⁴

 

Powerful leaders may be able to concentrate the authority to distribute patronage in themselves in order to deny potential rivals a power base. Because it was imperative that recipients of favors understand to whom they were beholden, King Louis XIV of France made sure that “he and nobody else would grant the favours, and they had to be asked for…. When somebody asked him to favour an individual who failed to court him, his reply would be: ‘I never see him…. Everything that is a favour must be asked for personally.’”⁵ In poor governments, however, leaders often lack the capacity to do this, and so every actor with resources or favors to dispense has the ability to use them strategically.

Modern poor governments continue to rely heavily on this strategy of governance. In Yemen, “in distributing patronage, the President considers a variety of factors, including the type of elite under consideration (tribal, technocrat, merchant, etc.), an elite’s grassroots influence and proven loyalty, and the tactical needs of balancing tribal, family, and regional alliances.”⁶

In Central Asia,

 

today’s presidents, like the khans of the past, exercise personal control over all public affairs. In theory, there is a division of institutional functions and powers. In practice, senior figures in the state apparatus are selected by the presidents, generally from among their own networks of dependents and clients; these in turn surround themselves with loyal subordinates of their own. This pattern is repeated at every level of the administrative hierarchy, thereby creating chains of interlocking personal loyalties that can readily circumvent proper procedures. Such a system inevitably fosters jealousies and rivalries between individuals as well as government departments. Partly as an antidote to these negative tendencies and partly in order to strengthen their own hold on power, the leaders frequently reshuffle ministers and other senior personnel. The high turn-over rate ensures that they alone represent continuity and authority and remain the ultimate dispensers of patronage…. However, this constant movement has exacerbated the sense of personal insecurity and created an atmosphere in which individuals at every level of the administration seek to “milk” their office for private gain.⁷

 

In Laos, “powerful families thus functioned as patronage networks, the more ambitious leaders of which established their own political parties. Patronage took the form of financial assistance, obtaining jobs in the civil service or private sector, or promotion in the army or bureaucracy, in return for political support.”⁸ After the revolution, “senior Party members soon began to dispense patronage in the traditional Lao way, rewarding extended family members and loyal retainers with jobs for which they were often poorly qualified, in order to build a political support base.”⁹ Wives and families “became conduits for requests for favours and preferences.”¹⁰ Similarly, in Cambodia, powerful families span the police, the military, the Red Cross, the ministries of commerce, agriculture, and the interior, the legislature, and the party. The Phnom Penh Post published a diagram of elite family relationships and their relationships to power.¹¹

In poor societies, people with access to money or authority find themselves subject to strong demands for support by their less fortunate relatives and network members. Government actors at all levels are faced with demands by family, friends, and acquaintances for money, contracts, jobs, favorable government decisions, school fees, or a place to stay. When mid-level government workers go home, favor seekers are waiting for them in their houses and courtyards. Combined, their demands far exceed government salaries, and yet the reputation of government as a fount of wealth is such that many government officials find it difficult to plead their limited resources. A refusal to accommodate such demands risks social sanctions such as isolation and exclusion, while granting them brings status and elevation to the role of patron.

Some government actors cite these social pressures as one of the principal catalysts for using government offices to make money. President Bongo explained this system in the context of the upper-middle-income country of Gabon:

 

We have not attained your degree of political maturity. In Africa, the notion of the state is unfortunately often fuzzy, although that of chief is clear. He has his role and his privileges. Here, if one thinks that the chief doesn’t have money to redistribute, he can’t be respected or considered. He is thought to be selfish. Our culture is different. But it is not inferior to yours. In Africa, the demands are such that one can’t be chief and be rich, because you have to redistribute….

Sharing is inherent in African society at all levels. Not only the head of state, but also the ministers, the senior civil servants, as well as all those who have a little bit of money or power. One has to pay the school fees of a cousin, furniture for a nephew who is getting married, hospital expenses for a relative, etc. Africans will not accept that a big brother keeps everything for himself. The chief who doesn’t redistribute loses all credibility. We don’t trust him. This is why the money that I have, I have to give not only to one of my secretaries whose child has special needs but also to Gabonese I don’t know. When you go the interior of the country, people ask for a hearing, they wait all day. There is missing equipment, poverty. The president comes with sacks, he gives 20 million here, 30 million there.¹²

 

PATRONAGE GOODS. Patrons dispense patronage goods to clients. Anything of value, or anything that can be used to make money, can be used as a patronage good. Two of the most important patronage goods in government are government positions and government contracts. Jobs are especially important patronage goods in poor countries where there are limited employment opportunities. A government position may carry with it a salary or benefits; perquisites such as a government-provided office, car, driver, or telephone; and government authority that the office holder can use to make money by selling government decisions or access to government services.

Where government positions are used as patronage goods, the government has a strong incentive to make more of them in order to have more political currency to spend. As long as they do not come with attendant salaries, they can be minted for free. The monarchy of France, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and unable to borrow, manufactured government positions so that they could be sold or gifted:

 

King Francis I created new government offices simply for the purpose of selling them; as a consequence, in 1515 there were 8,000 persons in the service of the state; in 1665, there were 80,000.¹³ Having sold the offices and therefore having lost control over the income that they represented, the French government established an office to tax the sale of offices as well as offices passed by inheritance. At its peak, in the first half of the seventeenth century, these taxes provided 40% of the Crown’s revenue.¹⁴

 

Similarly, in poor countries “public employment becomes an instrument for political patronage and social welfare. Governments distribute jobs to supporters and spread the limited wage envelope across a large number of workers.”¹⁵ In Zimbabwe, the International Monetary Fund pointed out that “the wage bill in Zimbabwe is one of the highest in sub-Saharan Africa…. A recent public payroll audit identified 38,000 staff positions with significant irregularities, including possibly 14,000 ghost workers.”¹⁶ (Ghost workers are those who are paid despite the fact that they never report to work.) Alternately, poor governments distribute patronage positions by cycling supporters through existing jobs, leading to rapid turnover, including at the senior or ministerial level.¹⁷ Because office holders do not have security in their offices, this rotation can prompt office holders to seek to make money from their positions more zealously, as the opportunity is likely to be short term.

As foreign aid donors pressed for government decentralization, in the hope that it would bring government closer to the people and make it more accountable, some politicians saw the opportunity to expand the number of patronage positions they would be able to dispense. Uganda created more than forty new districts in less than a decade, creating a host of new parliamentary positions, “each one a patronage opportunity,”¹⁸ as well as a number of technical staff positions at the district level. These included:

 

six executive secretaries, a Chief Administrative Officer (CAO), Resident District Commissioner (RDC), deputy CAO, deputy RDC, and a District Auditor, Clerk (and Assistant Clerk), Community-Based Services Manager, Education Officer, Engineer, Extension Coordinator, Finance Officer, Director of Health Services, Information Officer, Inspector of Schools, Land Officer, National Agricultural Advisory Services Officer, Personnel Officer, and Planner, among others. Second, the payroll must include a new district chairperson and a new set of district councilors representing special-interest groups such as women, the youth, and the disabled, which in total average out to around 13 per district. The result of all of these new jobs at the district level is a cascading effect as lower-level officials are promoted upwards, thereby creating new job openings at all levels of local government. Indeed, when asked about the benefits of district creation, sub-county councilors in Nakaseke primarily answered by noting the new jobs and promotions for local citizens who formerly had been unemployed by the previous Luwero district administration.¹⁹

 

Another important government patronage good—and one that receives the most attention—is the public contract. Contracts may be awarded to friends, families, political supporters, and party members. The contract winner need not have any capacity to perform the contract; instead the winner acts as a prime contractor and subcontracts the actual work, after taking a percentage of the value of the contract. Large contracts are valuable because they are potentially more profitable. Contracts whose performance cannot be easily monitored are also valuable for the same reason. These include contracts in infrastructure (which is built in layers, with each layer concealing whatever defects might lie beneath) and contracts in the national security sector (which are usually protected from disclosure and public oversight).

Monopolies are also a historic patronage good. In England under Queen Elizabeth, the grant of a commercial monopoly was a favorite patronage good. Recipients of royal monopolies sold their privileges to merchants and manufacturers.

 

There was scarcely a commodity that was not the object of a monopoly. On one occasion, when a long series of concessions was recited in Parliament, a member exclaimed, “Is not bread in the number?” And to the astonished cries of “Bread!” he replied, “Yes, I assure you, if affairs go on at this rate, we shall have bread reduced to a monopoly before the next Parliament.”²⁰

 

In modern Yemen, President Salih “issued import licenses to favored shaykhs who then sold the licenses to traditional merchants for a profit,” while the state-run Yemeni Economic Corporation “received lucrative access to commodity and private sector imports.”²¹ The president also distributed oil concessions and the right to sell oil to clients, and he allegedly allowed a favored few to buy subsidized diesel and sell it on the international market.²² Finally, a number of sheikhs simply received stipends from the state in order to purchase their loyalty.²³

 

Those sheikhs collaborate with the government in keeping security and stability in their areas, said Mohamed Hussein Taher, an officer at the Sana’a-based Tribal Sheikh Affairs Authority. “If the cabinet cuts their stipends, they will let their fellow tribesmen attack oil pipelines, power grids and other vital installations that contribute much to the state’s budget.”²⁴

 

CLIENTELISM. “Clientelism” is used more narrowly to describe democratic politics in which politicians deliver private economic benefits to their voters, such as jobs, contracts, or cash for school fees or medical bills. It is sometimes used to include local public goods such as schools or roads delivered to supporters (in the United States, “pork barrel politics”). Because each politician has many supporters, the personal aspects of the relationship are not as pronounced as in a patronage relationship, but even here it can be more than an impersonal economic exchange. By addressing supporters’ personal and material needs, politicians show themselves to be generous and caring leaders. Weber, lecturing about patronage in Europe and the United States, said that

 

With the development of the money economy, perquisites and prebends especially are the typical rewards for the following of princes, victorious conquerors, or successful party chiefs. For loyal services today, party leaders give offices of all sorts—in parties, newspapers, co-operative societies, health insurance, municipalities, as well as in the state. All party struggles are for the patronage of office, as well as struggles for objective goals.²⁵

 

In the 1990s, many poor authoritarian states became at least nominal democracies with regular elections. When governments are too poor to provide public goods and services, the impact of democratization is a change in the way in which patronage is wielded, rather than reducing or eliminating it. Previously, a seemingly immovable political leader (“big man”) was the ultimate dispenser of patronage and favors, but with democracy, candidates and parties could now contest for the popular vote; one way to do this was by distributing benefits to their supporters.

In Papua New Guinea,

 

electoral politics is primarily a competition for access to the state. In the Highlands province of Simbu, for example, “people have come to regard the government as the major, or only, source of opportunity and finance. Having a friend in national government is seen as necessary for economic success….” Aspiring candidates make (often optimistic) calculations of their electoral prospects based on the number of voters in their own clan or tribal group. Once elected, the expectation is that the successful candidates will use their position to extract resources from the government and deliver them back to their supporters, but not necessarily to the electorate as a whole.²⁶

 

Political candidates are expected to distribute material goods to voters or to make substantial contributions to local public goods such as schools, roads, or churches. In Kenya, according to the Coalition for Accountable Political Financing, the average parliamentary candidate spent about $33,000, over 40 percent of their total campaign expenditures, on the distribution of cash and gifts to voters.²⁷ The 2005 Afrobarometer survey asked respondents in nine poor Sub-Saharan African countries, “In your opinion, how often do politicians do each of the following: Offer gifts to voters during election campaigns?” Seventy-four percent of respondents in Mali, Benin, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zimbabwe answered “often” or “always.”²⁸ It may be a mistake, however, to see these interactions as an impersonal economic exchange of “vote buying.” Instead, it may be a signal of a candidate’s wealth, personal concern, and generosity—all important characteristics of good patrons.

Because politicians preserve their power by distributing patronage, they must have access to government resources to distribute. After elections, there is rampant party switching as supporters from the opposition seek to gain access to the patronage benefits now controlled by the majority. In francophone Africa, this type of party switching is called “political nomadism”; it has been decried in countries such as Burkina Faso,²⁹ Mali,³⁰ and Niger.³¹ In former British colonies, it is known as “party hopping.” Some countries have passed laws or amended their constitutions to prohibit this behavior. Senegal, Bangladesh, and Papua New Guinea are examples; a constitutional reform in this direction was proposed in Mali.³² While the presence of such laws may suppress legislative party switching, the need for such laws is a strong indication of the relative importance of patronage and clientelism.

The administration is also affected by elections, with sweeping replacements of lower-level government workers as the new party in power allocates jobs to its supporters. While one might expect that more senior political appointees would also be replaced—as happens today in the United States—there is, paradoxically, often less replacement at the higher levels of government in poor governments because the group of elites is so small that new governments have no choice but to consolidate their position by paying off the same elites and incorporating them into the new power structure, even after having accused them of corruption while campaigning. In Nepal, Pramanada Jha was demoted from the Supreme Court on the grounds that he accepted a bribe to free a convicted drug smuggler. But this did not prevent a political party from advancing him for the vice presidency—a position that he ultimately won.³³

In Benin,

 

politicians are elected not to defend policy issues, but to ensure that government resources are channelled to their region of origin. In fact … personalities are more important than parties, and it is more common for prominent people trying to hedge their status to join a political party or, more often, create one, than for politicians to gain national prominence through a party career. Thus, it is not surprising that most parties have no political programme and no technical capacities in terms of policy analysis. In addition, parties and individual MPs that find themselves in opposition after an election tend to gravitate towards the government. As one notorious party-hopping MP declared: “Opposition does not feed a man.”³⁴

 

When political parties are organized to capture state resources for their members, they do not need—and typically do not have—distinct ideologies, platforms, or policy agendas. Shared ideologies and policy goals can bind parties together, but patronage politics is a zero sum game. The larger the share that goes to a person, group, or party, the smaller the share for the rest. Coalitions and parties tend to be unstable. Unless prevented by electoral law, poor democracies tend to attract large numbers of candidates and parties with small constituencies. In 2007 in Kenya, more than 2,500 individuals ran for 210 parliamentary seats.³⁵ (It should be noted that due to a self-awarded pay raise, Kenyan parliamentarians earned $147,000 per year.³⁶ They subsequently reluctantly agreed to accept a salary cut in return for a number of other perks, such as a grant for the purchase of a car.³⁷)

Monetizing Government Positions

There are a number of reasons why people in poor countries seek to translate government jobs, authorities, and contracts into maximum financial gain. These include salaries that are often inadequate and irregularly paid, weak rule of law and law enforcement, the absence of social safety nets, and networks of dependents and favor seekers laying social claims for support. Where government jobs, authorities, or contracts are dispensed as patronage goods, they are expected to be used as personal property rather than for the public welfare. Historically, they have been bought and sold, leased, bequested, and inherited. As President Mobutu of Zaire put it:

 

In a word, everything is for sale, anything can be bought in our country. And in this flow, he who holds the slightest cover of public authority uses it illegally to acquire money, goods, prestige or to avoid obligations. The right to be recognized by a public servant, to have one’s children enrolled in school, to obtain medical care, etc…. are all subject to this tax which, though invisible, is known and expected by all.³⁸

 

The importance of government positions as a way of generating personal profit is reflected in popular metaphors in Sub-Saharan Africa and in Melanesia that link government to eating or food.³⁹ In Nigeria, “I chop, you chop” (“I eat, you eat”) was a political slogan and an attitude toward government brilliantly spoofed by the Mama G song “National Moi Moi” (in which she sings, “you chop your own, I chop my own, my government will not chop alone”). Ugandans speak of making a corrupt official “vomit up what he has eaten.” In the francophone countries, officials eat or wolf down government money and resources (“manger,” “bouffer”). Similar metaphors can be found in Melanesia (“big man” as a political leader, the “national cake” and analogies of corruption to eating food).⁴⁰ In the Solomon Islands,

 

many close to the tendering process say that the word corruption has been replaced by less “demeaning words.” “Everybody is calling it lunch money nowadays…. It’s not a bribe, so it is not corruption, just lunch money,” said a senior government officer who preferred to remain anonymous. “Those in most of these tender boards have a system where they predetermine who gets a contract, and this is based largely on what they could offer board members, or a selected few, … lunch money, that is,” the officer said. “Many board members have people on the outside who, in most cases, approach contractors and basically find out how much lunch money they are willing to fork out.”⁴¹

 

The value of government jobs as patronage goods is not defined by their low and irregularly paid salaries or their bewildering array of official salary supplements. Instead, the value of the position is defined by the extent to which a position carries authority that can be monetized. At the highest levels of government, schemes for enrichment are elaborate, more sophisticated, and certainly more rewarding. In Kenya, the government paid subsidy payments for nonexistent exports of gold and diamonds to Goldenberg International, to the tune of $600 million; Kenyan president Daniel Arap Moi was implicated.⁴² In Liberia, former president Charles Taylor gave control of the Bureau of Maritime Affairs to family friend Benoni Urey.⁴³ The BMA runs Liberia’s lucrative ship registry, through which the country earns revenue by providing “flags of convenience” that allow ships to travel international waters. It was later shown that Urey diverted about 20 percent of the registry’s annual income; he is now under a United Nations travel ban for economic crimes. (This has not prevented Liberian president Sirleaf from appointing Urey as a mayor, notwithstanding her anticorruption stance.)

The ways to profit from a government position are limited only by human imagination, but certainly one of the most common is to charge fees to render government services. Whereas just 0.5 percent of Americans reported an encounter with a bribe-seeking public official in a 2003–2004 survey, 30.5 percent of those surveyed in Mozambique and 29 percent of those surveyed in Cambodia reported such an encounter in the previous year.⁴⁴ Police demand payment to respond to a crime scene or to investigate, secretaries demand payment to schedule meetings with their bosses, clerks demand payment to process files. “Teachers expect to be ‘rewarded’ for raising marks, or awarding diplomas; health workers charge for ‘free medicines.’”⁴⁵ In Vietnam,

 

the situation in hospitals can be galling: nurses will arbitrarily write anything on your admittance sheet: heart rate, pulse, blood pressure. They will only take your pulse and blood pressure and record them in your patient’s intake form if you pay.

“They make it painful for you,” says Nghiem Thi Thu, a woman in her late 40s who works as a caregiver. “You pay, and the nurses will give you shots without hurting you.” Indeed, it is a frequent complaint that otherwise the nurses make it physically painful.

Within my first year of living here, I fell and cut myself deeply. At the hospital, I sat in the emergency room for more than an hour before a visiting neighbor asked, “Did you give them an envelope?” That’s when I learned that in an emergency, you pack envelopes to take with you to the hospital. You put a few bills inside and hand them to intake clerks, nurses and doctors if you want to get any service.

Visiting a friend in a hospital recently, I saw a short woman getting in and out of bed every few minutes to pace the room, stepping over and around the mass of people. These people from the countryside had come into Hanoi seeking better medical care related to their reproductive system. The woman was cursing out the nurses, the doctors and her husband in turn.

“I’m just a second class citizen,” she said. “It’s been five hours and they won’t give me my shots.”

The room had four beds—two patients per bed—and scores of relatives acting as caregivers. Several people kept reminding her to hand over an envelope. She refused, and everyone else received their shots and medicines. Alone, she kept pacing the room and cursing.⁴⁶

 

In Bangladesh, primary school teachers must bribe the local government education officials in order to obtain training, transfers, monthly pay orders, and retirement benefits.⁴⁷ Along with school officials, they receive a share of funds that were intended for student scholarships and food. Teachers and administrators also demand bribes from students and their parents for admission to school or even to be allowed to sit for exams.

 

Shafayet Ullah, an examinee at the higher secondary level, claims that his geography teacher forced him to pay 2,200 taka (US$3232) to secure passing grades in the practical session of examinations. “The teacher did not teach a single class, but we still wanted to take the test and submit our practical sheets, but the teacher forced us to pay the money. This happens in every educational institution. I am really ashamed at how some teachers commit such sins and pollute a noble profession.”

Interviews with a number of students in several schools reveal that even students at the secondary education level have to pay bribes to the school authorities in exchange for selection for the lengthy secondary school certificate examinations. If they fail the test examinations, they have to pay 1,000 taka (US$15) to 1,500 taka (US$2222) for each subject to ensure that they will be allowed to take the next round, the public examinations. Students are also required to bribe their teachers for the required marks in the practical examination sessions.⁴⁸

 

Payment may also be demanded by government actors or offered to them for faster service. Those who do not pay may find that they do not receive service, as government actors invent delays or those who pay are repeatedly prioritized above them. In courtrooms in Sierra Leone,

 

there are posters that remind people that bail is free. Nevertheless, human rights groups continue to draw attention to the fact that people still pay illegal fees every day to court officials to secure bail. I myself learned recently that it is a common practice in the Magistrates Court for clerks and police prosecutors to encourage a defendant in minor cases to plead guilty at the start of their trial.

One lawyer told me that the defendant can then negotiate and secure a lighter punishment by illegally paying a fee to the court officials. In cases of corruption at government hospitals, nurses’ handbags are used as illegal pharmacies from where prescription drugs are sold to patients. An extra payment to officials at relevant government departments will lead to faster processing of an application for various services including passports, drivers’ licenses, property title registrations or utilities.

People have little option but to pay incentives to public officials in order to secure faster processing of an application for most public services. This is because there is no functioning complaint and redress mechanism to discourage officials from delaying or refusing to process an application for a public service without being paid a bribe.⁴⁹

 

Even aid donors are sometimes taxed by government actors who are monetizing their offices. In Myanmar,

 

a lay Catholic who spent a year working on the church’s relief effort on the ground—and who with a few others spoke more frankly about the aftermath—said that junta officers rarely missed an opportunity to enrich themselves in a storm’s wake. They regularly forced church officials to pay bribes just for permission to deliver basic aid.

Permits for construction projects, ranging from rudimentary chapels to larger housing units, also required hefty bribes to officials. Other times, authorities would simply deny permission to build. One brother said his order had to abandon plans to expand a hostel for poor boys because it lacked funds to bribe the requisite officials.⁵⁰

 

A recently passed antibribery law in the United Kingdom raises concerns for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) trying to reach populations in need.

 

It is well-known that NGOs may make “facilitation payments” to gain access or ensure the delivery of aid in emergency situations. The new UK Bribery Act stipulates that any act of bribery by a UK organisation or nationals, anywhere in the world, breaks the law in the UK and that “facilitation payments” come under this. This represents the clearest obstacle to NGOs.⁵¹

 

Payment may also be required for protection from government coercion. Auditors and inspectors require payment so that they do not engage in harassment. Health officials charged with ensuring that incoming travelers have proper vaccinations threaten to administer missing immunizations on the spot with a dirty needle, unless a bribe is paid. Police and immigration use their powers to extort bribes by threatening violence or jail. In Somalia,

 

Ali Isse, a local businessman, had firsthand experience of being detained at Mogadishu’s Adden Adde International Airport while coming back from a business trip to the United Arab Emirates.

“The security at the airport took me to a room and questioned me for an offense I did not understand. They threatened me with arrest if I did not pay them 1,427,000 Somali shillings (US$1,000), but I refused to pay because I knew I was innocent,” Isse said.

Isse was taken to a secret prison in Mogadishu’s notorious presidential palace where he was held in solitary confinement for a month and allowed to speak to no one. After being repeatedly interrogated by anti-terrorism squads, he was finally released after his relatives paid a bribe of 2,854,000 Somali shillings (US$2,000).

“They paid the money without my consent because they knew I might never get any justice,” Isse said. “Here, we have to pay just to be alive.”

At the seaport, merchants importing goods into Somalia say that even after they pay the regular tax, which they maintain is already prohibitively excessive, importers and exporters are required by port officials to pay “facilitation fees.” This means they must pay bribes to be allowed to take their imported goods out of the port or face indefinite delays that involve undue inspections for illegal weapons, explosives or drugs.

“We have to cooperate or else we lose everything we have in the stores of the port or in containers,” Yusuf Musse, a rice importer, said. “If we dare report this to higher officials we would wind up fighting for our lives.”⁵²

 

One woman explained why she prefers the less comfortable shared compartments when traveling by train from Kyrgyzstan to Russia:

 

“It takes four days to get from Bishkek to Moscow, and the journey feels like torture, but it’s cheaper and safer than individual compartments for four people—it’s more difficult to harass people in front of others,” says Lydmila, who regularly travels back and forth between the Kyrgyz Republic and Russia. Several months ago, she enrolled her daughter in a Russian university and regularly visits her.

Being an experienced traveler, Lydmila quickly arranges a seat for herself and retrieves a small digital camera from her pocket. “My little savior,” she calls it. “When they start their raids they are cautious around people who have the means to document the abuse.”

Lydmila explains that during her last trip the officers behaved rudely as they inspected the passengers and rummaged through their luggage. After finding that Lydmila and her daughter were carrying nothing illegal, the officials became frustrated and began to bully them. The officials asked for papers that, by definition, could not be obtained before arriving in Russia. “It was obvious they wanted a bribe. They threatened to unload our luggage and force us out of the train in the middle of nowhere. I asked them ‘How much?’ and they told me to pay 5,000 Russian rubles (US$200). It was literally all I had on me at that point. I replied I couldn’t afford this and they lowered the tariff from 5,000 to 2,000 rubles (US$200 to US$80).”

When the officials started bargaining, Lydmila figured she needed to be blunt and resist the pressure. She took out her digital camera and warned she’d be taking pictures of their actions. They backed down immediately and dropped their demand to 200 rubles (US$10).⁵³

 

It is not only the public who pays; government actors may also be compelled to pay. Those with the authority to fill government positions may choose to sell or lease positions, instead of giving them to their clients. The more potentially profitable an office is, the higher the price it can command. “No jobs in Laos are simply advertised and then filled on the basis of experience or talent. Every applicant knows that they will need someone to speak for them: not just a referee, but someone who will actively attempt to ensure they get the job, and keep it…. But this support has to be paid for; and the more the job permits the holder to extract benefits, the greater the payment.”⁵⁴ Where government offices are sold or leased, those who paid to be appointed must find ways to make their offices profitable in order to recoup their initial investment or to make regular payments in order to continue to hold their office. For police, “getting a job issuing traffic tickets can be lucrative, but to get this job a cop needs to have connections and pay some dues. He also has to share what he takes with his superiors and colleagues.”⁵⁵ This practice creates hierarchies within government in which funds flow upward from lower-level employees, who demand payments from the public to those responsible for appointments, assignments, and promotions, and to those responsible for the distribution of paychecks and benefits.

Any position with the power to award large contracts for the purchase of government goods and services can be a very lucrative position. Those with procurement authority may allocate contracts to themselves, to their relatives and friends, or to those willing to pay, so a position on a tender board is a prime patronage good. In 2012, for example, the World Bank canceled a credit to Bangladesh for the construction of a bridge over the Padma River, citing “credible evidence corroborated by a variety of sources which points to a high-level corruption conspiracy among Bangladeshi government officials, SNC Lavalin executives, and private individuals in connection with the Padma Multipurpose Bridge Project.”⁵⁶ The executives of the Canadian engineering firm SNC Lavalin were charged with corruption in Canada.⁵⁷

Contractors routinely factor the need to pay bribes to obtain contracts and to receive payment, as well as the delay and hassle of “walking their payments through,” into the prices that they charge government for goods and services.⁵⁸ As a consequence, poor governments pay above market value for goods and services. Military purchases, infrastructure construction, or natural resource extraction all give rise to high-value contracts, with an incentive for competing contractors to pay bribes to get contracts and for government actors to pocket them. When a new government was elected in Kenya, ending Moi’s decades-long presidency, it was promptly tarnished by the involvement of senior government officials in procurement scandals, such as the Anglo-Leasing Scandal.⁵⁹ The government then reported that up to $47 million in foreign aid for textbooks and medical supplies had been stolen between 2005 and 2009 by officials in the education and health ministries.⁶⁰

Because poor governments are often dependent on foreign aid, positions managing the stream of aid are valuable. “When I was prime minister, people used to come see me—not to ask to be made minister, but to ask to be put in charge of an aid project,” confided a former prime minister of an impoverished government.

Every other attribute of government office is routinely turned to personal use. Official cars and drivers are seen on the weekend ferrying relatives on shopping and personal chores. Computers, generators, air conditioners, fans, chairs, and stationery are stolen from government offices. Those in charge of government money embezzle it or lend it out at interest. In Zimbabwe,

 

one of the most scandalous cases involved the controversial governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, Gideon Gono, who illegally withdrew money from the foreign-currency accounts of nongovernmental organizations, individuals, companies and embassies, allegedly to bankroll Mugabe’s electioneering as well as to fund his operations. Gono, who, rightly or wrongly, is also mentioned as one of the most corrupt individuals in Zimbabwe, publicly admitted that the Central Bank raided accounts of nongovernmental organizations to the tune of about US$1 billion.⁶¹

 

It is impossible to unpack this flow of funds and to separate out money that goes for personal enrichment, money that is used for political purposes, money that is redistributed to personal networks, and money that is used to pay for the ordinary expenses of rendering government services that should normally be paid with budgeted funds, such as supplying necessary but missing equipment or substituting for unpaid salaries. Those who profit from this system are quick to deny. Asked if this system was simply “a convenient excuse for enriching oneself,” President Bongo of Gabon replied: “Don’t fool yourself. For the head of an African state it is very difficult to enrich himself because he is subject to so many pressures, coming from the entire country.”⁶² However, the criminality of self-enrichment through the state, the social unacceptability of amassing wealth without sharing, and the disapproval of those who embrace Enlightenment governance values, including the donor community, make it unlikely that any government actor would publicly and candidly confess to having amassed a fortune using his government office. According to the Guardian, President Bongo’s family (at the time his son was minister of defense, his daughter was head of the cabinet, and his son-in-law was head of the Ministry of Finance), with forty years of access to his country’s oil wealth, “may be one of the richest first families in the world,” with multimillion dollar mansions in Gabon and France.⁶³

While Gabon is not a poor country, and leaders of poor countries have less ample opportunities for wealth accumulation, there are also reports of multimillionaire leaders of poor countries. According to a leaked U.S. diplomatic cable, the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court told U.S. diplomats that Sudanese president Al-Bashir had nine billion U.S. dollars in foreign bank accounts, although Al-Bashir has denied these claims.⁶⁴ In Haiti under “Baby Doc” Duvalier,

 

while international aid organizations tried to help, Duvalier pocketed much of the relief money for himself. According to documents, shortly after the International Monetary Fund granted $22 million to Haiti on December 5, 1980, $20 million of that money was withdrawn from the government’s bank accounts. Former U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig received a cable saying that approximately $4 million may have been diverted to Haiti’s secret police, the Tonton Macoutes, while the remaining $16 million disappeared into Duvalier’s personal accounts.

At the same time, Duvalier was making lavish purchases, like the eighty-six foot luxury yacht, named “Nikki,” that he bought for $1 million. Even after he fled the country in 1986 to escape an imminent coup, the spending continued. In 1988, a journalist from the St. Petersburg Times in Florida described Duvalier’s luxurious villa in the French Riviera (monthly rent: $40,000) as having “Ferrari sports cars parked in the driveway.”

While it is hard to link specific bank accounts or purchases to specific incidents of corruption or bribes, the rate at which money flowed out of the public coffers was staggering. All told, Jean-Claude Duvalier, his ex-wife Michelle Bennett Duvalier, and three people acting as agents are believed to have taken $504 million from the Haitian public treasury between 1971 and 1986.⁶⁵

 

THE VIEW FROM THE BOTTOM. Most governments engage in redistribution of wealth. In theory, this should be accomplished through public policies with transparent and impersonal eligibility criteria (such as social safety nets for the poor). However, patronage systems use government itself as a good to redistribute, and its offices and consumption of goods and services as an instrument of redistribution; in contrast with program eligibility defined by objective and transparent criteria, the redistribution of patronage systems is opaque and hinges on personal networks. It is an unequal system of redistribution that favors government actors, their families, friends, and supporters—a narrow elite.⁶⁶

The unequal treatment generates substantial frustration. Some, however, benefit indirectly, when government resources and income streams are shared. Others hope to benefit, patiently waiting their turn.⁶⁷ For them, government is a lottery and they can dream of becoming winners. Still others accept that they are in a system that is beyond their power to change and strategize accordingly. As Steven Pierce related:

 

A highly educated friend with a professional, public-sector job, someone who has been eloquent in condemning corruption in government and Nigerian society, one day surprised me by going on at length about his desire to gain government office in order to provide for his children. Failing such a job, he wanted to be given a government contract. Public works are generally assigned to contractors, but many of these contracts are handed out because of one’s proximity to government officials and do not reflect any actual capability to fulfill the assignment on the part of the original contractor. Getting a contract therefore is a lucrative opportunity to get paid by the firms that will actually perform the services, which can recoup their money (and then some) with substantial cost over-runs. My friend saw nothing hypocritical in the disparity between his political beliefs and his ambitions; it is an imperfect world, and life is full of compromises.⁶⁸

 

At the same time, there is vocal condemnation of corruption. In a 2005–2006 Afrobarometer survey of eighteen Sub-Saharan African countries, a strong majority of people answer that for a government official to give a job to a relative without adequate qualifications is wrong and punishable, although a significant number of respondents answer that it is either “not wrong” or “wrong, but understandable”—for example, 45 percent in Madagascar and 36 percent in Uganda.⁶⁹ A higher percentage think that it is wrong and punishable when “a government official demands a favour or an additional payment for some service that is part of his job;” although here too there are similar minorities that answer that it is either “not wrong” or “wrong, but understandable”—40 percent in Madagascar and 37 percent in Uganda.⁷⁰

There are two common interpretations of the disconnect between practice and expressed attitudes. They are not mutually exclusive, and both explanations are probably true. The first is that people do not find corruption as reprehensible as they say they do when asked, and that corruption complaints are actually complaints of unfair sharing and exclusion. Anders writes that “the general rejection of ‘corruption’ does not imply a clear and unequivocal rejection of practices considered to be corrupt among average Malawians if we investigate this vernacular.”⁷¹ He notes that in Malawi, bosses who fail to share properly with their subordinates are likely to have corruption allegations lodged against them.⁷² In French West Africa, “actors simultaneously condemn the practices that they justify” by justifying corruption as long as one doesn’t “overdo it.”⁷³ One justifies and defends one’s own behavior; it is only corruption when someone else does it.

The second explanation is that in a system in which no one else is following the rules, it becomes much more difficult and costly for any individual to follow the rules. Failure to “go along” with the system could not only mean forgone opportunities, but also the inability to access government services and vulnerability to extortion and abuse. As one report of police corruption in Hong Kong in the 1970s put it, the choices of young police officers confronted with the existing system of corruption were to “get on the bus” or “run alongside the bus,” but “never stand in front of the bus.”⁷⁴

There are individuals willing to pay such a high price in defense of their principles, but they are exceptional. As King Louis XIV explained:

 

It seems that, in this general disorder, it would be impossible for the most just person not to become corrupt; because the average person would swim alone against the tide of all the others, and curb his tendency to pursue his self-interest, while those that should prevent it cause it by their example.⁷⁵

 

The king’s observation echoes in the frustration of an anticorruption campaigner in Zimbabwe:

 

John Maketo, an official with an anti-corruption watchdog group in Harare said that corruption in Zimbabwe was so deep-rooted and institutionalized that some people accept it as their sole means of survival. Acknowledging that corruption is on the increase largely due to the economic crisis, Maketo says that Zimbabweans have begun to actually celebrate the most corrupt among them. Only “small fish” are prosecuted for petty corruption; big fish are immune to prosecution as they are cash-rich. “As a country and a people, we have become [so] morally degraded that we accept corruption as a normal practice. If you are not corrupt, people laugh at you,” says Maketo.⁷⁶

 

This suggests that changing such a system would require changing the behavior of many people at the same time. But if the government is poor, and relies on patronage and clientelism as governance strategies, it is worth asking what governance strategy it would use instead.

 

THE IMPLICATIONS OF PATRONAGE GOVERNANCE. For a poor government, patronage is an important and necessary strategy of governance, and so to the extent that government is a benefit, the strategy can be seen as beneficial. From the perspective of the government, the advantage of patronage as a governance strategy is that upfront costs are low, which makes it an attractive strategy for cash-strapped governments. Many patronage goods can be created and distributed for free. These include exemptions from laws or regulations, such as a license to open a business, import, or export. Government posts can be cheaply created, provided that they don’t come with much in the way of salary. And when scarce goods must be allocated, such as government contracts or travel opportunities for government workers, allocating them to clients or to one’s own network has no upfront cost. As a political strategy, patronage and clientelism also have the benefit of allowing government actors to allocate scarce resources for maximum political payoff, whether this is to purchase political or electoral support, neutralize opposition, or to leverage the influence of elites in a form of “indirect rule.” In the words of one scholar of Africa considering the democratization of the way in which governments hold power,

 

Fiscality constitutes the Achilles heel of poor democracies…. The advantage of the kind of elite clientelism practiced in authoritarian Africa is its cheapness, and the more ambitious expenditures of a more democratic clientelism will bring with it huge economic risks, particularly in the absence of rapid economic growth.⁷⁷

 

And of course patronage systems reward those at the top of the system generously, in wealth, power, and social status. Because patrons are supposed to be wealthy and generous, their accumulation of wealth is tolerated as long as it is seen to be matched by their generosity. No wonder that patronage continues to be a common system of rule not only when countries are too poor for alternative strategies of governance, but even as they become wealthier.

But as a governance strategy it also has a number of undesirable side effects, which lead to the marginalization of this strategy in rich liberal democracies. The distribution of private goods is a zero sum game—more for you means less for me. Rather than campaigning for policies to grow the (economic) pie, under patronage and clientelism individuals and groups contest for a slice of the national cake. Government becomes a prize to be shared out rather than a means to an end of improved public welfare. Although patronage does involve redistribution, as a system of redistribution it is neither transparent nor fair. Insiders and their circles are rewarded; others less so, their rewards fading with their distance from power.

Moreover, patronage may enable governance by creating a coalition with an interest in upholding the current government, but the coalition is fluid and unstable. The support that is purchased is support for the current sharing arrangement, not support for government in the abstract or a set of rules that determine how government should operate.

Because patronage uses government itself as a reward, and its apparatus as an instrument of personal profit, the government’s ability to make and implement policy is undermined. Neither government contracts nor government positions are given to those best able to carry out the associated duties. In the United States before the establishment of merit-based hiring in the federal civil service, the “spoils system” produced regular mismatches between jobs and the qualifications of those who held them:

 

Before 1883 the spoils system largely prevailed, with politicians dictating appointments. Consequently, civil servants had varied and irrelevant backgrounds. In 1867 employees of the Treasurer’s Office numbered in previous occupations “7 accountants, 13 bankers, 18 bookkeepers, 27 clerks, 1 detective, 2 druggists, 1 editor, 5 farmers, 1 hackdriver, 1 housekeeper, 1 hotel steward, 16 laborers, 1 lawyer, 1 machinist, 1 manufacturer, 8 mechanics, 14 merchants, 2 messengers, 1 minister, 1 page, 1 porter, 1 postman, 2 salesman, 1 sculptor, 12 students, 1 surveyor, 24 teachers, 2 telegraphists, 1 county treasurer, 1 waiter, 1 washerwoman, 1 watchman, and of no particular occupation, 112.”⁷⁸

 

Government contracts are not given to those best able to implement them, resulting in inflated costs and uncompleted public works. Poor countries are pocked with abandoned or collapsing infrastructure projects—half-built buildings and collapsing roads. Governments may even be motivated to adopt policies that are not in the public interest for the purpose of generating more patronage to distribute, such as creating unneeded government positions, contracting for unneeded work, passing regulations whose principal purpose is to allow the distribution of exemptions, or creating monopolies.

Under patronage systems it is impossible to draw a clear boundary between public and private actions, roles, or resources. Because corruption is often defined as “the use of public office for private gain,” it is possible to characterize these countries as suffering from systemic corruption, but the definition of corruption assumes two clear and distinct spheres, the public and the private, and a norm that public office is to be used only for the public benefit. Neither of these exist under patronage systems.

A final downside of patronage as a strategy of governance is that it makes rule of law impossible, weakening state-made law as a system for coordinating behavior or predicting the actions of government. This is both because patronage is a system of opaque individual deals, and because use of public office for private gain is usually criminal under both domestic and international law. This important implication is explored more fully in chapter 6.

Repression

The use of force is another strategy of governance common in poor countries, whose armed forces tend to be deployed within their own territorial boundaries. Some poor governments are battling insurgents for territorial control. Others use repression of unarmed civilians as a routine tool of statecraft, suppressing speech and association, and imprisoning, torturing, or killing political opponents. Highly repressive poor governments include Central African Republic, Somalia, Sudan, Eritrea, North Korea, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan.⁷⁹ Accordingly, some poor governments have sizeable military expenditures as a percentage of the budget. In 2008, according to World Bank data, military expenditure made up 27 percent of Ethiopia’s central government expenditure and 20 percent of central government expenditure in the Kyrgyz Republic; in 2009, it was 16 percent of Cambodia’s central government expenditure. (The use of opaque security budgets as a cover for diversion of funds and patronage goods should also be kept in mind.)

Although the ill-trained, ill-equipped, underpaid, and under-motivated security forces of poor governments may be adequate to control unarmed civilians, they may crumble in the face of armed opposition. The same poverty, patronage systems, and self-dealing that compete with public policy objectives in civilian administrations undermine military capacity. A special operations trainer with the 2009 U.S. effort to train the Malian military reported on conditions found. The unit was equipped with obsolete rifles, as well as rifles without stocks, hand guards, or with missing or broken sights.⁸⁰ He found that a number of Malian soldiers reported that prior to training they had not shot 1,000 rounds in their entire military careers, and that they had abandoned vehicles after an ambush because the drivers had been killed, and only the drivers knew how to drive vehicles.⁸¹ Soldiers were apathetic and lacked initiative, while officers did not conduct training or seek to address and correct obvious problems.

Many poor governments have poor human rights records. Just as poor governments lack the capacity to centralize the distribution of patronage, poor governments also lack the capacity to control and discipline their own security forces. Civilian control of the military may be tenuous or illusory; chains of command may exist in name only. Poor governments also lack the ability to deliver adequate justice, to maintain prisoners in humane conditions, or to protect citizens from abuses. This is particularly likely when the government is engaged in violent conflict to extend or maintain its control over contested parts of its territory. This can make it difficult to distinguish between repression as a deliberate strategy of governance and abuses that occur due to a lack of capacity to prevent them. From the standpoint of a citizen, however, it may be a distinction without a difference.

The U.S. State Department produces annual reports on the observations of human rights in foreign countries that help direct U.S. policy toward those countries. In Burundi,

 

The main human rights abuses included torture and extrajudicial executions of detainees, particularly members of certain opposition political parties, by police, military, and intelligence services; prolonged pretrial detention of detainees, often without formal charges; harsh and sometimes life-threatening prison conditions; and a lack of judicial independence.

Other human rights abuses included interference with and intimidation of government officials and political opposition members by certain members of the CNDD-FDD and the intelligence and police services. The political rights of certain opposition political parties—including the right to hold party meetings—were restricted arbitrarily, and members of these parties were detained, threatened, and intimidated. Some journalists and members of civil society and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) who criticized the government and CNDD-FDD were harassed and intimidated.⁸²

 

In North Korea,

 

Public executions, death by starvation and torture are common in North Korean political prisoner camps, according to testimony given to human rights group Amnesty International…. According to testimony, every former inmate at one camp had witnessed a public execution, one child was held for eight months in a cube-like cell so small he couldn’t move his body and an estimated 40% of inmates die from malnutrition.

Tortures included placing a plastic bag over the head of a victim and submerging them in water, sleep deprivation, bamboo slivers under the fingernails, and suspending prisoners whose feet and hands have been bound behind them, witnesses said.⁸³

 

Repression of dissent operates through a number of channels. Governments may act to restrict the freedom of speech, or association, or to imprison or torture opponents. According to Freedom House, an NGO focused on promoting human freedom, in 2013 in Eritrea,

 

The law does not allow independent media to operate in Eritrea, and the government controls all broadcasting outlets. A group of journalists arrested in 2001 remained imprisoned without charge, and the government refuses to provide any information on their status. Reporters Without Borders said in August that it had received confirmation of the deaths of three of the journalists detained in 2001 as well as a fourth, held since 2009. Eleven members of the Asmara-based broadcaster Radio Bana, who were detained in 2009 on suspicion of collaborating with exiled opposition groups, remained in custody without charge. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 28 journalists were in prison in Eritrea as of December 2012. The government controls the internet infrastructure and is thought to monitor online communications. Foreign media are available to those few who can afford a satellite dish….

Freedoms of assembly and association are not recognized. The government maintains a hostile attitude toward civil society, and independent NGOs are not tolerated. A 2005 law requires NGOs to pay taxes on imported materials, submit project reports every three months, renew their licenses annually, and meet government-established target levels of financial resources. The six remaining international NGOs that had been working in Eritrea were forced to leave in 2011. The government placed strict controls on UN operations in the country, preventing staff from leaving the capital.⁸⁴

 

Repressive governments may use the justice system instrumentally to suppress regime opponents. Ironically, because poor governments rely on patronage to govern, and patronage is criminalized, accusations of corruption are often used to discredit or disempower political opponents. While they may be true, enforcement is selective and the same activities of regime insiders are ignored. Military tribunals, which operate under rules that provide fewer protections to defendants, are sometimes used to judge civilians, a hallmark of repressive regimes.

At the extreme, some poor country governments simply gun down opponents. In Zimbabwe in 2008, opposition supporters “were tortured, beaten and killed. That campaign of violence was organized and directed by a clique of military commanders and senior politicians close to Mr. Mugabe.”⁸⁵

 

As regional leaders push for free and fair elections in Zimbabwe, a high-ranking general in the country’s army has vowed that the security services will ensure that President Robert Mugabe, 87, remains in power, calling his chief political opponent a “national security threat” who “can only be dealt with by people in uniform.”

“President Mugabe will only leave office if he sees it fit or dies,” a state-controlled newspaper, The Herald, quoted Brig. Gen. Douglas Nyikayaramba as saying in an article on Thursday. The general added, “We will die for him to make sure he remains in power.”⁸⁶

 

In May 2011 the government of Yemen responded to a peaceful protest of unarmed civilians outside a government building by shooting into the crowd, killing four and wounding sixty.

 

Then the real assault began. Armored vehicles, tanks and bulldozers began converging on the protesters’ tent city from all sides. They fired tear gas and water cannons into the square and began shooting protesters at point-blank range. They doused the tents, which extended for hundreds of yards in every direction, with gasoline and lighted them on fire. None of the protesters had weapons.⁸⁷

 

In postgenocide Rwanda, the ruling party

 

has imposed various legal restrictions and informal controls on the media, and press freedom groups have accused the government of intimidating independent journalists. In February 2011, Umurabyo newspaper journalists Agnès Uwimana Nkusi and Saïdati Mukakibibi were sentenced to 17 and 7 years, respectively, for denying the genocide, inciting civil disobedience, and defaming public officials based on a 2009 article criticizing President Paul Kagame. Nkusi and Mukakibibi appealed their case in January 2012, and in April, the Supreme Court reduced their sentences to four and three years, respectively. In July, Idriss Gasana Byiringiro, a reporter for the private weekly Chronicles, was detained for 30 days shortly after he submitted a police request to investigate an incident of state security agents interrogating him about his reporting and confiscating his telephone and laptop. In November, the editor of the Kinyarwandan-language paper Umusingi, Stanley Gatera, was fined and sentenced to one year in prison for gender discrimination and inciting “divisionism” in a June opinion piece.

Rwanda’s repressive media environment has led many journalists to flee the country and work in exile. In November 2011, Charles Ingabire, editor of the Uganda-based online publication Inyenyeri News and an outspoken critic of the Kagame regime who had fled Rwanda in 2007 due to threats, was shot dead in Uganda. His murder remained unsolved at the end of 2012. There are increasing indications that e-mail and other private communications are being monitored. In August 2012, the lower house adopted a constitutional amendment expanding the surveillance and interception capabilities of security authorities.⁸⁸

 

More recently, Rwanda has been accused of sending assassins after regime opponents living in South Africa; the government has denied it.⁸⁹

Repression cannot be the only strategy of governance, however. At a minimum, the government must maintain the voluntary support of its enforcers. The frequency of military coups in poor countries demonstrates that this support cannot be taken for granted, particularly given the absence of any long tradition of constitutional rule or civilian supremacy. Scholars studying coups have long noted the relationship between national poverty and coup attempts.⁹⁰ Recent coups and coup attempts in poor countries include those in Mali, Madagascar, Niger, Guinea-Bissau, The Gambia, Sri Lanka, Burundi, Togo, Lesotho, Guinea, and Ethiopia.⁹¹

Conclusion

Patronage and clientelism are not strategies that are reserved for use by poor governments. In the context of the United States, we can think about the practice of appointing as ambassadors campaign finance “bundlers” who lack even a minimal understanding of the country to which they wish to represent the United States.⁹² Alternately, we might think of the reported practice of Hillary Clinton of keeping a spreadsheet and points system of supporters as “an improvement on what old-school politicians called a ‘favor file.’ It meant that when asks rolled in, she and Bill would have at their fingertips all the information needed to make a quick decision—including extenuating, mitigating and amplifying factors—so that friends could be rewarded and enemies punished.”⁹³ It is not that the governments of rich liberal democracies do not ever use patronage, clientelism, or repression as strategies of governance; it is that they rely on them less. Their wealth gives them additional options, including the ability to hold democratic elections, provide the rule of law, deliver universal public goods and services, and enjoy the popular support and legitimacy that comes from providing them.

As rich liberal democracies created more impersonal rule-based government institutions, they stigmatized the older, personalistic strategies and more sharply defined the distinction between public and private roles and spheres. “Corruption” is commonly defined as “the use of public office for private gain,” a definition that implies the existence of two separate spheres: the existence of a public office, and the existence of a public benefit for which such public offices should be used. From this vantage, poor governments are often termed “systemically corrupt.” But this is a misnomer. Corruption, in the context of a rich liberal democracy, is a deviant and criminal act in a system that strives to provide services according to impersonal criteria. For poor governments that rely on patronage and clientelism, however, the monetization of government office is a consequence both of the way in which public power is exercised and of the incapacity of poor governments to displace personalistic social insurance mechanisms by providing the rule of law, regular and adequate government salaries, and adequate impersonal means of public service delivery. “Corruption” is system-wide, common, and even expected. Many poor governments’ positions are routinely monetized; there is a secondary market in lucrative government positions; and such behavior is considered unsurprising and rarely punished. This sharing out of government wealth is the glue that holds poor governments together and makes it possible for them to govern. There may be better ways for poor governments to govern, but it will not be from the popular legitimacy that comes from democratic elections, the rule of law, and the wide delivery of public goods and services because poor governments cannot afford to provide them.

Understanding the way in which poor governments hold power is necessary if we wish to understand or predict their behavior. For example, the demands of patronage systems often dictate government actions that would be inexplicable if one assumed that the primary purpose of government was to make public policy or to deliver public goods and services effectively under the rule of law. Such actions might include, for example, a strong preference for easily monetizable infrastructure projects; a refusal to fire people who are obviously not working; the creation of a host of new ministries; or the adoption of burdensome regulations that can then be used to allocate discretionary exemptions to favorites.

As we discarded these disfavored strategies of governance we criminalized them and used our international influence to press for their criminalization worldwide. The monetization of government offices is illegal under domestic law in most countries. As a consequence, where patronage and the monetization of government authority and office are a central strategy of governance, law cannot rule. The criminalization of one of the government’s principal strategies of governance leads to a divorce between the formal rules and institutions of government and the actual routine operation of government. In chapter 6 we will consider the weak rule of law in poor governments in more detail.