Institution-Building and Development in Africa

Richard Joseph is director of the programme of African studies at Northwestern University, Illinois. He has been involved for many years in the study and promotion of improved governance and development in Africa.

Reports by international organisations produced over the past two decades document the slippage of sub-Saharan Africa into an economic trough. During this period, while the number of people living in extreme poverty has dropped worldwide, it has increased in Africa from 42 to 47 per cent of the population. In China, an estimated four hundred million people have been lifted from poverty since 1981. According to the United Nations Development Programme, if current trends continue, the Millennium Development Goals set for 2015—such as reducing poverty and child mortality, and increasing primary education—will not be met in many African countries until the middle of the twenty-second century.

What must now be confronted, as a central feature of development strategies, is the need to reverse the loss of institutional capacity in Africa as a result of the prolonged economic contraction. Of the many problems facing Africa during the first decade of this millennium—violent conflicts, large refugee flows, uneven democratic transitions, HIV/AIDS and other preventable diseases—the most critical is the failure to achieve the level of economic growth needed to reduce poverty. In its review of sub-Saharan Africa in January 2004, the Economist magazine stated that there has been, on balance, zero growth in Africa during the past twenty-five years. With the exception of buoyant gas and petroleum exports, African countries lack dynamic poles of economic advancement. Other sources of income, such as undocumented trade in precious and basic commodities, budgetary transfers from aid agencies, and remittances from the expanding overseas diaspora, do not bridge this gap. Africa’s share of world trade, and of direct foreign investments outside the energy sector and South Africa, remains miniscule. The reversal of these trends would require the level of sustained international co-operation that was marshalled to end colonial rule and apartheid.

Every few months, an international meeting is convened to review what has already been reviewed countless times and to propose remedies that often recycle under new terminologies strategies intended to accelerate growth and reduce poverty in poor countries. On 25–7 May 2004, an international conference was held in Shanghai on “Scaling Up Poverty Reduction”. It brought together development practitioners from around the globe to discuss the findings of one hundred case studies of successful and unsuccessful programmes. Yet one searches in vain for ideas that are not already current in development thinking, or which suggest how the forces for positive change in Africa can be drastically strengthened and the negative ones neutralised. The report of the Shanghai Agenda, issued at the conclusion of the conference, emphasises that development solutions can be scaled up if a dozen or more lessons are implemented. Among these lessons is that “a strong management focus is key for scaling up, and requires the build up of capacity and long term administrative and management functions”.¹ Of all the recommendations, this is the most critical for Africa. But how will this build-up of management capacity be achieved when so many factors keep eroding it, especially the loss of professionals who take up better jobs overseas?

Institutional Debility

The time has come to confront squarely deinstitutionalising processes in Africa and how the construction and strengthening of institutions in all sectors can be encouraged. Many African countries have slipped into a grey zone in which informal economic structures and networks predominate over formal ones, both in the conduct of domestic public policy and in relations with the outside world. In response, families and communities adopt survival strategies, skirting and dismantling official institutions to improve their life chances. A global effort is required to reverse this cycle, and must involve the participation of a large number of African and non-African specialists from many disciplines. There is abundant evidence from four decades of post-colonial governance in Africa that the majority of countries have not been endowed with the institutions needed to produce desired public goods in many sectors: education, health, water and electricity, transport, and cultural production and preservation. My recognition of this debilitating syndrome began in the late 1970s when I taught and conducted research at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. A quarter of a century later, the socio-political dynamics that I and other scholars identified have deepened, along with the exacerbation of their destructive consequences.²

After a year or more of serious reflection and review, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) was established in 2001 by African governments as their collective agenda for tackling many of these shortcomings. The principles and proposals of NEPAD can hardly be faulted. They are a compilation of many positive goals: improved governance, sustained economic reforms, and a peer-review process to monitor their introduction. Today, there are so many things being designated as NEPAD initiatives that it is difficult to know where its scope begins and ends, and to discern where it is likely to have a transformative impact.

More focused is the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) of the United States which, for the first time, applies indices of political and economic reform to determine the allocation of substantial increases in development assistance to African and other low-income countries. Within the MCA’s guidelines, recipients have the opportunity to devise specific projects tailored to their circumstances. Half of the first sixteen beneficiaries are African—Benin, Cape Verde, Ghana, Lesotho, Mali, Madagascar, Mozambique, and Senegal—each of whom warrants inclusion. It can be assumed that the unnamed MCA “threshold countries” with access to a smaller sum also deserve this designation. What is particularly significant about the MCA in Africa is that it comes at a time when American assistance for Africa (with the exception of programmes to combat the AIDS epidemic) has been drained to meet the demands of conflict and reconstruction in Iraq, and when US involvement in the continent is being strongly shaped by anti-terrorism concerns.

All the major bilateral donors, international financial institutions, and UN agencies are rolling out new or revamped projects to tackle the core issues in Africa of deficient governance and inadequate financing of economic and social programmes, and to help remove obstacles to increased involvement in global trade and investment. If this new round of development assistance is not to conclude in the same frustration and disappointments of the past, a central hurdle must be surmounted: the loss of the capacity in Africa to maintain complex institutions and to build a public sphere characterised by predictability, transparency, and constitutional legitimacy.

As a consequence of his engagement with the AIDS pandemic, Alex de Waal has raised, in stark terms, the fundamental issue of the loss of institutional capacity in Africa and the erosion of the norms and procedures required to sustain it. De Waal cites the university as an example of a complex institution that is sustained by rules and procedures that are transferred down the generations and which enable buildings, departments and curricula to be constructed and modified in response to changing needs and conditions. Because of the erosion of core behaviours essential for operating complex institutions, simpler institutional forms are substituted. Over time, a downward cycle takes place and new entrants to these institutions, whatever their talents and commitments, accomplish less and less than their predecessors.³

The Formal–Informal Divide

I agree with de Waal but believe that the situation is even more complicated and nuanced than he describes it. There is a displacement in Africa of the talent to build and maintain institutions from formal to informal arenas, from legal to illicit undertakings, and from universalistic to communal and religious associations. Hence the paradox in contemporary Africa of highly sophisticated informal arenas, for example, of currency exchanges, mega-churches, and such operations as smuggling, money-laundering, drug-trafficking, and counterfeiting, while basic state-run services become increasingly inefficient and unreliable.

For the past three decades, a number of scholars have called attention to the loss of institutional capacity in the formal realm in Africa. They include Aristide Zolberg, Goran Hyden, and Thomas Callaghy. Others, such as Janet MacGaffey, have explored the vibrancy of economic organisations in non-formal arenas. For the reader interested in exploring how to move beyond these dualities, however, these studies provide few concrete answers. Hyden suggested the need to develop the private entrepreneurial sector and along with it a capitalist bourgeoisie that would influence the construction of a more capable state.⁴ His pioneering analyses, however, earned him a cascade of criticism for breaking ranks with socialist argumentation. Meanwhile, the question of how such a private sector will emerge without a facilitating state sector is left unanswered. How to foster this mutual dynamic when it has not emerged on its own is a question that still baffles analysts of contemporary Africa.⁵

An African scholar with a clear line of argument for confronting this dilemma is Peter Ekeh, who maintains that the post-colonial state is shaped by amoral practices as a consequence of its derivation from the colonial state. Ethical practices in Africa, he contends, are largely confined to ethno-communal realms, while formal state institutions are treated as sources of income to be extracted and invested in the “primordial” sphere. Ekeh has pursued the logic of this conceptualisation over three decades, although it suggests an increasingly dichotomised African society and the gradual balkanisation of nation-states. He has not flinched from arguing the need to devolve constitutional authority and state power from centralised governments to local entities based on kinship ties.⁶ At a recent conference, Pierre Engelbert argued the need to begin thinking differently about the configuration of African states because attempts to replicate the dominant model in the global system have not worked in Africa.⁷

State Weakness

Engelbert is one of several scholars who are not convinced that incremental approaches to improving the weak capacity of the state in Africa, and of the core institutions that it comprises, will work. Although using different theoretical approaches, their analyses converge in the expectation of persistently weak states that are incapable of regulating conflicts among their constituent social groupings, of using public resources efficiently for developmental purposes, and of effectively representing the public interest in the international arena. Jean-François Bayart and his co-authors centre their analyses on the entrenchment and proliferation of criminal networks and practices that embrace both state and society.⁸ Jeffrey Herbst points to the difficulty African states have experienced in projecting power from their centres because of the unfavourable territorial configurations resulting from late-nineteenth-century partitions by European powers.⁹ Will Reno has produced several insightful studies of the importance of informal networks in the allocation of power and resources in Africa that militate against the construction of legal and bureaucratic organisations.¹⁰

A fascinating contribution to our understanding of this conundrum is found in Frederick Cooper’s overview of modern African history.¹¹ Cooper resurrects a term often used in the 1970s: “gatekeeper”. Colonial states, he contends, were “gatekeeper states”: they possessed “weak instruments for entering into the social and cultural realms over which they presided, but they stood astride the intersection of the colonial territory and the outside world”. African leaders inherited these gatekeeper states in which “the state’s economic power remained concentrated at the gate between inside and outside”. Such states are inherently weak and their leaders vulnerable because they usually succumb to the temptation to “strengthen their control of narrow channels rather than widen and deepen forms of connections across space”.¹² Like that of their colonial predecessors, their reliance on gatekeeping strategies impedes the building of national and regional economies.

What is insightful about Cooper’s conceptualisation is that it helps us avoid the ideological disputes that often shape debates about the post-colonial state. When combined with the insights of Ekeh, Herbst, Olukoshi and others, Cooper’s arguments sharpen our understanding of the central developmental challenge to be confronted. Africa’s weak formal institutions are embedded in dynamics that have evolved over decades. To begin reversing these outcomes at a time when domestic and external pressures are immense requires the collaboration of a wide array of actors and agencies. Most importantly, it involves recognising the need for a multiplicity of approaches that must be implemented over a sustained period, and whose success will depend on an unusual degree of co-operation among individuals working in “strong institutions” (in both northern and southern countries) and those seeking to nurture such institutions in Africa. I will identify several aspects of this essential institution-building agenda in Africa.

Repairing the Damage

First, ways must be found to bring to the formal sphere the institution-building and institution‑maintaining capacities in Africa that are lodged in communal, religious, and informal realms. Incentives must be provided that would induce actors in the informal realm, who often disparage formal institutions, to participate in such transfers. These processes should involve government leaders, university researchers, and civil society activists with sustained support from the international donor community. To rebuild institutional capacity in Africa, according to the Ghanaian political scientist, E. Gyimah-Boadi, we have to begin imagining “institutions that are different”. This task of envisioning should be grounded in the realities of the kinds of institutions that work in Africa outside the secular public sphere, with their own norms and procedures, and often with large numbers of participants.

Second, the knowledge and skills of thriving African diasporas must be harnessed to rebuild African institutions. Many Africans have left the continent in recent decades, taking their valuable skills and entrepreneurial capacities with them. For many, their engagement with the continent now consists of remittances to their families and direct assistance to relatives and kinfolk who wish to emigrate or further their education (often as a first step to permanent relocation). The time has come to recognise that contemporary Africa is transnational and transcontinental.

That is especially true of some of the most enterprising communities of its citizens. Today, the performance of many diaspora Africans working in institutions overseas matches, and often surpasses, that of their local hosts. They tend to be highly critical of conditions “back home” and despairing of the possibility of effecting positive change. Because of the valuable experience they have acquired overseas, they should be regarded as potentially important agents of change in their countries of origin. Past assumptions by development agencies that such individuals may be induced to return permanently to Africa and take up the challenges there have often proved unrealistic. More important today is identifying ways in which many of these individuals can continue their primary employment and residence overseas while becoming engaged in long-term development projects in Africa with key institution-building components.

Third, Africans must be induced to return a substantial amount of the capital lodged overseas for investment in their own countries. Underinvestment in Africa constitutes a vicious cycle. Overseas investors are unwilling to invest in the continent because of the many disincentives. Every newspaper article about corruption, violent conflict, or dictatorial rule reinforces negative perceptions, even when they concern countries far removed from those under consideration.

In the past, outside the energy and mineral sectors, external investors in Africa have tended to be from the Middle East or South Asia, or individuals in search of extraordinary profits through illicit deals. More recently, they have been joined by South African entrepreneurs confident of their ability to overcome the hurdles and pitfalls of doing business in Africa. Africa needs the capital that has been amassed by its own citizens, often in illicit ways, which mainly serves as loan capital to overseas entrepreneurs. In the case of Nigeria, this overseas hoard is believed to be much greater than the national debt.

How can these fugitive funds be tapped? Each country has to devise the strategies and incentives relevant to its own context. The origins of many major enterprises in the advanced industrialised countries can be traced to unsavoury forms of “primary accumulation”. Whatever its origins, such wealth can be used for social ends if converted to investment capital within the continent.

Fourth, South–South economic relations today reflect what Brazil’s president, Lula da Silva, has termed a “new global trade geography”. The “Third World” has gone down this road before, especially during the 1970s and debates about a “New International Economic Order”. This time, however, more than moral arguments are being invoked. The phenomenal growth of China during the past two decades, the significant expansion of India’s economy, and the resurgence of Brazil under Mr da Silva have provided developing nations with real leverage in global trade and investment negotiations. Its use can be seen in the mobilisation on trade issues that resulted in the collapse of the World Trade Organisation’s talks in Cancun in September 2003; in the WTO’s upholding of Brazil’s challenge to US cotton subsidies as illegal restraints on trade in May and June 2004; and in the UNCTAD conference in Sao Paulo in June 2004 to negotiate tariff reductions among developing countries.

Trade among such countries is currently growing at 11 per cent annually, more than twice as fast as global trade. South Africa is one of the protagonists in the promotion of this new “trade geography”, and its entrepreneurs will benefit accordingly. Other African countries must become active participants in this upswing of South–South trade which can boost their growth rates. Many, however, are not equipped to compete effectively even in this arena. To rectify this deficiency, key institutions of economic organisation in fast-developing countries should create special partnerships with their counterparts in African countries to reduce this gap.

Fifth, there should be a stronger response from persons of African descent overseas to the many humanitarian crises that have occurred in Africa in recent decades. There is a marked contrast between the significant role leaders of this community played in the anti-apartheid struggle and their limited involvement in responding to Africa’s economic decline, stagnation, and slow growth. Their voices have been little heard on the critical issues of corruption, electoral fraud, repressive governance, and the devastation inflicted on middle-income countries such as Côte d’Ivoire and Zimbabwe.

There is a need to go beyond the practice of convening “summits” that produce great oratory and stirring resolutions but have little impact on the course of events in Africa. There is also a need to end the unwillingness to criticise African leaders and governments when they fail to live up to their own promises and international obligations. In brief, a new pan-Africanism is needed that corresponds to the realities of the present. A new generation of political and intellectual leaders must emerge determined to forge ties between old and new diasporas and willing to become engaged in the continent to help build institutions that truly serve the interests of the masses of the people.

Sixth, and most importantly, a movement of institutional renewal must emerge within Africa that rejects the rote repetition of excuses for the disappointments of the post-colonial era. “What happened to the emancipatory projects of post-colonialism?” is a question squarely posed by Tade Aina.¹³ He describes the dire conditions of life of many people in the continent that are far removed from the promises of the independence era. Many African intellectuals, civil society activists, business people, and religious leaders are also posing this question. What would it take, it should now be asked with all frankness, for much of Africa to achieve the Millennium Development Goals by the middle of the twenty-first rather than the twenty-second century? This is as significant and daunting a challenge as any confronting the people and governments of Africa.

On 15–18 July 2004, twenty-five representatives of west African universities, research centres and civil society organisations met in Eerbeek, Holland, to participate in a planning conference of the Consortium for Development Partnerships (CDP). Also taking part were researchers from Northwestern University in the United States and the African Studies Centre and the Royal Tropical Institute of Holland with the support of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The CDP will conduct policy-relevant research in the areas of democratisation and state-strengthening, private-sector growth and poverty reduction, and peacebuilding and regionalism.

The CDP is inspired by the central argument made in this article, namely, that building viable institutions, along with the mechanisms and procedures required to protect their integrity, is indispensable for advancing governance and development in Africa. In recent years, Africa’s post-colonial failings have been exhaustively analysed and debated by many commissions and working groups. The time has come to apply the lessons learned and to do so in a frank, open, and collaborative manner. I believe that this is one of the major global challenges of our era.

Endnotes

1. “Shanghai Agenda for Poverty Reduction” [http://www.worldbank.org/wbi/reducingpoverty/docs/confDocs/ShanghaiAgenda-FinalVersion.pdf], p. 7.

2. See Richard Joseph, “Africa: States in Crisis”, Journal of Democracy 14, no. 1 (July 2003); and Crawford Young, “The End of the Post-Colonial State in Africa? Reflections on Changing African Political Dynamics”, African Affairs 103, no. 410 (January 2004).

3. Alex de Waal, “How Will HIV/AIDS Transform African Governance?”, African Affairs 102, no. 406 (January 2003).

4. See Goran Hyden, No Shortcuts to Progress: African Development Management in Perspective (Portsmouth, UK: Heinemann, 1983).

5. Pathbreaking work on this issue from a comparative perspective is being conducted by experts at the World Bank Institute. See Daniel Kaufmann, Aart Kraay and Massimo Mastruzzi, “Governance Matters III: Governance Indicators for 1996–2002”, World Bank, Washington, D.C., June 2003 [www.worldbank.org/wbi/governance].

6. See the relevant discussion in Richard Joseph, “Nation-State Trajectories in Africa”, Georgetown Journal of International Affairs 4, no. 1 (winter/spring 2003).

7. See the report on the conference “Governance and Insecurity in West Africa: An International Conference on Peace, Democracy and Development”, Northwestern University, 13–15 November 2003 [http://www.northwestern.edu/african-studies/Pdfs/GIWA%20report.%20final.pdf].

8. Jean-François Bayart, Stephen Ellis and Béatrice Hibou, The Criminalization of the State in Africa (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1999).

9. Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000).

10. See, for example, William Reno, “War, Markets and the Reconfiguration of West Africa’s Weak States”, Comparative Politics 29, no. 4 (July 1997), and Warlord Politics and African States (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1998).

11. Frederick Cooper, Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

12. Ibid., pp. 5 and 14.

13. Tade Akin Aina, “Scales of Suffering, Orders of Emancipation: Critical Issues in Democratic Development in Africa”, African Sociological Review 7, no. 1 (2003), p. 73.