Thinking About Developmental States
in Africa
Thandika Mkandawire
One remarkable feature of the discourse on the state and development in
Africa is the disjuncture between an analytical tradition that insists
on the impossibility of developmental states in Africa and a
prescriptive literature that presupposes their existence. States whose
capacity to pursue any national project is denied at one level
(theoretical or diagnostic) are exhorted, at the prescriptive level, to
assume roles that are,
ex definicione, beyond their capacity or
political will. Such states are urged to "delink", to reduce themselves,
to stabilize the economy, to privatize the economy, to engage in "good
governance", to democratize themselves and society, to create an
"enabling environment" for the private sector, etc. In other words, to
do what they cannot do. What we then have is, to paraphrase Gramci, the
pessimism of the diagnosis and the optimism of the prescription.
Obviously such a contradictory position is unsatisfactory. To attain
some congruence between diagnosis and prescription, we need to retrace
our steps back to the diagnosis. We shall argue that neither Africa�s
post-colonial history nor the actual practice engaged in by successful
"developmental states" rules out the possibility of African
"developmental states" capable of playing a more dynamic role than
hitherto. This assertion has to contend with a whole intellectual
tradition on the prospects of capitalist accumulation in Africa and the
nature of African states and societies � a tradition characterized by
the casualness with which assertions about such prospects are made, and
the deterministic and aprioristic nature of the discourse rarely based
on analysis of the actual experiences, but merely on first principles,
ideological conviction or faith.
We shall also contend that most of the analyses about African states
that have led to so much despondency about prospects of development are
based on invidious comparison between African states in crisis and
idealized and tendentiously characterized states elsewhere. This
invidious comparison has occulted the African state, making concrete
analysis of its character less important than the normative statements
about what it should be. The "ought" has proved more interesting than
the "is"; turning debates on the state in Africa into the most
pontifical and teleological of any theme in Africa.
If the state was given a central role in earlier views of the process of
development in Africa, the situation changed dramatically in the late
1970s and 1980s. The African state is today the most demonized social
institution in Africa, vilified for its weaknesses, its over-extension,
its interference with the smooth functioning of the markets, its
repressive character, its dependence on foreign powers, its ubiquity,
its absence, etc. The state � once the cornerstone of development � is
now the millstone around otherwise efficient markets. It is now the
"rentier state", the "overextended state", the "parasitical state", the
"predatory state", the "lame leviathan", "the patrimonial state" the
"prebendal state", the "crony state", the "kleptocratic state", the
"inverted state", etc. Although this inflation of epithets has reached
high proportions in more recent years, the tradition itself predates the
"crisis" years. Early criticism of the state in Africa came from the
neo-Marxists whose own epithets to describe the pathological condition
of the African state included the "petty bourgeois state", the
"neo-colonial state" and the "dependent state". The many epithets
underscore the fall from grace of the African state.
It is now argued that not only has the state become dysfunctional in
terms of the management of larger societal issues, but also a real
nuisance in
la vie quotidienne of its citizens, as evidenced by
the "withdrawal" from state-dominated economic and social spaces
(Chazan, 1988a; Chazan, 1988b; Rothchild, 1994).
Some even go so far as to conceive of developmental schemes that
completely circumvent or marginalize the state as non-governmental
organizations, the private sector and local communities proceed almost
surreptitiously with addressing issues of poverty and development
without the encumbrance of the state.
The shift in attitudes is attributable not only to the dismal
performance of African states during the current social and economic
crisis, but also to a number of ideological, paradigmatic and structural
shifts in both the domestic and international spheres. First, on the
ideological level there has been the dramatic ascendancy of
neo-liberalism � partly as a result of the rise and political triumph of
the neo-conservative movements riding on the discontent with welfare
state and the inflationary impact of Keynesian solutions. To the extent
that perceptions of welfarism and state interventionism spilled over
into the aid business, it is not surprising that the aid discourse has
embraced some of the anti-statism of neo-liberalism. Second, at the
structural level, the process of globalization has forced all
governments to rethink and restructure the state-market relationships in
their respective countries and to pay greater homage to "market
forces".
The "Developmental State"
In the literature, the "developmental state" has two components: one ideological, one structural. It is this ideology-structure nexus
that distinguishes developmental states from other forms of states. In
terms of ideology, such a state is essentially one whose ideological
underpinning is "developmentalist" in that it conceives its "mission" as
that of ensuring economic development, usually interpreted to mean high
rates of accumulation and industrialization. Such a state "establishes
as its principle of legitimacy its ability to promote sustained
development, understanding by development the steady high rates of
economic growth and structural change in the productive system, both
domestically and in its relationship to the international economy"
(Castells, 1992: 55). At this ideational level, the élite must be able
to establish an "ideological hegemony", so that its developmental
project becomes, in a Gramcian sense, a "hegemonic" project to which key
actors in the nation adhere voluntarily. The state-structure side of the definition of the developmental state emphasizes capacity
to implement economic policies sagaciously and effectively. Such a
capacity is determined by various others � institutional, technical,
administrative and political. Undergirding all these is the autonomy
of the state from social forces so that it can use these capacities to
devise long-term economic policies unencumbered by claims of myopic
private interests. It is usually assumed that such a state should, in
some sense, be "strong" and enjoy "relative autonomy" from key social
actors. The quest for a "strong state" in the development process was a
strong feature of the "modernization" literature. Such a state was
contrasted to what Myrdal (1968) referred to as the "soft state" that
had neither the administrative capacity nor the political wherewithal to
push through its developmental project. And, finally, the state must
have some social anchoring that prevents it from using its autonomy in a
predatory manner and enables it to gain adhesion of key social actors.
As formulated, the definition of the "developmental state" runs the risk
of being tautological since evidence that the state is developmental is
often drawn deductively from the performance of the economy. This
produces a definition of a state as developmental if the economy is
developing, and equates economic success to state strength while
measuring the latter by the presumed outcomes of its policies. It has
led to myopic concentration of analysis around success to the neglect of
the "trial and error" nature of policy-making even in the most
successful cases. If a developmental state is not be deified into some
kind of omnipotent and omniscient leviathan that always gets what it
wants, then the definition must include situations in which exogenous
structural dynamic and unforeseen factors can torpedo genuine
developmental commitments and efforts by the state. This allows room for
poor performance due to exogenous factors, miscalculation or plain bad
luck. At times, a government�s political will and technical capacity may
simply prove inadequate to fend off exogenous forces. In Africa, we
have many examples of states whose performance up until the mid-1970s
would have qualified them as "developmental states" in the sense
conveyed by current definitions, but which now seem anti-developmental
because the hard times brought the economic expansion of their countries
to a halt. Recognition of episodes and possibilities of failure leads
us to a definition of a developmental state as one whose ideological
underpinnings are developmental and one that seriously attempts
to deploy its administrative and political resources to the task of
economic development. Proxies such as "tax efforts" and public
expenditure patterns can be used to measure such "seriousness". The main
force behind the developmentalist ideology has usually been
nationalism, inducing nations to seek to "catch up" with countries
considered as more developed, to firm the resource base for national
defence and security, etc. It is essential to stress these ideological
underpinnings of state policies for it is these that provide the
rationale for some of the "policies" and give legitimacy to otherwise
unpalatable "sacrifices", not only because they serve as the "opium of
the masses", but also because they knead together the ruling class.
The centrality of ideology also points to the naiveté of the
de-politicized quest for technocratic "governance", now pushed by
international financial institutions (IFIs), in which a technocracy is
supposed to carry out policies that are good for the nation for no
apparent reason, not even self-serving ones.
Learning the Wrong Lessons for Africa
Not only has the spectacular
success of the East Asian "Four Tigers" led to a re-reading of the role
of the state in the development process, but it has also raised the
question of repricability of their policies and experiences in other
developing countries. The lessons drawn from these experiences differed
and were often shaped by the pre-analytic predisposition of the
observer. Earlier recognition of this performance of the "Four Tigers"
was refracted through the prism of neo-liberalism so that the experience
appeared shorn of all dirigisme and was cited as irrefutable evidence
of the superiority of essentially laissez-faire policies. More
specifically, reliance on market forces and the adoption of
market-driven export-oriented development strategies was said to have
led to efficient exploitation of the comparative advantage of these
countries in cheap labour (Balassa, 1971; Little et al., 1970).
The first presentation for African consumption of the lessons from Asia
from the neo-liberal perspective was the "Berg report" (World Bank,
1981), which has been the definitive document on adjustment for 17
years. There have been amendments, subtractions, additions and
refinements of the argument, but as Adjustment in Africa (World
Bank, 1994) clearly suggested, the World Bank was almost congenitally
tied to the core argument of the Berg report with its faith in the
market and a minimalist view of the state. The 1994 report insisted on
the dichotomy made in African policy-making between state and market in
which these appeared as rival forms thus reviving Manichean discourse
that had for years vitiated "development planning" in Africa.
Subsequent analysis has shown that neo-classical reading of experiences
of development in Asia has been tendentious, deliberately downplaying
the role of the state in the "success stories". "Revisionist" literature
on the Asian experience presents a picture quite different from that
projected by neo-classical interpretation of that same experience. These
countries were far from paragons of laissez-fairism and, instead, were
highly "dirigiste" economies in which the states had "governed markets"
to ensure high levels of accumulation, technology absorption and
conquest of foreign markets. The
general conclusion of this literature is that "market failure" so
prominent in development economics is still a problem that warrants
government intervention and that since such "failures" differ in
intensity, scope and location, a selective set of interventions is
required. The most significant lesson has been the central role played
by a "developmental state" in the process of development. This
"dirigiste" Asian experience and theoretical developments in economics
have revived interest in some of the issues that were central to
development studies, unleashing what Krugman (1992) has called a
"counter-counter revolution". These issues include problems of human
capital; possibilities of the state "crowding in" private investment;
market imperfections and failures, industrial policy, etc. In the
African case, the failure of structural adjustment programmes has
compelled even the most dogmatic institutions to recognize the positive
role the state can play in the process of development, beyond acting as a
"night watchman".
In its book, Sub-Saharan Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Growth,
the World Bank (1989) acknowledged the importance of the state in
managing development and social change, and brought back on the agenda
the pro-active role of the state in development. However, the return of
the state was now premised upon a whole series of proposals about "good
governance". In Adjustment in Africa (World Bank, 1994) and Bureaucrats in Business
(World Bank, 1995), the World Bank retreated to its more familiar
ideological terrain in which a developmental state borders on an
oxymoron. One sees in the tortured logic of the presentation of the Asian miracle,
especially with respect to industrial policy and its reduction of a
complex set of pro-active state policies into a vacuous "market
friendliness". The lesson drawn for Africa by the World Bank was that,
in the best of cases, development strategies
or, more precisely, industrial policy was either superfluous or, where
useful, merely simulated the market, which, in the opinion of some,
would have done better without the interventions anyway. In the African
case, two additional arguments were added � first, even if industrial
policy had worked in the successful economies, African states were too
weak and too prone to "capture" by vested interests, so that the pursuit
of such polices would produce perverse outcomes. And, second, in any
case in the World Trade Organization (WTO) trade régime most of the
policies central to industrial policy were no longer acceptable.
The Impossibility Theses
The economic crisis of the
1970s, the demise of the theoretical armour for state intervention, the
ideological hegemony of neo-conservatism in key funding institutions and
donor countries, the palpable failure of "development planning" in many
countries, stagnation and the crisis of accumulation in the socialist
countries and the changing "mood" towards Third World Countries (the
Afropessimism, the anti-Thirdworldism, etc.), the pessimism or cynicism
of the development establishment about its counterparts in the recipient
countries � all these pointed to "government failure" as more insidious
than the market failure that state policies had purportedly been
designed to correct. However, although some of the arguments against
state intervention are based on an idealized and dogmatic view of
markets, there is now widespread acceptance of "market failure" on the
grounds of economies of scale, imperfect information, etc. Consequently,
the most important case against developmental states in Africa is not
faith in flawless markets, but rather that whatever the degree and
extent of "market failure" African states cannot correct them in ways
that do not make things worse. What emerges in the literature on Africa
is that what has obviously worked in other "late industrializers" is
simply a non-starter in Africa. While it is now admitted that the state
has played a central role in the development of Asian countries, it is
suggested that replication of the Asian experience is somehow impossible
for Africa. The reasons include the (a) dependence, (b) lack of
ideology, (c) "softness" of the African state and its proneness to
"capture" by special interest groups, (d) lack of technical and
analytical capacity, (e) the changed international environment that did
not permit protection of industrial policies, and (f) past poor record
of performance.
For instance, Peter Lewis, discussing the repricability of the Asian model, states:
"While some aspects of this model (for instance, greater political
insulation of economic policy makers) could reasonably be achieved in
African countries, the extensive co-ordinated economic interventions of
the East Asian states are well beyond the administrative faculties of
most African governments" (1996).
Similar sentiments are explicitly expressed by Callaghy (1993), who
argues that African states lack the capacity to pursue the statist model
of Asia since Africa is hemmed in as it tries "to navigate between weak
states and weak markets and to do so with open political structures".
Lack of Ideology?
One argument often advanced by
Africans themselves relates to the lack of an ideology of development
anchored in some form of nationalist project. This is a recurring theme
in political discourse in Africa. Frantz Fanon�s (1966 and 1967) tirades
against the ideological numbness of the emergent ruling classes in
Africa remain among the most sustained statements of this position. Many
other political leaders and analysts have elaborated on this lacuna.
Onimode talks of the "ideological vacuum" that he attributes to petty
bourgeois commitment to their class interests and their fear of
"revolutionary pressures", to the obscurantism of imperialist powers and
to mass illiteracy "which imposes a culture of silence and passivity
and inhibits popular demand for ideological discourse" (1988). Thus
Claude Ake states: "The ideology of development was exploited as a means
of reproducing political hegemony; it got limited attention and served
hardly any purpose as a framework for economic transformation" (1996).
For some, the lack of ideology is inherent to personal rule under which
loyalty is not to some overriding societal goals but to individuals,
often holding highly idiosyncratic ideologies that they themselves flout
with impunity and with no moral qualms (Jackson and Rosberg, 1982;
Sandbrook, 1986). Consequently, such leaders are said to have no moral
basis on which they could demand enthusiastic and internalized
compliance to whatever "national project" they launched. In the more
extreme versions the lack of ideology of development is evidence of the
cultural rejection of development by African leaders and their
followers.
However, as I have argued elsewhere (Mkandawire, 1997), for most of the
first generation of African leaders "development" was certainly a
central preoccupation. Indeed some writers characterize the
post-colonial state as "developmentalist" almost by definition.
African leaders have always been aware of the need for some
"nationalist-cum-developmentalist" ideology for both nation building and
development. The quest for an ideology to guide the development process
inspired African leaders to propound their own idiosyncratic and often
incoherent "ideologies" to "rally the masses" for national unity and
development. If such ideologies are still absent it is definitely not
for lack of trying. The centrality of "development" was such that it
acquired the status of an ideology ("developmentalism") that provided
the ideological scaffolding of "development plans"
and the authoritarian scaffolding given to it. For some, such an
ideology has essentially served purposes of mystification and
obfuscation. Thus Gavin Williams, writing about the ruling class in
Nigeria, states:
"The Nigerian bourgeoisie lacks the commitment of a religious socialist
or nationalist character of the rationalising, capital accumulating,
surplus expropriating classes of Britain, Russia, Germany, or Japan
during their period of industrialisation. Perhaps it is this which lies
behind the repeated call for a �national ideology�, which seeks to
subordinate the energy of the people behind a single national goal. In
fact the Nigerian bourgeoisie do have an ideology, in the sense of a
theoretical legitimisation of the status quo. It is found in the concept of �development�..." (1977: 286).
My own view is less cynical. By political commitment and social origins
most of the leaders were deeply committed to the "eradication of
poverty, ignorance and disease", which formed an "unholy trinity"
against which nationalist swords were drawn in the post-colonial era.
And even today, some view of development conditions African
policy-makers� perception of policy. The exigencies of political
legitimacy impose "development" on any meaningful political agenda.
Although the Bretton Woods institutions (BWIs) have managed to convince
many that African leaders� objection to structural adjustment programmes
(SAPs) was because these would undermine their rent seeking and
clientelistic chasse gardée, there are well-documented
developmental arguments against SAPs, advanced by African bureaucrats,
on the need to maintain public investment in infrastructure and
education, on the need for some form of credit rationing to stimulate
private investment, etc. The Economic Commission for Africa has over the
years regularly codified these positions, which were often dismissed
peremptorily by the BWIs.
In conclusion, one should note that, if the first generation of African leaders concentrated their energies on the politics of nation building, there are signs of a new leadership whose focus is on the economics
of nation building. These new leaders swear by economic growth and seem
to view good growth indicators as the main source of their legitimacy.
In addition, if the earlier nationalist leaders associated capitalism
with foreign control, the new leadership seems much less preoccupied
with that. They have embraced privatization and attraction of foreign
capital as centrepieces of their policy initiatives. Ominously, these
leaders are more attentive to the apprehensions and appreciation of
international organizations than to their domestic capitalists. While
assiduously cultivating a good image in the eyes of international
financial institutions (IFIs) and seeking out foreign capital, they tend
to have a jaundiced view of domestic capitalists, whom they hold in
spite and incessantly vilify for parasitism, failure jointly to set up
modern enterprises able to compete internationally, etc.
Dependence Syndrome
In the modernization school that
dominated development studies in the 1950s and 1960s, it was usually
assumed that, once colonialism had shaken these underdeveloped countries
out of their traditional stupor, they would embark on a process of
modernization that would make them traverse certain "stages" � as spelt
out by W.W. Roust in his famous "anti-Communist manifesto", Stages of Economic Growth
(Rowstow, 1960) � towards a full-fledged capitalist system.
Considerable empirical work was produced indicating certain historical
regularities associated with economic growth, the idea being that once
identified they could then be deliberately introduced or manipulated
(through aid schemes and "development planning") in the underdeveloped
countries to initiate or accelerate the growth process.
"Traditional society" might set up barriers but these would be overcome
by modernizing élites, aid and foreign capital. The first generation of
post-colonial "development plans" were couched in a language that
suggested conscious efforts to move economies from one "stage" � usually
the "pre-take off" stage towards the "take-off" stage. In all this, the
centre stage was occupied by "modernizing élites" guided by the
aspirations of nation building and development. The "developmental
state" was seen as not only desirable but possible and able to be
facilitated by training programmes, aid, military support, etc.
(Gendzier, 1985).
By the mid-1970s, this linear view of capitalist development began to lose its dominance largely due to the onslaught of the Dependence School that
generally denied that capitalism in the periphery could play its
historical progressive role (in the Leninists sense of leading to an
increase in the productive forces of social labour and in the
socialization of labour). Instead it spoke of processes of an
ineluctable "development of underdevelopment". The assertion followed
from a rather constricted view of possible "paths" of capitalist
accumulation and a highly stereotyped and idealized view of how the
"paths" of the developed capitalist countries, which were then posited
as models against which current development experiences could be judged,
had actually been. This point of departure in turn led to the mistaken
view that, because capitalism in the periphery was different and
produced a series of social, political and economic contradictions that
were specific to it, it ceased to be capitalist or, worse, it led to
stagnation � a view associated with the Russian Narodniks that Lenin was
to debunk.
More significant was the fact that this perspective ruled out the
possibility of developmental states in Africa that were either led by a
national bourgeoisie or capable of nurturing one. This of course meant
that either transnationalization processes had obviated the need for
such a national bourgeoisie or the asymmetric nature of centre-periphery
relations tended to produce class structures that were not conducive to
dynamic accumulation and, more specifically, produced a bourgeoisie
that was historically condemned to be no more than a "comprador
bourgeoisie" subservient to the interests of foreign capital (Leys,
1975; Nabudere, 1981; Shivji, 1980). Such a ruling class could not
produce the "captains of industry" needed for the mobilization of
resources and acquisition of technology. Fanon (1966; 1967) was to
provide the quintessential characterization of the socio-psychology of
this class as essentially born senile and decadent before scaling the
heights of enlightenment and industrial revolution. At best, Africa
could have "lumpen bourgeoisie", "dependent capitalist" or, worse,
"drone capitalist". Such descriptions pointed to one fact, namely, that
the African state was not up to its "historical mission" of ensuring
capitalist accumulation. They underscored how the African state diverged
from the historical "norm" of the capitalist state in the "centre" in
which the national bourgeois had created a state that was the linchpin
of the industrialization of Europe. The question that emerged from this
analysis was: is the aberration only temporary so that one could
envision a set of policies and events that would turn this state into a
"normal bourgeois state", or was the historical conjecture such that the
position of these peripheral states would remain pathological and that
the only solution would be some kind of "delinking" from the "world
system"? Most of the countries that openly pursued the capitalist path
were considered "neo-colonial" and so beholden to foreign interests that
they could not possibly pursue something so eminently "national" as
development. Versions of "associated dependent development" appeared in
literature on Africa to accommodate the high growth rates in such
countries as Côte d�Ivoire and Kenya, and were most articulately
advanced in the so-called "Kenya debate".
The third position was that, even if capitalist accumulation was
possible, transcending of capitalism in the periphery was not on the
immediate agenda and there was no point in going through the phase of a
nationally directed process of a capitalist accumulation and, therefore,
of thinking about appropriate state structures and functions. This
argument was the more persuasive when informed by the view that the
"revolutionary pressures" were intense and that the revolution was
around the corner (Ake, 1978). The "actuality of the revolution" (to use
George Lukac�s phrase) meant that radical change was imminent. There
was simply no point in considering possibilities of capitalist
accumulation under the aegis of a national bourgeoisie given the
apparent imminence of socialist transformation. Having reduced the
choice in the Third World to that between "Barbarism or Socialism",
there was no point in pondering the prospects of capitalist accumulation
as a feasible, let alone, morally acceptable alternative. The more
successful states, in terms of growth, were usually dismissed as
neo-colonial and that was that. If a developmental state was to emerge
it would be in the transient from a "national democratic phase".
By the 1970s and 1980s most of these arguments had begun to lose their
force partly because of the Asian � and some African and Latin American �
experience of what Cardoso and Faletto (1979) termed "associated
dependent development" and partly because of ideological changes among
key social movements that increasingly sought internal reform rather
than rupture. The "associated dependent development" allowed for
capitalist development in the periphery and in many ways provided the
intellectual tools necessary for conceptualizing the possibilities and
dynamics of "dependent development". The prerequisites for such
development were, inter alia, that a progressive national
alliance be established between the national bourgeoisie and labour and
that the alliance constitute a "developmental bloc" able and willing to
pursue a strategy of national industrial development over the long term.
All this presupposed a "developmental state".
Similarly, those of "classical" Marxist persuasion asserted that
capitalist accumulation was taking place in the developing countries in
the "normal way" � both during colonialism (that "pioneered" capitalist
industrialization) and, more obviously, after independence (Warren,
1980). Warren�s thesis was applied in its unadulterated form to Africa
by Sender and Smith (1986), whose book was a polemical attack on the
"nationalists" dependence view that colonialism and imperialism had bred
underdevelopment. Arguments that capitalism had been stunted by
colonialism were either evidence of "guilt and shame" and were lumped
together with the literature of the "masochistic modern version of the
White Man�s Burden" (Warren, 1980) or nationalist "scapegoatism" aimed
at shifting the blame for post-independence policy failure on
imperialism (Sender and Smith, 1986: 132).
Lack of AUTONOMY
One major set of recent
"impossibility theorems"are derived from a focus on the internal
conditions of African countries and are largely informed by neo-Weberian
accounts of state-society relations or by public choice formulations on
how the rational pursuit by individuals of their interests has led
rather to lack of autonomy of the state and African malaise due to
capture by societal interests.
Neo-patrimonialism
The neo-Weberian critique has
focused on the failure of African states to establish themselves as
rational-legal institutions and to rise above the "patrimonialism" that
affects all of them, regardless of their ideological claims and the
moral rectitude of individual leaders. Going back to the functions that
modernization had assigned to the state, the neo-Weberian highlights the
flawed nature of the performance of the post-independence state,
especially in its relationship with a society at large from which it has
not been able to distance itself adequately so as to perform
efficiently. In these accounts, "market failure" central to development
economics and "government failure" central to neo-classical economists
are replaced by something more debilitating and more recalcitrant �
"societal failure" signalled not only by lack of "social capital", but
also by the disease-like spread of this societal malaise into both
market and state structures. Termite-like, Africa�s primordial and
patrimonial relationship (what Göran Hyden refers to as the "economy of
affection") has eaten into the very core of the edifice of modern
administration rendering it both weak and incoherent. In Hyden�s words:
"... the economy of affection � is an underestimated threat to the
macro-economic ambitions of either capitalism or socialism in Africa.
Derived from a mode of production in which the structural
interdependence of the various production units is minimal or nil it has
no provision from a systemic superstructure to keep it together.
Instead the economy of affection is a myriad of invisible micro-economic
networks which, if allowed to penetrate society, gradually wear down
the macro-economic structures, and eventually the whole system. The
threat of the affective networks stems from their invisibility and
intractability" (1983: 21).
Mired in redistributive activities imposed by affective relations,
prebendalism or clientelism, so the argument goes, the state has not
been able to provide the bureaucratic order and predictability that
capitalists need if they are to engage in long-term investment. To the
Asian "autonomous state" is juxtaposed the African "lame Leviathan"
(Callaghy, 1987), which is so porous and "penetrated" by society, so
beholden to particularistic interest groups, so mired in
patron-clientelist relationships, and so lacking in "stateness" it
cannot pursue the collective task of development, which demands
insulation from such redistributive demands. It is these relationships
that constitute what Bayart (1993) terms the "politics of the belly"
that has paralysed African economy. Of the "governmentability" (i.e.
mode of governance) produced by this "eating", Bayart states: "� it has
crushed most of the strategies and institutions, in particular the
Christian churches, the nationalist parties and the civil services,
which have worked for the advent of a modern Africa. The experiences of
governments which attempted to break free from their grip have either
not lasted a long time or have in their turn been absorbed by its
practices" (1993: 268).
There are a number of problems with this approach as we contemplate the
prospects of a developmental state in Africa. One is that it is not
always clear whether such state-society relationships are inherent to
the level of development and that with passage of time the African state
will evolve into a more respectable and recognizably developmental
form. Or are they merely conjunctural phenomena attributable to the
greed and venality of African leaders spurred on by the dramatic
increases in revenue accruing to the state in the post-colonial era? Or
are these attributes of the peculiarities and the historicity of African
cultures that account for Africa�s predicament (as compared, for
instance, to the blessings of Confucianism enjoyed by the Asian
countries) that can only be transcended in the longue durée?
Another problem is that "neo-patrimonial" states in and outside Africa
have pursued a wide range of policies including some that are squarely
developmental. In other words, other than indicating the style of
governance, neo-patrimonialism does not tell us much about what policies
a state will pursue and with what success. In the African case
"neo-patrimonialism" has been used to explain import substitution,
export orientation, parastatals, privatization, the informal sector
development, etc. The result is that, in seeking to explain everything,
it explains nothing except perhaps that capitalist relations in their
idealized form are not pervasive in Africa. Even more damning is the
fact that some of the features of the African state highlighted by this
literature have been a salient aspect of successful developmental
states. Accounts of spectacular corruption in the high performing East
Asian economies have become frequent in the press following the
financial crisis. So, obviously, neo-patrimonialism is not a robust
independent variable in explaining low economic growth. One solution to
this conundrum is to suggest that, while the Asian variant of
patrimonialism does not constrain rational bureaucratic decision-making
(a contradiction in terms), Africa�s patrimonialism does just that. The
African state is said to be afflicted not only with partenalism, but
also with a debilitating strain of "pathological partenalism" (Ergas,
1986). Much of this speculation fails
to spell out exactly what African cultural attributes would produce the
pathology of paternalism in Africa. It also displays ignorance or
idealization of the Asian experience and thus occults the very complex
processes behind the successful performance of these economies.
Finally, we should also bear in mind that morally reprehensible or
culturally unacceptable though certain "clientelistic" practices may be,
we do not have a clear theoretical establishment of how they affect the
performance of capitalist economies. Capitalist economies operate with a
much broader moral latitude than it is often preached. A very wide
range of morally reprehensible behaviour can be integrated into
strategies of accumulation effortlessly. Not even the case for the
negative effects of corruption and capitalist accumulation has been
satisfactorily established, despite the new crusade against corruption.
Public Choice and Rent Seeking
The most cogently stated of
these critiques is that of public choice school with the work of Bates
(1981) being the single most comprehensive statement of the critique as
far as Africa is concerned.
Essentially this critique starts from assumptions of how unregulated
markets work. In general, these markets are said to operate in a Pareto
optimal way in the sense that the allocation of resources that they
generate is such that it can only be improved upon by making somebody
worse off. Given that markets work well, why are "market distortions" by
the state tolerated or generated? In Bates� work, the answer lay in the
rational pursuit of self-interest groups by organized individuals who
pushed the state to adopt policies that generated "rents" for them. The
state was then essentially a rent generating institution that inhibited
efficient allocation of resources. In this literature "rent seeking"
invokes the expenditure of resources to capture artificially created
rents. It should be stressed that the point of departure of "rent
seeking" literature is the perfect market. In real life and, indeed, by
this definition, rent would be ubiquitous in any situation in which a
state existed to safeguard or transfer rights.
Like "neo-patrimonialism", rent seeking is used in a procrustean manner
so that it ultimately assumes the character of a bogeyman. While the
concept points to something real in most economies, it has been made to
carry more than it can bear. This has been partly because of the
anti-statist ideology to which it has become tethered making it serve as
an ideological weapon in the statephobia that neo-liberalism has cast
so broadly, and partly because of the protean definition assigned to it
so as to include anything from Mafia-like activities to the
protestations by the Chamber of Commerce over pieces of legislation. In
the case of Africa, rent seeking is conflated or used interchangeably
with corruption, patron-clientelism and even the extended African
family.
Rent seeking usually involves redistribution of income from one group to
another. The effect of such redistribution on growth depends on its
impact on incentives and the use to which the "winners" put the surplus
in their hands. As Catherine Boone (1994) notes in the case of Senegal,
rents can constitute a form of primitive accumulation, as can be
inherited wealth or any form of windfall profit. She observes that, for
the emergence of African capitalism, the key question is: will wealth
collected in the form of rents be transformed into capital through
productive investment? Other than the "easy come, easy go" thesis, there
are no a priori reasons to believe that only the wealth earned by one�s blood, sweat and tears will be used productively.
In most of the literature, rent seeking activities are around firm,
industry or sector micro-economic policies, leading to various
micro-economic distortions that have all been grouped under "import
substitution" policies. Rent seeking is generally responsible for
micro-economic inefficiencies that are often remotely related to the
macro-economic imbalances for which rent seeking is usually blamed.
Rodrik (1995) points out that it was generally macro-economic imbalances
and the failure to correct them in time that have accounted for the
economic crisis in most developing countries. The countries that
experienced the debt crisis were those that failed to adjust their
monetary and fiscal policies and not those that had large micro-economic
distortions. The "rent seeking" literature in Africa has tended to blur
the distinction between micro-economic distortions and macro-economic
balances, tending to believe that the latter was the logical consequence
of the former. It is now generally evoked against active policy making
even in directions that have been theoretically and empirically
demonstrated to be beneficial. It has become the great caveat that
brings the apparently inexorable logic of "market failure" to a dead
halt. And yet many of the policies attributed to rent seeking and
identified as the cause of Africa�s failure have been and are still in
use by the high-performance Asian economies (HPAEs) to good effect. In
other words, while micro-economic distortions were costly, what
eventually drove many impost substituting countries to ruin was not so
much the inefficiencies induced by rent seeking, but macro-economic
imbalances that are not easily attributable to rent seeking groups.
Even in the context of new growth theories, we simply do not have
evidence on the precise channels through which rent seeking adversely
affects such variables as growth, if at all. In looking at some of the
advice given to African countries, it turns out that what is wrong is
not rents per se but rents attached to a wrong strategy. This partly
explains why advocates of export-oriented strategies admit, albeit
surreptitiously and reluctantly, to the need to deploy rents to
stimulate export-oriented industries. In the push for exports towards
which Africans are now being urged, it is suggested that governments
provide selective confessional credits, export subsidies, etc. This
involves creating "rents" in these new activities. It is not clear why
these rents will not induce as much lethargy as those given for import
substitution industry.
Rents can be both "productive" or "unproductive" in their incentive
impact. In most models it is assumed that rents are exogenous to the
individual firm. They are out there and the firm allocates resources to
get them. It follows from this assumption that such an allocation will
leave less resources for productive investments. However, once the
assumption of exogeneity is dropped and once we assume instead that the
level of rents a firm gets depends on the size of the firm�s activities,
the story changes and we get an entirely different dynamics in which
rent is a function of the firm�s performance. The pursuit of rents can
lead to expansion of productivity activity. In such cases rent seeking
becomes a spur to growth as rent seekers attempt to capture as much of
the rents as possible.
In a study of Tunisia, Bellin (1994) concludes that government mediation
of profits and even extensive cronyism can be compatible with
productive investment and growth if appropriate political conditions
prevail. What matters about rent is its contingency and reciprocity.
This in turn depended on the nature of the state structure, the
self-monitoring of the capitalist class themselves, the pressures of
other social classes for performance and the logic of the régimes
sustaining political coalition.
Much of the writing on Asia, at least up until the current financial
crisis, took it for granted that the creation and allocation of rents by
the state had played a central role in both creating a nationalist
capitalist class and promoting accumulation. Writers on Asia point to
"contingent rents", which have been used to encourage contests among
private firms for government incentive and co-ordination schemes
(Yanagihara, 1997). Such rents are paid to reward growth enhancing
activities by private firms. Jomo, who has written extensively on
Malaysia makes a very clear statement of the issue when he states:
"... the rentier nature or origins of income does not mean that such
income will necessarily be subsequently deployed unproductively. Scale
economies or other considerations may well determine that a perfectly
competitive situation will be suboptimal, in which case the question
arises of how best to distribute or allocate such rents. Rather than
insist on competition in such circumstances in a vain search for
efficiency, which would effectively dissipate the rent through the
expenditure of rent seeking costs, the state could instead allocate such
rents in a manner so as to accelerate and direct the accumulation
process, e.g. in favour of industrialisation. Hence, for instance,
effective protection policies have been used in Northeast Asia to push
import substituting industries to export through the use of conditional
incentives. It is not the existence of rents in themselves which should
always be the focus of concern, but rather their distribution or
allocation and deployment for productive purposes. In many
circumstances, the existence or attraction of rent capture may well be
the most effective incentive to encourage productive) investment or
economic activity, e.g. technology development"
(1994: 649-650).
Elsewhere Jomo notes:
"Rent transfers may well contribute to, rather than undermine further
investments in the national economy since rentiers can usually count on
further advantages from such investment. If capital flight is thus
discouraged, the greater concentration of wealth associated with such
rentier activity may actually have the consequence of raising corporate
savings, thus accelerating capital accumulation, growth and structural
change" (1996:12).
The Asian use of rent seeking to spur firms to expand and export echoes
this endogenization of rents. The dependency on rent earned on
investment has been used as an instrument by governments to raise the
profitability of investment in selected economic activities. This case
is well argued by Akyüz (1996), who advances the proposition that the
creation of rents and the pushing of profits over and above those that
would be attained under free market policies were central to the process
of accelerated capital accumulation and growth and establishing of new
industries by providing a profit-investment nexus that undergirds the
high corporate savings and investments in a number of Asian countries.
He suggests five reasons for the success in the linking of rent creation
to promotion of industrialization.
- Rents were achievable through activities which served national interests.
- Rent seeking costs (information collection, influence peddling and bargaining) were kept low.
- Governments acted to close off non-productive channels of wealth accumulation such as urban real estate speculation.
- Rents were provided on a selective and temporary basis and
withdrawn as new industries became mature enough to compete
internationally.
- The realization of rents was related to performance standards.
The point of the Asian experience is that the use of "rent seeking" as
an argument against a more active developmental state is simply not
credible. The relevant issues are "rents" for whom and with what
reciprocal obligations for receivers of such rents? And the answer will
lie on the desired income distribution and strategy of development. The
denial of an active developmental state for fear of "capture" is
tantamount to the denial of the possibilities in Africa of accelerated
development achieved by a deliberate "government of the market" towards
greater mobilization and developmental allocation of resources
(including rents). In the African debates, the fear of the damaging
effects of rent seeking has not only sustained the argument for a
minimalist state, but has also given the foreign experts, who for
inexplicable reasons do not engage in rent seeking like all other mortal
beings, a moral upper hand.
Both the rent seeking and neo-patrimonialism argument have been used to
seek more autonomous states by suggesting that the key to Asian states
was such insulation. Analysis by institutionalists suggests that the
view of the autonomy of the state in the "Asian miracle" countries is an
oversimplification and the argument for state technocracies pursuing
development in complete isolation from societal pressures is a myth and
is not empirically founded. In the seminal work on developmental states,
Chalmers Johnson (1981) underlined as a crucial feature the intimacy of
their relationship with the private sector and the intensity of their
involvement in the market. Subsequent writing on other developmental
states has underscored this point leading to the useful, albeit
problematic, notion of "embedded autonomy" to describe the nature of
state autonomy in these societies as circumscribed by the dependence of
the state on the activities of the private sector for its development
project (Evans, 1992). Evans has also argued that the much vaunted
autonomy is "embedded in a progressively dense web of ties with both
non-state and other state actors (internal and external) through which
the state has been able to co-ordinate the economy and implement
developmental objectives" (1992). In popular parlance such a
relationship is encapsulated by such expressions as "Japan Inc." or
"Malaysia�s smart partnership", which all point to close relationship
between state and domestic capital from what is advocated by IFIs. These
essentially corporatist arrangements were central to the edification of
the relationship of trust between state and capital. In many countries,
independently organized business associations have had considerable
influence on state polices. In South Korea, concentration of business
and the highly diversified interests of the chaebols obviated the
need for organized collective action. Instead business-government
relations were managed through direct firm level and even personalistic
consultations between the chaebols and state institutions (Cheng
et al., 1996). Hawes and Liu note that in other Asian countries
technocrats, who have enjoyed less autonomy than those in South Korea
and Taiwan, have had "to seek allies where they could find them. both
nationally and internationally, and they have found many willing
partners in the demand for new institutions within the growing and
increasingly competitive classes of the region" (1993: 647). The World
Bank observes that "formal institutions that facilitate communication
and co-operation between the private and public secures ... in effect an
institutionalised form of wealth sharing aimed primarily at winning the
support and co-operation of business elites" (1993: 181). The
"isolation" of these states was not from all particularistic interests
but from those of some particular interests or classes. More
specifically what most of the "state autonomists" imply is an economic
bureaucracy beyond the reach of populist pressures (Felix, 1994) � a
point that has unwarrantedly led to the view that "autonomous" states
must be authoritarian.
These problems arise from the tendency to treat conjunctural features of
states as if they constituted structural or intrinsic features of
African societies. Failure to handle a particular crisis is considered
as evidence that the state is non-developmental in both ideology and
technical capacity. The result is ambiguity in the use of concepts and
their relationship with other variables. Associated with success in
Asia, clientelism and close ties between business and the state have
been advanced as evidence of "embeddedness" of state autonomy while
similar practices in Africa are evidence of "capture". And now that same
"embeddedness" in Asia is advanced as evidence of "crony capitalism"
that has ineluctably led to the current Asian financial crisis. It is
obvious that such concepts as neo-patrimonialism cannot serve as a
robust independent variable � especially when given a culturalist twist.
Wrong Economic Histories
Much of this "impossibility"
literature is based on a misreading of the economic history of Africa.
The Berg report contained a brief history of Africa�s post-colonial
development and the role of the state in that development. It portrayed
both post-colonial policy and performance as unmitigated and
undifferentiated disasters. The veracity of the Berg report�s analysis
of the African economic crisis was taken for granted by most analysts of
African economies who proceeded to derive generalizations from it and
to provide the political explanations for that poor policy performance.
And yet the Berg report had in many ways falsified economic performance
during the preceding two decades.
First and foremost, it underestimated the enormous importance to African
economies of external conjuncture and the role of foreign expertise.
African economies generally do well when the global conjuncture is good
and poorly when it is bad. It is a lesson that the BWIs have gradually
learnt as their own stabilization and adjustment programmes have on
several occasions been unscrambled by external factors. As for foreign
expertise, this is one variable that is often conveniently forgotten in
looking at the malaise of the African state. Nevertheless, international
institutions do, on occasion, admit that their role in African policy
making has been a major contributory factor to the policies African
countries have pursued. Most policies that are today attributed to
neo-patrimonialism and rent seeking were the orthodoxy of the day
brought to Africa in well-funded and well-manned packages. The lack of
"policy-ownership" is not a new thing in Africa and, alas, not a thing
of the past either.
Second, key economic policies � especially those surrounding import
substitution � were not the result of lobbying by rent seekers or
"capture" of the state of these policies. Synthesizing the results of a
number of studies on the interaction between the economics and politics
in several developing countries, Robert Bates and Anne Krueger, who have
contributed richly to the public choice school, state: "One of the most
surprising findings in our case studies is the degree to which the
intervention of interest groups fails to account for the initiation or
lack of initiation of policy reforms" (1993:455). With the exception of a
few cases, such "embeddedness" never really developed in Africa. If
there was anything that the state in Africa failed to do it was to allow
the local business class effective presence in policy-making. Or,
conversely, if there is anything that African business classes failed to
do it was to "capture" state policies. Much of the evidence of
"capture" is deduced from the fact that gains accrue to identifiable
groups or sectors. However, the argumentation here often involves a non sequitor.
The fact that a group benefits from a particular set of policies does
not prove that they lobbied for those policies, let alone that they have
"captured" the state. Dispensation of rent by states does not establish
capture by beneficiaries of such rents. Thus, when Mobutu embarked on
"Zairenization", transferring foreign-owned firms to nationals, all one
can say is that a state awash with revenue from increased commodity
prices took some "nationalistic" measures which benefited some of
Mobutu�s cronies. The true test of "capture" is the behaviour of the
state during hard times. In the African case, key groups benefiting from
putatively "captured" policies (such as the vaunted "labour
aristocracy") have been dropped from the coalition with surprising ease.
Conceptually, state policies were never a "class project" in Africa.
Import substitution was neither the result of successful lobbying by
rent seeking groups nor a consciously devised strategy to support the
emergence of a national bourgeoisie; and even the small capitalists that
emerged almost inadvertently, and at times despite state harassment,
were to be abruptly left out in the cold as governments danced to the
tunes of the BWIs. Indeed, where intimate relationships emerged they
tended to be arbitrary and lacking in reciprocity. There were many
historical reasons for the weakness of the African capitalist class
vis-à-vis the state. For one, colonialism had suppressed the emergence
of such a class so that, unlike the case in India, for instance, the
national bourgeoisie played a marginal role in the liberation struggle
and could easily be marginalized in policy making. The absence of a
group of large indigenous capitalists with sizeable capital,
organizational resources and entrepreneurial skills, obviated the need
for the new states to form an alliance with such classes for its
development project. It also limited the capacity of indigenous
capitalists to "capture" state policies. In addition, only in rare cases
have the domestic capitalist classes constituted an important base of
state revenue. In the mineral rich economies, the state had access to
revenue either by directly owning the mines or by relying on foreign
capital. In other economies, the state has had access to peasant revenue
without any mediation by a capitalist class, not even a merchant one.
Third, despite the many distortions of import substitution, up until the
second "oil" crisis many African economies had performed relatively
well. Indeed the performance of some of the countries was of
"miraculous" proportions (for instance, Côte d�Ivoire, Kenya, Malawi and
Tanzania had rates of growth of more the 6 per cent for over a decade,
based largely on agricultural and industrial expansion). One interesting
feature is that much of this growth was sustained largely by domestic
savings which increased from around 15 per cent in 1960 to 25 per cent
in 1980 (see figure 1). The rates of savings and investments compared
well with those of East Asia, although they tended to yield lower rates
of growth. The state played a central
role in this process even in countries such as Côte d�Ivoire, Kenya and
Malawi. Although the World Bank tended to use the Ivorian case as
evidence of the benefits of its proposed adjustment models,
the Ivorian state was highly interventionist and "dirigiste" with the
state spearheading development of whole agricultural export activities
through parastatals such as SODEPALM, regional development schemes and
import substitution industrialization.
And so Africa has had examples of countries whose ideological
inclination was clearly "developmentalist" and that pursued policies
that produced fairly high rates of growth in the post-colonial era and
significant social gains and accumulation of human capital. African
bureaucracies were able to extend infrastructure and social senses to
degrees that were unimaginable under colonial rule. Moreover, in a
significant number of countries, the political élite were able to reach
arrangements that provided peace and stability. And, in a sense,
"developmental states" are not totally alien to African climes. These
experiences need to be critically examined for useful lessons.
Savings increased significantly after independence, reaching, on the
average, 21.5 per cent by 1980. Close to a third of the countries had
savings rates that were higher than 25 per cent by 1980.
- -----------------
- TABLE: "Savings rates in sub-Saharan countries"
Fourth, African development strategies were not inward looking in a
simplistic "hostile-to-trade" manner. Nor was the failure to pursue
labour-intensive, export-oriented strategies a failure to respect
comparative advantage. Most development strategies were based on the
assumption that, by using the comparative advantage in "land", African
countries would industrialize by export minerals or other primary
products to earn the necessary foreign exchange for industrialization,
which would eventually allow diversification of their export bases. For
these "land rich" economies revealed comparative advantage lay in these
"land-intensive" exports rather than in the labour-intensive ones
associated with Asia. Such a choice has had enormous implication on the
stability, flexibility and social structures of African economies. The
inflexibility was re-enforced by the lack of explicit export-investment
nexus to diversify export away from monocultural structures.
Finally, the assumption by the state of an active role in economic
affairs was not always the result of hostility to private investment
putatively caused by visceral anti-capitalist reaction induced by
colonial experience. The fact of the matter is that in the immediate
post-independence period most African governments pursued what was known
as "industrialization-by-invitation" strategies in which the attraction
of foreign capital played a central role. Protective measures for
industry were often part of the package of incentives demanded by or
intended to attract foreign capitalists. It was the reticence of foreign
investment that pushed African governments towards increased reliance
on parastatals and joint ventures and escalation of the battle to
attract foreign capital using a battery of invectives. There is some
sense in which we may be reliving the same experience as once again
African governments pursue "beggar-my-neighbour" strategies to attract
foreign investment in manufacturing with little sign of success. The
reticence of foreign investment was accompanied by a suspicion of and
hostility towards indigenous capital by African states even in those
countries that were avowedly capitalist in their ideologies.
New International Order
A new worrisome "impossibility
theorem" comes from debates on globalization as eerily reminiscent of
earlier dependence arguments. The argument is that the current order
does not allow many of the policies that constituted the core of the
activities of developmental studies. Protection of industries, financial
repression, export promotion subsidies are now ruled out by current WTO
arrangements.
Maladjusting the African State
The significance of these
"impossibility arguments" is that the discursive framework they have
engendered has produced a knowledge that has been acted upon by key
policy-makers in a self-fulfilling manner. The consequence of these
perceptions of the state has been a set of self-fulfilling predicaments.
They have led to a set of measures that have so maladjusted African
states that they provide proof of the impossibility theorems. To avoid
clientelism and rent seeking, the state is squeezed fiscally and even
politically. This weakened state then exhibits incapacity to carry out
its basic functions (partly because of demoralization, moonlighting by
the civil servants, corruption, etc.). This is then used to argue that
the state in Africa is not capable of being developmental and therefore
needs to be stripped down further and be buffeted by legions of foreign
experts. And so we witness in Africa the reinforcement of policies that
continue to erode the economic and political capacity of the state even
as considerable noise is made about "good governance" and "capacity
building". And it to this that we now turn.
Undermining State Capacity
One central tenet of adjustment
has involved "rolling back the state". While it is true that any kind of
response to the fiscal crisis of the state may have justified drastic
reductions in state expenditure,
