Folks, This is one of Dr. Ayittey's many emails. He is a capitalist without
capital; I don't buy his view, as I am more of a BIG government ideologue. But
I am sure you will enjoy his critique of African leaders and governments.
Ocii
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Africas Development model goes Kaput Every society that seeks to
move from point A (state of under-development) to point B (a developed) on
the development stage needs a working state or vehicle. Regardless of
horsepower, shape, or color, a vehicle is an amalgamation of systems: ignition
system, fuel system, electrical system, cooling system, transmission system,
suspension system, brake system, as well as other systems. Each system is
designed for a specific purpose and must be in good working condition for the
vehicle to operate efficiently. When a system breaks down, it must be repaired
promptly. Parts designed for one
system cannot be used to repair another. Oil, a lubricant, cannot be used as a
coolant in the radiator. Periodic maintenance and repair are imperative for
optimal operating efficiency of each system. In other words, you cant neglect
to put oil in the engine of a car and when the engine seizes up, claim that the
vehicle colonialists bequeathed you was defective. Unfortunately, the word
"maintenance does not even exist in the official lexicon of African
governments, who drive new systems into the ground and then abandon them.
Institutions are to a state or society what systems are to a vehicle. A society
has such institutions and systems as the military, the police and law
enforcement, the political system, the economic system, the educational system,
the judiciary system, the banking system, the civil service, and the media.
Each institution has a specific function to play and should not be
cross-matched with different functions. For example, the role of the military
is to defend the territorial integrity of the nation and protect its citizens,
while that of the judiciary is to enforce the rule of law and assure justice.
Soldiers cannot be placed in civil judicial or political roles, because they
are not trained for such roles. These institutions can also provide
institutional checks against each other; for example, the police against the
judiciary and verse versa. Unfortunately in virtually all African countries,
the development journey or process was turned completely upside-down. The tools
of development were state controlled or owned. The institutions that were
supposed to provide the checks and balances were debauched by the ruling
vampire elites for self-aggrandizement. The elites turned politics or service
in government as the arena for self-enrichment. To be rich in Africa, the
elites head straight into politics or government, not the private sector. As
government officials, their role is not to serve but to fleece the
people. To achieve their objective of self-enrichment, they take over and
subvert every key institution of government -- the civil service, judiciary,
military, media, banking and even the educational system. These institutions
become paralyzed. Meritocracy, rule of law, property rights, transparency and
administrative capacity vanish. State-owned corporations and the national
treasury are raided with impunity. With enormous powers accumulated in their
hand by two defective systems they themselves established (the economic system
of statism and the political system of sultanism), the elite bazongas (raiders
of the public treasury) go scot-free. Where parliament exists, it is
rubber-stamp and not likely to probe deeply into the collapse of a looted,
state-owned corporation. Other systems in the state (or development vehicle)
are also perverted to dispense patronage. The civil service is packed with
party hacks, cronies, and tribesmen. Eventually, it becomes bloated,
inefficient, and riddled with corruption. The educational system produces
functionally illiterate elites, who sing fawning praises to the Big Man. The
judiciary system fails to uphold the rule of law because the judges themselves
are crooks and the police highway bandits. The banking system is subject to
manipulation by the ruling elite to siphon billions of dollars into overseas
accounts. The media in most African countries was taken over soon after
independence by the state and gagged or used as a propaganda mouthpiece for the
ruling vagabonds. The remaining private newspapers were cowed into silence with
criminal libel suits, assassinations, and onerous registration requirements.
But the most discredited and perverted institution in Africa has been the
military-cum-security forces, lacking even an elementary understanding of their
basic function in society. Instead of protecting the people, security forces
train their guns on them. As infrastructure crumbled in the
post colonial period, the ruling elites sought medical attention abroad, sent
their children to schools overseas and shopped in foreign capitals. And the
people? They were left to eat grass or starve. By the early 1980s, Africas
development model (or the developmobile) had broken down with a host of
agricultural crisis, foreign debt crisis, inflation, etc. Fiendishly clutching
control was a reckless and unskilled megalomaniac who proclaimed himself
"leader-for-life.He had no idea how the country worked and viewed it as his
personal property. He blamed any failure on the colonialists and surrounded
himself with his cronies, tribesmen, mistresses, sycophants, and other
patronage junkies. They, in turn, brought along their relatives, tribesmen, and
friends. With all of these leeches and parasites mooching off the people, the
system collapsed leaving a trail of crises in its wake Thus debauched, the
institutions and systems in Africa's states became dysfunctional and
the developmobile kaput. Internal systems malfunctioned. The warlords in
Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia and other African countries cared less
about the condition of the state or the people. Rather, they battled
ferociously to determine who should be in control. Not to be outdone, Africa's
politicians and intellectuals argued furiously and endlessly over who would be
a better leader: a Hausa, Yoruba, Tutsi, Hutu, Kikuyu, Muslim, or a professor.
No one was talking about fixing the institutions or systems. What was the sense
in arguing over who would be the "best leader or whether a six-lane highway
must be built when Africas "developmobile was kaput? Meanwhile,
multilateral financial institutions, such as the World Bank, the IMF, Western
governments and donor agencies trip over themselves to offer aid and
conflicting advice. Initially, they preoccupied themselves with removing
obstacles to development by building highways, bridges, dams, and schools to
improve literacy rates, and sinking bore holes for drinking water, for example
a pointless since the state had broken down. Subsequently, in the 1990s,
they shifted their focus to fixing various parts of the state: Structural
adjustment (economic reform) and democratization. But what the World Bank and
the IMF failed to understand was that Africas state needed a complete
overhaul, not just piece-meal reform. Eventually, the vampire state and the
coconut republic imploded. Groups excluded from the gravy train rose up in an
insurgency to overthrow the ruling bandits, sucking the country into a vortex
of carnage and mayhem. Burundi, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone,
Somalia, and Zaire would all have been saved if their military despots, most of
whom are dead anyway, were willing to relinquish or share political power and
give their people a better shake. In summary, Africa's developmobile is going
nowhere because of institutional breakdown (dysfunctional
systems) and the megalomaniac drivers, who have "gone bonkers. Their
development priorities are oriented toward self-aggrandizement and
self-perpetuation in power. It is an African tragedy because no nation can
develop when it is ruled by a phalanx of rabid bandits who stay in office
forever. As George Soros, the billionaire financier, observed succinctly: "The
main cause of misery and poverty in the world is bad government" (The Wall
Street Journal (March 14, 2002; p.B1). This development crisis situation
confronts many African countries. It has three dimensions relating to the
leader, the condition of the state apparatus, and the environment. It is
important to recognize that fixing one without the other would make little
difference to the development process. For example, changing the leader through
democratic elections alone would not mean much if the government had broken
down. The experience of several African countries in the 1990s is instructive
at this
juncture: Some leaders were merely changed without reforming their dilapidated
systems/institutions: Zambia in 1991 (from Kenneth Kaunda to Frederick
Chiluba); Liberia in 1996 (from Samuel Doe to Charles Taylor); Ivory Coast in
1999 (from Konan Bedies to Robert Guie in 1999 and from Guie to Laurent Gbagbo
in 2000); Nigeria in 1999 (from Abusallam Abubakar to Olusegun Obasanjo), and
Kenya in 200 from Moi to Kibaki. Therefore, questions of accelerating
development (becoming a developed state) must be deferred until the state
system is fixed. We can argue forever whether this situation inherited from the
colonialists was defective or not, but that would be pointless. But as Africans
themselves often say, We struggle hard to remove one cockroach from power but
the next coconut-head comes to do the same thing. REFORM means fixing that
broken dvelopmobile. But the vuling vampire elites are not interested. Period.
Because they benefit from the rotten status quo. Under
pressure from Western donors, they only undertake the bare minimum cosmetic
reforms to keep aid follars flowing. Africans deride this as the "Babangida
boogie" -- one step forward, three steps back, a flip and a side-kick to land
on a fat Swiss Bank account. Much ado about nothing. Ask them to cut bloated
state bureaucracies or government spending and they will set up a Ministry of
Less Government Spending. Ask them to establish better systems of governance
and they will set up a Ministry of Good Governance (Tanzania). Ask them to
curb corruption and they will set up an Anti-Corruption Commission with no
teeth and then sack the Commissioner if he gets too close to the fat cats
(Kenya). Ask them to establish democracy and they will empanel a coterie of
fawning sycophants to write the electoral rules, toss opposition leaders into
jail, hold fraudulent elections and return themselves to power (Ivory Coast,
Rwanda). Ask them to place more reliance on the
private sector and they will create a Ministry of Private Enterprise (Ghana).
Ask them to privatize inefficient state-owned enterprises and they will sell
them off at fire-sale prices to their cronies (Uganda). Or ask them to move a
foot and they will demand foreign aid in order to do so. In 2003, some 30,000
ghost names were discovered on the payroll of the Ministry of Education,
costing the government $1.2 million a month in salaries heisted by living
workers. When Ghana demanded foreign aid to purge the payroll of these ghost
names, Japan coughed up $5 million. The reform process has stalled through
vexatious chicanery, strong-arm tactics, willful deception, and vaunted
acrobatics. Only 16 out of the 54 African countries are democratic and fewer
than 8 African countries are economic success stories. Intellectual freedom
remains in the Stalinist era: only 8 African countries have a free and
independent media. But without genuine reform, more African countries will
implode. Africa is stuck in a veritable conundrum. George Ayittey,
Washington, DC
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