The Postcolonial State in Africa: Fifty Years of Independence, 1960–2010

5. Anatomy of State Crisis

From Revolutionary Expectation to Failed State: Guinea-Bisssau At the zenith of state expansion in 1974, Guinea-Bissau had been a lodestar for African hopes.1 Its remarkable liberation struggle from 1961 to 1974 had all but defeated a Portuguese army that peaked at fifty-thousand. Its extraordinary 158 5 Anatomy of State Crisis It is not possible to live in a state where there are killings all the time. We practically have no state. —Antonio Armando, Guinea-Bissau teacher, 2009 The state is in a phase of deliquescence. The state has been dismantled. —Carlos Vamain, former justice minister, Guinea-Bissau, 2009 Already in September the drug traffickers had started moving out of Guinea-Bissau. The drug traffickers need a certain stability. They don’t need a failed state. They need a weak state. —Antonio L. Mazzitelli, UN Office on Drugs and Crime, Dakar, 2009 Débrouillez-vous (Fend for yourself). —Article 15, Mobutu Congo-Kinshasa Constitution (popular version), 2009 A central postulate unanimously shared by political elites, planners and advisers is that the state must organize and direct the development effort. Agricultural growth will not come from the occult workings of an invisible hand, but through the guidance and stimulation of the political and administrative structures. —Crawford Young, 1971 Anatomy of State Crisis 159 leader, Amilcar Cabral, won global admiration for his revolutionary doctrines, rooted in empowerment of rural society and a summons to the petty bourgeois political elites to commit “class suicide.”2 In the latter phases of the liberation war, when Portuguese detachments had been driven back into garrison towns, PAIGC, the revolutionary movement, had created liberated zones in much of the country, establishing people’s stores, schools, and clinics. These avatars of triumphant revolutionary transformation attracted admiring commentary from veteran observers of African liberation movements, such as Basil Davidson and Gérard Chaliand, as well as young scholars, who were invited to tour the liberated areas by PAIGC.3 The state, once torn from colonial grasp and reshaped as revolutionary instrument, could fulfill the guiding mission I and many others anticipated at the time.4 But by the end of the 1980s, the illusory nature of transformation projects led by a state incarnating the potent force of the revolutionary liberation movement was clear. A rural civil society, argues Joshua Forrest, had indeed been empowered by the Portuguese loss of authority. But the unusually weak colonial state had never succeeded in fully subjugating peasant society or incorporating its local leadership.5 The project of rural civil society was local autonomy, not state-led development. The aura of liberation faded and the liabilities of a state with minimal revenue possibilities beyond initially generous external aid, a very slender infrastructure, and unstable politics became evident. Such iconic undertakings as the people’s stores had proved to be corrupt, inefficient, even extortionate liabilities rather than vehicles of rural uplift. By 1982 expenditures rising at 19% annually were twice domestic state revenue; the fifteen thousand government employees were 61% of all salaried workers. The array of newly launched state light industrial enterprises were headed for bankruptcy.6 By the turn of the century, the state became prey to narcotics trafficking and was a prototype of the failed state. State decline and even failure was the dominant theme of the 1980s. Not all African states succumbed, but many confronted a deep, even existential, crisis by the end of the decade. The anatomy of state decline is the focus of this chapter. In my reading, a core factor was the excess embedded in the state expansion ambitions of the 1970s: what I have termed the integral state project. Logic of State Expansion The point of departure is the would-be integral state, whose portrait I sketch in chapter 2. There is no need to add further layers of detail to the schema set forth in that chapter. It is worth recalling, however, that although the 1970s were marked by projects of state expansion almost everywhere, their actual scope varied considerably. But the pattern of overreach was sufficiently general by the 1980s to shape the widespread perception of state crisis afflicting much of the continent. The marriage of the integral state project with the dominant pattern of patrimonial autocracy, whose corrosive effects were becoming fully evident, was a toxic pairing for the African polity. I endeavor in the following pages to unravel the results and consequences of the shattered illusion of the...