Democratizing or Reconfiguring Predatory Autocracy? Myths and Realities in Africa Today: Myths and Realities in Africa Today

Chapter Ten - Summary and Conclusion

Chapter Ten Summary and Conclusion The greatest defect of African multiparty elections is that they address the symptoms of the African predicament rather than its structural causes in terms of explaining the structural roots of the crisis of politics, power, and production. Inefficiency, waste, mismanagement, corruption, hiring of ghost workers, over-generous allowances to political elites and bureaucrats, and in the World Bank’s own words, “the appropriation of the machinery of government by the elite to serve their own interests” are manifestations of more structural and historically determined coalitions, contradictions, and crises (World Bank, 1989 and 1992). These conditions are not necessarily natural or spiritually determined. They are the precipitates of particular forms of social relations, political balances, power relations, alignment and realignment of class forces, and the region’s location and role in a highly exploitative and very competitive international division of labour. Without addressing the structural roots of the crisis, the prescription of good governance would simply fail to resolve any of the immediate or longer-term problems of Africa. As well, because the political terrain is so repressive, hostile, uncertain, unstable, and undemocratic; the state, its custodians, and agencies have been unable to contain or mediate the forces of economic, social and political decay and disintegration. Elites loot the treasury because they can get away with it. The dominant classes privatize the state and its resources because civil society is weak and highly fractionalized and factionalized. Economic policies fail because they largely reflect the narrow interests of the dominant classes and those of foreign capital. The widespread human rights abuses, mindless corruption, waste, and the subversion of the goals of nationhood which have characterized the majority of African social formations since political independence cannot be divorced from inherited structural contradictions and dislocations. It is doubtful if mere insistence on good governance, even the imposition of political conditionalities will resolve these deep-rooted problems. 62 Democratizing or Reconfiguring Predatory Autocracy? Myths and Realities in Africa Today Let us examine this point by answering a few questions. When foreign aid is denied and countries are isolated until they meet the dictates of the donors and lenders, who actually suffers? To what extent did Western imposed sanctions affect the Nigerian elite during the Abacha era? How much of the sanctions imposed on Libya has affected Ghadaffi and the Libyan bourgeois class? Will the elite crumble under the yoke of sanctions and US naval blockade? The truth of the matter is that cutting foreign aid, redirecting investment and the like do not have much of an impact on the elites; it is the already impoverished masses who suffer the most, and when the elites do yield to such pressures, more often than not, they have already designed ways to accommodate and domesticate Western dictated or imposed political prescriptions. Under such conditions, concessions to civil society become more of a survival strategy, a sort of tactical political manoeuvre. Robert Bates (1990: 33) captures very accurately the survival tactics employed so perfectly by Africa’s dictators: In normal times, the power of government opposition is sufficient to cripple all efforts at political reform. But there is a time when these governments themselves become champions of the rule of law. They do so when they are about to fall. At the time of their political demise, tyrants become converts to civil liberties. On their political deathbeds, they seek an expanded role for due process, restrictions on the use of the police and the judicial system, an independent judiciary, and the rule of law. When they are about to pass from the political scene, they acquire a vested interest in civil liberties. They want legal and political shelters from the lust for revenge on the part of the citizenry they once repressed. With regard to the impact of the economy on politics, there is no doubt that neoliberal policies have exacerbated socio-economic inequalities, and thus become an important obstacle in the way of progress toward democracy: they have set limits on greater political participation, and have eroded the foundations which could increase citizens’ political education and sophistication. Who can deny that when the majority of a nation’s people spend most of their daily efforts merely to survive, their concern for the polis loses relevance? In other words, this is one of the causes that explains people’s political disaffection. But the problem of democracy in societies such as ours lies not only in people’s lack of [18.188.61.223] Project...