The Politics of Neoliberal Reforms in Africa: State and civil society in Cameroon

6. Good Governance, Privatisation and Ethno-regional Conflict in Cameroon

129 6 Good governance, privatisation and ethno-regional conflict in Cameroon Introduction By proclaiming that a ‘crisis of governance’ underlies ‘the litany of Africa’s development problems’, the World Bank’s 1989 report SubSaharan Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Growth placed the concept of good governance at the heart of the donor agenda for Africa (World Bank 1989: 60). Painfully confronted at the time with the relative failure of its structural adjustment programmes (SAPs), the World Bank was inclined in this report to blame the weak, predatory and neopatrimonial African states for the poor performance of structural adjustment rather than to question its own neo-liberal reform package. It therefore stressed the need not only for less but also for better government in African states. But what is good governance and how is it to be promoted? The term remains rather vague. The World Bank (1992: 1) defines it in managerial terms as ‘the manner in which power is exercised in the management of a country’s economic and social resources for development’. Good governance was to flow from enhanced accountability within the public sector, transparency and openness in decision-making, the rule of law, and more efficient public management. World Bank officials also added the issue of capacity building to enable technocrats to initiate and implement marketbased economic reforms as an essential element for good governance (Sandbrook 2000: 10-13). Whereas the World Bank couched its interventions in the affairs of African countries in governance terms that enabled it to claim not to have preferences for particular types of regime, bilateral aid donors felt less inhibited in linking democracy to good governance. The latter sought to promote a liberal-democratic system through a 130 The Politics of Neoliberal Reforms in Africa combination of political conditionalities and financial support for democratisation initiatives and capacity building, such as the introduction of international election observation and the empowerment of non-government organisations. Although bilateral donors continuously stressed that democratisation had its intrinsic merits, it is beyond any doubt that they saw it primarily as a vehicle for promoting the more efficient implementation of structural adjustment measures. Democratisation was said to empower the electorate by providing it with mechanisms of a parliamentary and extra-parliamentary nature to check upon the ruling regime’s neopatrimonial practices and to participate in the decision-making process about necessary structural adjustment measures. This would contribute to the legitimisation of unpopular neoliberal reforms among the population. Clearly, the good governance discourse, propagated by the donor community generally and the World Bank in particular, represents an instrumentalist, managerial and technocratic approach to development. It aims at promoting the emergence of a more conducive and, in their view, more legitimate political environment, backed by the requisite administrative capacity, for the successful implementation of orthodox structural adjustment (Olukoshi 1998a: 35). This approach entails an essentially depoliticised notion of governance. It narrates the proposed restructuring of African societies simply as a managerial and technical problem rather than as being contested and political. Disagreements and conflicts over the design and implementation of neo-liberal reforms are usually absent from any analysis, and development emerges as a neutral project guided by ‘technical considerations of economy and efficiency, rather than ideological and political considerations’ (Abrahamsen 2000: 143). When the World Bank and governance theorists do acknowledge conflict, they are usually in the habit of treating it solely, or primarily, as the result of ‘selfish’ and ‘illegitimate’ machinations of vested interests that are steeped in a variety of neopatrimonial relations. In the end, this approach tends to insulate governance from the actual political process: persistent struggles for power, control over resources, as well as access to the decision-making process about the contested neo-liberal reforms. It tends in particular to gloss over the weak and dependent position 131 Chapter 6: Good governance, privatisation and ethno-regional conflict in Cameroon of African states in the world capitalist system. The continent’s strategic and economic marginalisation in the new world order and its dependence on foreign assistance have facilitated intervention and governance by international institutions and organisations to the extent that more and more decisions that determine the wellbeing of Africa’s peoples are today being made outside the continent in the Washington offices of the Bretton Woods institutions. Power, in other words, is increasingly located outside the political community as conventionally defined by democratic theory, and beyond the reach of the democratic control of...