| BOOK REPORT
TITLE: STATE LEGITIMACY AND DEVELOPMENT
IN AFRICA
AUTHOR: Pierre Englebert
PUBLISHER: Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henriette Street, Covent
Garden, London WC2E 8LU, U.K. 2000
PAGES: 244
PRICE: US$55.00
REVIEWER: KOFI AKOSAH-SARPONG
The central theme of this book is power in Africa, where the
elite choose policies as a pay-off of their functions in disregard to institutional
capacity building. Why this situation? Africa—that’s the one created by the
Europeans—has since 1960 being struggling for balance in its existence. In the face
of all these tossing and turning, the real Africa—that’s the original one
created by the African peoples themselves before the coming of the Europeans prowls on,
undisturbed by the unfit structures created by the Europeans. But since the two
Africa’s have not been able to reconcile properly since the 1960s the significant
issues of state, legitimacy and development have become a thorny issue in Africa’s
developmental journey, spilling over into civil wars, tribalism, low social capital,
arrogance, confused elite, influence of invisible forces, and mounting cultural decay.
The lack of balance in Africa’s developmental goal is explained
by the fact that the African nation-states were created without the consent of the African
peoples. Put in another way, the African nation-states were created without resort to the
history and the culture of the African peoples. This is the root cause of the conflicts;
paralyses, tensions, and arrested development Africa find itself in today. For this
reason, the author, Pierre Englebert, teacher of politics at Pomona College, wraps many an
Africa state’s progress around "Development," "State," and
"Legitimacy." It is from these three terms that Englebert’s core argument
relates the African State’s development capacity to its degree of historical
legitimacy.
Englebert argues that since the African –nation-states are
"imported", that’s the designs of colonization left over by their Europeans
and appropriated by new African elite upon independence, they have tended to conflict with
pre-existing indigenous African political institutions that underlie norms of political
behaviour, and customary sources of political authority. "These new African states
are not the endogenous creations of local history. These are not embedded in domestic
power relations. They lack legitimacy," argued Englebert. These realities make
African leaders face specially daunting challenges, compared to leaders elsewhere, and
have few options to address the challenges. Their foremost challenge is to acquire
reasonably sufficient hegemony over the African societies in order to bring stability and
regularize power.
In their struggles to stabilize and regulate power, African leaders
could not use development policies and institutions to generate support for themselves.
They require loyalty from the bureaucracy and fair flow of response from private agents,
which is lacking from scratch. In the absence of these, African leaders resort to
patronage, nepotism, corruption, and political behaviour bordering on the state becoming
‘Father Christmas." This Father Christmas policies aim at instrumental
legitimacy by using patron-client links for lack of moral foundations, thus reducing the
African nation-state to "merely instrumental role, a set of resources that rulers use
to foster their power: fiscal revenues are distributed to create networks of political
support as rulers personally appropriate public funds to finance political
allegiance." Employment is used as patronage and public investments are politicized
rather than economic rationales and trade and pricing distorted to create rent and vested
interests. As a result, the African state looses its capacity to provide healthy
institutions and to design and enforce policies that will create growth. In a climate like
this, the rule of law swings from one end to another, a sign of instability, as does
degree of trust of citizens in their institutions. As rule of law vacillates, people loose
respect for institutions, helping spread corruption. In such a culture, domestic and
foreign private agents distance themselves from such unstable economic environments,
investments dry up, resulting firms and households taking refuge in informal activities.
The overall economy stagnates while the "very logic of the system makes it resistant
to reform," explained Englebert.
There are, however, variations throughout Africa. Englebert informs
us that this is revealed by how each African society is linked to its past. While African
islands like Cape Verde, Mauritius, Sao Tome and Principe, and the Seychelles have high
legitimacy because of their human settlement and colonial experience, and which explains
their good economic health, others, especially those in the main land Africa, have weak
legitimacy, and explains their poor economic health. Hovering behind all these are
differences in leadership styles. Botswana’s Seretse Khama and Ketumile Masire are
well known leaders on integrity whereas the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Mobutu
Sese Seko’s was "largely a bandit who not only stole from his country but even
encouraged his people to steal," Englebert informs us. "Just steal a little at a
time," Mobutu warned the Congolese.
Using diagrams and tables, Englebert argues that this explains the
political dimension of Africa’s economic stagnation, where development capacity,
as capacity of regimes to design and implement policies for growth and provide governance
to the African societies and markets are low; the state, as a broader concept,
including government or regime, includes territory, laws, the bureaucratic
and military apparatus, and some ideological justifications of the state’s existence
have low deficit; and legitimacy, when the state’s structures have grown
within its own society and there is some level of historical community to its institutions
is lacking.
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