African Perspective on Governance

Edited by: Goran Hyden, Bamidele Olowu, and Hastings W. O. Okoth-Ogendo

Publishers: African World Press, Inc. P.O. Box 48, Asmara, Eritrea. 2000

Pages: 323; price: not stated

Reviewer: Kofi Akosah-Sarpong in Montreal, Canada

Governance has become a reality thrasher in Africa's painful road to stability, democracy, human rights, and sustainable development, despite the shock waves sent by the new African coup d’etat in Cote d'Ivoire. The word, or rather the term, has varying meanings, depending on what one wants to use it for. There are different perspectives on governance as there are different cultures and societies and political systems in the world, but the bottom line is order, discipline and participation. The contributors go variously by this loose framework in their employment of the term governance.

This lucidly written book by 11 African scholars from both East and West Africa not only adds to the growing literature on the issue of African governance but it stretches the debates and perspectives, including here the African media, African women, and African intellectuals.

No doubt the editors underline the fact that ''this volume is meant to provide a platform for African scholars to engage the issues of governance and provide their interpretation of what is relevant and how some of the problems facing the countries on the continent might be tackled more effectively." In this regard the volume is exploratory, making the contributors come with their own perspectives on governance in Africa. Despite its African-wide perspectives, it combines specifically scholars from East Africa and Nigeria.

Whether seen from constitutionality, the media, ethnicity, bureaucracy, local government, women, structural adjustment programmes, global politics or intellectuals the common thread running through the scholars perspectives on African governance, both explicit and implicit, is weakness of genuine public realm via rule of law, justice, and intra- and intra-tribal respect.

Despite what the title of the volume alludes, AFRICAN PERSPECTIVE ON GOVERNANCE, much of the pieces in the volume are written from Western development paradigm and not from African culture and tradition, despite some nuggets of African history and tradition. Because much of the political and economic policies dancing the Africa development terrain, including the umbrella nation-states's structures are not rooted in African culture and tradition, hence the painful search for governance informed by rampaging crises. Africans and non-Africans are increasingly acknowledging that Africa is the only continent in the world with the greatest intrusion of foreign development ideas, models and theories with gross disregard to African culture, tradition and history.

The writers walked through the difficult terrain of explaining Africans attempt to govern themselves in nation-states largely created by non-Africans, and whose structures, do African culture, tradition, and history, not inform. Nigeria's Rotimi Suberu, who skilfully captures this balancing acts by African in their journey for African-orientated structures and institutions, informs us in chapter 5, entitled Governance and the Ethnic Factor, the existence of two publics, or rather two republics, in Africa--one purely and genuinely African and the other foreign, and one of the principal sources of the governance crisis.

Suberu's two publics in Africa are, one "primordial" which is naturally strong and moral, and the second "civic" which is weak and legitimate, and servers of the "primordial." In all measure the crisis of governance in Africa is the crisis of inability of Africans scholars and their foreign cohorts to come out with models and theories authentically African which meets the African psychic, the over 2,000 African ethnic groups.

The challenge facing African social scientists today is how to come out with an agenda acceptable to the over 2,000 ethnic groups making the African nation-states. Should it be purely African or a fusion of African and the global cultures as the "African Renaissance" project envisages? Who should midwife this? Should it be the African mass media? As Nigeria's Ayo Olokotun hints in chapter 4 on the 'governance and the media' where the media painfully battles anti-African forces or should it be hatched by African intellectuals? As Nigeria's Adebayo Williams, a columnist for the London, U.K-based Nigerian-owned AFRICA TODAY, incisively recounts about the heaviest use of Nigerian intellectuals during the Gen. Ibrahim Babangida's regime.

The challenges of African governance in the coming centuries would be, considering the nature of the creation of the African nation-states initially, how to rightly, not wrongly as we are witnessing today, mix the African and the global cultures in such a way an African-orientated paradigm is given birth that is acceptable to the diverse and complex over 2,000 ethnic groups making the whole of the 53 Africa nation-states.