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GOVERNANCE and the AFRICAN CONDITION Okello Oculi, Ph.D

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GOVERNANCE and the AFRICAN CONDITION Okello Oculi, Ph.D AFRICAN STRATEGIC REVIEW GOVERNANCE AND THE AFRICAN CONDITION Okello Oculi, Ph.D Executive Director, AFRICA VISION 525 B7, Ndamela House, Area 3, Garki 500 Tafawa Balewa Way "If one party has been eating so much, what with many parties? They will finish us!" The above statement was made by some villagers in Tanzania in response to inquiries on whether or not they would wish to leave the one-party system of government for the call by donor agencies and local opposition elements for a multi-party system of politics. The 1991 Presidential Commission, which was undertaking the nationwide inquiry, was chaired by Chief Justice Francis Nyalila. It reported that 80 per cent of the people favoured the existing one-party rule by Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) - a merger between the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) and the Zanzibar and Pemba based Afro- Shirazi Party (ASP) - but recommended a multi-party system since it was favoured by 20 per cent of the people, which the commission considered to be a significant minority. A most weighty part of that minority was Mwalimu Julius K. Nyerere who had voluntarily resigned from the presidency in 1985, and become a vehement proponent of multi-party politics. To appreciate the historical gravity of the views of these villagers, it is necessary to recall that colonial military and bureaucratic dictatorship was the first experience of failed governance all across Africa. Beginning with genocide in Namibia (under German administration) and in French-ruled Niger, Chad, Gabon, Cameroun, Congo Brazzavile and Central African Republic, colonial governance had also seized vast tracks of land, and livestock from local farmers in Kenya, Tanganyika, Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). Nyasaland (Malawi), Angola, Mozambique and South Africa: 2 generated 2 famine caused by severe food shortages through the disruption of production for household consumption, and impoverishment producers through collecting high taxes, withholding of surpluses derived from low prices paid to farmers 1 AFRICAN STRATEGIC REVIEW for "cash crops" and what government earned from their sale in the international market. Furthermore, colonial governance utilized forced labour by colonized peoples for constructing roads. railway lines, - in the case of the Belgian Congo, this included Congolese labourers carrying railway engines and wagons on their shoulders from Matadi port to the mainland. There was also forced labour on White Settlers' farms and company mines.' By 1938 the level of malnutrition and disease including yaws was so severe that a British Government Commission reported that Britain could not expect to recruit soldiers from the African and Caribbean colonies to fight in the impending Second World War. These conditions generated widespread protests ranging from West Africa through Central Africa to East and Southern Africa. In Tanganyika, for example, the colonial government was faced with protests against evictions of villagers from their land in Wameru (1951): riots against officially-sponsored reduction of numbers of cattle owned by herdsmen in Morogoro (1955); resistance in Iringa, Mbulu, Usumbrua (1957), etc. The depth of rejection of anti-people colonial governance was so widespread and protracted that attempts by the leaders of TANU to have a narrowly based and highly disciplined party (which like the Russian Communist Party which seized power in 1917) failed. Instead mass support turned TANU into a nationalist movement. In Uganda, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Ghana. protests against low prices (by refusing to sell cocoa, coffee, and cotton) forced British officials to invent Produce Marketing Boards to act as a depositor of monies earned from the international market into British banks while paying stable but low prices to local farmers. The nationalist struggle in Africa was rooted in mass rejection of failed or anti-people and externally directed development governance. In Rwanda and the Belgian Congo people attacked symbols of their oppressors on the day of independence. This point deserves emphasis because it had a major influence on post-colonial governance. Except in Congo Kinshasha (where after June 30 1960 Patrice Lumumba was prevented from settling down to govern by military mutinies, secession, a military coup and eventual assassination in January 1961), post-colonial leaders linked the function of government directly to eradiating poverty, providing education and health care to the masses of the people. However, by the mid-1960s, the verdict was almost a uniform report of a second failed governance. Colin Leys was among the earliest to point out that 2 AFRICAN STRATEGIC REVIEW Kenyatta had adopted the strategy of shutting out local party leaders and supporters from influencing government policy-making and policy execution. This allowed his government to allocate land (bought from white settlers with a 70 million pounds sterling loan from Britain), to members of Parliament, top civil servants and government ministers while the millions of landless people either went without or received very limited allocations." The landless left rural areas for the slums of Mathari Valley in Nairobi. In Nigeria, the increasingly high revenues earned from oil exports led to widespread corruption, fraud, embezzlement under military and civilian governments while peasant farmers did not receive significant shares of oil revenues as investments for improving their tools of production and food processing; while the middle class exported their share of oil revenues to benefit foreign farmers by importing frozen beef, chicken, wheat, rice, milk and beverages from South American, North American and European Union economies. In 7 Mobutu's Zaire, budget allocations for sectors were embezzled and shared out in declining proportions from top officials in Kinshasha, to regional district and local government administrators. Soldiers and police in rural areas received no salaries and lived by seizing yam, chicken, cassava and other food crops from women going to local markets. Governance became primarily servicing the greed of Mobutu's "entourage" and not "the provision of equitable and equal welfare (education, health, housing, old-age pensions, agricultural inputs, roads, etc), to the people". Under these circumstances local communities could only perish and starve when rains fell and epidemics struck. Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Zaire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, sahelian states have been victims. Several explanations have been provided for post-colonial African elites creating their own version of failed governance. Franz Fanon had in 1961 blamed it on their hunger for consuming what European industrialists have invented out of their sense of mission for creating European material progress. Hayatudeen, President of the Nigerian Economic Group, put it this way in a recent interview with NTA: "We have never really had a bourgeoisie in this country: people who believe in making money the hard way: rather our business leaders have been appendages of foreigners.” 3 AFRICAN STRATEGIC REVIEW A possible contributory factor is that, unlike Korea and China which experienced Japanese settler-colonialism in which large scale industrialization and modern agricultural production was undertaken by the Japanese. fellow oriental people like themselves, and not by Europeans or Americans. This socialized Koreans and the Chinese in Manchuria, with vital self-confidence and the need to use oriental genius, hard work, national cultural values and patriotism to achieve effective public administration, and national industrial takeoff on the basis of self-help and self reliance. In this regard, we would expect Algerians, Zimbabweans. Kenyans, and South African blacks who experienced varying degrees of agricultural and industrial productivity by European settlers would exhibit higher dosages of bourgeoisation. Whatever the explanatory factors, the failure in governance has produced high levels of frustration, hunger and anger out of mass poverty and unemployment. This has continued to throw out generations of armed robbers whose activities deepen poverty by driving away investment capital through capital flight by the same elite because it has "made the lives of those who run their own investment very unsafe" It has also forced middle and lower ranks of civil servants into corruption through the use of inefficiencies and irritating red tape as tools for forcing those seeking their official services to resort to bribery as a facilitator and accelerator of action by bureaucrats. Unlike under colonial rule, post-colonial public administration in Africa has gone into spiralling inefficiencies and sluggish performances, non-actions, and non-decisions often as deliberate ways of effecting corruption. The higher ranks of public officials have introduced the notion of bureaucratic suicide and staticide by resorting to "looting". The African Centre for Economic Growth has spelled out the effects of looting thus: "It usually involves the kind of scams whose figures are so huge that when they are successfully concluded they have macroeconomic implications fairly quickly - they cause banks to collapse. inflation to rise, the exchange rate to decline. The impetus for looting is often political and it happens under the direction or with the acquiescence of important political players in a given country. It often involves, for example, the printing of currency to fund fictitious projects; using public revenues to award enormous
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