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Does Federalism Matter in Africa?

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Does Federalism Matter in Africa? Federal Governance 2019, 15(02): pp. 36-40. 36 Does Federalism Matter in Africa? Rotimi T. Suberu1 Professor of politics and international relations at Bennington College, USA. His research interests include Nigerian government and politics, the management of ethnic and religious conflicts as well as federalism and democratization. He is a member of the advisory board of Federal Governance. Introduction matter where [formal] institutions themselves have little import” (Dickovick 2012, 3). The academic study of federalism is somewhat unfashionable in Africa, where formal institutions are Federal Impulses Across Africa often regarded as superficial, ephemeral and Yet, in Nigeria, the continent’s most populous state ineffective, while informal norms, networks, and largest oil-producing economy, federalism has processes and practices are considered to be the real long functioned as the indispensable basis for bedrock and substance of politics. Indeed, for sustaining the legitimacy, territorial integrity, and decades, a “neo-patrimonial theoretical framework” stability of the national polity. Much of my academic or “institution-less school” has been the prevailing research has explored the evolution, operation, paradigm for analyzing African governance and dysfunction and prospective reform or reorganization politics (Cheeseman 2018, 10-12). As a concept, of federal institutions in the Nigerian context (Suberu neo-patrimonialism focuses on the pathologies of 2001). Such a research agenda is consistent with personal, “big man” rule, corruption, predation, recent revisionist perspectives in African political patron-client networks and other informal ruling studies, which are beginning to give more attention mechanisms in Africa. African structures of to formal institutions (elections and electoral personalist rule and relations, in this neo-patrimonial systems, term limits, parliaments, courts, local conceptual framework, have little or no place for governments, constitutional change, etc.) and their formal federalist institutions of self-rule, shared rule, complex interactions with informal practices and and limited rule. Consequently, federalism is often processes (Cheeseman 2018). regarded as irrelevant, unviable, or invariably doomed to degradation, extinction, and The relevance of federalism in Africa becomes more administrative, fiscal, and political recentralization in visible and compelling if we agree with Ronald Watts Africa’s neo-patrimonial governance eco-system. “In that federalism is a normative governance ideology short,” in the words of a leading scholar of that refers to “the advocacy of multi-tiered decentralization in Africa, “federalism can hardly government combining elements of shared rule and 1 Corresponding email: [email protected] Federal Governance www.federalgovernance.ca © Suberu, 2019 ISSN 1923-6158 Federal Governance 2019, 15(02): pp. 36-40. 37 regional self-rule” (Watts 1999, 6). Consequently, which are designed to serve as building blocks for the federalism’s practical implementation involves not AU (Tieku 2013, 573). only full-fledged, classic, American-style, The diversity of contemporary federalist federations, but also diverse forms of multi-tiered experimentations and aspirations in Africa suggests political organizations and territorial power sharing. that, despite the continent’s checkered history of For Watts, the broad spectrum of federalist failed and defunct colonial and post-colonial applications and political organizational forms federalist arrangements, federalism is still broadly include: quasi-federations or hybrids (federations regarded as pivotal to the realization of the key post- with overriding central government powers “more colonial goals of inter-ethnic accommodation, typical of a unitary system”); constitutionally democratic stability, and socio-economic decentralized unions/unitary states (“basically development. unitary in form but…incorporate constitutionally protected subnational units of government”); However, recognizing federalism’s relevance in federacies (involving the grant of special or Africa is not inconsistent with acknowledging the asymmetrical autonomy guarantees to distinct, importance of informal neo-patrimonial processes usually peripheral, units of a state); and international and practices. Consequently, a challenge and political organizations such as confederations, agenda for future federal studies in Africa is to condominiums, leagues and joint functional analyze the intricate ways in which formal federal authorities (Watts 1999, 8-9). institutions converge with, and/or diverge from, informal institutions on the continent, and the In essence, the contemporary African federalism implications of such dynamics for inter-group experience encompasses not only the relatively accommodation, democratization, and socio- established federations of Nigeria, Ethiopia, and economic development. A recent study of political South Africa, but also the federacy of Tanzania and decentralization in Kenya, for example, examines the quasi-federal (or robustly decentralized unitary) devolution’s role in promoting “a system of horizontal state of Kenya. What is more, a survey (Hartmann accountability between different figures at the county 2013, 125) of post-conflict territorial power-sharing level,” despite “the spread of corruption and arrangements during 1990-2011 identifies the mismanagement that has characterized county-level implementation of federal state and/or governments” (Dyzenhaus 2018, 328). Utilizing case decentralization reforms in Mali (1992), Mozambique studies of political struggles involving impeachment (1992), Niger (1993-4), Angola (1994), Djibouti motions launched by subnational assemblies against (2001), Comoros (2003), Burundi (2003), Senegal county governors, Dyzenhaus demonstrates that (2004), Sudan (2005) and Angola (2006). To this list when African subnational governments “have can be added the ongoing vigorous debates around genuine and tangible powers, the pursuit of federalism and decentralization in such conflicted patronage resources [by competing subnational countries as the Democratic Republic of Congo, elites] may go hand-in-hand with pushing for Somalia, and Cameroon. A final set of “federal accountability. In other words, informal practices and impulses” and ideas (albeit unconsummated) in networks can work towards the strengthening and Africa involves experiments in supranational consolidation of institutions rather than their integration, including the African Union (AU) and the subversion, and can create more accountable local African Regional Economic Communities (ARECs), governments” (Dyzenhaus 2018, 329). Federal Governance www.federalgovernance.ca © Suberu, 2019 ISSN 1923-6158 Federal Governance 2019, 15(02): pp. 36-40. 38 The Nigerian Experience movements that lack effective subnational elite support. Arguably, therefore, the conflicts are not In a similar vein, my research has highlighted the credible existential challenges to Nigerian statehood. paradoxes and ambiguities of federalism and Yet, while averting large-scale disintegrative ethnic decentralization in the Nigerian context. I have warfare, the system of multi-state federalism has documented the salutary contributions of the spawned local-level strife (including intense conflicts Nigerian federal system to national political between so-called state indigenes and non- development, while acknowledging the multifaceted indigenes over political and economic patronage) in ways in which the system “abets, and is enmeshed ways that have entrenched subnational identities and and subsumed in an overall context of prebendal, promoted ethno-client politics, while undermining neo-patrimonial politics”: “Nigeria’s experiment in national unity and thwarting democratic good federal governance… is remarkably resilient and governance. innovative, but also profoundly conflicted and problematic” (Suberu 2013, 79, 84). A focus on At the same time, Nigeria’s multi-state federal model Nigerian federalism’s complicated interactions with has produced multiple benign democratic outcomes. informal neo-patrimonial processes offers a useful The model has fostered multi-ethnic and federation- framework for explaining the federal system’s wide parties; promoted subnational electoral political ambivalent effects on national unity, competition in ways that have partially assuaged the democratization, and development. zero-sum struggles to control the powerful federal presidency; leveraged opposition-controlled Following the collapse of its first post-independence subnational states as vehicles for engendering republic and the outbreak of civil war in the sixties, national electoral alternation and undermining Nigeria evolved from a centrifugal federation of three dominant one-party rule at the federal level; major ethnic regions into a more centripetal federal advanced formal and informal rules of ethnic power structure of 36 constituent states. This multi-state sharing, rotation, “zoning” and consociation; and federal structure has sustained Nigeria’s territorial facilitated the role of the federal supreme court as an integrity and prevented a recurrence of large-scale independent arbitrator of intergovernmental inter-ethnic warfare. The system of multiple disputes. Yet, a profound democratic deficit in constituent states, according to Larry Diamond, has Nigerian federalism involves the perversion of “functioned reasonably (even remarkably) well to constitutional guarantees of subnational
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