Tackling problems of fragile states in Africa

Poor of governance, inequality and weak institutions are all major drivers.

Reasons for the general failure of African states, including Uganda, must involve an inquiry of the region’s colonial predecessor.
The colonial state was a military and administrative entity, aimed nearly exclusively at extracting resources for the economic development of the metropolitan area (Chazan et al, 1999).

It exhibited an institutional system in which unaccountable colonial bureaucracies had, at the same time, both decision-making and implementation roles, consequently putting aside the concept of division of powers.

Despite its authoritarian nature, the colonial state was weak, and its involvement with African society was very limited, since it had little concern for the improvement of the masses’ conditions of life.
In this period, the rural masses rarely dealt with the state that had preferred a system of indirect rule, like the one the British had adopted in Ghana (Berman, 1998).

Thus, the colonial period saw the development of a state based on domination rather than legitimacy and an authoritarian political culture that considered violence, patronage and corruption as normal tools of maintaining control over a population (Chazan et al, 1999).

The post-colonial states inherited these structures at the same time where the political culture was one in which the first leaders of African independence states were becoming politically active.

Those leaders would, after the independence, keep intact the structures of coercion and administration inherited by the colonisers, while simultaneously suppressing, fervently, the pluralist institutions that had been imposed by the European powers during the negotiations of independence (Gordon, 2007).

The characteristics described above could be found everywhere in Africa, but it is in the Belgian Congo where they have been the most extreme. In what would later become the Democratic Republic of Congo, the state was so intertwined with concessionary companies that the distinction between the public administration and business came to be blurred (Bayard, 1993).
The state nearly exclusively focused on its extractive duties.

An impressive industrial infrastructure and an extended network of roads were built, but sectors, such as healthcare and education, were completely ignored and left to the church, which had been operating 99.6 per cent of schools (Young 1994). No superior education was going to be provided until the 1950s.

In a lesser measure, the same dynamics can be found in British colonial territories where the system of indirect rule was adopted.

In Sudan, the British favoured the Arab speaking north and its trading elite, while they ignored, completely, a South Sudan that had been deemed to be just a reservoir of resources (Woodward, 2003).

The British administration limited itself to taxing the production of resources such as cotton, and exploiting the thriving trade conducted by an emerging class of North Sudanese traders. Except for the maintenance and the expansion of communications, the colonial administration had not taken any significant measure to modify the living conditions of the Sudanese.

Both colonial possessions were ruled with authoritarian methods, both retained their coercive institutions intact after the independence and in both, the limits between private business and public administration were blurred because of the exclusively extractive nature of the state.

In this respect, for example, the Belgian colonial state was very similar to the Congo of Mobutu, under which the central government relinquished any function aside from the extraction of revenue for a restricted group of privileged individuals.

Another important aspect is that both used divide and rule tactics, purposely neglecting the improvement of the local work force through education. Instead, they privileged an ethnic or social group over the others, bringing the increase of inequality and the creation of a small-sized, westernised local elite (Gordon, 2007).

I, therefore, outline two major causes in the failure of African states: The colonial predatory state structures that, as I have shown, have been inherited and left unaltered by the African governments and the unaccountable African elite, who have succeeded the European administrators after independence.

Used to an unfair system of rule and confronted by the attractive possibilities of private accumulation offered by the state, the new rulers have not resisted the temptation of “privatising” the state for their own means, continuing a tradition of plunder and injustice.
To sum it up, the causes of Africa’s failed states must be researched within those states. External relations of dependency and neocolonialism have aggravated their situation.

Mr Muhoozi is the chief executive director,
Ambrosoli Consult Uganda Limited
[email protected]