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By the mid-1960s, then, a more skeptical mood concerning African prospects took hold. Three African giant states were torn by civil conflict. Congo-Kinshasa, after an apparent recovery from 1961 to 1963, descended into a wave of rebellion affecting a third of the country in 1964–65.49 Nigeria was torn by a bitter civil war from 1967 to 1970, when the Igbo-dominated Eastern Region tried unsuccessfully to secede.50 The discontents of the southern provinces of Sudan over their marginalization were congealing into a broadening separatist insurgency.51 Single-party systems that escaped military intervention hardened into autocracies. Though there was still no sign of generalized economic crisis, the anticipated “takeoff” was nowhere visible. The term “Afropessimism” had not yet been coined and in any case would have been too strong to capture the sense of unease creeping into the prognosis for African development. But the sunny optimism of 1960 was gone.
PHASE 3: STATE EXPANSION
However, by the late 1960s a number of positive developments opened a second cycle of more modulated hopefulness. The fires of civil war in Sudan, Congo-Kinshasa, and Nigeria were not only extinguished but an era of high hope held sway in this pivotal trio of megastates; indeed in retrospect all three enjoyed a moment of great expectations that was never again matched. The “new regime” of Mobutu Sese Seko that seized power in November 1965 in Congo-Kinshasa had remarkable accomplishments to its credit in its early years. The remnants of the rebellions were eliminated, and most of the political elite rallied to the regime. Mobutu's project of reinventing the vast country as a centralized, unitary nation-state commanded broad support and initially seemed to succeed. A successful International Monetary Fund (IMF) program in 1967 had eliminated inflation and created a strong currency. Grandiose projects such as the giant Inga dam and Inga-Katanga power line were launched, and foreign-financed projects proliferated: a steel mill and automobile assembly plant were built and copper expansion and oil production went into high gear. Mobutu felt secure enough in 1973 to spend 150 days out of the country, visiting twenty-six countries. A once-critical Belgian journal marveled at the Mobutu-led resurrection: “Both in the domestic field and in the pan-African and international arenas, General Mobutu exhibits an extraordinary energy and dynamic activity, which leaves one wondering what its outer limits might be."52
In Nigeria, the bitter civil war pitting the secessionist Biafra southeastern region against the federal government lasted thirty-one months, ending when Nigerian army forces overran the last separatist redoubt in January 1970. Starvation and hostilities took a heavy toll during the war itself, with more than a million fatalities in the Igbo regions.53 The active Biafran information services gave dire warnings of a likely genocide if Nigeria succeeded in defeating the secession. However, Nigerian ruler Yakubu Gowon chose the path of reconciliation. Those who fomented and led the separatist attempt were not punished, nor was any vengeance wreaked on the Igbo who had supported the Biafra venture. Igbo bureaucrats and officers who had deserted the federal side to join the secession were given the opportunity to reintegrate into the Nigerian civil service and military. Igbo elites could not recover the leading position they once held in the national bureaucracy, but the ethos of reconciliation was remarkably effective. The oil fields discovered just before independence began to yield a large revenue bonanza following the civil war, permitting a moment of dramatic increase in infrastructure investment and educational expansion. Good feeling and confidence in consolidated nationhood marked the Nigeria of the early 1970s.
In Sudan, with the active mediation of Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, a 1972 accord between the Khartoum regime of Jaafar Nimeiri and southern rebels promised to bring at last a peaceful resolution to long-simmering rebellion in the southern region, whose antecedents dated from before the 1956 independence. The north appeared to abandon its earlier insistence on Arab-Islamic culture and religion as the privileged basis for national unity, accepting a southern regional government with some autonomy, integration of Anya-nya rebels into the national army, and southern region control over army units garrisoning the south. Southern scholar-diplomat Francis Deng notes a striking surge of attachment to a united Sudan in the south following the settlement: “No observer,” he writes, “could fail to see a genuine feeling of solidarity with the North under the leadership of Nimeiri, and a desire for national unity.” Nimeiri himself underlined the broader African significance of the reunification: “Divergence in cultures and origins is a common factor in all African countries.... Our success in settling this problem is a victory for our continent. It will give them new hope and new belief in national unity despite cultural and other differences."54
The shock of the growing military intervention in politics that served the final deflator of independence moment optimism concerning new African states was by the late 1960s ironically inverted into a symbol of hope. A legend was spun by an array of influential analysts presenting the military as uniquely suited by its institutional properties to serve as instrument of modernity. Armies, ran the argument, embody the qualities of hierarchy and discipline required for effective developmental leadership. As armed servants of the nation, they have a unique vocation to nurture unity. Meritocracy is embedded in the ethos of the military, ensuring selection mechanisms that guarantee leadership qualities at the summit.55 Samuel Huntington provided a compelling gloss for these theses with the broader argument that the crucial vector for development was authority.56 The vogue of the military as privileged developmental agent did not encounter systematic challenge until the Samuel Decalo monograph on military rulers in 1976.57
As African countries found themselves buoyed by a sense of renewed self-confidence and a sharpened economic nationalism, by the end of the 1960s a wave of nationalizations and indigenization measures swept the continent. In 1968, the Algerian state took over marketing of gas and oil products, and sixty-six of the three hundred foreign firms then operating in Algeria; the total takeover of the oil sector was completed in 1971.58 Congo-Kinshasa nationalized its giant copper company in 1969, and Zambia followed suit the same year by taking 51% control of its copper mines. Mobutu then raised the ante in November 1973, suddenly announcing the virtual confiscation of a huge array of foreign-owned commercial and agricultural enterprises for redistribution by the state to politically favored Congolese.59 In Nigeria, the Second National Development Plan in 1970 struck a newly assertive economic nationalist tone: “It is vital, therefore, for Government to acquire and control on behalf of the Nigerian society the greater proportion of the productive assets of the country. To this end, the Government will seek to acquire, by law if necessary, equity participation in a number of strategic industries that will be specified from time to time."60
Far-reaching indigenization decrees of 1972 and 1977 gave substance to this declaration of intentions. President Milton Obote in Uganda proclaimed a “move to the Left” in 1969, proclaiming an intent to take a 60% state equity in the eight-four leading foreign firms; his successor, Idi Amin, took the seizure of foreign assets a giant step further in 1972 with the sudden expulsion of Asians who controlled much of the commercial sector. The 1967 Arusha Declaration in Tanzania proclaimed a more socialist course; by the mid-1970s, then Tanzanian economic advisor Reginald Green noted with satisfaction that 80% of Tanzania's medium- and large-scale economic activity lay in the public sector, a higher figure than for the former Eastern Europe Soviet bloc states at a comparable time after imposition of Stalinist socialism.61 Parastatalization of much of the economy swept Africa during these years.
Such measures drew sustenance from a more radical moment in the ebb and flow of ideological currents in Africa and the third world more broadly. Dependency theory, which originated in Latin America, migrated across the Atlantic to Africa, and had a major intellectual impact, not least among the political leadership. Powerful texts translated the premise of a relentlessly extractive Western capitalism draining resources from the underdeveloped world to the African context; Dakar-based Egyptian M
arxist Samir Amin and the late Guyanese scholar Walter Rodney were especially influential.62 Socialism as a doctrine of African development had held rhetorical sway in the first postcolonial moment but often had had only modest policy impact. A second wave of socialist orientation now washed over Africa, much more influenced by “scientific socialism” of Marxist derivation; a number of states declared Marxism-Leninism to be regime ideology.63 “Third worldism” was in full intellectual flower, and a summons to a “New International Economic Order” reverberated in international forums. The stunning effectiveness of the 1973 Arab oil embargo on the West fostered a momentary sense of possible empowerment.
Notwithstanding the leftward shift in ideological discourse, for a brief period in the early 1970s the major international lending agencies were keen to lend to African states, particularly those with major resources as implicit collateral. Western economies were stagnant, and large Eurodollar surpluses swashed around in the books of the biggest banks. African debt was still small, and thus a number of giant projects such as the Inga-Katanga dam and power line in Congo-Kinshasa could find finance.
A final factor contributing to a sense of African momentum was the 1974 collapse of the Portuguese dictatorship, opening the door to swift independence for the five Portuguese colonies (Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and Sao Tome and Principe). Suddenly the stalled campaign for the liberation of southern Africa took on new life, as the Zimbabwe and Namibia guerrilla armies were presented with new open frontiers. Even the ultimate redoubt of white racial domination, South Africa, suddenly lost its large buffer zone; its rulers began to talk of an impending “total Communist onslaught” on the apartheid state. At the other end of the continent, the collapse of the millennial imperial order in Ethiopia and its replacement by a radical socialist regime opened new vistas of African transformation.
The international context perhaps impinged less on African evolution during this phase than it had in earlier phases, at least until the Angolan civil war that erupted in 1975 created a new terrain of direct cold war confrontation. The Vietnam War was winding down, the Sino-Soviet bloc had split, and China, in the turmoil of the cultural revolution, mostly withdrew from Africa, save for the Tanzania-Zambia railway project. The Soviet Union was entering what was retrospectively known as the Leonid Brezhnev “era of stagnation,” and the United States was convulsed with Watergate.
PHASE 4: DECLINE AND STATE CRISIS
By the end of the 1970s, the African mood pendulum was swinging back toward its pessimistic pole. A sense of impasse took hold on multiple fronts: economic, political, institutional. The term “state crisis” (not yet “state failure") began to enter the analytical vocabulary, initially with reference only to the most spectacular cases. I recall first invoking this phrase in a paper presented at a 1977 conference, to some skepticism, and in a 1978 article concerning Congo-Kinshasa in Foreign Affairs. However, I applied the term only to what seemed some egregious cases at that moment (Uganda and Ghana, in addition to Congo).64
Across the continent single-party autocracy or military rule had degenerated into personal rule, a phenomenon given early recognition by Robert Jackson and Carl Rosberg. “Personal rule,” they suggested, “is a system of relations linking rulers not with the ‘public’ or even with the ruled (at least not directly), but with patrons, associates, clients, supporters, and rivals who constitute the ‘system'. ... The fact that it is ultimately dependent upon persons rather than institutions is its ultimate vulnerability."65 Soon this flowered into the concept of “neopatrimonialism” as the defining attribute of African regimes. The notion of patrimonialism, borrowed from Max Weber, was first deployed in 1972 by Jean-Claude Willame to characterize the Mobutu regime in Congo-Kinshasa.66 Its reformulation and systematization as “neopatrimonialism” was especially shaped by Jean-François Médard as life presidency by a “big man."67
Corruption on a grand scale became a defining feature of the African state. One of its major practitioners, Congo-Kinshasa president Mobutu declared in a 1977 address to a party congress that every encounter with the state was subject to an “invisible tax": “In a word, everything is for sale, anything can be bought in our country. And in this flow, he who holds the slightest cover of public authority uses it illegally to acquire money, goods, prestige or to avoid all kinds of obligations."68
Although the term “kleptocracy” was coined by Stanislav Andreski in 1968 to characterize a system of government in which “the use of public office for private enrichment is the normal and accepted practice,” in the first postcolonial cycle its scale was still modest and often received indulgent academic treatment as mere machine politics that lubricated the wheels of government.69 In 2002, Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo told an OAU meeting that $140 billion was secretly exported annually by African rulers and leading politicians, a figure frequently invoked since that time by international financial institutions and others.70
Another measure of a deepening infirmity of the postcolonial state was the emergence in the later 1970s of a widespread debt crisis. Until 1970, African external debt was negligible. The lending conduits were wide open for a few years, as international banks suddenly flush with Eurodollars and petrodollars sought to recycle their holdings. By 1980, African external debt neared $300 billion, and a number of countries were in acute distress. At this untimely moment, a sea change took place in ascendant global economic ideology with a resurrection of neoclassical doctrines. Beset by unpayable debts and negative trends in international primary commodity markets and shunned by foreign capital, African states had little choice but to accept the stringent market-oriented conditions of the “structural adjustment programs” (SAPs) whose contours were first delineated in the 1981 World Bank Berg Report.71 SAPs were made more irresistible by the Soviet decision by the early 1980s to move away from costly African commitments. State socialism as an alternative pathway to development progressively lost its élan, as the stagnation of the Soviet bloc became more evident. The dictates of the market economy became ineluctable.
Through the 1980s, these painful therapies fell well short of delivering the promised relief. Negative growth rates had appeared in a number of countries by the later 1970s; through the 1980s, across the continent declining per capital gross domestic product (GDP) was the norm. For the sub-Saharan countries, the World Bank reported an average annual negative growth rate of 2.8% from 1980 to 1987.72 The 1979 OAU Summit took official cognizance of the developmental impasse, receiving a report that offered the sobering conclusion that “Africa ... is unable to point to any significant growth rate or satisfactory index of general well-being.” The then director of the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), Adebayo Adedeji, captured the widespread mood of disappointment in asking sadly, “How had we come to this sorry state of affairs in the post-independence years which seemed at the beginning to have held so much promise?"73
Analysts began to speak of state decline as a widespread African pathology.74 Naomi Chazan, in an influential 1982 monograph examining Ghana at the deepest moment of existential crisis, concluded: “By the early 1980s it was apparent that Ghana had forfeited its elementary ability to maintain internal or external order and to hold sway over its population. Although its existence as a de jure political entity on the international scene was unquestionable, these outward manifestations did raise doubts as to its de facto viability. . . . Indeed, some kind of disengagement from the state was taking place[,] . . . an emotional, economic, social, and political detachment from the state element."75 Others went further and raiseed questions as to the empirical reality of the weakened African states. Robert Jackson and Carl Rosberg suggested that the postcolonial state was artificially sustained by the international system, which accorded African polities a juridical sovereignty that served as shield concealing their lack of empirical “stateness.” In this view, African nations were mere “quasi states."76
By the late 1980s, the postcolonial state was the target of scornful c
riticism. Leading African novelists such as Sony Lebou Tansi and Ayei Kwei Armeh portrayed the state as a predator. A former senior official of the Bank of Ghana, Jonathan Frimpont-Ansah, published an insider analysis of government operations terming his erstwhile employer as a “vampire state."77 The metamorphosis of the state from privileged agency of development to predator preying on civil society was deeply anchored in the public mind by the end of the 1980s.
PHASE 5: DEMOCRATIZATION WAVE
At the very moment when Afropessimism was at its darkest, a new morning of hope and expectation was about to dawn. The miracle of the marketplace touted by the “Washington Consensus” as therapy for state crisis proved wanting; redemption required a profound reworking of the political realm, a virtual reinvention of the state. Through an extraordinary confluence of events, such an outcome came within the realm of possibility. A veritable tsunami of democratization swept over Africa at the end of the 1980s, the final act in what Samuel Huntington memorably labeled the “third wave” of democracy that opened with the collapse of dictatorships in Greece and Iberia in the mid-1970s and then swept through Latin America and parts of Asia in the 1980s before washing up in Africa.78