adminCetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena
Intellectuals and politicians of the Global South have learnt it the very hard way that political decolonisation, that is the victory of nationalist struggles against colonial administrations, was not exactly liberation. As large and as proud a titanic figure like Ali Mazrui had to admit his own euphoria and naiveté about African decolonisation and liberation.
Complete decolonisation and true liberation, Mazrui noted after his belated loss of political virginity, is going to only arrive on the day the colonial state and its enduring structures in Africa and the entire Global South are demolished. In that logic, the first failure of the state in Africa and the whole Global South is that it is a colonial state in the very first place, it was created and brought not for the good but for the colonisation of the Global South.
After political decolonisation, that is the removal of colonial administrations, the coming to power of the black elite and the arrival of new colourful flags and melodious anthems, the state in Africa became, in the view of Mazrui, a kind of refugee in the world that relies on charity and handouts in form of donor support and political advice from the West. Refugees as displaced people and the state in Africa as a disabled institution and a problematic relic of colonialism share a lot of similarities in the way Mazrui came to understand the African condition. The African state or the state in Africa can then, pursuant to Mazrui’s understanding, be noted as a refugee institution that is located but not exactly at home in Africa as much as it is marginalised and demonised in the entire globe.
What then is state failure in Africa? Is it the failure of an institution that is a colonial relic to survive the African historical and political climate or the failure of Africans to adapt a borrowed institution, one that was imposed on them, to the African political weather and social realities? Is there something in the political temperature of Africa that is anti-state or something in the nature of the state that cannot breathe in Africa? Important to me for now is the point that the first failure and disability of the state in Africa is its colonial nature and imperial origins, the fact that it bears an ugly birthmark of coloniality which increasingly becomes its death mark as well, throughout its life in Africa the state is failed and haunted by its coloniality.
In Africa the state was born already with seeds of its failure and death.
African states of failure
Such African scholars as the Ghanaian political economist Jonathan H Frimpong-Ansah achieved intellectual celebrity status in 1991 when he published a treatise on “the vampires state in Africa” which derided the poverty of economic thought by Africans in Ghana and elsewhere. Africans get blamed for political and economic failures of the states in Africa. In a way they are accused of failing to emulate the states in the West or of failing to learn good lessons from their former colonisers. American intellectual tourists of Africa such as Robert I Rotberg have achieved fame and fortune thinking and writing of failed states in Africa and their problem to the world and threats to international security and global happiness. Others write of predator states, states which eat their own economies and polities, and impoverish their people.
There is a flourish of literature on client states that are simply companies whose job is to commit the sins of selling their natural resources and unprocessed raw materials of their countries to western countries at silly prices, auctioning their own people and condemning them to poverty. Every government in Africa has at one point or another talked of or pretended to be a developmental state that champions state-led developmentalist economic and political priorities. All these names and descriptions of the state in Africa conceal and do not reveal that in essence the state in Africa is by its genealogies and provenances a monster state that maintains, produces and reproduces coloniality. It is through the states, the states of failure, in the Global South that the capitalist, modern and colonial world system keeps its many-fingered octopul grip on the countries. The state is by its origins and purposes in perpetual states of political and economic failure in Africa, it is a colonial artefact that was created and instituted to facilitate colonisation and enhance imperialism not develop or civilise the South and for that reason it must be urgently decolonised, or some of its structures and systemic habits abolished.
The failed states
Failed states exist in the Global South. The question is what or who fails them. The African and black political and intellectual elites have done their part as products of colonialism and the colonial system of education to produce and reproduce coloniality in the African states and the states of the Global South at large. Through corruption, bad politics and incompetence the peoples of the South have also worsened the coloniality of the state. By corruption I refer to theft and cozenage that have produced politicians and businesspeople that are richer than their countries in the Global South. Bad politics is such practices as, nepotism, tribalism, regionalism and other favouritisms that sacrifice political and economic performance on the alter of the tyrannical bloodline. Incompetence arises from ignorance and political violence that permits politicians to use fraud and force to remain in power outside the popular will of the masses even if they are not performing politically and economically.
Failed states normally deny their failure and pretend to be successful in their own way. Political denialism, therefore, is one capital quality of failed states. They are failed states that deny the bad odour of their armpits. States that continue dreaming of their successes and remain in bed dreaming, instead of crafting policies and inaugurating programmes that will bring success, until their dreams become true nightmares, and their countries end up in civil wars and turmoil. These are failed states by definition.
Failure and fragility of states
Ever the brave intellectual and political risk-taker, Ali Mazrui hazarded six ways of measuring state fragility and ultimately failure. Western scholars such as Rotberg have done their own matrices of measuring state fragility and failure in the Global South. Those matrices, in the main, are dubious and suspicious as they conceal the coloniality of the origins and purposes of the state in the first place. Without recognising and acknowledging the original sin and foundational crimes of the state, its coloniality and imperiality, one cannot offer a decolonial critique of the state in the Global South. One can only offer racist judgements and one-eyed perspectives of the problem. The ten-eyed Mazrui spelt out what a successful state does as his way of pointing out what a failed and fragile state looks like. In other words, states can be judged by what they are failing to do and not what they are doing, by absences, not presences.
A successful state, in the Mazruian index will first and foremost be a state that has sovereign control of its country as a geographic, economic and political territory. In other words there must be a country in order for there to be a state. One can add that there must be a nation as in a population of subjects and citizens of the state and the country. Nation building is at once state building. Nationless states and stateless nations are failure itself. Secondly, a successful state will have sovereign control of the national resources not that, in the infamous example of Joseph Mobutu, the head of state must be richer than the country but that the state should be a good steward of the national purse. After that, a successful state must have effective and efficient revenue collection mechanisms that allow for fair and just taxations on incomes, goods and services. The successful state will also be able to provide and maintain working and modern up to date infrastructure such as roads, means of communication, railways and other built facilities.
Infrastructural disrepair and decay is a physical symptom of rot in the polity and the economy, and of a really sick nation. For the state to be counted as a success, also, there should be efficient and effective service delivery where descent sanitation facilities, education and healthcare, including social welfare can be afforded to the masses. Finally a successful state will have law and order. Law and order is not only where the law is applied on the population but also where there is no executive lawlessness and political hooliganism of powerful economic and political elites in the land. Successful states have constitutions and courts that work, and that work in justice and in fairness, where powerful people do not enjoy political impunity. Just and fair states can be seen by the protection they offer the weak and the marginal in the land not by the power and prosperity of those that have possession of and proximity to power.
Beyond economicism and politicism
Mistakenly some intellectuals and politicians mistake economic stability and prosperity in any country alone to be a sign of a successful state. Western countries in particular can support a tyrannical regime in the Global South that keeps business thriving in the country and profits are flowing, even if the masses are oppressed. Capitalism can sit well with tyranny and despotism. That constitutes what I call Economicism and Businessism, the prioritisation of economic and business fundamentals at the expense of human happiness, justice and peace. Political stability alone, also, does not guarantee success of the state. Some of the world’s most venal tyrants have been men that have kept their countries, through brute force and fraud, stable. Political stability is not necessarily peace; it may mean the silence of a clobbered and terrified population, and silence is not peace by any measure. I call the enforcement of political stability at the expense of justice, peace and democracy a crime of Politicism, elevating politics, power and control above other human needs. State success demands more than just Economicism and Politicism, human needs and interests of the national population should be at the centre of a successful state project in the Global South. To decolonise the state and to fight for liberation entails eradicating coloniality and dealing with the way in which it is variedly reproduced in the Global South by the political and economic elite.
– Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Gaborone, Botswana: [email protected].
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