Contemporary West African States (African Studies)

235 Pages·1990·4.81 MB·English

by  Donal Cruise O'Brien

CONTEMPORARY WEST AFRICAN STATES
AFRICAN STUDIES SERIES 65
GENERAL EDITOR
J. M. Lonsdale, Lecturer in History and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge
ADVISORY EDITORS
J. D. Y. Peel, Professor of Anthropology and Sociology, with special reference to
Africa, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
John Sender, Lecturer in Economics, School of Oriental and African Studies,
University of London
PUBLISHED IN COLLABORATION WITH
THE AFRICAN STUDIES CENTRE, CAMBRIDGE
For other titles in this series see page 217
CONTEMPORARY
WEST AFRICAN
STATES
EDITED BY
DONALB. CRUISE O'BRIEN
Professor in Politics with reference to Africa,
University of London
JOHN DUNN
Fellow of King's College and
Professor of Political Theory in the University of Cambridge
and
RICHARD RATHBONE
Chairman, Centre for African Studies,
University of London
CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1RP
40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011^211, USA
10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Victoria 3166, Australia
© Cambridge University Press 1989
First published 1989
Reprinted 1991
British Library cataloguing in publication data
Contemporary West African states - (African
studies series; 65)
1. West Africa. Social conditions
I. Cruise O'Brien, Donal B. (Donal Brian II.
Dunn, John III. Rathbone, Richard IV. Series - 966)
Library of Congress cataloguing in publication data
applied for
ISBN 0 521 36366 7 hardback
ISBN 0 521 36893 6 paperback
Transferred to digital printing 2004
Contents
List of contributors page vi
Preface vii
1 Introduction Donal B. Cruise O'Brien and Richard Rathbone 1
2 Burkina Faso: Rene Otayek 13
Between feeble state and total state, the swing continues
3 Cameroon Jean-Francois Bay art 31
4 Chad: Robert Buijtenhuijs 49
The narrow escape of an African state, 1965-1987
5 Cote d'lvoire: Yves A. Faure 59
Analysing the crisis
6 Ghana: Richard Jeffries 75
The political economy of personal rule
7 Liberia Christopher Clapham 99
8 Nigeria: Shehu Othman 113
Power for profit - class, corporatism, and factionalism in the military
9 Senegal Christian Coulon and
Donal B. Cruise O'Brien 145
10 Sierra Leone: FredM. Hayward 165
State consolidation, fragmentation and decay
11 Conclusion John Dunn 181
Notes 193
Index 217
Contributors
Jean-Francois Bayart, Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, Paris
Robert Buijtenhuijs, Afrika Studiecentrum, Leiden
Christopher Clapham, Department of Politics, University of Lancaster
Christian Coulon, Centre d'Etude d'Afrique Noire, Universite de Bordeaux I
Donal B. Cruise O'Brien, Department of Economic and Political Studies, School
of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
John Dunn, King's College, Cambridge
Yves A. Faure, Centre d'Etude d'Afrique Noire, Universite de Bordeaux I
Fred M. Hay ward, Department of Political Science, University of Wisconsin,
Madison
Richard Jeffries, Department of Economic and Political Studies, School of
Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Rene Otayek, Centre d'Etude d'Afrique Noire, Universite de Bordeaux I
Shehu Othman, St Anthony's College, Oxford
Richard Rathbone, Centre for African Studies, University of London
VI
Preface
The authors of these studies have wished both to review the significant
changes which have taken place in the region in the ten years that have
followed the publication of West African States. Failure and Promise (John
Dunn, ed., Cambridge University Press, 1978) and to assess the shifts that
have taken place in the scholarly analysis of these states over the same
period. The studies have emerged from a small conference held at the School
of Oriental and African Studies in June 1987, where scholars were invited to
contribute papers on particular countries of the region. Contributors were
asked to use narrative as the foundation of their analysis, so that the volume
might be a useful text book as well as a contribution to a review of the nature
of the state and political processes in Africa.
A decade's political change in the region is marked in one way by the
inclusion of new areas of interest: the chapters on Chad, Burkina Faso and
Cameroon are intended to match the changing concerns in the field with data
on areas untouched in the previous volume. Both the introduction and the
conclusion suggest the salient thematic shifts: these include the remarkable
retreat of dependency theory and Marxian analysis and the rise of free-
market theorising on the part both of governments and of scholars. The
selection of Francophone scholars is a recognition that some of the best new
political analysis for the region has been emerging in French, produced by
the new scholarly generation which surrounds the journal, Politique africaine.
The inclusion below of some of this French writing in translation will, we
hope, serve to introduce readers to a major body of scholarship which has
been far too often ignored on this side of the Channel.
The editors wish to recognise their many debts in the production of this
volume. The Nuffield Foundation was generous in its support for the 1987
conference, and we would like to thank both Patricia Thomas and the
Nuffield Trustees. We are no less grateful for the financial assistance of the
Research Committee of the School of Oriental and African Studies and for
the help and guidance of its secretary, Martin Daly. Above all we are grateful
to our colleagues for sharing their ideas so openly and amicably. In addition
to the authors we would like to thank Patrick Chabal, Naomi Chazan,
Stephen Ellis, Mike Hodd, Richard Joseph, Wyatt McGaffey, Sam
Preface
Nolutshungu, John Paden, Hillard Pouncey and Kaye Whiteman for major
contributions to the conference proceedings. Chris Gray not only helped
with the conference organisation but also with the translation work. Marion
Swiny, secretary of the London Centre of African Studies, was as always
both benign and efficient in overseeing our proceedings. We are also grateful
to Maryjayne Hillman for coping with a mountain of re-typing, and to
Stephen Schartz for compiling the index. Lastly we were encouraged by
Cambridge University Press's Liz Wetton whose contribution to African
studies at the Press has been of enormous assistance to the field. And of
course we would insist that none of those who have helped us be blamed for
our mistakes.
vm
1
Introduction
DONAL B. CRUISE O'BRIEN AND RICHARD
RATHBONE
The imperfections and limitations of West African states have been much
remarked by outside observers over the period of close on three decades since
independence, while another topic, that of the very survival of the state, has
slowly emerged. It should of course be admitted that the critical comments
of journalists or academics on the subjects of official corruption, poor
governmental performance, the prevalence of unregulated social conflict or
institutional decay are in broad terms often justified. But such critical
commentary is properly to be set against the important fact that these states
without exception have maintained themselves in being. The states of West
Africa have, for example, escaped the more drastic forms of political
disintegration apparent in Uganda or Sudan, in Zaire or in Mozambique.
In the process of surviving, the West African states may have more or less
subtly altered in character as their rulers and citizens have modified their
political expectations, discarding the innocent hopes of the early years of
independence, but the state as political unit appears to rest on a significant
measure of popular acceptance. The state has in general scarcely been
challenged with any resolution, in principle a surprising fact in the case of
such an allegedly artificial political entity, the creation of European colonial
rule. The case of Biafra remains the outstanding exception in this regard, for
outside of Nigeria it is the absence of concerted challenge to the state which
is remarkable. We would infer from this absence of challenge a (perhaps
provisional) popular acceptance of the state, latent if you will, but an
acceptance which has its unarticulated logic: this is, that the discernible
future possibilities, in the absence of the state, are very much worse than the
flawed reality of the present.
Looking into the political future in the event of a collapse of the post-
colonial state, the outside observer may consider the consequences of a
possible reconstitution of traditional political entities - the Asante con-
federacy perhaps, or the Sokoto caliphate. Such reconstitutions could only
be achieved at the price of a more or less prolonged period of war. From such
a period of warfare, furthermore, there would be no certain victors: the
short-run certainty would be of institutional fragmentation and social
conflict, haunted by Hobbes' nightmare vision of the war of all against all.
Donal B. Cruise O'Brien and Richard Rathbone
The present post-colonial peace has in general rested on the notion of a
religiously neutral or secular state, this compromise being increasingly
threatened by Islamic militancy in many West African states; and on the
ascendancy of European languages as languages of state, this compromise
being as yet little challenged by the advocates of African languages (which
languages to recognise?). The post-colonial peace may be worth preserving
in the form of these communal compromises, at least pending the emergence
of viable political alternatives.
The states examined in this volume have a less and less valid claim to the
label 'new states'. The symposium which drew our contributors together met
over thirty years after Ghana became independent: none of the other states
exactly exhibits the bloom of youth. Apologists and analysts sound less and
less plausible when they propose inexperience or the malign colonial heritage
as excuses for incompetence or failure. These states have, then, reached
maturity. Each has an adult generation which grew up in a sunlight unshaded
by the Tricolore or the Union Jack. Each state is manned by a large, some
would say too large, body of professional, expert administrators whose
careers have been, with a declining number of exceptions, those of civil
servants trained in the management of sovereign states. Each state's armed
forces, educational and medical services, industries large and small are
directed and manned by Africans whose expertise and experience are
considerable. Trial and error over time have allowed them to preserve those
elements of colonial practice they admire, to reform or abandon those they
deplore, and to innovate where appropriate or necessary. Similarly in the
political arena the vast majority of actors have cut their teeth in the post-
nationalist era. The choice of methods of operation and strategic decisions
are, like managerial decisions anywhere, informed by an international
context, but they are ultimately arrived at locally and independently.
This volume differs from its predecessor not least because those who care
about and study these states and their inhabitants come to their analysis
shorn of the expectations that are inherent in 'newness'. West African states
can and must be analysed like any other regional cluster of states. They must
then be examined without the essential paternalism that inheres in the
terminology of novelty. But, if this 'coming of age' is, as we would argue, a
set of discernible and concrete phenomena, it has been accompanied by a
remarkable shift in the ideas which inform analysis. In the ten years which
separate the initial volume from this, its successor, analysts and politicians
alike have experienced not only a rapidly changing world but also rapidly
changing ideas about that world.
In those ten years the material basis for many of the apparently established
truths about the post-1945 world has changed radically. In the midst of these
processes, optimism appears to have died. Liberal democratic thought has
been forced to abandon much of its- Keynesian underpinning and has
adopted at least some of the monetarist reasoning of the Right. Socialist
theories have had to be recast in the light of the acknowledged failure of