14.3: Assessing Value

As is the case in today’s liberal democratic states, changes of methods in governance are rarely made without some form of coercion or even conflict, but to summarily dismiss such efforts as colonial, as many Africanists are inclined to do, is not especially helpful. In the interest of having a frank discussion on local governance, it must also be said that there remains among many observers of African politics the idealization of pre-existing political norms and institutions, in much the same way as French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau is said to have spoken of the ‘noble savage’ that could do no wrong. ^[2] According to these scholars, all that was indigenous prior to the arrival of the colonizer was best and the ongoing encounter with the outside world has been only detrimental – akin to the unfortunate introduction of Original Sin to Adam and Eve or to the Christian doctrine of the Fall of Man (e.g. Asante, 2007). The fact is that many well known Western Africanists are direct beneficiaries of a history of colonial governance, though they scarcely give the issue thought. The problem, in their minds, is simply ‘over there’ in Africa and their colonial legacy.

Africanists, such as Bernard Lugan, who have attempted to suggest that some advances in governance were made during the colonial era, have been dubbed conservative révisionnistes or worse (Lugan, 2004). But even the most critical of the colonial era should agree that local governance and human security have declined in vast regions of sub-Saharan Africa since the 1960s wave of independence movements – notably in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) where over 5 million souls have been lost in just a few years in a complex protracted war (Prunier, 2009; Stearns, 2011). Critics like Adam Hochschild and Michela Wrong have correctly noted that the circumstances at independence were far from adequate: in the entire Congolese state there were fewer than thirty African university graduates and only three Congolese were employed in the five thousand management level positions in civil service (Hochschild, 1998, p. 301; Wrong, 2002). Yet all agree that the infrastructural and other public service gains that might have been achieved within the Belgian Congo during the colonial period deteriorated over the many decades that followed independence. That is, in the literature on the history of the DRC there is an acknowledgment of colonial infrastructural gains, though the focus is generally on colonial violence and post-independence decline.

Michela Wrong, for example, highlights the desperate efforts of all citizens to just get by with virtually no income in former Zaire: “knowing how to ‘se débrouiller,’” she tells us, “that untranslatable French concept meaning to fend for oneself, to cope against all odds, to manage somehow…” became crucial to survival. She continues:

For public servants, juggling two jobs – the one that involved sitting in a dimly lit office reading newspapers and the real one that started at noon and, hopefully, brought in some real money – became the norm. The skill was finding a Darwinian niche in the ecosystem, the tiny competitive edge that meant one had something to sell, a means of survival in a ruthless world… (Wrong ,2002, p. 152)

Throughout the Cold War period this entailed the use and abuse of public assets and, as Wrong describes, any leverage that a government job might provide. With Cold War patronage, the State became a resource to latch onto if one was lucky enough to do so though the overall trajectory was of state decline.

The post-Cold War period has now challenged that previously entrenched norm of survival. Wrong describes the decline in terms of a gradual withdrawal from all formal sector jobs:

In 1955 nearly 40 per cent of the active population worked in the formal sector. By the 1990s, this had shrunk to 5 per cent and the official figures for per capita income had fallen to a laughable – and obviously impossible – $120 a year .(Wrong, 2002, p. 152)

According to the Gérard Prunier, author of Africa’s World War, the issues at independence were much like the adage so often attributed to Antonio Gramsci: the Old was dead but the New was not yet born – “a dangerous moment indeed” (Prunier, 2009, p. xxx). Whatever the exact reasons – Cold War patronage, fluctuations of the global economy, etc – the gains of infrastructural development and local governance that took place during the colonial era were gradual and surely lost. Regaining an interest in the redevelopment of these areas is, upon reflection, eminently important to the realization of human security. Since the end of the colonial era these issues have been apparently lost in the overly optimistic first wave (1960s; second wave 1990s), and in today’s pessimistic literature of the postcolonial left and the corrupt-leadership-focused right.

Moreover, in policy circles the process of strengthening local government institutions in sub-Saharan African contexts has been viewed, largely within the context of internal ‘decentralization policies,’ as a drain on central government resources and power – but it need not be so. Proponents of such zero-sum views assume that the functioning of local governments takes place at the expense of central government authority and control. Indeed, the fact that Africa’s central government leaders have tended to hold onto central government political power is nothing new; what is dramatically different in the post-Cold War context is that external Cold War patronage that tended to support central over local government leadership, is now over. This new environment has already led to highly publicized political reforms, including the aforementioned ‘wave of democracy.’ Yet, as indicated above, most observers of African politics remain focused on central government events.