Governance in Africa: more than political and economic ‘management’

When assessing the state of governance in Africa we often refer to World Bank reports and IMF economic evaluations (‘Article IV Consultations’). But it is also of prime importance to listen to African voices about the political, legal and economic system they live under.

Mo Ibrahim
Since many years the Mo Ibrahim Foundation tries to be one of these voices, although not one ‘from the masses’. Mo Ibrahim, the Sudanese pioneer entrepreneur in telecom, has a great interest in improving overall governance in Africa, and his Foundation assesses it in its annual indexes and reports, based on its own database. It also awards a prize to notable African leaders showing ‘good governance’ in person and/or by political and legal reforms. The Foundation  “...defines governance as the provision of the political, social and economic public goods and services that every citizen has the right to expect from their state, and that a state has the responsibility to deliver to its citizens”, measured in four domains: safety & rule of law, participation & human rights, sustainable economic opportunity, and human development.

How to measure governance?
Researchers can learn much from the effort and try to further explore the multiple aspects of governance and its ‘successes’ or ‘failures’ via empirical research and comparison. One can thereby reveal some paradoxes and puzzles, especially by putting findings on ‘governance’ in a wider perspective. Apart from who defines governance, how is it measured? The above Ibrahim Index of African Governance (IIAG) method is one, although it (too much) emphasizes the state’s role in ‘providing’ governance. But governance is more than that. It is not merely a question of technocratic application of measurable criteria, as virtually all donor institutions - notably World Bank-like parties - like to think. It is also an issue of public culture, respect for civic rights and duties, cultural freedom and a shared societal ethos: these are difficult to ‘measure’.

Unacceptable repression
Is a ‘good score’ on the governance indexes such as Mo Ibrahim’s IIAG, a good indicator of well-being, social stability, or overall human development? The IIAG criteria are necessary but not sufficient. How can a country like Rwanda, with a quite worrying and in fact unacceptable record of repression and subjection of its people, be in the high-score category on governance? Is Cameroon, which also has shown ‘stability’ and economic growth over the last years due to rising oil revenues, ‘doing well’? If we listen to the country’s youth demonstrators and public artists like Valséro (see this, this and this video) we would say no: we rather see stagnation and decline. Is Ethiopia doing OK after more than a decade of significant 8-10% annual GDP growth and reduction of the number of people below the ‘poverty line’? In some ways yes; but seeing the massive (youth) protests in the last two years until today, as well as the frequent ‘ethnic clashes’, e.g. between Somali and Oromo in late 2017 (read this article and this article), perhaps something is amiss.

Courageous activists
In many parts of Africa, despite social dynamics and growth, there is insecurity, repression, and continued misery for large masses of unemployed, neglected youngsters, or displaced people. And courageous journalists, activists, artists and local NGOs try to develop their societies in other respects than only economic. The protests in Ethiopia were organised by youngsters and by people affected by land reallocation or expropriation for national projects and foreign firms, and they felt they had lost their rights and received too little compensation. Others felt culturally or ‘ethnically’ marginalized. According to observers, however, most of the protests were against the stifling of democratic and electoral rights.

Donors cling to political ‘stability’
One could say that despite high national GDP growth, in some countries, e.g. Ethiopia or Angola or Equatorial Guinea, patterns of state governance are not ‘inclusive’, to use today’s buzzword, and repress people clamoring for rights and access to land or jobs or education. But in view of the growth figures, the indexers and donors still find economic figures and apparent political ‘stability’ of prime importance. To some extent, rightly so; assessing long-term structural changes in the economy and the administration is obviously relevant. In the long run, economic development can have an empowering logic of its own and can contribute to stability and more ‘stakes’ for citizens, at least if the opportunity structures are kept open (that is, an ‘open access order’ instead of a ‘limited access order’, cf. North, Wallis & Weingast’s 2009 book Violence and Social Orders). Economic opportunity can certainly create a beneficial social and cultural dynamics and can contribute to better overall governance. But this mostly depends on the political system and its openness. Governance is not only ‘public management’ of economy and political power.

Female empowerment in Ethiopia
What exactly is its link with economics? In a recent, very interesting seminar at the African Studies Centre Leiden on 15 March 2018, Norwegian researcher Dr Lovise Aalen addressed economics and (female) empowerment in Ethiopia’s budding industrial sector. We could link this to Mo Ibrahim’s two dimensions of ‘sustainable economic opportunity’ and ‘human development’. Ethiopia is a country without an ‘industrial culture’, powerless trade unions and little political impact of the industrial sector. In newly industrializing countries, historically the labour force and the management have quickly asserted a public role and changed the political playing field. In Africa in general (except, of course, South Africa) and in Ethiopia in particular this has not happened yet, but Ethiopia is now accelerating the formation of an industry-based economy, result of a clear developmental state model of governance that aims to encompass the entire economic and political spectrum. In her very focused talk, Lovise Aalen examined the specific hypothesis of whether newly employed women in the emerging factories of Ethiopia - set up under this ambitious industrialization programme - would gradually develop feelings of ‘empowerment’, both domestic and civic-political, as a result of their jobs and their own income. This form of economic empowerment, it was hypothesized, “....may imply a cultural shift towards gender equality and women’s democratic participation”. Lovise indicated that research results refuted this: women with jobs and their own income did not show more markedly political or civic engagement. This was not only due to their lacking enough time (long working hours, household tasks) or to the constraining role of cultural premises related to gender role notions and patriarchy, that is, ‘micro-governance’ in domestic and family settings. Perhaps it was more due to scarce trust in the governance system in place and in the effectiveness of political activity. Ultimately, also in this case, the political margin conditions for citizens to engage in social, civic and political activities appear to limit the formation of civic empowerment notions and wider participation in governance structures. Such lower-level findings do not invalidate indexes such as Mo Ibrahim’s IIAG Index, which remains a great starting point. But they may miss or bypass some less measurable but deeply felt aspects of (good) governance in fragile African contexts.

Social aspects of governance
Discussions on ‘governance’ show it is a complex and multi-level social phenomenon, and perhaps an unwieldy, catch-all term. We should resist definitions of governance as a managerial, technocratic concept that is easily reduced only to issues like political management, stability maintenance and economic GDP growth. ‘Governance’ might be said to occur on all levels of a society (also beyond the state) and has cultural roots and social aspects that shape ‘the political domain’ in a society and its conditions of ex- or inclusion.

Top photo: Ethiopia has been rocked by continuing public protests in the past two years, notably by young people dissatisfied with government policies. Source: http://onlineethiopia.net/2018/03/unstable-ethiopia-wobbles-addis-ababa/.

This post has been written for the ASCL Africanist Blog. Would you like to stay updated on new blog posts? Subscribe here! Would you like to comment? Please do! The ASCL reserves the right to edit, shorten or reject submitted comments.