CIVIL SOCIETY REVISITED

In 1995, I published an article entitled “Africa in the Age of Democratization: The Civic Limitations of Civil Society” in the African Studies Review. The article was an attempt to make sense of the fragile relationship of state and civil society in the alleged period of the continent's “second independence.” I must confess, however, that after writing “Africa in the Age of Democratization,” I remember telling a colleague that this would be my last venture into the subject. I argued that the debate on state and civil society had reached a point of utter saturation and sterility and that no further intellectual advance was possible in the foreseeable future. The debate had all the symptoms of what Albert Hirschman once defined as the debilitating disease of “compulsive and mindless theorizing” (1972: 64). And yet, here I am, prepared to talk on this very topic. Did I change my mind? Was I completely wrong? Did a new paradigm crystallize? Have events of the last four years forced me to reassess my position? I am afraid that the answer to all of these questions is no; so why another excursion into state and civil society? The simple truth is that I could not turn down an invitation from my alma mater specially when it came from Peter Walshe who inspired me into the intellectual vocation.

I will not, however, merely regurgitate the argument contained in “Africa in the Age of Democratization,” even if after re-reading it, I would neither revise its main theses, nor be capable of adding to it anything original. ¹ It is not that the article was so brilliant or path-breaking that revisions and corrections could not improve it; far from it, my main propositions were simple and none too new. At the time of its writing, I was reacting against the dominant and rather naive view that ongoing processes of democratization in Africa were caused by an emerging and consolidating civil society. Civil society was held to represent an arena of private institutions and agents bent on establishing the collective good against an incompetent and predatory state. Civil society was the domain of virtuous and civic associations seeking to overcome a hyper-inflated state dominated by vicious and self-seeking politicians (Bayart, 1986; Carter Center, 1990; Clough, 1992: 110-116; Chazan, 1986; 1992; Clark, 1990; Diamond, 1988; Ford Foundation, 1990; Harbeson, Rotchild, and Chazan, 1994; Hyden, 1990; 1992; Keane, 1988; World Bank, 1989). In this perspective, democratic consolidation required on the one hand supporting the solidification of a vibrant civil society, and on the other the emasculation of the state through the deregulation of the economy and market-induced privatizations.

In contradistinction, I argued that while civil society was a potentially liberating factor in any political calculus, it was not always civil. Civil society could indeed be quite uncivil; it was replete with antinomies. It is true that in periods of acute scarcity and deprivations, it mitigated some of the most deleterious effects of the economic crisis and offered to subordinate classes a fragile refuge from predatory rulers, but it was incapable of generating collective welfare and supplanting the state in the provision of public goods. Embedded in the coercive social discipline of the market, civil society was virtually bound to come to the defense and promotion of private rights and sectional claims. I emphasized the fact that by generally reflecting the lopsided balance of class, ethnic, and sexual power, the organizations of civil society tended inevitably to privilege the privileged and marginalize the marginalized. Civil society's plurality did not entail an automatic and equal representation of the whole polity. It was not the all-encompassing movement of popular empowerment and economic change portrayed in the reveling and exaggerated celebrations of its advocates. In short, civil society was not to be confused with a “civic community.” The latter, as Robert Putnam (1993: 15-88) defines it, is “marked by an active, public- spirited citizenry, by egalitarian political relations, by a social fabric of trust and cooperation.... Citizens in a civic community, though not selfless saints, regard the public domain as more than a battle-ground for pursuing personal interest.” Thus, I argued that civil society was simply not a democratic deus ex machina equalizing life-chances and opportunities; crippled by material limitations and class impairments it constituted at best a very uncertain substitute to what had previously been the corrupt and class-based patronage of a more profligate state.

Moreover, “In Africa in the Age of Democratization,” I suggested that the continent lacked that bourgeois-like “autonomous agentic individual” described by the dominant paradigm as the essential prerequisite in the making of civil society itself (Seligman, 1992: 202-203). For such individual freed from communal, ethnic, and class loyalties was nowhere to be found in Africa. By privileging the imaginary “free, self-determining individuality” of a mythical citizen, the dominant paradigm became an alien construct forced unto an “invented” Africa; an intellectual hallucination of a triumphalist hyper-liberal fin de siŠcle. In my view, African civil society “resonate[d] first with that which [was] not of the state” and symbolized a collective rejection of predatory regimes rather than an embrace of “the individual as an autonomous social actor and as an ethical and moral entity” (Seligman, 1992: 202-203). It had no predetermined effects, it contained both despotic and democratic impulses, and it guaranteed neither the establishment of the collective good, nor the hellish environment of chaotic violence.

I thus suggested that if civil society was to be a useful heuristic tool in deciphering contemporary African history, it had to be conceptualized as the realm of collective solidarities generated by processes of class formation, ethnic “inventions,” and religious “revelations.” As such, it seldom embodied the peaceful harmony of associational pluralism (Lemarchand, 1989; and 1992). In fact, civil society in Africa was conflict-ridden and prone to Hobbesian wars of all against all. It was the prime repository of “invented” ethnic hierarchies, conflicting class visions, patriarchal domination, and irredentist identities fueling deadly conflicts in many areas of the continent.

Four years after making such a somber assessment, I find no reason to change it. If anything, my afterthoughts suggest that I underestimated the evils and contradictions contained in civil society itself. The unmitigated brutality of the Liberian and Sierra Leonean civil wars, the collapse of Somalia into “warlord” violence, the “redictatorializations” of Togo, the Congo-Brazzaville, and Niger, the persisting obscenity of crude power struggles in the Congo, the killing fields of Angola and the Sudan, and the “ethnocides” of Rwanda and Burundi are all very incomplete reminders of the potential ravages of an exploding and uncontrollable civil society. Such savage forms of violence have little to do with some congenital sickness of African culture. To assume otherwise, is to believe that a rational understanding of the continent's political quagmire is impossible and thus that its potential resolution is beyond the reach of current and future generations.

In fact, the acute problems facing Africa on the eve of the new millennium are mainly due to the decomposition of the African state. While I have no time to go into the complex history of this decomposition, suffice it to say that it has clear domestic and international roots (Fatton, 1992). Intense processes of class formation based on the struggle to death between contending blocs to capture the state for the establishment of predatory rule, and the utter dependence of African societies on external constellations of financial and military power, have ultimately contributed to the decay of the African state. In practical terms, this has meant that once dictatorial regimes capitulated in one form or another to the subversive challenges of mobilized civil societies, they gave way to situations of multiple sovereignty in the context of an emasculated state condemned to dig its own grave by foreign induced Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs).

Based on the triumphalism and hegemony of the neo-liberal doctrines of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), SAPs are based on a series of deeply flawed assumptions. They posit that development can be “private-driven,” and that African bourgeoisies can suddenly have a change of heart and become the engine of the take-off, whereas these bourgeoisies have never shown any commitment to sustained productive investment. They posit that privatization leads necessarily to rational economic decisions and that private agents are inherently more virtuous and efficient than public servants, whereas revenues derived from the sale of state assets can be stolen and squandered, and private agents are bent on defending their own selfish interests rather than the collective good. They posit that democratic governance is compatible with the imposition of fiscal austerity in an environment which is already suffering from acute material deprivation, whereas SAPs' huge social costs are unlikely to be tolerated by docile and passive populations. Finally, they posit that trade liberalization will promote more efficient African economies whereas Africa's small industrial base is incapable of withstanding and surviving foreign competition without public protection.

It is not surprising that after close to two decades of structural adjustment, African economies are doing poorly. While the IMF and the World Bank are claiming that the continent is undergoing a strong economic rebound and resurgence, the human condition has shown no improvement. ² According to the UNDP's Human Development Report 1997 poverty has actually increased in Africa. While in 1987 38 percent of the continent's inhabitants barely subsisted below the poverty line set at $1 a day per person, by 1993 the number had climbed to 39 percent. About 220 million Africans are thus living in abject conditions. To be more precise, the UNDP estimates that 249 million people lacked access to safe water and 205 million lacked access to health care. Not surprisingly life was short for many; 124 million Africans are not expected to survive to the age of 40 (UNDP, 1997: 27). Thus, while the precipitous and alarming declines of the 1980s may have halted. there is little to indicate an economic resurgence, let alone a reduction in human misery and decay. At best, on the eve of the new millennium, the continent is showing timid and pale signs of re-establishing the material and social conditions that prevailed at the end of the mid 1970s.

Pale and timid are the signs for according to the UNDP's profile of human poverty index, of the 45 countries in the world classified as having a “low Human development,” 38 are in Sub-Saharan Africa (UNDP, 1997: 55). Finally, the external debt of African countries increased from $328.7 billion in 1995 to $340.5 billion in 1996. Thus, the vision that Africa is now on the move and in the midst of an economic resurgence may well prove to be a “virtual reality” (De Brie, 1997).

As Adam Przeworski has explained, the neo-liberal foundation on which rests SAPs “... is but a conjecture, based on a mixture of evidence, argument from first principles, self-interest and wishful thinking. Moreover, this is not even the model that developed capitalist countries follow in their own practice: Western advisors are in the duplicitous situation of having to say, as Stiglitz put it, “Do as we say, not as we do” (1995:. viii-ix). In reality, current SAPs can only generate the complete de-nationalization of African economies. The strong likelihood is that powerful foreign monopolies in alliance with politically “connected” domestic entrepreneurs will make a huge financial bonanza by acquiring control of the handful of truly profitable public firms.

For instance, in spite of its alleged status as Africa's shining economic model and the World Bank's praise for its “multipronged battle against [corruption]” (1997: 106), Uganda is facing a massive scandal touching President Yoweri Museveni's family members as well as closest advisers. In December 1998, the country's “no-party” Parliament condemned “some politically powerful families” of using the process of privatization for illicit gains and accused the Museveni regime of generalized “nepotism.” ³ This, however, did not stop the Consultative Group of Donors to grant the government a $2.2 billion over the next three years (Yahoo! News, 1998).

Thus, the massive selling of state assets seems certain to result in a form of casino capitalism, where productive investments are minuscule and thoroughly overwhelmed by the rise of a small band of international and local financial speculators bent on the making of easy money. The emergence of this late-twentieth century form of piracy is likely to spawn urban and rural discontent as potential losers will organize to defend their interests against foreign imposed state policies. Such opposition can easily turn into a fundamental systemic crisis with unpredictable consequences. It can draw its substance from a reservoir of antiquated norms and practices which are manipulated by “big men” in search of power and wealth.

The persisting attraction of popular traditions reflects people's attempts to cope with the vicissitudes of historical change and the material deprivations of daily existence. Rather than being an instrument of resistance and revolutionary transformation, cultural traditions are a means of dealing with the devastation brought about by failed projects of progress. The enduring vitality of traditions represents a source of self-affirmation and moral anger with which to condemn the evil world created by the intersection of global political economy with local culture and rituals.

The presence of the past, however, does not entail fixed and frozen traditions; on the contrary, it implies a sense of continuity which is always affecting and affected by a changing present. This is the domain of “invented traditions,” where people, in search of the material and moral resources with which to defend their current interests, turn back to yesterday's rules and cosmology with the tools of today (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983). Such return to the roots symbolizes peoples' logical answer to the uncertainties of a bastardized capitalist modernity. It is not the monopoly of rural areas; urban centers that have been fully integrated into the cash-nexus are also major sites of the “modernity of tradition.” There is nothing surprising about this phenomenon, since the poverty, inequities, and moral depravation of “maldevelopment” have given to African cities a dimension of evil. Urban dwellers have resorted to the “medicine” or “JuJu” of past generations to exorcise the maledictions of modernity (Comaroff, 1993). In the bewildering context of a world run amuck, people explain their destitute conditions in terms of the wickedness of evil forces. Those who have been taken over by these forces have been transformed into witches, “bloodhounds who have no friends,” to use the metaphor of the Nigerian editorialist Emma Agu (Bastian, 1993: 129). The politically powerful have indeed fallen prey to evil, they are now “predators” and “greed is their hallmark.” “Propelled by an uncanny obsession with self,” the agent of the state is viewed as someone who sees in “every other person ... an object to be victimized” (Bastian, 1993: 129). When evil has acquired such proportions, witchcraft provides an inviting and powerful explanation of “modernity and its malcontents.” As Misty Bastian (1993: 156) put it: “Rather than being antirational, or antiscientific, or antimodern, witchcraft continues to offer a possible description for actions that are morally wrong.”

For many, the failed passage into a developed capitalism and the long detour into hell are the work of an all encompassing presence of evil. This presence has generated the image of the bloodthirsty state sucking vital resources from an already debilitated society (Austen, 1993: 89- 110). The “alimentary” aspects of the state are invested with supernatural authority. The “politics of the belly” (Bayart: 1993) filling the stomachs of the few is thus the product of evil; irreversible and inevitable, except through the mystical powers of a “counter-witchcraft.”

Change is thus possible, but inspired from occult forces, it is capricious, demanding, and otherworldly; it precludes determined collective action (Austen: 1993: 104-105). In fact, counter- witchcraft is more often than not an individual method of changing one's fortune and/or inflicting on others the curses of emasculation, sickness, and madness. It is also at the center of gender warfare, as “phallocentric” interests and powers use it to thwart women's self- assertion. African women who are successful tend to be perceived as witches possessed of supernatural powers “castrating” male authority and “eating away” the scarce resources of the household and community. Not surprisingly, these malefic attributes have legitimized a frontal male attack on women's attainment of influence and wealth.

For instance, Andrew Apter (1993: 113-123) has shown how the Atinga anti-witchcraft cult among the Yoruba of Southwestern Nigeria was supported by a “rising commercial elite” of “new men” bent on taking over the commercial network of the cocoa economy that had traditionally been a women preserve. Witchcraft and counter-witchcraft rituals are deeply embedded in the private practices of daily existence; they are personal remedies to the overwhelming presence of evil, and they pervade civil society with a supernatural aura. Civil society is thus not all enlightenment, it is also the domain of profoundly inegalitarian and obscurantist institutions and lifestyles. Nor does its opposition to the state automatically spell freedom, as “witches”--self-seeking predatory rulers--can easily subvert it into corrupt and cruel ends.

In such conflictive conditions the authoritarian temptation will re-surface again as the imposition of SAPs will require political surrender to the dictate of international financiers, rule through decrees, and the autocratic style of local technocrats educated in the dogmatism of the World Bank and IMF. As William Robinson has explained (1996: 375):

Throughout the continent, foreign donors and their representatives have persistently threatened to withdraw their support if African institutions and politicians fail to submit to the stringent requirements of SAPs. This is the process that transforms state administrators into “the pimps of global capitalism” (Robinson, 1996: 374). It generates popular cynicism and discontent and undermines any genuine democratic prospect.

At a minimum, the survival and consolidation of democracy demand that national economic policy be credible in the eyes of those who will experience its consequences and thus that it be the result of a national consensus reached between state and representative organizations. This in turn can only imply the minimization of the social costs of SAPs and the continued and indeed increased role of the state in the provision of resources for education and health as well as for the maintenance and expansion of the physical infrastructure. Moreover, the state must coordinate an industrial policy that would generate the necessary incentives for private investment in both agriculture and industry. To advocate the withdrawal of the state and the supremacy of the market in African countries is to invite economic, political, and social disaster. Such a withdrawal seeks to discipline an already devastated society to the harsh rules of unregulated markets, rather than protecting it from their further social ravages.

We are thus witnessing the return of what Karl Polanyi called the “stark utopia” of the savage period of early capitalism (1957; see also Cox with Sinclair, 1996). According to Polanyi, the stark utopia consisted in a system of production in which the state abdicated its social responsibility and came under the subordination of the laws of the self-adjusting market. When society is governed by such a regime, Polanyi warned, inequalities increase dramatically, the ecological balance is dismantled, and democracy is dilapidated. Moreover, such conditions of decay invite the most decadent forms of material survival and economic gains (Chossudovsky, 1996:. 24-25). Not surprisingly, the continent has witnessed the growing cancer of drugs. Powerful syndicates, an African Mafia, allied to influential politicians are now controlling the illegal production, smuggling, and consumption of narcotics. Nigeria, for instance, is considered to be the way station for more than 25 percent of the heroin shipped to the United States (Perouse de Montclos, 1998: 6; Washington Post, 1996: A32).

When the market rules in conditions of economic and state collapse and in an environment of rising deprivations, the terrain is fertile for all sorts of criminal transactions. As Polanyi put it, the regime of the self-adjusted market cannot “exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society” and without “[destroying] man and [transforming] his surroundings into a wilderness” (Polanyi, 1957: 3).

It is true that in its World Development Report for 1997, The State in a Changing World, the World Bank has acknowledged that “development without an effective state is impossible” and that Sub-Saharan Africa's economic disaster is largely the result of “collapsed states.” It is also true that the Bank has started to put greater emphasis on health and education. Catherine Caufield has pointed out, however, that this newly found emphasis of the Bank “is partly in response to the drastic cuts in those sectors that its adjustment programs have forced borrowers to make.” As she explains:

The contradictions of the Bank's policies are embedded in its utter commitment to the superiority of the competitive market over governmental and public intervention in the economy. As a result, it views, the state as nothing but the enforcer of the efficient rules and institutions of the market. As the Bank sees it (1997: 25), [states must work] in partnership with markets to correct their failures, [while] not replacing them.... The state's unique strengths are its powers to tax, to prohibit, to punish, and to require participation. The state's power to tax enables it to finance the provision of public goods. Its power to prohibit and punish enables it to protect personal safety and property rights. And its power to require participation enables it to minimize free riding.

Thus, for the Bank, the ultimate purpose of the state is to impose on society the projet disciplinaire of the market. It has little to do with curbing obscene forms of inequalities. The state, according to the Bank, should not “overextend” itself in the provision of public goods since those are best taken care by markets, private spending, and non-governmental assistance. Thus, the institutions of the market and civil society are supposed to supplant the state in supplying to citizens most of their health, education, and welfare. ⁴ Moreover, since the Bank resigns itself to the reality that materially deprived nations such as those of Africa cannot aspire to create Western-like social programs, the poor and very poor of these regions can only hope for the generosity of NGOs and extended families. That the World Bank has brought “back in” the state, has precious little to do with the frontal assault on poverty and inequality that is necessary for the long lasting establishment of any meaningful democratic rule.

The reality is that whatever may be the merits of NGOs, they cannot replace the state as the engine of development. Those that work well in alleviating social miseries are too limited in their reach to make significant systemic contributions. As the Overseas Development Institute has pointed out in its report, entitled Reluctant Partners (as quoted in Barratt Brown, 1995: 346):

The problems of NGOs are not merely confined to issues of reach and fragmentation; they also stem from their organizational leadership which tends to draw its cadres from privileged classes bent on keeping the status that they had paradoxically acquired through their earlier association to the state. To that extent, NGOs contribute to the reproduction of class cleavages even if they have generated a new elite of NGOs' entrepreneurs. Moreover, the minuscule membership of NGOs bode very poorly for a brave future of empowered workers and peasants. Finally, the utter dependence of NGOs on external funding merely replicates the historical debility of the post- colonial state (Barratt Brown, 1995: 325-346). These harsh realities do not imply that NGOs cannot create some limited political space for democratizing forces, a refuge for endangered activists, and tiny islands of relative welfare; they do, however, point out to the obdurate limitations of NGOs' capacity to transform systemic conditions.

In a politically accountable environment, the state must play a central role in organizing production and investments, in correcting market failures, in reducing obscene material inequalities, and in securing public peace through the enforcement of predictable rights and obligations. Far from engaging in this task, African states are shrinking their institutional arena. They are generating their own demise through privatization to the best connected bidders and through budgetary reductions; they are becoming irresponsible and unaccountable apparatuses incapable of protecting citizens from violence, poverty, and disease. Their growing social and economic retreat may well cause a descent into chaos. As Przeworski explains (1995: 111- 112):

In Africa, the accelerated development of private security systems for the wealthy and the recent wave of criminality affecting rich and poor alike, are the harbinger of a Hobbesian world in the making. By denying any meaningful sense of citizenship, the social and economic emasculation of the state is generating a descent into a “war of all against all” that constitutional design and electoral processes are unlikely to stop. The displacement of the state by unaccountable private monopolies of violence represents the most extreme and perverse form of civil society's revenge against predatory rule. Partly generated by the decomposition of corrupt, fragmented and undisciplined republican armies and the internationalization of cheap weapons transfers, private militias are becoming the critical factor in political competition. Connected to self-seeking “big men,” devoid of any apparent ideological commitment, and ethnically rooted, they are at worst the vehicle of unmitigated barbarities, and at best the painful birth pangs of new and reconstructed African states.

This last alternative is full of uncertain promises, its ultimate outcome can only be apprehended in what Fernand Braudel called the “longue dur‚e.” If the European experience is any guide (Tilly, 1992), the current deployment of coercion throughout large areas of Africa, may have unintended and surprising beneficial outcomes. Paradoxically, the complex and long term metamorphosis of zones of war into secure and ultimately peaceful areas, may transform warriors into citizens, ethnic particularisms into broader identities, private monopolies of violence into legitimate states, and coercive compliance into accountable obligations. The ugly travails of bloody conflicts in West, and East Africa as well as in the Great Lakes region are all portent of a new geo-political realignment of such magnitude. History, unfortunately, seldom responds to our best wishes; reversals are likely and indeed inevitable, the question, however, is whether they are permanent. While my firm belief in the dialectical movements of history bodes well for the hopeful vision that sequences of crisis and decay give way to periods of opportunities and progress, my reading of the post-colonial era and of the really existing constellation of global and national power invites a cautious pessimism of the intellect.

For instance, in the Great Lakes region there is no apparent reason to assume that the ever changing alliances and wars between private militias of collapsed states, and governments born out of violent rebellions, will lead to a better future. Very little if any good has crystallized from the continuing civil and internationalized strifes in Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Congo-Brazzaville, Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda. These strifes have produced a new culture of violence rooted in the conviction that coercive force is the only means of acquiring and hanging onto power.

This condition is unlikely to change even with the presence of competent leadership, diplomatic statecraft, and the desire for reconciliation. What is ultimately decisive is the emergence of a balance of terror between the contending blocs, or that a particular set of actors achieves total victory. Regional peace on the basis of re-organized and reinvigorated state authority entails the implantation of an enduring balance of power on whose foundations can be erected a new social contract between citizens and states. Only then will political players be compelled and eventually habituated into conforming to an institutionalized set of practices and behaviors that minimizes the potential for the constant deployment of military force.

The desire for peace cannot obliterate the historical reality that war-making has played a fundamental role in the formation, collapse, and reconstruction of states. Ironically, the continent can draw some hope from this bleak and grim conclusion. In the end, the contradictions and tensions besieging the relations between state and civil society have generated very uncivil and bloodied grounds, a terrain from which might develop unexpectedly and unintendedly legitimate patterns of governance with their own obligations, perquisites, and interests. Thus, while things are falling apart, a new center may ultimately hold; a new African cartography sweeping colonial legacies is in the making. The twenty-first century may after all be the century of Africa's real independence.

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West Africa Review (1999)

ISSN: 1525-4488

CIVIL SOCIETY REVISITED:
AFRICA IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM

REFERENCES