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By Charles Onunaiju
The return of the military in some countries in the West and Central Africa sub-regions have generated intense concerns about what many people consider the fate of democracy in the region. In Niger Republic, where the military takeover happened in late July, ECOWAS, the sub-regional organization and the strong men in Niamey are negotiating to restore the ousted civilian government, even though hopes are fast fading that the former civilian administration would be reinstated. The military regime is offering a three-year transitional period before the restoration of civil rule.
In the Central Africa state of Gabon, with a population of less than 3 million, a 56-year dynastic rule of the Bongos was terminated, with crowds pouring out in the street to celebrate. Earlier between 2020 and today, coups and counter coups have taken place in Mali, Guinea, Burkina Fasso and even an attempted but unsuccessful one in Guinea Bissau. Concerns are that the ambitions of some factions of the military in the region are threatening elected civilian rule.
There are ground-swell of opinions that democracy in Africa is in crises. Some opinions hold that civilian practitioners of democracy have poorly executed the project leaving the room for the ambitious factions of the military to step in. In some cases as in Guinea and Gabon, politicians attempted to manipulate the constitutional process, leaving popular frustrations to boil over and consequently instigating the military intervention.
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While the political process of the Civil rule might be weak and vulnerable to manipulations, the state as the critical foundation upon which the democratic process is erected is amorphous, ambiguous and fragile and the contemporary crises of civilian rule in Africa is a manifestation of the deeper crises of the ambiguity of the state in Africa. The nature of Modem state anywhere, is the culmination of the dynamics in historical trajectories of the society in questions.
The dynamics involves conflicts and its resolutions which naturally generate institutions, processes and rules that mitigate and shape the construction of consensus, a foundational framework for resolving emerging dissensus, agitations and conflicts. In Africa, the modern state was the result of a violent and disruptive external intervention and the arrest of the continent and her people’s historical process. The purpose of the colonial state from whence the modern State arise has no consideration for the concerns of the people except for maintenance of an “Order “ that was conducive to the colonial project of domination and exploitation.
The achievement of political independence and the end of colonial rule would not have been the ultimate ambitions of the anti – colonial leaders but a total reconnection to the African historical process through renegotiating the inherited colonial state and casting it anew in the light of the several existential social variables and the historic nature of the productive forces, values and the point of the clash of colonial and indigenous institutions. None of these introspections or reflections would have meant the wholesome rejections of the concrete experiences and its institutional manifestations gained in the course of the encounter with colonialism and its chief instrument of enforcing domination and plunder, the modern State.
Contemporary Military coups in Africa and poor governance under civil democratic rule is not a crises of democracy but a critical and epic crises of the state. Democracy especially liberal or electoral democracy is contestations and competitions but must be secured on the strategic consensus and order enabled and fostered by the state. A State built on consensus and order is one whose institutions, processes and rule evolve from the internal dynamic of its society, manifesting its values and social norms. The critical role of the state as an ombudsman and arbiter is not in its coercive power alone, which it however, deploys to remake the recalcitrants but in the power of the civic consensus from which it originates, evolves and thrives. The broad legitimacy of a state, originating from civic consensus or even a revolution but generating a template for consensus, is the stable order on which the mechanism of democracy can and should be erected to advance the common good.
The modem state in Africa were made in the image of their colonial creators and because it was born out of a historical lacuna it did not bear birth marks of Africa’s existential social reality. It was born and thrived under the reality of colonial domination and exploitation and save for the change of personels with the departure of white colonial administrators and managers, nothing significantly changed in the structure of the state. And even an indigenous attempt to re – purpose the state, without affecting its structure and interrogating its origins have led to the contemporary atrophy and stagnation in which the game of revolving doors alternating between the Interregnum of civilian and military rule becomes the fate of Africa.
The social context of the current stagnation of civil rule in Africa is the unreformed modern state and the dysfunctional institutions and processes it has spawned. The slippery ground on which the democratic project is been erected is the beleaguered and ambiguous state. The modem state is an organism and not of machine. It should be a living organism, breathing the oxygen of its own reality, evolving in coherence with the daily dose of the indigenous experiences and ideas that nourishes and strengthens it.
Where the state is a living organism, it lives and thrives by the nourishing hopes and aspirations of its people. In most of Africa, the modern state from its colonial origins to its contemporary existence has functioned as machine, lifted by any triumphant faction of the competing elite to primitively extract surplus while leaving the people with the burden of an unreformed machine.
To revisit the state and reinvent it in the context of the Africa’s existential reality and aligning it to current and contemporary stage of development, without the pyrrhic declaration of easy victory is the only way forward. Inclusive and sustainable development have been vitiated in Africa not for lack of vision or goodwill but has been largely constrained by the objective nature of its modem state. Even the electoral process in Africa has remained stymied with controversies about its credibility and in most cases heavily contested by parties.
Because civil democratic process has been constrained by the nature of the modern state, it has not delivered on tangible improvement in the quality of lives of the people. Military interventions and rule is more constrained to deliver on sustainable, and inclusive development, because the military is the most acute and concentrated expressions of the ambiguity of modern state in Africa, that made it structurally more of the problem than the solution. Any meaningful reform and reinvention of the modern state in Africa would re-assess and realign the military in the course of any meaningful strategic retooling of straregic institutions.
As it stands in Africa today, there would be no need to reinvent the wheel or indulge in the lazy fantasy of knocking everything out but statesmanship and imaginative leadership should understand the extant hollowness that belies institutions that enjoys the bloom of generous rhetoric flourish but grossly deficient in the critical indices that makes for institutional efficiency and credibility. A credible and efficient state would considerably give effect to entrepreneurship and resourcefulness and also allows immense scope to the unfettering of the productive forces and harnessing them in a free and open market largely unconstrained by vicious special interests.
A market economy is a mobilise ofr entrepreneurial initiatives but without a strong, credible and efficient state, it would be an arena of chaos where bandits and robbers dressed in business suits are eminent actors. The return of what appear like epidemic of military coups is not simply an assault at democracy and should not be finger point exercise at any culprit.
The debilitating atrophy of the modern state in Africa would yield a stalemate in the civil political process, to only interrupted by military rule, a further stage in the malignant stalemate and this circus show would continue likely until something gives way in the future.
The story of the stagnation and ambiguity of the modern state in Africa is not a pathetic license for hopelessness but a wake – up call to reframe the existing thought infrastructure, realign it to the social reality we live in and not to cultivate an extant idealism constructed from another Social reality. The practical way to re-engage our reality is to interrogate it with more and more questions instead of pretending to have found the answers. Many countries in Asia and even south America which share the brutal colonial legacy like Africa reinvented their inherited colonial state, re designing their institutions in accordance with their broadly shared values, and thereby largely establishing indigenous and popular ownership of theit modem state.
The culminative outcomes for most of them is breaking through the net of modern history, and assuming their rightful place in the scheme of things in the contemporary world. They did not assume the state it was given to them by colonialism, but thoroughly shook it up and re -align it with existential social reality of their respective Societies.
For instance, they did not discard of the parliament as it is the foremost representative of any state but it was thoroughly redesigned. Instead of representing an amorphous and nameless abstract “people”, it represented concrete realities of ethnic groups, professional or interest groups and other specific and concrete Communities in which the country was districted.
In this context and especially in Nigeria, representing the “people” is only an alibi for representing nobody. The progress of many Asian countries in wading through the storms of representative government and democracy is only guaranteed by a stable social and political order enabled by an efficient and credible State founded on a relative social consensus, constructed by their creative endeavours.
• Onunaiju is the director of Abuja-based think tank
