The Debate over African Conditions

The discourse about Africa within the academia is not positive. Adjectives like authoritarian state, predatory state, unproductive state and collapsed state have been used to qualify the African conditions. Although different, those concepts are similar in content and are used to describe the same object, the African state, which is seen as hindering development in Africa. The radical solution would be to free ourselves from the state, to destroy the state; however this is unrealistic solution. So, the academia, have to work on alternatives that could conciliate the existing African state with development. Such exercise pre requires a dive into history as well as a deconstruction of the actual, if not dominant, paradigm that tend to view and explain African failures from a cultural perspective.

Unfortunately, after the departures of the colonialists, the African political elite who inherited the power behaved much like their departing masters. Overwhelmingly, the African political elite continued to deny the African peoples their basic freedoms and human rights meaning that most countries have graduated from colonial oppressive rule to an equally authoritarian national rule. Economically, the fundamental problem in African development has been the permanent intervention of the state through ownership of means of production and through regulation in the normal working of the market. The post colonial state has became ‘predatory’ of its own people in the sense that it used its power not to promote clear developmental agendas but to squeeze the few productive forces (in the agriculture for example) in order to found the enlargement of its own political basis. In long term, these policies reveled unsustainable and it became unrealistic to ignore the obvious African underdevelopment both politically and economically. Underdevelopment, and political ‘chaos’ became the main features in most of the African states.

However, it is reductionism to think that this African underperformance is due to the character of African culture. There is no cultural logic on this. Instead we have at least two ways to explain the African conditions:

The first way is to do it by looking back to the historical movements that left their signs on African shores. In this exercise, we find that the colonial legacy left Africans without any developmental structures and since the purposes of the colonizers were generally separated from the main contents of national interests, the state has developed a considerable amount of relative autonomy vis-à-vis the native economic and social forces so it could freely adopt and follow its policy of exploitation without any internal strong contestation. Education for natives was totally neglected hindering, in this way, the emergence of an African thinking body that could pave the way for alternatives in African development.

The second way is to look into the structures of World trade. In fact, if we consider that trade between countries can promote or prevent certain countries’ development, the nature and quality of goods produced by a certain country will determine its position in the World ranking of development. African status as producer of basic agricultural products and row material does not help due to the low economic added value in this sector if compared with the industrial and service sectors.

As we can see, colonial legacy and the structures of world trade are challenging explanatory alternatives from where we can get some answers for the African conditions. They are progressive and thus different from using a static cultural approach because they have some policy implications. In the first case the implication could be the call for the former colonizers to take their responsibility, paying reparations by supporting African development and in the second case, the implication could be the need for African countries to change or improve their base of production so they can get better benefits from the world trade.

Out of those negative conditions, Africa is experiencing an impressive transition from one-party states, military rule or civilian dictatorship to various forms of political pluralism. However, the idea of democracy that is being experienced in most of African State’s is the minimalist democracy which reduces the meaning of democracy into, usually unfair and non transparent, cyclical elections. the main question is how to make these countries move from the minimalist conception of democracy towards the comprehensive and procedural approach which refers not only to the electoral process but also gives us the quality of democracy in the sense of enlarging and deepening democratic structures and moving away from a mere electoral democracy towards a liberal democracy?