Good evening to everyone here with us at the Oxford Martin School and those following us online.
It is my great pleasure to welcome Dr. Nick Westcott to the Martin School.
In fact, Nick is already at the Martin School because he's a visiting fellow with the Martin School,
but mostly is the director of the Royal African Society and has been so since 2017.
Nick's trajectory is quite rare, certainly amongst both historians and diplomats,
since he's been both throughout his career after a Ph.D. in African history at Cambridge in the early eighties.
Nick joined the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and served in Brussels, in Washington and Tanzania,
and latterly he was British High Commissioner to Ghana and ambassador to Cote d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Togo and Niger.
At the Foreign Office he filled a number of roles dealing with the EU as a European correspondent,
with the G8 as the head of Economic Relations Department, and for five years he was the Foreign Office Chief Information Officer.
Again, another interesting aspect out of the ordinary aspect about Nick's trajectory from 2011,
he was actually seconded to the European Union in Brussels,
firstly as managing director for Africa and then managing director for the Middle East and North Africa in the EU's External Action Service.
He's also on the board of the journal. African Affairs is a member of Chatham House and a fellow of the Royal Geographic Society.
It's a great pleasure to have you here with us. Nick will next lecture today will be on the state of the African state.
They will speak for about 40 minutes, at which stage we'll be able to entertain questions from the audience and also from the online audience.
Without further ado, Nick, welcome. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed, Riccardo, and my warm thanks to the Oxford Martin School, to yourself,
to Charles for giving me this opportunity to come as a visiting fellow and to give this lecture before an extremely informed audience,
which I do with some trepidation. But it's good to have the opportunity, having worked on Africa on and off over about 40,
45 years, to actually try and put my ideas into some kind of coherent form.
That's what I'm trying to do today in the Oxford Martin School.
Give me the opportunity to do that. So very nice to see you all. Thank you for this opportunity.
The African state is a subject that has received a lot of attention from people who studied it and far more detail, more academically than I have.
So I with some trepidation on that aspect, I also do it.
But there is a serious challenge that I have been quite unhappy with some of the way people
talk about the state in Africa and particularly the repeated emphasis on the failed states,
state failure, this kind of thing, which seems to be to miss the point somewhat, whatever the condition of a state politics is going on there.
And what you need to do is understand what that political dynamic is if you are to interact usefully with it and contributes to both.
I think where it is in a state of some instability, trying to work with the people of that state,
that space, that society to create a more stable situation.
So that's been my sort of motivation really to try and get a better grip on what is going on.
And as I will explain more later,
none of the existing approaches fully address the issue and in particular for aspects of analysing the situation of the state.
So I think we need to look at more explicitly to get a better idea, and that is what are the forms of accountability?
That exist in that society, in that space.
Secondly, how within any given space, you try and assure the balance between the different groups.
Thirdly, what is the basis of trust, if you like, for where does the legitimacy come from?
Who do you trust? And fourthly, what are the arrangements for political succession, if any?
And I'll come back to those at some detail. And this really is a prospectus for research rather than a finished product.
This is something I'm just embarking on. So this is a very good opportunity to try and put my ideas into order and get people's thoughts on it.
I think it's very important to put the African state in historical perspective, but this is challenging to respects.
Firstly, there is not enough known about pre-colonial political structures in Africa,
partly because there are very few written records of Africa from pre-colonial Africa except those from outsiders.
And secondly, there's actually been very little resource available for African scholars to study their own past.
So there has been some archaeology, anthropology, oral history, try to plug this gap, but we really don't know enough.
And a lot of the studies that do exist come out of what is called the Western Academy, and that itself poses some problems.
But what we do know has been summed up by my view quite succinctly by John Oliver,
who says of pre-colonial Africa that scattered settlements and huge distances hindered transport,
limited the surplus the powerful could extract,
prevented the emergence of literate elites and formal institutions left to cultivate a much freedom and obstructed state formation.
Despite the many devices leaders invented to bind men to them.
Altogether. Africa's natural environment was challenging. Land was plentiful and people scarce.
And this meant the precolonial societies, states, empires were remarkably fluid.
This is the key facts that we need to establish if people are hungry or unhappy.
They could move and they did move elsewhere in Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia.
There were states that sustain themselves over centuries, albeit in fluctuating form, but other political entities and empires.
Ghana, Songo, Sokoto. Congo. Benin, Ashanti.
Buganda. Zimbabwe. Zulu. They grew. They shrank.
They came. They went. The few that established themselves solidly over centuries.
Some achieved a certain solidity and institutional coherence, but across quite a lot of areas of Africa, they were effectively stateless peoples.
For example, months the Igbo where society was based on not having those kind of established institutions.
This meant that even up until the 19th century.
Although Arab trade has brought Islam this sort of Islamic more formal structures both of trade and and rule across the continents.
The whole African societies were hugely diverse, frequently fragmented and immensely complex.
There was a process of political evolution going on, but it was abruptly,
even brutally interrupted by the arrival of Western traders, missionaries and colonisers from the 17th century onwards.
Some came to settle, especially in the South and later East Africa, Eastern Africa.
Others came initially to trade most lucratively and damagingly in slaves and later to rule.
The new colonial authorities in Africa had a very consistent political theory underpinning this was,
if you like, the imperial ideology of civilisational maturity.
If I just summarise it very briefly, because it was important that this ideology categorise African societies as,
quote, primitive, unquote, in contrast to Western ones, which were quite advanced,
and thereby there was a, quote, duty to bring them to quote, civilisation, unquote,
in form of faith, education, health, trade, industry, bringing this to, quote, backward heathen.
Quote, Africa was dragged swiftly and unceremoniously into a globalised,
capitalist economy and society, interrupting that sort of process of evolution.
This also underpinned the settlers, quote, right, unquote, to take land, turn it into, quote, productive, unquote use and for old, quote,
barbaric, unquote customs to be abolished and new structures put in place, tax imposed education in the new imperial language to be provided.
And of course, any opposition to the imperial project to be violently repressed.
This ideology has its own internal contradictions.
And it didn't last long. There was a willingness to share Western civilisation, unquote, but not to share power.
And this was clearly exposed when Africans were recruited to fight in the Second World War, to fight for freedom in the West, the north of them.
And therefore, it's little surprise that the contradictions brought this ideology to a fairly swift end, in fact,
and it was replaced by a dominant ideology that then dictated things for the following 30, 40 years that of nationalism.
From the outset, Africans had sought to reassert control over their own destiny.
There had been resistance to colonial invasion. But it couldn't survive Western technological superiority.
Some then sought an assimilationist path, accepting the premise of Western civilisation and,
quote, seeking equality in agency through education and employment.
But the limits of this were quickly exposed, as I said, by the colour bar that was de facto and the contradictions of the imperial ideology.
In some sense, nationalism, though, remains an exercise in emulation.
What had made Britain, France, Germany, Portugal so powerful?
They had strong central government's ability to mobilise their resources to make the country of home prosper and to conquer abroad.
Nationalist leaders sought to build something like that.
They voluntarily, if you like, or well, involuntarily, to some extent,
adopted the Western model of the nation state because it provided the ideological and practical means to evade that colonial rule.
There was certainly rhetorical adherence to the principles of Pan-Africanism when Nkrumah expressed this very powerfully,
but it was subordinated to the immediate need to seize the reins of power,
which happened on a territory by territory basis,
because that's the way the colonial administrations were structured and the imperial decision making had the.
Nationalist leaders. Contributed hugely to the development of African political philosophy and as Stephen Chan has just published a book on this.
So as Ekua, Nkrumah, Sango and the West Kenyatta in your area in the East mcGlowan and Cabral,
they all had really important ways of configuring how Africans should think about the state and their societies.
The problem with nationalism as a governing ideology is that.
After Independence. So from the fifties to the eighties, it was so dominant political ideology, it ran out of steam.
It was no longer sufficient to legitimise the state appeals to patriotism and nation building.
No longer satisfied people, they were asking for more.
What more African citizens looking for?
Within their states, there is not enough work on this.
We have some opinion polls by Africa Barometer. We have lots of journalism and opinion.
But there is very little. About what Africans themselves think their state.
There's a huge agenda there, I think, for future research, and I'm not going to try and pretend that I know in this case.
But it is it is very important.
Because the state is not just a physical space, it's what the people living in that space think behave as what they are doing.
Borders still matter. And these borders, as we know, were the product of the colonial carve up.
What they have done is reduce that fluidity that existed in pre-colonial societies and states and define the political societies within which.
The people within that defined space have to find a way to live together, to distribute resources, to settle disputes, to select their leaders.
In other words, to build a political society that meets their needs.
If differences cannot be settled, if they are unable to find a structure that enables them to do those things, you get violent conflict.
Now that a lot of people have looked at this problem, he says, it's quite clear it's not hidden.
There's no magic in that. And the broadly explanations fall into, I would say very crudely, summarising four broad areas.
Firstly, those who attribute the difference to the quality of leadership and Martin Meredith's
book say traffic if you've ever read that so tends to that kind of inclination.
And they attribute the difference between the fate of African nations, their leaders,
where they had a near airy or needy army and Obasanjo or a Charles Taylor.
A mandela or a Mugabe. Of course, leaders matter, but it's not an adequate explanation.
Going back to the sixties and seventies, there was a powerful trends in thinking about this.
Originating from Frantz Fanon through Sameera,
I mean Walter Rodney that African countries fell into the hands of neo colonial elites who were not protecting the interests of their own society,
but those of themselves, of the economic interests, of the former colonial power and international capitalism at large.
This was hugely influential and a lot of supporting evidence for this.
But again, it's not it tends to undervalue the agency of the African populations that these elites sat on top of.
A political society has to work enough for the people living within it, otherwise it becomes unsustainable.
In the eighties and nineties, people that research tended more towards using the theory of neo patrimonial ism, which is, in my view,
more sophisticated version of the old patron client approach to political analysis,
arguing that political actors seek to use state power to support clan networks to preserve their political authority.
As Kathryn Scott says, state offices are not occupied to produce public or collective goods,
but to bring personal wealth, status and acclaim to their holders.
Again, this accurately reflects what we see in quite a lot of post-colonial African political systems.
But again, it overlooks the kind of bottom up pressure that can influence these elite, elite bargains.
You need to represent something, something more than just the interests.
There's a sort of a variant of this which is called by some developmental patrimonial ism.
Tim Kelsall is the advocate of this,
whereby an authoritarian ruler may use his power to mobilise resources for the genuine development of the state and benefit the citizens,
as long as there's not too much questioning of his political authority. And Rwanda, until recently, Ethiopia with a poster child.
So this kind of theory. But I think recent events in Ethiopia perhaps weakens it as a theory.
And then in the last decades, there's been a lot of attention paid to the ideas of afcon and political settlements theory,
which evolved from, you know, sensible questions asked by many donors why some development policies work in one country but not in another.
He developed this quite sophisticated analysis.
It has to be said, with a density of language and impenetrability, sometimes to these quite hard to get your head around.
But basically it's common sense and it sort of looks at how organisations, as he calls them,
mediated through institutions, achieve a settlement that enables resources to be shared in a certain way.
Some of these settlements are stable and some are not.
It's good. It's a good way of analysing, particularly how decision making is made in particular circumstances.
Again, it's not really a sort of a for me, not a satisfying explanation.
So what do I think? How do I think we need to get a better grip?
On the process of political change in Africa.
So I argue the Precolonial political structures had great fluidity, variety and flexibility.
And now Africans found themselves living with the confines of an imposed colonial structure in terms of territories and state systems,
which has failed. The colonial state failed.
Very important also to understand that because they could not command legitimacy from the inhabitants,
nor ultimately could they ensure their security. They could show their own security and Africans seized control of these structures.
Now the UN news organisation, African Unity's founding decision in 1963 to respect colonial borders was a fateful one.
No doubt it saved Africa from much bloodshed.
But it also meant that most of the conflicts in Africa since independence have been within the States rather than between them.
By contrast to, say, the experience in early modern Europe,
where it was conflict between states that led to the consolidation and definition of states and eventually borders, the borders became a huge issue.
Looking at these. Structures.
I do have a serious problem here with categorisation,
because defining what is going on within these state structures, these state boundaries as stable or unstable,
democratic or authoritarian, honest or corrupt, efficient or incompetent, successful or quote failed, unquote, tends to oversimplify.
And it brings a whole bunch of assumptions about, you know, it's a democracy.
It's not a democracy. You know, this is a very fuzzy area.
And these kind of binaries, I think, obscure as much as they illuminate.
While many African countries in the last 60 years have suffered degrees of political turbulence at some stage or another,
this is seen elsewhere in the world. Quite common for post-colonial states.
After the disappearance of an empire, there is frequently a period of political turbulence,
while people within that given space sort out how they're going to run things.
Some have become more stable and prosperous where people have benefited more and suffered less.
But that doesn't always equate to prosperity.
Some countries have been stable but remain poor. Nevertheless.
As I said at the outset, I think there are three critical variables and one,
a fourth factor that I think help explain it and I want to get into those in a bit more detail.
So that's the extension form of accountability, the provision of balance between the different regions and groups,
and the level of trust in not just the authorities, but all political actors and indeed the structures within that state.
The fourth criteria, as I said, is having an agreed process for deciding political succession.
As we know, almost nobody wants to leave power voluntarily.
You have to build in a system whereby they are full slave.
In early modern Europe with a system of inheritance.
This meant that only death could remove you from power.
This meant death came all the sooner to the rather inadequate rulers than they perhaps expected.
But that's not really a very efficient system as was found.
Anyway, let me look at these in term accountability.
All political systems, even the most apparently authoritarian, are accountable in some form.
It's just a question of to whom and how. Every leader, these followers, every patron needs clients.
Every artist needs listeners. These are two way relationships the reciprocal obligations.
Every elite bargain, the elites are answerable to others. Democracy is a very loaded term.
So which is why I prefer the word the term accountability.
Because that does not prejudge the means by which the accountability exists.
That's. The forms don't always follow.
The reality is clearly illustrated by the quite rapid failure of most of the independence constitutions, which were, you know,
lovingly drafted by British constitutional lawyers, negotiated Lancaster House conferences and didn't mostly last a decade.
But even where there's constitutional review, that doesn't necessarily define how politics is actually happening, how the system works.
In a growing number of African countries, there are now regular elections.
But these are very imperfect means of accountability, given how easy they are to manipulate.
Nic Cheeseman and Brian Klaus have written eloquently about this.
Nevertheless, they have value as a mechanism because they require politicians to spend some time with the people they represent.
Talking to African voters and politicians I found very illuminating.
During the 2015 Nigerian elections.
I was talking to one group of voters and they said they really liked elections because, quote, once every four years they have to give us something.
It's our one chance to get something back.
And during a visit to London year before last by some Nigerian MPs, I asked them all, So what is it your constituents want?
And they said, as one of multiple cross-party, I said as well, our constituents want money,
money for school fees, money for hospital fees, money to start a business, money to hold a funeral.
And they said. So we had to find the money from somewhere. Otherwise they'll throw us out.
And gone in publishing five years before had said to me, I was high commissioner at the time.
Had this democracy of yours that you want us to have is very expensive.
Every campaign I have to find more money. I have to provide more things.
How do you think I'm going to fund that? So this is anecdotal evidence, but I think it's fine.
Sentiments like this echoed quite widely in other African countries.
Certainly in the recent elections in Kenya, you know, the most expensive election has ever had.
Expensive in what sense? Not just advertising. But, you know, this is what.
They are the participants in the political system are seeing it as.
Now, multiparty electoral systems generally provide a better chance for councillors because there is greater opportunity to challenge the decisions,
actions, behaviours of the Government. But it's not the only way one party states.
Could be quite accountable. Tanzania, the one I know is the cam, was a sole party,
but there was intense competition to become the local candidate for the CCM and candidates knew that unless they had delivered to their constituents,
they would be thrown out and the constituents would pick somebody else instead.
Accountability worked in that way, even in very authoritarian systems.
There is a degree of accountability. Colonel Gaddafi, you know, as authoritarian as you can get.
Nevertheless assiduously made contact with Libya's tribal leaders.
And I'm told by somebody that he had a prodigious memory for the genealogical details that really mattered for these people.
So every authoritarian effectively maintains a court of the factions that need to be gets on board.
Even if as Mobutu, you sort of ring the changes, you bring some in, takes him out.
But you always have to try and keep them engaged because you need that degree of legitimacy and control.
Coups are problematic because the men with guns are only really accountable to the other men with guns.
But even then, there's a degree of accountability. You see the two coups this year in Burkina Faso.
One brought in a senior officer, but he didn't satisfy the junior officers.
So the junior officers took over. So even there, there is in some form of accountability, liberation movements.
In particular, find both accountability and pluralism problematic.
It's logical to an extent, to succeed in a violent struggle for liberation.
You need a very clear structure of authority and often an absolute intolerance of dissent.
Loyalty is all. If you're in the bush. And that's why quite a few liberation movements have proved quite fratricidal and
have found it quite difficult in power not to become authoritarian and corrupt.
Accountability comes low down their political priority list.
So I think you see in a number of countries Algeria, Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, even to some extent South Africa.
It has been difficult for the liberation movement to adapt to a way that is more responsive to the society they now control.
One of the most powerful drivers of accountability is taxation.
This principle of no taxation without representation goes back a long, long way, way before the Boston Tea Party.
And I have I would like to do some work on whether there is a statistical
correlation between the size of the tax base and the degree of accountability.
But the inverse is very easy to see. Free money is bad for account political accountability, where the cash pours in,
whether it's from raw material exports, oil, gold, diamonds, or whether it's from foreign aid.
Free money reverses the accountability flow.
Instead of people giving money to the government and saying, What are you giving me in return?
The government has the money. People go and say, Give me some money. And that is a fundamentally different political calculus, political structure.
And some of the most African countries with the greatest problems are those that rely on this basically free money,
raw material exports and why foreign aid is often problematic because it reverses that process of accountability.
The government is accountable to the foreign donor, not to the people that need to be benefiting and that that causes difficulty.
So there's a whole set of issues there and accountability that affect how responsive the government is to actually the demands of its people.
Secondly, balance. Again, when I was working in Tanzania, I was often very puzzled by some of your areas cabinet appointments.
How could such an intelligent leader appoint such less intelligent ministers?
So some of that critical areas until somebody explained to me where the ministers came from.
So this minister of education, he came from a country from the south east where there was very little education.
They wanted more education.
He put them on there, represented in the schools and the area, understood the importance of achieving a balance, even at the expense of efficiency.
This is something I wonder whether the Academy has yet understood.
I'm not sure Mr. Melies did, but by balance, I mean not just geographical, regional balance.
It's between social, religious, racial, ethnic groups, but distinct groups who have who identified themselves having an interest.
In being represented at the centre. Especially where the political structures operated in a sort of winner takes all away.
This became really difficult. Nigeria is the classic case where it took some decades to create a system that ensured adequate balance.
After the Biafran secessionist movement and the fear of more than Muslim dominance amongst quite a lot of Christian groups in the South.
It took a major reform in devolution to create those 36 federal states to diffuse the tension by diffusing the power which enabled.
Then to manage those divergent interests. Nigeria still has plenty of problems, but this is less of one than it was.
Kenya, too, was teetering on the brink of civil conflict after the 2007 elections, beginning of 2008, and again its constitution of 2010.
It created 47 counties with significant devolved powers,
so it appears to have successfully reduced the risk of electoral violence because
regions and groups who lost out to the centre still controlled some resources,
still had a stake in the system working.
Sometimes, as I said, this balance can be achieved through a party rather than through an electoral based democracy system.
South Africa's ANC and its close alliance with the Communist Party,
with COSATU and very powerful regional branches, sort of achieved a degree of that balance.
This is decaying, but nevertheless it has been there for a while where the perceived imbalance is not corrected.
You will get conflict. And Rwanda.
Burundi are the worst cases where that balance was never achieved leading to.
Catastrophe. Cote d'Ivoire is another example where resentment of migrant northern migrants
led to a movement of ivory to reasserting the rights of native Ivorians.
And a civil war broke out, frozen for a decade.
But this case and the case of Somalia, which again descended effectively into anarchy because people could not agree who would have central authority.
Both those cases, the balance was only restored following with the help of external intervention.
In the case of Korea, why was the U.N. backed up by the French legal team that enabled an election to be held,
which people accepted as providing adequate balance in the ankle?
Ouattara has governments that it's not solely has enabled a more peaceful political process to take place.
And in Somalia, it was Amazon, the African Union that came in,
provided a security umbrella within which Somali factions could at last reach some kind of very devolved political
structure that enabled them to accept there should be a federal government and allow one to take office.
I could multiply examples, but I would. I'll just mention one last one in terms of balance, and that is Ethiopia, where again we see the challenge.
It's an old established state,
but it's one in which the balance between the different groups within the space we call Ethiopia has fluctuated over centuries.
And despite a strong national identity, these are regarded by the different groups within that space as an existential issue.
So after the EPRDF coalition overthrew the Derg, which in turn had overturned the Amhara dominated elite of Emperor Haile Selassie,
Menna has introduced an ostensibly federal structure.
But this evolution was interrupted when the EPRDF nearly lost the 2005 election.
And they panicked. They repressed. They managed the system. They won all the seats in the electoral process.
And after Melissa's death, it proved unsustainable. The instability in particularly Oromo, led to changes brought in Mr. Abiy, who thought, Right,
what we need is a single party and this federal structure created the Prosperity Party, alienated the TPLF and we have a civil war to this day.
We have a peace agreement brokered by largely the Americans.
But this this conflict in Ethiopia is very far from resolved, and all the Chinese are breaking out.
The Somalis, the Afghans, the Oromo.
It's an extremely volatile situation. And until there is a balance restored, people accept, yes, there is a federal government.
I have a part in it that at least satisfies enough of what I require.
We will not see peaceful development returning.
Thirdly, the last, the third and greatest of these three criteria is trust.
The underlying principle is very system. In any political system, people are willing to concede authority to give their loyalty to those they trust.
Or in systems which are institutionally robust to the political institutions that provide government.
Personally, I could never say that I trusted Boris Johnson, but I trusted the institutions just about the parliamentary system.
On the Supreme Court, though, my faith in Parliament was sorely tested for a while.
But then I accepted that people tend to trust those closest to them the same family.
The same village. Clan, region. Language group.
As people's social interaction widens in more mobile societies, which is what's happened to Africa in the 20th century, other factors come into play.
Other criteria. Many will start putting their greatest trust in a religion, church or faith.
Others in their business associates or employers, others again in their trade unions, voluntary associations, football clubs, even political parties.
And this is crucial to understanding where loyalty lies, who you regard as a legitimate representative for you.
In Morocco, for example, King Mohammed the six retains legitimacy because people still broadly trust him.
That enables him to play actually a larger role in the government of the state than the Constitution would formally indicate in Ghana.
So by contrast, traditional chiefs retain a great deal of credibility and respect, but no political power.
That was part of the independence bargain that was struck.
They could remain traditional chiefs but then interfere with politics.
They are nevertheless an integral part of a wider social and political structure to maintain stability.
The churches in Ghana are again an integral part.
Before every elections, the chiefs, the churches, the civil society groups are all on stage saying, keep it peaceful, guys.
And this this contributes to the fact that there is a consensus in the outcome and acceptance of it.
Same role has been played in the past by the leads the Brotherhood's in Senegal.
And we see civil society, a very active civil society, playing critical roles in Kenya, in South Africa, in a number of other countries.
That all contributes to the trust that people have in the system.
Afrobarometer has demonstrated that most Africans want to live in democracies.
The challenge that democratic governments face on the continent is they are increasingly unable to
deliver the benefits that the promised order that are promised in order to get themselves elected.
And this is leading to a degree of popular disillusion with Democratic politics that we've seen explicitly in Tunisia, in Guinea, in Mali.
Recently in Burkina Faso. People have accepted coups because the Democratic politicians were so useless, so corrupt, so unable to assure security.
This is a major preoccupation, the African Union.
These are unconstitutional changes of government, but they reflect a real lack of trust in the structures that had existed.
Security is fundamental to this mean. A core function of the state is to provide security for its citizens.
And almost all states in Africa retain the monopoly of force with the government.
Nothing undermines trust and legitimacy faster than the failure to provide for your citizens security.
This is what undermined it in Somalia. This is where we are and across several countries in the Sahel.
It is what worries me about Nigeria. The Nigerian government is not any longer.
It may be well devolved, but it's not able to assure the security of its citizens through police.
People are very cynical about the police or in the North-East, Boko Haram, the whole West.
Now other jihadist groups in the South just kidnapping.
So there are things that need to be done there.
Barack Obama, when he visited after in 2010, made the point of emphasising that what Africa needed was strong institutions, not strongmen.
This is true, but institutions reflect societies more than mouldable.
So people need to empower institutions like the judiciary, like Electoral Commission,
the Auditor General, if they are to be effective in South Africa.
It has strong institutions, but this did not prevent state capture over a ten year period by Jacob Zuma and his friends.
The institutions are now trying to remedy that and people are recognising the cost of not
allowing or institutions to contain a political system which is tending towards corruption.
But nevertheless, it could happen. Last point, and then I'll wrap up and we can discuss.
As I said, it is about succession. I've already explained, you know, people don't like leaving power.
It's very hard to get them out. And authoritarian systems face particular challenges in this respect.
In the West, we've accepted democratic elections as a way. If you lose the elections, you leave normally.
And. In authoritarian systems.
It's so hard because there is not an established mechanism.
So in Algeria, for example, as in Bouteflika was basically totally incapacitated for the last ten years.
He was ruling because there was no means of selecting a successor.
There are plenty of other cases, and it also points to the difficulty of sustaining the two term limit.
Because people in power won't accept that there's a valid succession process that takes them out and.
That needs to be either enforced or a lot of Western countries don't have a two term limit,
but they have a mechanism that people trust for selecting a successor.
So just to conclude. My purpose here is to say that if we look at those four factors.
It is much easier to discern what is creating stability in these countries or underpinning where one or other is weak.
There is a risk that there will be some contestation outside of a political structure where all for absolute, I would say conflict is inevitable.
And in looking for how political societies are do developing themselves, those are the criteria they need to ensure are put in place.
Two last points. This is becoming more important.
Because all African states are under particular threat from two ineluctable forces over which they have little or no control.
Rapid population growth and accelerating climate change.
Both will put unprecedented stress on political systems that are still evolving fast, still themselves remaining volatile.
Population growth is one of the outstanding successes of Africa development.
In improving health care systems, keeping more people alive if.
But it still tends to be seen only as a problem. How are you going to feed?
How are you going to employ? How are you going to find living accommodation?
Urbanisation is accelerating enormously rapidly.
Very soon, 50% of people in Africa, compared to 25% only 30 years ago, 50% will be living in towns where again, they are more volatile.
The kind of political systems you need to govern an urban population are different from those from predominately rural one,
and it creates intergenerational conflict. That, again, is a major factor in potentially precipitating instability.
Many young speak of empowering youth. But you could do that very quickly.
If you give them a Kalashnikov is not a constructive way to do it.
Climate change compounds these stresses.
Stability of African states could depend heavily on accelerated ability both to mitigate and adapt to increasingly rapid climate change.
But that requires effective states. In their absence, people will just move to where they can survive.
And that itself is likely to increase the stresses either on the neighbouring countries
they migrate to or across the water from more affluent ones where they may choose to move.
Therefore, the stability of the African state is a question of global significance.
Thank you. Thank you.
We have about 25 minutes for questions, both from the physical audience here and from the online audience.
I would just ask two things. First, when you introduced when when the microphone gets to introduce yourself briefly.
And second, try to be as concise as possible in your questions.
And questions are preferable to comments unless they're very brief, precisely because we have a large audience.
And it would be great to hear from as many of you as possible.
Thank you. Thank you all. So. There's a question here.
The front. Hi.
I'm. I'm a third year history in politics undergraduate being treated by Ricardo at the moment.
And I think with the four criteria that you set out at the start of your lecture, to what extent,
without undermining the agency of out of the African governments, to what extent will African states and state politics be informed by?
External external factors such as the Chinese governments and foreign aid and the principal of Francophone Africa,
etc., will take three or four and then thank you there.
There was a question back there. Thank you.
My name is Cesar Turing, and I teach philosophy from Ghana.
And I just wanted to go back to the reference you made to the oil use decision
to maintain the borders that had been established by the colonial powers and.
Whether these borders. Since they were artificial and people did not really identify with the colonial state
where they drive just sort of like imposed some form of nationalism was not a necessity.
And to what extent can we legitimise nation building and separate it from a
nationalistic ideology because there was no nation and they had states without nations.
So somehow they had to be built.
And then in the light of recent developments, especially with the adaptation by many countries of multi partisan politics,
where party politics or parties tend to sit along ethnic and religious lines in many countries,
whether this is also not an ingredient that is disintegrating, the attempt to create nations where they didn't exist.
Thank you. Thank you very much. There's a question in the back.
Hey, I'm quite batshit. I finished my undergrad in politics and I've just recently graduated with a master's in social anthropology.
I think my question will be, I think they have contributed to his socio economic problem.
And how do you think African countries can transition the agrarian economy into an industrious one?
I think he would like you to think about land reform.
Thank you. Thank you. Is there another question? There's a question here.
Hi, Nick. Thanks for your interesting lecture. I'm a giant Jackson Post doc in history and you've talked a lot about.
Where the African state came from and sort of where it is broadly less so about where it's going.
I wonder whether briefly that might come up in the discussion and some projections perhaps that you might have.
But also, I wonder if you can comment on the impact that the COVID pandemic might have had and continues to have on the state,
as it were, broadly speaking. Thank you. Those are very, very good and wide ranging questions.
I'll save you for the next round, if you don't mind. Right now that I keep miles of quite quick with the question.
The good thing about a bunch of questions is that you can avoid the difficult ones and hide behind the easier ones.
I'll try and take you in order. And your question about external influences is very important.
One, because there was a clear trajectory of influence in forms of government from China and the Soviet Union in the sixties and seventies.
The one party state was explicitly modelled on some of these of the particular China, and your area was heavily influenced that you had.
This was a party in leading the country,
avoiding these kind of dangerous splits between ethnic loyalties and the rest by fighting the leadership function in the party.
And that had a huge influence.
And this wave of transitions into a one party state the early and while there was an internal or domestic logic to that as well,
the outside influence in some ways validated it. And this fell apart in 1989 when the wall fell.
And the fact that there was then a wave of democratisation in the sense of accepting multi-party
systems after that was not just due to donor pressure or internal change of opinion,
it was that the credibility of that approach had worked in one party states,
hadn't worked very well because they have been becoming corrupt and incompetent.
But the ideology was cut from under. And this has also happened quite recently.
The developmental state again explicitly modelled itself on the kind of success that China has had
in transforming the economy while keeping the politics under very firm control and democracy.
So you seem to be a shambles. And why would you introduce all these divisiveness into your political systems?
So, you know, the pendulum swung back. We'll see how long it swings back.
It swings back and forth.
But yes, the outside world does influence in terms of attitudes as much as an example, as much as the Chinese coming saying here have lots of money.
And that sort of influence says, oh, we can.
Can we separate nation building from nationalism?
It sounds as though you feel that nationalism is a slightly pejorative concept, that it is problematic.
I was trying to treat it relatively neutrally.
Obviously, nationalism can be a very negative.
Political ideology can be used negatively.
I think for the nationalist leaders, it was an essential tool.
It was the only way you could mobilise, as I say. Precolonial African societies had been enormously diverse and quite localised and complex and they
needed a simple concept to get everybody to apply sufficient pressure to get the colonial rulers out.
This was the the obvious and successful means of mobilising everybody.
And then what do you do with your nationalism? You weren't going to turn it into fighting your neighbours, which is where a lot of it came from.
Europe. You've tried to devote it to nation building, harambee, you know, all this kind of stuff, but.
It was. It did not entirely satisfy people's.
Need to have trust in leaders, and that's where you tends to get, as you were saying.
Ethnic parties, I trust actually the people who speak Luo.
I don't trust the people that speak to you. Therefore,
I'm going to support a party that is dominated by my people and that you can only
overcome by building institutions that are all building alternative loyalties.
That takes time. So it.
There's a constant process of evolution in Western societies.
You saw industrialisation created class based parties and we are not in that position in many African countries yet.
Patrick The transition, yeah, it raised the economic question, which again I hadn't really addressed at all.
That economic policy is again a fundamental Patrick regardless of the fundamental attribute of the state.
And. If you like, alongside nationalism development became part of the either ideology.
We this we government will develop the people launching infrastructure, football stadiums,
railway lines, projects is an integral part of what every African government does.
Every democratic government does actually. So land reform, however, is a particularly contentious one in Ghana.
It was an absolute nightmare. Many investors said we can't go to Ghana because we don't know whether they could have any secure tenure of land.
I think it was a metal that no government was willing to grasp because control over land was the one thing that was left with the traditional chiefs.
In many parts. So land reform has become almost impossible,
and yet it is a major constraint on development that the government acknowledges but is too difficult to deal with.
It's different in other places. In Rwanda, they very successfully categorised all that.
Everything is titled. There is a market here that. But that is quite that's the exception rather than the rule.
And that is a major constraint on the transformation of African agriculture, which is a major constraint on the development altogether.
And very few governments have acquired sufficient legitimacy to tackle the land reform issue and say,
guys, this is the way you've always done things, but we've got to do it differently.
And people will say, okay, that very few governments have got that level of power of legitimacy to do that.
Lastly, John, where they're all going, I wish I knew.
If there is a benign scenario and a less benign scenario, which, like the less benign one, is what I was painting at the end,
that actually governments are not able to establish sufficient authority through balance,
accountability, trust to take the kind of decisions that need to be taken.
The pandemic was a very good stress test, but they were quite lucky because actually throughout Africa the death rate turns up.
And I've got to say, this is a stress test because they were lucky, because the mortality rate was relatively small in Africa.
Had people been dying for Ebola like then,
there would have been a very serious risk of collapse as it was the fact that they couldn't exercise greater control over the societies.
Didn't matter too much, but they tested government authority in a number of countries to quite a limit.
Where there was severe lockdowns, all the kids had stay home.
Markets were closed. Some societies, some groups were teetering on the brink because everybody in those areas who lived hand-to-mouth,
if you didn't go to the market, make a few shillings, you couldn't buy the food, feed kids.
So it became really a real problem. Most people found ways to get around the rules, otherwise they couldn't survive.
So it was both an example of governments taking decisive action and people having to find their way around it in order to survive.
And that was that's problematic. So I would say it did not enhance the authority of the state as a whole.
But some people accept it was necessary to try and mobilise international support, to get protective gear,
to get vaccines and vaccines to be challenged because the international community failed to deliver.
And that undermined the legitimacy, the credibility of international actors in that respect.
So it's I think there's actually scope for a lot of studies that would reveal a great deal about the
relationship between governments and their citizens if we had the resources to do those studies.
Chris, thanks. My name is Stephanie Kunkel.
I'm a visiting researcher. I do research on digital technologies and industry and links with environmental sustainability.
And that's why I'm interested in your perspective which role African countries are playing in the fight against climate change.
And and if you see any signs of African countries taking new routes of development,
maybe some post industrialisation approaches, maybe this is more of wishful thinking.
But yeah, generally role for climate change mitigation and adaptation.
Thank you. There's a question over there on the left.
And at. Hello.
My name is Sasha. I was a master's student of international relations, but that was a year ago.
My question was regarding the issue of strong men and strong institutions.
I have a slight issue with this statement because the USA, when Obama was president, was installing military bases in African countries.
So my question really is what what is the role of African militaries against that form of neo colonialism?
Because militaries are needed to protect ourselves against colonialism just as policies that against taxation and so on and so forth.
Yeah. So, yeah, that's my question. Thank you.
Question? Well, several questions to three and then the fourth one here and then we'll go on.
Good evening. My name is Sampson.
So my question is, when it comes to borders and migration and what have view in contemporary times, especially at least to Africa.
A lot of people have said, oh, Africa is a failed state.
And when you ask people, the bodies of people moving into different countries and some of them as a result of climate change as well,
especially in the Horn of Africa. Now the question is, oh, I've looked at a lot of migration policies.
I'm going to put policies, especially as he has to do with Africa and the West.
And I see that most of these policies are peremptory in the this of the positions in the way that the people that are coming,
they only accept people with a confused something position does thus does migration in either case, is it not.
When it comes to forced migration, well, of course we know how the West treats Africans when it comes to forced migration.
So my question is whether we get it. Does the African state where we head and so we can continue with these peremptory measures,
even in the case of decarbonisation and sustainability, we can see the discussions that affect Africa in sustainability there.
The apparent IT analysts, they rely on the West.
How long are we going to continue like this? What is the way out for the African state?
Thank you. Thank you. There on the back.
Thank you. Good evening. I'm Peter Hinton. I'm a Dphil student.
Look at the financing of low cost non-state schools in Africa.
I also teach on impact investing at the business school. And so my I have two questions.
One, am you probably familiar with Stefan Dirksen's book Bargaining on Development.
So I'd like to hear your observations on the success or otherwise of bargaining with elites in Africa and where you see signs of hope in that regard.
I've just come back from South Sudan, which is a particularly challenging part of the world.
My second question is going back to population growth. I don't see it as a great attribute, to be honest.
If you look at China and bringing people out of poverty, people talk about the numerator being economic growth,
but they forget about the denominator being a pretty stable population.
So I just wonder what your thoughts are on what I see as a good opportunity of more girls getting education,
bringing the birth rate down through choosing to have smaller families because women are empowered through that process.
Thank you. We didn't plan the reference to Stefan Durkin's book, but just just now that you mention it,
Stefan Durcan is co-director of our Oxford Medical School Program on African Governance,
and we had a great event here back in May launching his book, which you can see online with several interesting discussants.
Exactly. You. Yeah.
Hi, my name is Charlotte. And then I'm doing M.S. and African Studies.
You're probably also familiar with Lindbergh's philosophy or theory of democratisation through elections.
E just recently argued agenda that was the only way African state would get use of African population,
would get used to the benefits of democracy, and that eventually they will become democracy in a way that we see it.
And I mean Western sense of having accountable government around what kind of stuff?
What do you think of that? That was my first question. My second question is you mentioned for a kind of access in your argument.
And the fourth one was we need to have like a model.
Oh. Giving away power. But you didn't tell us what?
What? Well, what should happen if it's not for the election?
If it's not for the two terms? What should happen? I think there's one more over here.
So I. With.
Hi, my name is Jonathan. I'm a third year doing history in politics.
My question kind of pertains to developmental. Is corruption honest?
With the coming election in Nigeria, there is the idea that you can grow the economy by more than you potentially steal.
So do you think that corruption is inherently old with development, or can you have both at the same time?
Mm hm. Thank you, Nic.
I'll throw in one very brief question.
Yeah, but don't feel that there's several speakers to your question, so don't feel like you have to answer them all.
But one major change in the international relations of African states over the last 20 years has been
the diversification of their choices away from this overdependence that they had on on the West,
especially since the end of the Cold War. I think from the vantage point of 2022,
we don't we shouldn't just be speculative about what this may mean because we have two decades worth of major presence Brazil,
China, India, and obviously smaller but important players the Emirates, Turkey, Qatar, Russia.
So we could we can now make general statements about this this much wider menu of international choices.
How has it pan out for from Africans perspective?
Has it hasn't had any noticeable impact in terms not just in concrete terms like development finance,
but has this emancipated Africa from what was termed by one of the one of the members of the audience,
the neo colonialism, or at least the complicated nature of the Western relationship?
Or is it more of the same despite despite that diversification?
I'm aware it's a sprawling question. So again, I'll try and take the Nordics.
Otherwise, I'll miss somebody. Sorry. We have 5 minutes. A few minutes each.
Climate adaptation. It would be very nice to think that Africans would leapfrog as they have with mobile telephony to clean energy.
But African governments were arguing hard in 2017 to be allowed to develop their
gas them their hydrocarbon resources because their countries need development.
That's the way you develop. Why should we develop that way too?
The answer is to make it more economically viable and advantageous to develop that now,
not just in 20 years time for the benefit of humanity, but right now for real people.
And there has been a dearth of investment in adequate levels of investment in renewables in Africa, and that money needs to be mobilised,
which is why some money for loss and damage would be a good thing, enabling a faster investment in renewables,
diminishing the need to develop hydrocarbons in the US bases in Africa.
It's not just the US bases. There are many external military actors, including Turkish drones bombing the Tigrayans in Ethiopia.
Amazon keeping the peace in Somalia.
The French, of course, all across the Sahel. By and large, these are invited by African governments.
Because they need the additional support to assure their security against threats, usually internal threats.
al-Shabab successfully conquered most of Somalia.
Most Somalis were not happy with that.
Some of it was better than the chaos that came before, and they welcomed the arrival of Amazon, which was provided by Africa.
African troops funded by the UN and the EU.
That is, they tried to do the same in the Sahel to tackle the jihadist threat there, which was killing a lot of people.
There was some popular support for some of the jihadis, particularly amongst the fighting in Mali,
because the government in Bamako had ignored them all the time.
But nevertheless, they were ended up killing a lot of people.
And the Malian government of the time invited the French to come and help them fight the jihadists.
The answer is for African governments to have security structures that enable them to ensure their own security.
And very few have been able to do that.
If you look at the effective militaries and I'm discussing this as a security issue because security is important,
whether it's the neocolonial or the Volvo group is any less neocolonial than hard or legal or anything else.
The externals who come in often to support a local regime for its benefits, not for the people's benefit.
You could say that's neocolonial, but the only alternative is that the people get their governments to have security forces that are efficient,
be honest, and see big enough to assure their security as opposed to being weak, corrupt, incompetent.
And that is very difficult to do. It took centuries in Europe.
For that to evolve, it is desirable. It's also very expensive.
But the effective militaries in Africa you can probably list on one hand I think is a one hand.
Rwanda, very effective. Uganda has been running.
Angola was Angola. I think those are the effective militaries.
So, you know, it's a real challenge. It's and it's not as there's no simple solution.
US bases are protecting US interests,
but also often at the invitation of local governments who are protecting their own interests to Australia is quite low on migration.
Yes. Samsung.
One thing that astonishes me about Africa is the hospitality of neighbours for their people fleeing an actual country.
There are about a million South Sudanese in Uganda and these half a million tigrayans now in Sudan.
And these people are accommodated. There's a slight problem with xenophobia in South Africa, where Zimbabweans are not terribly welcome.
But by and large, it suggests to me that that old sort of fluidity still exists in some ways in African societies.
You accept people who have had to move from one place to another.
It still can be challenging, politically challenging.
So and borders are much less rigorously policed.
Across Africa, though, they are in Europe.
I let's not start the discussion about my European migration policy that would do that in the bar afterwards.
That's too long. But it is still a feature of Africa that there are very large cross-border movements of people,
and by and large, they have not led to immediate conflict.
Peter Beinart Yeah, Declan book's great. I don't agree with all that,
but it's he's he's he's identified that elites can have a fundamental influence on how effective the development effort is.
And I will actually link this to the question about corrupt Jonathan's question about corruption and development because.
If you take the example of Indonesia or indeed Thailand, these are countries where there is huge corruption and yet they have been able to develop.
Why? Because the corruption, if you like, was recycled internally.
Businessmen made a lot of money. They planned it back into building their businesses on the spot in quite a few African countries.
The profits of corruption are simply exported. You go and you buy property in Paris or London or Swiss bank account or Johannesburg.
It's not recycled in country. And that's for you is the difference.
It's not whether it's corrupt or not. It's how the corrupt gains are used.
And in many African countries, people thought, I want to use this money outside rather than saying, I can now build my business better inside.
This has been an export dominated corruption.
And that has made a difference. Democracy through elections.
So I think, yes, ultimately, I suppose I've come to the fact that, you know,
Western countries, lots of countries have tried those of different political forms.
And like Churchill, I believe democracy is the worst possible solution except for all the others.
And it's actually very difficult to build democracy because you have to have trusted institutions.
Elections don't. Don't generate democracy.
It's far more than that. They can be an integral part of a democratic and accountable solution, but they in themselves, they don't deliver it.
So and lastly, Ricardo. Yeah.
I think African countries have benefited hugely from having a wider range of external partners.
Africa has historically been an investment poor land rich resource rich, poor investment, poor country.
Therefore, investment from all directions should be welcome.
This question of how effectively that is used and some sources of investments are more productive than others.
Some will very happily come and build you a football stadium or three football stadiums, which is really helping the economy a lot.
Others will allow a lot of money into agricultural development schemes.
So some good, some are not. So in theory, having a wider pick of partners should be really good.
And I can pick and choose the ones that are most beneficial. So in principle, it's a good thing.
That said, some of the partnerships are used more for local benefits than national benefits.
And if you look at some of the Gulf partnerships in the Horn of Africa,
and there's the question how much they are really helping build the stability of their societies and the prosperity.
And it brings us back to the question of prosperity. How responsible are African governments for delivering development?
They all say they are. It's a fundamental requirements African citizens are looking for, and yet delivery has been very weak.
And this is because there are within these political structures, dynamics that both prioritise the short term and prioritise the personal,
because you are funding a political system rather than funding development that then funds the political system.
Thank you, Nick, for this insight. Insightful and very, very wide ranging.
So please join me in thanking our speaker. Thank you.