Samuel Cohn: Global Social Trends

William Reno, the chair of the political science department at Northwestern University, is one of America’s leading experts on violent conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa. His arguments are always original, non-trivial and on target.

One of the most important questions one can ask about Africa is why there are so many civil wars, so many insurrections and so much political violence. A standard and correct explanation for this is that many African states are weak. They lack the police capacity and the military capacity to stand up to warlords. So the warlords rise up unimpeded and make mayhem.

Why are so many African states weak? There are many orthodox explanations for this – nearly all of which are reasonable. Professor Reno would agree with all of these – although he thinks the standard lists are incomplete. African states are weak because:

1. Budget constraints prevent them from raising enough taxes to support their militaries.

2. These same budget constraints can prevent governments from providing public services such as health care, infrastructure, and income support for the poor. (Counterintuitively, many do surprisingly well at providing education. The shortages are in other areas.) The absence of government services generates popular discontent and builds support for rebels.

3. Many countries are comprised of different ethnic groups with long histories of hostilities. Ethnic divisions undercut national unity and encourage regional rebellion.

4. Rebels can finance their operations with the proceeds of mineral and energy deposits in outlying regions. This allows them to resist the central government. It also provides no deterrent to committing atrocities – since rebels with independent bases of monetary support do not need to obtain the goodwill or cooperation of the general population. Rebels who depend on local citizens for food, medical care and materiel tend to treat these locals more humanely.

One could add more items to this list if one wanted to.

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How does William Reno expand upon these accounts?

In an article that appeared in 2003 (see the reference below), Reno argued that many weak African states intentionally sabotage their own power. They do not do this out of some suicidal death-wish. They do this because what has to be done in the short term for their regime to maintain control undercuts the power of their government in the long term. Prime ministers and presidents make Faustian bargains with the Devil. The Devil ultimately comes to take what is owed. What specifically are these forms of self-sabotage?

1.The reality African governments face in realpolitik is the high risk of a military coup. Between 1963 and 2002, more than half of the civilian governments had been replaced by military governments. Reno calculates that between 1970 and 1990, there was an over 70% chance that any given African leader would leave office under violent circumstances. In the 1990’s, the odds fell to a mere 40%. That is still a large enough risk to be of great concern to a president or a prime minister.

The high risk of coups d’etat made civilian leaders very wary of concentrating military force in the hands of a small number of generals. Concentrating militaries in the capital city raised further risks of coups. Leaders were also afraid of unified militaries. The counter-strategy was to decentralize the military and divide them. Armed forces were spread around the country in different units under different commands. Ethnic differences among troops would be accentuated. Generals would be played off against each other to create interservice rivalries.

Furthermore, civilian leaders would create new military forces to serve as counterweights to traditional military forces. These might be personal guards of the President,  or special task forces with a mission for combatting crime.

The consequence of such decentralization and factionalization was to fill the countryside with armed self-interested sub-leaders with strong motivations to fight everybody else. Every region had military commanders with loyal followers who trusted nobody and felt threatened both by the central government and by other regional forces. Civilian leaders tried to balance the strength of these disparate forces so that no one warlord would be capable of “going for it all”. Such balancing acts were fragile. They failed often.

2. Presidents tried to keep the peace by buying off combatants with patronage. Bribing rivals could be effective in the short term. However, money spent on sops to regional warlords was money not spent on providing services to the general population. The popular support of civilian leaders would decline as they failed to produce meaningful government resources.

A further consequence of patronage is that it clearly identified the central government as the “goose that lays the golden eggs.” A warlord who stays loyal receives his regional percentage of the patronage pie. A warlord who seizes the capital city gets 100 percent of the patronage pie. Government by patronage puts a target on the back of the civilian leader who administers in this fashion.

3. The need to provide payoffs lowers the incentives for civilian leaders to build strong technologically efficient government departments. When ministries are working as they should, they make technical decisions about the best uses of public resources – and then administer government programs to efficiently and effectively deliver services on the basis of need. A leader who is merely trying to buy off the most dangerous general in a given week does not need a staff of Ph.D. specialists to advise the president on where the money should go. Presidents doing balancing acts neither want nor need executive branches with competent technocrats. So they fail to develop those – with long term consequences for the overall effectiveness of state policy as a whole.

Reno backs up his arguments with a review of the history of various pathological African governments. Nigeria gets a lot of attention. He has a great deal of empirical material to back up his case.

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I make a counterpoint here that Professor Reno would probably agree with. He specializes in the least effective and most pathological African governments.

Keep in mind that many African governments are first rate. Education levels in Sub-Saharan Africa are non-trivially high. Many African universities can be legitimately viewed as centers of excellence. National governments staff their ministries with locally educated technocrats of the highest caliber. These officials then develop economic, social and public health programs that are effective and create meaningful improvements in standards of living and national quality of life. The Cabo Verde Islands and Mauritius are particularly famous examples. Tanzania, Rwanda, Ghana and Ethiopia made dramatic improvements in the twenty-first century. Ethiopia, sadly, is now gravitating back towards war. I personally do not know what differentiates the star developers of Sub-Saharan Africa from more pathological cases such as the Democratic Republic of Congo or the Sudan.

But Reno does develop a powerful explanation of why things fall apart so dramatically in the bottom tier of countries. State failure and state collapse are real. When things have gotten to the point that the military can not be trusted to have concentrated power in the capital city, the country has the pre-conditions for what could turn into more permanent state collapse. Such dangerous conditions are fixable. Between 1990 and 1994, Rwanda experienced a genocidal civil war between Hutus and Tutsis, with additional violence between factions of the Hutu themselves. Rwanda is well-run and peaceful today. State collapse is not a permanent condition. But life can be a living hell in the chaotic periods of all-out civil war.

A good takeaway from Reno, is that state collapse is not something that happens to governments due to circumstances beyond their control. It is something they bring on themselves. The strategies that Reno discusses are not the only way that presidents and prime ministers can protect themselves against military coups. They are merely a common way to seek such protection. The consequence of such strategies can be decades of bloodshed.

Proven economic and poverty alleviation strategies could be an alternative to dispersing and buying off military officers. The military officers may still be ambitious. They may still attack the seat of government. If the President does a good enough job, he or she may be able to count on crowds of civilians keeping the military vehicles from advancing. Putsches often fall apart in the face of an absence of popular support. But the President has to earn this with bona fide performance.