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' He Sees The Fact That Contemporary States In Africa Are Not Of Indigenous ...

' He sees the fact that contemporary states in Africa are not of indigenous design and evolution as their downfall it explains why most African states do not meet the Weberian criteria for a state. He explains that ‘theirs is a dubious community of heterogeneous and occasionally clashing linguistic, religious and ethnic identities; their claim to force is rarely effective and much less monopolistic; their frequent predatory nature fails the test of legitimacy; and their territoriality is generally at best hesitant and contested.' Herbst (1996, 122) points to the methods by which independence was gained and enshrined as an explanation for the ‘state failure' so often discussed in contemporary discussions of African development. ‘Implicitly, the granting of sovereignty to the new nations also suggested that every country that gained freedom from colonization would be politically and economically viable, despite the fact that most colonies in Africa had been demarcated with the assumption that they would not become separate, independent states.' This suggests there may be a need to rethink the nature of statehood in Africa, and the geographical lines along which states have been formed.
Englebert (1997, 774) highlights ‘the alienating consequences of the alliance between the local customary state and the national colonial one. By allowing chiefs to use their authority as a means towards personal strategies of accumulation, indirect colonial rule favoured a process of antagonisation between customary authority and its previous social foundations and of class fragmentation within the rural areas.' Booth (2005:1) argues that ‘in the sub-Saharan region all of the most significant obstacles to public and private investment in development (from preventive health to infrastructure, from nutrition to trade) can be traced back to policy inadequacies. And the policy inadequacies track back in their turn to the way politics is typically conducted in a ‘soft' state with a highly clientelistic system of political competition.' Time and time again then, it can be seen that the role of the state is absolutely key to understanding development (or the lack of it) in Africa. One of the key questions that needs to be addressed therefore, is what form of state would be most helpful in African countries. The answer may in fact be different for different countries and areas, and it is important to take a broad-minded approach to this question, and not to assume that the European model of the state is the only or best option.
However, it is also important to understand what it is about the African context that has made the European state model which has been relatively successful in Europe unsuccessful in much of Africa.


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