To what extent have Africans taken ownership of their independent states, retaining what they value from their origins and early development, discarding the rest, and infusing their own values into them?
By Prof John Harbeson
Ethiopia has confronted postcolonial state formation with clarity without parallel in the modern political history of sub-Saharan Africa. Ethiopia has been an empire of its own creation, greatly enlarged to its present borders (minus by the conquests of its penultimate emperor, Menelik II (1889-1913). Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has introduced democratic reforms since coming to power in April, 2018, including planned free and fair elections and allowing unprecedented freedom of speech and association. Ethiopians have their first ever opportunity to fashion a post-imperial state of their own creation, after an unbroken history of authoritarian rule from Menelik’s time through that of emperor Haile Selassie (1930-1974) and successor regimes — the military dictatorship (1974-1991) and Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF,1991-2018).
By contrast, states elsewhere in Africa were created in their present form through colonial rule, modified by the work of subsequent independent governments, for better or worse, but not re-created from scratch. Thus, a pre-eminent scholar of African politics wrote authoritatively about contemporary Africa’s “colonial states.” The form and structure of the state as we know it today was imported into sub-Saharan Africa by the colonial powers to serve their purposes rather than those of the African subjects they ruled. They have persisted since independence in most cases, along with authoritarian ruling patterns carried over from colonial times.
Ethiopia’s unique opportunity to fashion a post-imperial state of its own creation poses the question of the nature of the state itself in post-colonial circumstances. Explicitly or implicitly, it has been conventional to rely on the definition early 20th Century German philosopher Max Weber offered: compulsory territorially based community possessing a monopoly of the legitimate use of coercion, reinforced by the late Charles Tilly’s theory of the European state as a product of war and war preparation. The pervasive phenomenon of states in Africa that are fragile because they are unable to establish human security is probative evidence that post-colonial states will establish sustainability only when their citizens, and not just capable rulers, so determine. Thus, Ethiopians have the singular opportunity to use democratic processes to establish a post-imperial state by asking the fundamental question of on what terms and with whom are they prepared to coexist in each other in a polity.
Perhaps the principal problem for Ethiopia has been that the 1995 constitution established by the EPRDF famously organized Ethiopia as an ethnic confederal polity with regions and subregions defined to uphold self-determination for the dominant ethnic community within each. Each such region or subregion was granted a high degree of autonomy and self-determination up to and including, by specified processes, secession. A motivating EPRDF hypothesis was that, armed with these powers, no region would find it necessary to pursue independence from Ethiopia as Eritrea did in 1993. Unfortunately, rather than summoning these communities to harness their liberated political energies to define a post-imperial state, President Ahmed Abiy has allowed these ethnic communities to joust with each other and his regime, at the cost of extensive violence, risking an inescapable return to authoritarian rule. In the worst case, tragically, an unraveling of the imperially, conquest defined state is possible rather than democratic construction of a long elusive post-imperial Ethiopian state.
As Ethiopia potentially teeters in the balance between pursuit of a democratic post-imperial state and reversion to old ways or worse, what about the status of the state in the eyes of citizens of other sub-Saharan states? To what extent, over the last half-century and more, have African peoples come to take ownership of their independent states, retaining what they value from their origins and early development, discarding the rest, and infusing their own values into them? To what extent has post-Cold War democratization supplied venues not only to realize freedoms of expression and association and free and fair elections but to reform their states to their liking? Kenya’s current debates about whether and how to amend their model 2010 Constitution raise these very questions among others.
Two decades of Afrobarometer surveys offer some approximate estimates on these questions. Its in-depth randomized surveys African opinion in over thirty countries between 2011 and 2013 included the question of whether respondents identified completely or largely with their nation-states, equally a part of their nation and of their ethnic community, or completely or largely a part of only of their ethnic community. After forty or more years of independence, just 48 percent of respondents felt largely or wholly a part of their new states. Their answers to the same question in the most recent 2016-2018 surveys actually showed a decline in that percentage to just under 39 percent. Kenya’s numbers were just above 56% in the earlier survey, down slightly to 54 in the latter.
In sum, the post-colonial/post-imperial African state remains, if anything, more elusive than ever.
— Author is a professor of Political Science Emeritus as well as a professorial lecturer for the African Studies Program, Johns Hopkins University.
Email your news TIPS to Editor@nairobilawmonthly.com, and to advertise with us, call +254715061658 anytime of the day
