Morris Szeftel

Misunderstanding African politics: corruption & the governance agenda

Political corruption ‐ the misuse of public office or public responsibility for private (personal or sectional) gain ‐ has been an important theme of the neo‐liberal policies of adjustment, conditionality and democratization in Africa. Having identified the state as ‘the problem’, and liberalization and democratization as ‘the solution’ to that problem, it was inevitable that efforts to eradicate and control the widespread corruption characterising post‐colonial politics would be given a high priority by ‘the donors’. From the outset, proponents of structural reform linked political corruption to authoritarianism as an explanation of developmental failure, thereby identifying the arguments for democratization and ‘good governance’ with those for liberalization. This paper explores the way in which corruption has been understood in this ‘governance’ agenda and the efforts that have been made to control it by improving institutional performance and policing ‐ greater transparency and accountability, more ef...

Between Governance & Under- development: Accumulation & Africa's 'Catastrophic Corruption'

Capital eschews no profit, or very small profit, just as nature was formerly said to abhor a vacuum.With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 per cent will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 per cent will produce eagerness; 50 per cent positive audacity; 100 per cent will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 per cent and there is not acrime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged. If turbulence and strife will bring a profit, it will freely encourage both. Smuggling and the slave trade have amply proved all that is here stated. T J Dunning, quoted in Karl Marx, Capital I (1976:926, fn.). This paper explores aspects of the tension between, on the one hand, international efforts by multilateral and bilateral creditors and aid donors to reduce corruption in developing countries and, on the other, the role played by political corruption in promoting local accumulation of wealth, property and capital in Africa. The process of globalisation includes a concerted effort to reduce the costs and increase the predictability of international business activities. The effort has been particularly directed at countries undergoing economic restructuring and democratic change. The weak bargaining position of African states, where debt and underdevelopment make dependence on international creditors and aid donors especially acute, has led to a variety of direct, unsubtle pressures to force these states to undertake ‘governance’ reforms. While many of these measures address important problems undermining African development, they also misunderstand the nature of corruption as an African problem in two important ways. First, they seek to impose rules and norms of proper public behaviour, developed for and within liberal democracies, in environments where liberal democracy is not established. And, second, they threaten the dependence of the African petty bourgeoisie on access to the state and its resources. In the context of underdevelopment, local accumulation rests heavily on political power and the ability it provides to appropriate public resources. Corruption provides a means of transferring public resources to the new middle class and bourgeois strata which emerged in the post‐colonial order. And underdevelopment ensures that dependence on political power for accumulation is continuous. Africas development crisis has intensified dependence on the political domain even more and increased conflict as claimants fight over a diminishing pool of resources. Far from arresting the upward spiral of corruption, liberalisation and governance measures imposed by the donors have encouraged the development of new forms of corruption.

Clientelism, corruption & catastrophe

In the previous issue of this journal (ROAPE 84), the author argued that international anti‐corruption efforts created conflicts between aid donors and African debtor governments because they attacked the ability of local interests to control and appropriate state resources. The control of corruption is an essential element in the legitimation of liberal democracy and in the promotion of global markets. However, it also threatens the local accumulation of wealth and property (dependent as it is on access to the state) in post‐colonial Africa. This article explores another dimension of this problem, namely the way in which clientelist forms of political mobilisation have promoted corruption and intensified crisis. Clientelism has been a key mechanism through which political interests have built the electoral support necessary to ensure access to the states resources. In turn, it has shaped a politics of factional competition over power and resources, a politics obsessed with the division of the political spoils. The article argues that this process is not unique to Africa. What is different, however, is that factional conflict and its attendant corruption have had such devastating consequences. This reflects the particular forms which clientelism has taken on the continent. There is a need, it concludes, to find ways to shift African politics towards issues of social justice and government performance and away from a concern with a division of the states resources.

Political graft and the spoils system in Zambia — the state as a resource in itself

This article traces a number of cases of graft in Zambia to show the importance of this practice within the political system. Graft is treated as one element of a spoils system through which clientelism operates and through which, more generally, the state is used as a resource for private ends. Graft and patronage are shown to have negative consequences for the state through undermining efficiency and legitimacy and displacing policy ends. But perhaps most importantly, it is argued that graft ultimately involves a transfer of wealth between classes and more specifically is an important factor in the growth of an indigenous owning class.

The fall and rise of multi‐party politics in Zambia

The overwhelming electoral victory of the MMD in November 1991 restored multi‐party politics to Zambia and ended the UNIP monopoly of government which had existed since 1964. A coalition of forces disenchanted by economic decline and resentful of authoritarian one‐party rule, the MMD has moved swiftly to reduce the economic and social role of the state and to promote market restructuring in line with IMF conditionalities. An alliance of trade union leaders and local capitalists, the MMD also committed itself to political reform which encouraged hopes that stable democratic institutions can be forged. However, after only a few months in office, criticism of presidential authoritarianism and the widespread use of patronage in appointments raises doubts that such promises will be delivered. The question is posed of whether MMD replaces UNIP or simply reproduces it.

The 1996 Zambian elections: still awaiting democratic consolidation

On 18 November 1996 presidential and parliamentary elections were held for the second time under Zambias Third Republic. The first elections, in October 1991, ended the unbroken grip on power enjoyed by the United National Independence Party (UNIP) since 1964 and returned the country to a multi‐party political system after 18 years as a one‐party state. UNIP was heavily defeated by the MMD (Movement for Multiparty Democracy) and Kenneth Kaunda, the countrys president since 1964, was replaced by Frederick Chiluba. The peaceful nature of the changeover in 1991 was applauded locally and internationally. There was a sense of optimism about the countrys democratic prospects. Zambia was widely held up as a model of successful democratic transition and aid flowed in, partly in support of the democratic experiment and partly because of the new regimes commitment to economic liberalisation and structural adjustment. In some cases donor support was specifically earmarked for the promotion of good government and...

Ethnicity and Democratization in South Africa

The global proliferation of communal conflicts has its parallel in South Africa where the end of apartheid produced new demands for the recognition of group rights and ethnic interests. These run directly counter to the insistence of the ANC and its allies on a secular democracy based on equality of citizenship. Ethnic conflict, and particularly the violence in KwaZulu/Natal, has led to a renewal of interest in the study of ethnicity, particularly in problems related to its definition and to its nature in the South African context. Such issues raise questions about the role played by ethnicity in contemporary politics and about its place in the process of democratization. Although the renewed interest in ethnicity is timely, questions exist about the extent to which ethnic claims in South Africa have widespread support, or represent evidence of the resurgence of ethnicity rather than the assertiveness of heavily‐armed political machines.

Two cheers? South African democracy's first decade

The contributions in this issue mark the tenth anniversary of democracy and political liberation in South Africa. They are a selection of the papers originally presented to a Workshop organised in September 2003 in Johannesburg by the Democracy and Governance section of the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa. We are grateful to Roger Southall, its director, and to John Daniel for organising the conference, agreeing to a joint publication of papers with ROAPE and co-editing this issue. All the contributors are scholars and activists living and working in South Africa.

Commentary: taking leave of the twentieth century

A year ago, in ROAPE 60, we observed that the debt crisis provoked a deep pessimism about the prospects for African economic development in the immediate future. While the development process has been characterised historically by alternating waves of optimism and pessimism, the enormity of debt servitude and the ideology of debt management which structured the approach of the international financial institutions made the present conjuncture particularly disquieting. The brief hopes, encouraged by the events of 1989, that the end of the cold war would turn swords into ploughshares, end arms races and shift resources to growth, development and environmental protection have proved unfounded. Instead, US hegemony and the politics of markets have imposed further austerity on the poor and the weak and heightened local, national and global inequalities.

Introduction: Narratives of Nationhood

This special issue of JSAS has its origins in a major conference held in Lusaka in September 2012, titled ‘Zambia 2014: Narratives of Nationhood’, organised in anticipation of this year’s fiftieth anniversary of the country’s independence. This was an extraordinarily rich and vibrant event, bringing together dozens of scholars from a wide range of disciplines, together with practitioners in fields such as health care and literature, all of whom contributed to stimulating debates about Zambia’s own recent history and how this should be understood in the context of regional and international change in the last 50 years. The quality of the articles on Zambian literature and radio broadcasting was such that a group of these has already been published, in JSAS 40.3. The conference, however, despite the best efforts of its organisers – the editors of this special issue – unavoidably reflected the inequalities and unevenness of the academic and wider milieu in which it was produced. There is, as a result, a relative paucity of Zambian contributors to this special issue, a problem that is reflected in international journals more generally. The contemporary weakness of the higher education sector in Zambia in general, and at the University of Zambia in particular, are explored in the concluding section of this editorial. The wider challenge of presenting recent research on Zambian society is to provide some kind of coherent, intelligible research agenda while simultaneously avoiding the reduction of the history of a national territory such as Zambia to a necessarily limited set of themes that have attracted the attention of researchers. Historians of Africa in particular face the challenge of writing history, especially political history, that doesn’t construct or contribute to a narrative that – for the pre-1964 period – may read like a dress rehearsal for national independence and (for the post-1964 period) as a series of ripples that echo the achievements (or lack of achievements) of the independence event and the expectations that surrounded it. Here we seek to square this particular circle by reflecting on a set of core themes in Zambian scholarly literature that have been revisited and reassessed by the contributions to this special issue, while suggesting ways in which research in these areas may be further enriched in the future.