African Politics - Essay Example

AFRICAN POLITICS Question African Nationalism Colonialism is the act of a foreign power acquiring, exploiting, establishing, maintaining and expanding a territory in a region that the power has no claim over (Chabal & Daloz, 1992). This happened in Africa during the 19th and 20th centuries with western powers establishing colonies in nearly all nations of the continent. From the Nile in the north to the cape in the south, whites came to the continent as explorers for starters. Missionaries, settlers and even administrators later followed. The foreigners found the natives were organized into chiefdoms that were mainly grouped by their ethnicities. The chiefdoms relied on agriculture and pastoralism to support their economies with the communities having conflicts from time to time. The pattern used in dominating the communities is almost similar. The communities were offered protection from external interference if they gave the foreigners land. Those who resisted were, easily subdued by the whites’ military that greatly overshadowed the African armies that were disorganized and used crude weapons. This saw the new administration, administer European laws, decide land allocation as well as tax the Africans. The Africans also had to work for the Europeans with little if any pay. At the time, the communities fought each other with some uniting with the Europeans in order to have an edge over their enemies. This saw the colonialists divide their territories into smaller divisions based on ethnicity to help in having different policies for collaborators and communities that resisted enabling them to maintain their rule (Okoth, 2006). Over time, the Africans grew weary of the new administrations with the collaborators also regretting having handed over power to the Europeans. The main grievances were regular tax increases, land deprival, lack of representation in the administration and other matters that concerned them, race confrontation realities as well as low pay and forced labor. Slowly they began to understand the workings of the new administrations and vented in clubs and societies. Here, the natives had discussions that centered on how they would improve the conditions affecting their communities with the solutions almost always being seen as self-rule (Gatheru, 2005). These clubs and societies eventually developed into movements of African Nationalism with political interests. African Nationalism describes a movement that advocates for self-rule and determination (www2.stetson.edu, 2014). The origin of these movements was the Africans need to oppose colonialism. The movement’s goal was to see the liberalization of the colonies which would see an end to colonization giving the people the ability to rule themselves and make policies which would see the betterment of their lives. According to Medani (2012), South Sudan is the latest nation to apply the concept of liberation through its secession from North Sudan by way of a referendum in 2011 that served as a solution to the unending civil unrest between the two nations. The movements collectively labelled associations started with tribal grouping before the natives who lived in the urban areas formed urban groupings which were tribal. Tribal associations sought to protect their ethnic interests and collected the tribe’s grievances. They protested when the rights of the tribe were infringed. All associations, however, tried to lobby for reforms by making representations to the governments. Nevertheless, the governments simply ignored the pleas for several decades. However, World War 2 became the turning point for these movements and their methods. The movements consequently developed into political parties post-war. These were used as tools of engaging the colonialists through organising protests and creating legislature that eventually ushered in independence. However, the struggle for independence was not a smooth ride. The iconic leaders like Nelson Mandela, Jomo Kenyatta and Kwame Nkurumah faced a mountain of challenges. First, the leaders had to unite the people. The associations that existed were mainly tribal and did not augur well with each other. This meant the leaders had to bring these groups together to forge strong political organs that could push for change. Second, the leaders had to deal with an administration that did not pay attention to the people’s pleas choosing to ignore them instead. This meant the likes of Mandela had to make the administrations pay attention and act on what the people wanted. This meant they were on the receiving end of persecution with Mandel and Kenyatta being detained for a while (www2.stetson.edu, 2014). Being on the losing side at the time meant the African Nationalism leaders had limited resources at their disposal for use in lobbying support for their issues. However, the colonial territories that are now nations adopted different methods in their challenging of the colonial authorities. For example in Kenya, the movements chose political means of legislations and protest as the first method of pushing the colonialists. However, with time the pressure to see results resulted in the people viewing the process as unyielding. This resulted in the movements including military action. The Mau Mau, a Kikuyu military wing advocated for freedom using terrorism, creating a conflict that resulted in loss of lives on both sides. The effect of this in the post-colonial era was the development of an authoritarian leadership which was the presidency with the opinion of the people playing a small part in decision making. South Africa on the other hand employed a totally different model. There was no warfare. Instead the people took to the streets in massive numbers to protest apartheid rule and the detention of Mandela (Okoth, 2006). The African side of the protest suffered loss of lives, but in the end the pressure of the uprising forced the administration to yield and give the countrys independence. The effect of this in the post-colonial period was a presidency that was people centered with Mandela listening to the opinion of the people. Question 2 A British scholar by the name Ian Brownlie described a state as a legal entity that has a permanent population within a territory that is defined with an independent effective government (Jackson and Rosberg, n.d.). State formation requires the coming together of diverse groups of people to form one entity that is able to interact with other states. In Africa, colonization was the main driver for the formation of states. The African people experienced a clot of persecution from the colonialist. The foreigners had already instilled the values of formal governance. As such the Africans felt they needed to establish entities that could govern and manage the resources of the communities. This prompted them to come together and form states that had centralized systems of governing to manage the use of their resources as well as manage the state’s resources. However, in some states like Kenya, this resulted in formation of authoritarian leadership. One needs to look at the countries’ colonial and pre-colonial era history to understand this development. Kenyan pre-colonial era For centuries before the colonisation era, communities needed to adjust to their environments as a means of survival (Okoth, 2006). Some communities relied on agriculture while others turned to pastoralism to fuel their economies. Others relied on a combination of both with production in all economies being primarily aimed at collective subsistence. Labour payments mostly depended on the needs that one had. With the largest political organs consisting of a few clans, there lacked motivation for the formation of state size organs. Although the communities had reservations that saw them segmented, the fluidity of the boundaries allowed warfare, trade and intermarriages as inter-communal interactions. Colonial era With the establishment of colonies, the societies of Africans and therefore nations changed forever. The 1884/85 conference in Berlin set the stage for colonial occupation by setting rules. This saw Britain establish a protectorate over Kenya that assembled more than forty communities under one territorial bracket while dividing different communities into different territories. This resulted in inter-community politics as they competed for the colonial resources as in the case of the Kalenjin and the Luhya fighting the Kikuyu-Luo domination (Ndege, 2009). The demarcation of boundaries also created conflicts and sovereignty loss as colonial powers sought to maintain power over territories and impose colonial rulers. Africans lacked representation in legislative bodies until the end of the Second World War. The selection of collaborators to rule over their African counterparts as well as the policies of the administration, centralized power and governance while at the same time ethnicing and realizing it. This decided the legacy of the power and governance of the state after it was formed post-independence with the government inheriting all these properties save for the racial aspect of it. The colonial era administrations therefore resulted in the establishment of autocratic and neo-patrimonial system of presidency with no answerability as the presidency is ethnicized and the power centralized. In order to ensure centralization the leaders established a single party rule with KANU being the only party in the country in the decade. Economy wise, the key driver of the colonization of Africa, read Kenya, was the European thirst for natural resource to fuel their economies. This meant that their exploitation of the African resources did not have an allowance for the benefit of the African and therefore the Kenyans. For example, the British policies in Kenya focused on African taxation, land alienation, forced labour, export production and development of the settlers’ land (Ndege, 2009). These policies meant overexploitation of the Kenyan natural resource that fuelled such things as deforestation. These pre-capitalist policies proceeded to the post-colonial era with the authoritarian rule applying neo-patrimonalism by allocating such things as forested land to themselves (Steelworkers and Dependence, n.d.). Socially, the colonial era resulted in the erosion of the African culture. In the pre-colonial era, society shared its resources communally with harvest being shared. When the missionaries came, their conviction of spreading the gospel was of the view that erosion of the African culture and traditions was the best way of reaching out to the population (Ndege, 2009). This saw the values of sharing of resources fade away with the western culture of helping yourself growing. The effect of this on the leaders was that in the post-colonial era they became selfish. In Kenya, specifically Jomo Kenyatta and the elite leaders, allocated themselves the settled lands instead of dividing it to the community to maintain their loyalty. Therefore the political, social and economic trends exhibited in the colonial era resulted in the development of centralized authoritarian rules with the leaders exhibiting neo-patrimonialism in resource management. Question 3 Since it attained independence in the 1950s, Nigeria has had its political elite enrich themselves and their allies using state power. A neo-patrimonial bourgeoisie developed due to the pillage of resources by state organs that saw the country’s economics reduced to an equation of power, wealth and politics (Ojo, 2008). To this group, the term democracy is a threat as it poses a direct threat to the control of power that creates the political neo-patrimonial bourgeoisie (Brett, n.d.). At the time of attaining independence, Nigeria did not have this bourgeoisie. This means that the elite did not adopt it from the colonial power’s administration and instead fabricated the whole thing from political resources. The state acts as a tool through which the Nigerian economy gets capital. However, the nation’s political economy is influenced by the nation’s political playing field where the rule is accumulation is power. This translates into the fact that the more powerful you get, the more capital you accumulate failure to which you are marginalized (Steelworkers and Dependence, n.d.). This neo-patrimonial property of the country translates into the country having a Hobbesian dimension in the struggle for power and therefore accumulation of resources. This phenomenon saw the government draft a law restring the nation’s political parties to only two before announcing that it would establish and run both parties, a trait that describes authoritarian rule. This is one of the fails of such a structure. In the first republic era in the country, the struggle for power incorporated ethnicity and regionalism with the members of parliament not agreeing to lose their seats (Ojo, 2008). This shows that the structure results in civil service organs failing to do their work. The blocking of the parliament led to the outbreak of a civil war typical of the structure (Brett, n.d.). The structure is also a cause for bribery and other election malpractices that rule out the rule of democracy. During the second republic, nomination candidates paid thugs just so that they can rig the vote and remain in power. With such elections, it is no wonder there was a coup only three months later that resulted in another civil war. Surprisingly, with the recurring events, civilians seem not to care about the developments. First of all, it is their duty to contest unequal resource distribution as per the rule of democracy. If they did this, the idea that accumulation of wealth will result from gaining power will eventually fade away and dissolve the structure. The fact that the same corrupt people continue clinging to power while the people have the power to vote them out does not also sound like a democracy. All these show that the neo-patrimonial manner in which Nigeria is being run threatens the ideal of democracy in the nation (Steelworkers and Dependence, n.d.). During the colonial era, the administrations centralized the power and did not allow room for opposition to the leadership. This resulted in the Africans revolting against the administrations until they finally gained independence. However, the culture of leadership used by the colonialists was adopted by the post-colonial era administrations. This resulted in the new administrations mistrusting other ethnic groups and losing the favor of the people. They then adopted neo-patrimonial administrative structures with leaders handing out natural resources as well as other public wealth to gain the loyalty of the people. The end game to this is that the rule becomes authoritarianism with mistrust among ethnic tribes. Since there is an unequal and undemocratic distribution of resources, development is hindered which weakens the economy. References Brett, E. (n.d.). Dependency and Development: Some Problems Involved in the Analysis of Change in Colonial Africa. Sussex University. Chabal, P. & Daloz, J. P. (1992). Africa Works: Disorder as political instrument. The International African Institute. Gatheru, R. M. (2005). Kenya: From colonization to independence, 1888-1970. Jefferson (N.C.: McFarland. Jackson, R. and Rosberg, C. (n.d.). Why Africas Weak States Persist: The Empirical and the Juridical in Statehood. 1st ed. [ebook] Cambridge: Cambridge University. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2010277 [Accessed 3 Oct. 2014]. Medani, K. (2012). The Horn of Africa in the shadow of the cold war: understanding the partition of Sudan from a regional perspective. The Journal of North African Studies. 17:2, 275-294. Ndege, P. (2009). [online] Colonialism and its Legacies in Kenya. Available at: http://international.iupui.edu/kenya/resources/Colonialism-and-Its-Legacies.pdf [Accessed 3 Oct. 2014]. Ojo, B. A. (2008). Nigerias Third Republic: The problems and prospects of political transition to civil rule. Commack, N.Y: Nova Science Publishers. Okoth, A. (2006). African nationalism and the de-colonisation process: [1915-1995]. Nairobi [u.a.: East African Educational Publ. Steelworkers, I. and Dependence, M. (n.d.). Neopatrimonial Regimes and Michael Bratton and Political Transitions in Africa Nicholas van de Walk 453. Cambridge Univ Press. Www2.stetson.edu, (2014). UHURU: THE AFRICAN STRUGGLE FOR INDEPENDENCE. [online] Available at: https://www2.stetson.edu/secure/history/hy10430/uhuru.html [Accessed 3 Oct. 2014]. 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