Why SSA governments continue to pursue piece-meal development?

Development is a transformative process of change in the structure and use of wealth and power. Using this conceptualization, therefore, two sources of pro-poor development can be identified:

a)      When a society changes the way it distributes burdens and benefits. By societal burdens, I mean the taxes and other obligations that are imposed on citizens by the state; and societal benefits, I mean the public goods and services that are provided by the state to protect its citizens, enhance their welfare, and expand their life opportunities. When a society changes the way it distributes burdens and benefits, this also triggers changes the relations of power amongst social groups within that society. For example, a land reform programme that redistributes land resources to the landless families can alter the balance of rural wealth and power.

b)      When a society changes its political and social relations, this also changes the way in which that particular society distributes its societal burdens and benefits. For example, recognizing rights of trades unions or peasant movements, or disenfranchisement of slaves in a particular society – are all expected to some extent to affect the way the societal burdens and benefits are distributed, wishfully, in favour of the majority.

The above conceptualization makes development a quintessentially political and potentially conflictual. Indeed, wherever human groups form there emerge some universal and necessary processes which constitute what politics is. This conceptualization of politics moves away from thinking about politics as the formal and conventional apparatus of state and government, towards a stressing that politics is an essential and unavoidable processes in all human collectives. As such, politics can be summarized as all activities of cooperation, conflict, and negotiation in decisions about distribution of burdens and benefits among members of a given society.

This game of politics is governed by rules or political institutions that can be broadly classified into two:

a)      Electoral institutions – which are rules, procedures and processes govern how power is earned and distributed, and authorize its use in particular ways.

b)      Accountability institutions – which are rules, procedures and norms that govern how power and authority is exercised. That is, rules and procedures governing policy decision making process.

How well established, popularly accepted and agreed the political institutions are in a particular society, determines the level of political stability of that society or polity. In this vein, three broad categories of polities can be identified:

a)      Stable polities – are those with high degree of consensus about the rules of the political game (or competition), normally expressed in formal institutional agreements such as constitutions which specify the rules governing competition for, distribution, use and control of (state) power;

b)      Fragile polities – are those where fundamental rules are not well established;

c)       Hybrid polities – are those between the above two extremes, where rules of the political game are broadly agreed upon but are not exclusive, as other informal channels are also used to earn and exercise power and authority.

In all stable polities (such as Western European societies), consensus about the rules of the political game has normally been part of a wider and more or less explicit consensus about socio-economic conditions, including goals, policies and practice. As such, prospects for economic growth (whether pro-poor or not) are likely to be good where the rules governing the political game are agreed, and the majority players are committed to promoting and sustaining a consistently supportive development strategy. While most societies look forward to having stable polities, however, reaching such a settled consensus has seldom been easy or conflict-free. The centuries of struggles in the course of industrialization of Western Europe between the left (labourers who were pushed off their lands) and right (new owners of land and capital) that ensued for many decades, is just but a key example.

In contrast, where there is little agreement or indeed where there is a deep conflict, about the rule of the political game (for example, in most SSA countries, Libya, Yemen, Egypt and Iraq), intensity of political struggle is likely to be severe and developmental momentum will be seriously compromised. This is especially so because, development especially pro-poor is not the most option the political survival of the domestic elites. As such, the political elites are pre-occupied in bolstering the available viable means to survive politically such as ethnic patronage, and not the pro-poor development that they preach in their political campaign manifestos!

The current situation in SSA did not come as an accident! The pre-modern human societies in most parts of SSA were largely stable and peaceful. Whether gatherers or hunting societies, they are reported to have enjoyed high level of internal political stability based on often unwritten, agreed and understood rules embedded in structures of power, expressed in cultural institutions and legitimized by a variety of ideologies and beliefs, for example, that the tribal king had divine powers. With the onset of slave trade and colonial occupation, most of those stable polities were violently ended, including such events where worship shrines were burnt down, banished and proclaimed 'evil', and in some instances even declared illegal, in a desperate attempt to transplant the ‘civilized’ Western ideology and capitalist system amongst the ‘untamed’ Africans. Any resistance was termed barbarism, cannibalism, nativism, witchcraft, 'juju', tribalism and terrorism. One author argues that the cycle of destruction-and-later-construction is an inherent tactic for capitalist accumulation by dispossession. Post-independence SSA leaders with a modicum of nationalism who wanted to create relatively independent states (such as Patrice Lumumba of Zaire, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Felix Rowland Moumie of Cameroon, Mehdi Beni Barka of Morocco, and Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso) were quickly weeded out through military coups and other  similar tactics. The current crop of leaders has learnt a lesson and always tries to play it safe, as long as the abstract ‘democracy politics’ gives them a term of office. The result is that most current leaders of SSA governments seem to lack the de jure as well as de facto power to determine policy in many significant areas because the executive, legislative, and judicial powers are still decisively constrained by an interlocking set of "colonial reserve domains," military "prerogatives," or "authoritarian enclaves”.

The foregoing means that pro-poor development can be achieved in two broad ways:
a) By ensuring greater equity at the start of the economic growth process, for example, through land reform as in Japan and Korea;
b) By strengthening the workers trade unions that can effectively negotiate for more readily available low-skilled jobs thereby pushing up wages among the poor, as was achieved initially by the East Asian economies (like Thailand, Korea and Malaysia)'s export-led growth in labour-intensive manufacturing sector.