Why African States Remain Fragile?

At independence, post-independence African states were and continue to be rooted in the political, social and economic conditions experienced under colonialism. On coming to power at independence, African elites inherited a state system established by the former colonial rulers. This system lacked legitimacy, capacity and resources. It was geared towards law enforcement and control of ‘native’ populations, and secondarily if at all to their welfare. Mechanisms of accountability did not exist and civil society was weak. Economies had been geared towards serving the needs of the colonizer rather than the needs of the colonized. It was in this context that the new elites use the state and its resources to establish their political authority.

As a consequence, African states are usually characterized as having:
a) A strong executive to the detriment of the judiciary, parliament and civil society (least unionized) – often with power concentrated in the hands of a president;
b) An weak and often corrupt civil service – with civil servants using proximity to state resources for self aggrandizement and material advancement; and
c) A marginalized civil society - very few formal associations, even where formal associations exist (such as trade unions, religious groups, traditional leaders, business associations, even political parties), they are either marginalized from the decision-making process or are co-opted by government into patron-client relations

The post-independence African states inherited the colonial boundaries that did not respect the traditional ethnic, linguistic or religious divisions that existed in pre-colonial times, and imposed artificial "nation-states" on rival ethnic groups which did not share a fundamentally distinct or internally homogenous culture. The heterogenous and multi-tribal character of African societies reflects the circumstances of Africa's colonization and partitioning that were done without regard to either the interests or the natural divisions and institutions of its peoples. The administrative and political infrastructure devised by the colonial administrators so as to effectively and economically govern the colonies was feudal, both in its basic principles and organization. The colonial state inherited by the new African leaders at independent was essentially no more than an administrative convenience and a legal fiction. The result was that the newly independent African nation-states suffer from latent ethnic conflict. In eliminating these alternative sites of political power, post-independence African states continue to rely, as colonial ones had done, on coercion that at times creates more civil conflicts.

The greatest contradiction in human – environment interactions

Today 5th June is WORLD ENVIRONMENT DAY. The World celebrates nature. The theme for World Environment Day 2017 "Connecting People to Nature", implores us all to get outdoors and into nature, to appreciate its beauty and its importance, and to take forward the call to protect the Earth that we share. Land is the foundation of environment.

Land encompasses surface, space, soil, provision of food and water, and a basis for urban and industrial development. Land stands for property and is a production factor besides labor and capital. Land embodies many more dimensions, such as homeland, place of ancestry, a prerequisite for realizing individual freedom, and a basis for survival or wealth.

In traditional ancient societies, land was considered a gift from God that allows satisfying primary needs for food and shelter and, therefore, it is not transferable nor has it value. As put poetically by Polanyi (1944:187): “Land is tied up with the organization of kinship, neighbourhood, craft, and creed – with tribe and temple, village, guild, and church. … It invests a man’s life with stability; it is the site of his habitation; …; it is the landscape and the seasons”.

With the entrenchment of market economy or capitalism societies are changing, and a growing number of people are gradually losing the link with their ancestral land as a common asset. Instead of viewing land as a sacred trust, a gift of God to all humans, the idea of ownership and private property as a sacred right was introduced. The sanctification of property rights is an essential feature of markets. The market economy separates the man from the land, and turn both into commodities freely available for sale and purchase.

Bringing land into the ambit of the marketplace was a slow process, which followed centuries of violent dispossession initially in Europe, then Americas, Australia and New Zealand. First agricultural capitalism created the need for enclosures of vast tracts of land. Spearheaded by philosophers like John Locke (1689)’s The Second Treatise of Government, new theories of property were developed to facilitate accomplishment of this transformation. Theories of property have become a bedrock of contemporary economic thought and arguments favouring private property over the public need for commons.

Since as early as 13^th Century in Europe, years of violent dispossession of commons were and continue to create poor people as described by Karl Polanyi (1944: 37): “The lords and nobles were upsetting the social order, breaking down ancient laws and custom, … by violence… They were literally robbing the poor of their share in the commons, tearing down the houses … [of] the poor. The fabric of society was being disrupted; desolate villages and the ruins of human dwelling testified to the fierceness with which the revolution raged, endangering the defences of the country, wasting its towns, decimating its population, turning its overburdened soil into dust, harassing its people and turning them from decent husbandmen into a mob of beggars and thieves”.

According to Thomas Malthus, the poor were responsible for their lot because of overbreeding, leading to an imbalance between the population and the food. Unless this overbreeding was checked, it would lead to the spread of vice and misery, which is the natural result of poverty. Thomas Malthus (1798: 61)’s An Essay on the Principle of Population argues that feeding the poor would aggravate the problem of poverty by creating even more poor. With appropriate laws of the time, the dispossessed poor are driven into a pool of surplus labour required for mass capitalist production. A clearer expression of the necessity of poverty for providing labour is given by Burke (1877, cited by Winch, 1985: 240), who wrote: “When we affect to pity as poor those who must labour or the world cannot exist, we are trifling with the condition of mankind.” Ricardo (2010: 45) wrote that “The principle of gravitation is not more certain than the tendency of (laws providing relief for the poor) to change wealth and vigour into misery and weakness ... until at last all classes should be infected with the plague of universal poverty.”

As argued by Karl Polanyi in his 1944 monumental classic The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Times. The commodification of human beings and land required by the dominance of the market has done tremendous damage to society and environment. The value of human life has been degraded to their earning power. The world was peaceful until people started selling land, labour (turning human lives into saleable commodities in order to create a labor market) and money – three commodities very crucial to the efficient functioning of a market economy.

Dispossessed of their ancestral lands, most poor people squatter on unsafe tiny public spaces called slums. Ideation and acceptance in human mindsets of certain ideologies related to land, labour and money, justified and continue to justify both poverty and a certain amount of insensitivity, numbness and indifference to poverty. This is a greatest contradiction human nature that we continue to live with.