Neopatrimonialism in Africa and Beyond 9780415687935, 9780203145623

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ROUTLEDGE STUDIES ON AFRICAN POLITICS AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Neopatrimonialism in Africa and Beyond Edited by Daniel C. Bach and Mamoudou Gazibo

Neopatrimonialism in Africa and Beyond

There is simply no other work of sim­ilar scope on this essential topic for comparative pol­ itics . . . It enlightens the reader on the origins of the concept and its past uses, while also offering new theor­et­ical con­tri­bu­tions, crit­ical assessments of its use­fulness within and beyond Africa, and ori­ginal empirical applications. Pierre Englebert, Pomona College, California, USA A highly appropriate and masterly pre­senta­tion of the conceptual and theor­et­ical richness of neopatrimonialism that rightly corrects its traditional confinement to Africa and dem­on­ strates its relev­ance to other polit­ical con­texts including demo­cratic Western polities. Helge Hveem, University of Oslo, Norway This book without doubt elevates the theoretical and comparative study of neo patrimonial­ ism in Africa to new heights and demonstrates that the concept is not unique to Africa. Muna Ndulo, Cornell University, USA …a fitting tribute to, and reflection on, the work of Jean-François Médard, from which so much of our awareness of neopatrimonial politics derives. Christopher Clapham, University of Cambridge, UK …an essential collection for all those concerned with the politics of development in its broadest sense. Richard Crook, Institute of Development Studies, Brighton, UK Neopatrimonialism, a sys­tem whereby rulers use state resources for personal bene­fit and to secure the loy­alty of clients in the gen­eral popu­la­tion, is central to any teaching or conceptualisation of con­ tempor­ary African pol­itics. This book is a theor­et­ical and comparative study of neopatrimonialism in Africa and across world regions. Although such practices are widespread in other parts of the world, the African neopatrimonial state has also become a global prototype of the anti-­developmental state. This volume calls for a reappraisal of the genesis and in­ter­pretations of the concepts of patrimonialism and neopatrimonial­ ism. Expert con­trib­utors con­sider recent debates in Africa through the study of demo­cracy, clien­ telism, the ‘big man’ syndrome (Kenya), the rise of ‘godfatherism’ (Nigeria), ‘warlordism’ (Liberia) and the neopatrimonial state on a day-­to-day basis (Niger). They discuss patrimonialism and neopat­ rimonialism from Latin Amer­ica to Europe, Central Asia and Asia-­Pacific, to weave a comparative ana­lysis of the interplay between pub­lic pol­icies and private interest. Neopatrimonialism in Africa and Beyond is an im­port­ant and timely volume that will be of inter­est to students and scholars of inter­na­tional pol­itics, African studies, soci­ology and inter­na­tional development. Daniel C. Bach is a CNRS Director of research at the Emile Durk­heim Centre at the University of Bordeaux, France. He is also a professor at Sciences Po Bordeaux. Mamoudou Gazibo is Professor in the Department of Political Science of the University of Mon­ treal, Canada.

Routledge studies on African politics and international relations Edited by Daniel C. Bach, Emile Durkheim Centre for Comparative Politics and Sociology, Sciences Po Bordeaux.

1 Neopatrimonialism in Africa and Beyond Edited by Daniel C. Bach and Mamoudou Gazibo

Neopatrimonialism in Africa and Beyond

Edited by Daniel C. Bach and Mamoudou Gazibo

First published 2012 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2012 Selection and editorial matter, Daniel C. Bach and Mamoudou Gazibo; individual contributors their contribution The right of Daniel C. Bach and Mamoudou Gazibo to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Neopatrimonialism in Africa and beyond / edited by Daniel Bach and Mamoudou Gazibo.  p. cm. – (Routledge studies on African politics and international relations ; 1)  Includes bibliographical references and index.  1. Political corruption–Africa. 2. Political ethics–Africa. 3. Africa– Politics and government. I. Bach, Daniel. II. Gazibo, Mamoudou.  JQ1875.A55C6392 2012  320.96–dc23 2011025890 ISBN: 978-0-415-68793-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-14562-3 (ebk) Typeset in Times by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

Contents



List of tables List of contributors



Introduction

viii ix 1

M amo u do u G a z ibo

ParT I

Concepts and their relevance

7

  1 Weber’s patrimonial domination and its interpretations

9

H innerk B ruhns

  2 Patrimonialism and neopatrimonialism: comparative receptions and transcriptions

25

D aniel C . B ach

  3 The model of the political entrepreneur

46

D aniel C ompagnon

  4 Charles Njonjo: the portrait of a ‘big man’ in Kenya

58

J ean-­F ran ç ois M é dard

  5 Can neopatrimonialism dissolve into democracy?

79

M amo u do u G a z ibo

  6 Neopatrimonialism and its reinterpretations by development economics A lice S ind z ingre

90

vi   Contents ParT II

New orientations and debates in Africa

109

  7 The path from neopatrimonialism: democracy and clientelism in Africa today

111

N icolas v an de W alle

  8 Rebellion and warlordism: the spectre of neopatrimonialism

124

M orten B ø å s and K athleen M . J ennings

  9 The origins and meaning of Nigeria’s ‘godfatherism’ phenomenon

132

C hris A lbin-­L ackey

10 Monitoring the neopatrimonial state on a day-­to-day basis: politicians, customs officials and traders in Niger

142

M ahaman T idjani A lo u

ParT III

Regional transcriptions and interpretations

155

11 Oligarchy and caciquismo in the Philippines

157

D omini q u e C ao u ette

12 Jeitinho and other related phenomena in contemporary Brazil

169

Y v es-­A ndr é F a u r é

13 Neopatrimonialism, factionalism and patronage in post-­Soviet Uzbekistan

186

A lisher I khamo v

14 Berlusconismo as a case of ‘hybrid neopatrimonialism’

197

M a u ro B arisione

15 Clientelism and patrimonialism in international relations: the case of France’s African policy D aniel B o u rma u d

208

Contents   vii

Conclusion: neopatrimonial and developmental – the emerging states’ syndrome

221

D aniel C . B ach



References Index

225 254

Tables

5.1 Authoritarian, hybrid and demo­cratic regimes 7.1 Government employment, early 1990s 7.2 Characteristics and correlates of different kinds of clientelism

87 115 118

Contributors

Chris Albin-­Lackey is a Senior Researcher at Human Rights Watch, where he spent five years covering Nigeria and the Horn of Africa. His work on Nigeria has included research and reporting on state and local gov­ern­ment corruption in the oil-­rich Niger Delta, patterns of elect­oral viol­ence and vote-­rigging around Nigeria’s 2007 elections, and broader patterns of viol­ence and crimi­ nality in Nigerian pol­itics. Chris has a BA in Political Science from Boston University and a JD from Columbia Law School. Daniel C. Bach is Director of Research of the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) at Centre Émile Durk­heim and a Professor at Institut d’études politiques, University of Bordeaux. He holds a D.Phil from Oxford University and has published extensively on fed­eral­ism and pol­itics in Nigeria, regionalism and regional integration in Africa and the inter­na­tional relations of the continent. His latest pub­lications include ‘The Euro­pean Union and China in Africa’, in Kweku Ampiah and Sanusha Naidu (eds), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? China and Africa (University of Kwazulu Natal Press, 2008) and ‘The EU’s ‘stra­tegic part­ner­ship’ with Africa: Model or Placebo?’, in Osita Eze and Amadu Sesay (eds), Africa and Europe in the 21st Century (Lagos, Nigerian Institute of International Affairs, 2010). Mauro Barisione is Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Milano. He holds a doctorate from the Institut d’études politiques (IEP) of Paris and the University of Firenze. He has also taught polit­ical communication at the IEP of Paris. His research relates to pub­lic opinion formation, elect­oral com­ munication and the symbolic dimension of leadership. His latest pub­lications include ‘Valence Image and the Standardisation of Democratic Political Leadership’, Leadership, 5(1), 2009: 41–60; and Comunicazione e società. Teorie, pro­cessi, pratiche del framing (Bologna, Il Mulino, 2009). Morten Bøås (PhD) is Research Director and Senior Researcher at Fafo’s Institute for Applied International Studies. He has published extensively on African pol­ itics and global de­velopment. His art­icles have been published in journals such as Politique Africaine, the Journal of Modern African Studies, Third World Quarterly, African Spectrum and Global Governance. His two most recent

x   Contributors books are co-­editions (with Kevin Dunn) of African Guerrillas: Raging against the Machine (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2007) and (with Benedicte Bull) of International Development (vols 1–4, Sage Publications, 2010). Daniel Bourmaud is Professor of Political Science at the University of Bor­ deaux. He initially worked on East Africa, notably Kenya. His more recent work has been on the comparative ana­lysis of African polit­ical regimes, the continent’s inter­na­tional relations and France’s African pol­icies. He has simul­tan­eously been pursuing research on the evolution of the French polit­ ical sys­tem under the Fifth Repub­lic. His current research relates to the com­ parative ana­lysis of author­it­arian regimes and en­com­passes Latin Amer­ican and Asiatic case studies. Hinnerk Bruhns is Emeritus Director of Research of the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) at the Centre de recherches historiques (EHESS/ CNRS). He holds a doctoral thesis from Köln University, and taught Ancient History at the University of Bochum, and con­tempor­ary his­tory and social sciences at the University of Aix-­en-Provence, at EHESS (Paris) and at the École normale supérieure of Cachan. His recent pub­lications include (with Patrice Duran) Max Weber et le politique (Paris, 2009); (as editor) Histoire et économie politique en Allemagne. De Gustav Schmoller à Max Weber (Paris, 2004); (co-­edited with Jean Andreau) Sociologie économique et économie de l’Antiquité (Paris, 2004) and (co-­edited with Wilfried Nippel) Max Weber und die Stadt im Kulturvergleich (Göttingen, 2000). Dominique Caouette is Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Sci­ ence, University of Montreal, where he teaches inter­na­tional relations. Within the University of Montreal he co­ordinates the Réseau d’études des dynamiques trans­nationales et de l’action col­lect­ive (REDTAC) and is a member of the Centre for the Study of South East Asia. He also taught at the University of Ottawa and worked for five years in the Asia team of Inter Pares. Dominique holds a doctorate from Cornell University, Ithaca. He is specifically inter­ested in the study of non-­state actors in South-­East Asia and has published on social and revolu­tionary movements and, recently, on net­ works and movements involved in the protection of trans­national rights. Daniel Compagnon is Professor of Political Science at Sciences Po Bordeaux. He has worked in Somalia and Zim­babwe and has published on the compari­ son of author­it­arian regimes and their polit­ical eco­nomy in the Horn of Africa and Southern Africa. His current inter­ests also include the pol­itics of envir­on­ ment and global envir­on­mental governance. His latest book is A Predictable Tragedy: Robert Mugabe and the Collapse of Zim­babwe (University of Penn­ syl­vania, 2010). Yves-­André Fauré is Professor and dir­ector of the Pôle Universitaire Guyanais. He has taught at Sciences Po Bordeaux and was a Director of Research of the Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD) where he led research pro­

Contributors   xi grams and extensively published on the inter­actions between eco­nomic pol­ icies and polit­ical sys­tems in West Africa. He was then a professor at the Federal university of Rio de Janeiro, and pursued research on the regional eco­nom­ies and local de­velopment in Brazil (published by Editora E-­Papers, Rio de Janeiro). He is currently conducting research on the local production sys­tems in the Brazilian Nordeste and the Amazon basin. Mamoudou Gazibo is Professor in the Department of Political Science of the University of Montreal (Canada). He holds a doctorate in comparative pol­ itics from Université Montesquieu-­Bordeaux IV. His research relates to demo­crat­isation pro­cesses in sub-­saharan Africa, China–Africa relations and theor­et­ical/methodo­logical issues in comparative pol­itics. He has published: (with Jane Jenson) La politique comparée: fondements, enjeux et approches théoriques (Montréal, Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2004); Les paradoxes de la démocratisation en Afrique: ana­lyse institutionnelle et stratégique (Montréal, Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2005); Introduction à la politique africaine (Montréal, Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2006; 2nd edn, 2010); and (edited with Céline Thiriot) Le politique en Afrique: état des débats et pistes de recherche (Paris, Éditions Karthala, 2009). Alisher Ikhamov is Research Associate at the Centre of Contemporary Central Asia and Caucasus, School of Oriental Studies, University of London. He holds a doctorate from Tashkent State University. His research relates to nationalism, his­tori­ography, polit­ical eco­nomy of the farming sector and gov­ ernance issues of Uzbekistan. His latest pub­lications include ‘Stalled at the Doorstep to Modern State: Neopatrimonial Regime in Uzbekistan’, in Emil­ ian Kavalski (ed.), Stable Outside, Fragile Inside? Post-­Soviet Statehood in Central Asia (Ashgate, 2010); ‘Neopatrimonialism in Uzbekistan: Interest groups, Patronage Networks and Impasses of the Governance System’, Central Asian Survey (March 2007, 26(1): 65–84). Kathleen M. Jennings is a researcher at the Fafo Institute for Applied Interna­ tional Studies in Oslo, Norway, focusing on issues related to UN peacekeep­ ing opera­tions, the uses of force in conflict and post-­conflict envir­on­ments, and gender. She has previously been the acting deputy dir­ector of the Norwe­ gian Peacebuilding Center (Oslo), and a research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, DC. Jennings was educated at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and Stanford University. Jean-François Médard (1934–2005) was Professor of Political Science at the Institut d’Etudes politiques of Bordeaux University. A former dir­ector of the University’s African studies Centre (CEAN) and of IFRA (Nairobi), he is gen­erally remembered for his keen inter­est in African pol­itics. Médard had started his career by looking at com­mun­ity organ­isa­tions in the United States, then local pol­itics and patronage in France and Africa. His inter­est in compar­ ative pol­itics focused more specifically on what he called ‘polit­ical exchange’, including when this involved ‘corruption’. Most of his pub­lications are pre­ sented in the ref­er­ences at the end of this volume.

xii   Contributors Alice Sindzingre is a Research Fellow of the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) attached to EconomiX, University Paris X-­Nanterre, and a lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS, University of London). Besides her work in the field of de­velopment eco­nom­ics and the polit­ical eco­nomy of West Africa, she has published extensively on the con­ cepts of pov­erty, globalisation and the de­velop­mental state. Mahaman Tidjani Alou is a Professor at the Université Abdou Moumouni of Niamey. He holds a doctorate in polit­ical science and an Habilitation à diriger des recherches from the University Montesquieu Bordeaux IV. He is also the former dir­ector of and a research fellow at the Laboratoire d’études et de recherches sur les dynamiques sociales (LASDEL) of Niamey. He has taught in several Euro­pean universities and has been involved in numerous inter­na­ tional research programmes. His pub­lications relate to the study of inter­na­ tional aid, state construction and local pol­itics in Niger and West Africa in general. Nicolas van de Walle is Professor of Political Science at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. He is also associated to the Center for Global Develop­ ment in Washington, DC. He holds a PhD from Prince­ton University. He is the author of over 100 communications and pub­lications on pol­itics in Africa, the polit­ical eco­nomy of de­velopment and demo­crat­isation. His books include: Overcoming Stagnation in Aid-­Dependent Countries (Washington, DC, 2005), African Economies and The Politics of Permanent Crisis, 1979–1999 (New York, 2001) and (with Michael Bratton) Democratic Experiments in Africa: Regime Transitions in Comparative Perspectives (Cam­ bridge, UK, 1997).

Introduction Mamoudou Gazibo

Contemporary ref­er­ences to neopatrimonialism reveal a sharp contrast between what may be de­scribed as their quasi-­hegemonic acceptance when it comes to analysing African polit­ical sys­tems, and the paucity of comparativist reflections on the transcriptions of the concept.1 The term was origin­ally coined by Shmuel Eisenstadt so as to remove any ambiguity with respect to the distinction between ‘traditional’ and ‘post-­traditional’ modern patrimonial regimes (Eisenstadt 1973). Today, the concept’s asso­ci­ation with Africa extends well beyond the realm of schol­arly ref­er­ences as reflected by its casual en­dorsement by NGOs, donors or de­velopment research institutions. This envir­on­ment sets the founda­tions for the ambition of this volume to identi­fy the diversity of meanings associated with con­tempor­ary expressions of (neo) patrimonialism, and revisit the im­plica­tions resulting from its extensive use to characterize African pol­itics. In the pro­cess, the con­trib­utors to this volume also pay tribute to the pioneering work of Jean-­François Médard who first applied the concept of neopatrimonialism to the study of an African state in the late 1970s (Médard 1979). The confusion between the pub­lic and private spheres was, in his view, the essence of neopatrimonialism (Médard 1991a), an equation that still remains central to the model of the neopatrimonial African state whose contours and con­tents he helped to define. Accounting for the ‘endemic’ character of ref­er­ences to neopatrimonialism in Africa while the concept still remains parsimoniously used outside the continent has hardly called for attention so far. The dearth of comparativist work resorting to neopatrimonialism as a shared concept is all the stranger since until the 1980s, patrimonialism was called upon to ana­lyse areas and dy­namics that were not typ­ ic­ally African. The con­tri­bu­tions to this volume that discuss Russia and the post-­ communist states (Chapters 2 and 13), Brazil (Chapter 12) or the Philippines (Chapter 11) typ­ic­ally illus­trate how practices that pertain to neopatrimonialism remain easy to discern in these extra-­African con­texts. Outside Africa, discussing the interplay between corruption, clientelism and nepotism also goes along with the ref­er­ence to related but distinctive notions, such as those of ‘state capture’ (Russia), jeitinho and fisiologismo (Brazil) or ‘crony capit­al­ism’ (Southeast Asia). In such cases, the under­lying as­sump­tion is that neopatrimonialism does not need to per­meate the entire state, but may be of varying in­tens­ity, with

2   M. Gazibo the result of different patterns of inter­actions between the pub­lic and private sphere, and an ongoing abil­ity to produce pub­lic pol­icies. The con­tri­bu­tions to this volume, while addressing this issue, discuss how shifting away from somewhat reified understandings of neopatrimonialism in Africa offers oppor­tun­ities to monitor and conceptualize a con­sider­ably broader range of configurations. The ambition to depart from essentialist in­ter­pretations of African neopatrimonialism is a path fraught with its own dif­ficult­ies. Indeed, seeking to avoid the kind of ‘flattened’ comparative approach that would proceed from ana­lyses restricted to African coun­tries can induce prob­lems of conceptual overstretching. Neopatrimonialism then becomes associated with case-­studies that are obviously foreign to its logics, with the result that qualit­at­ive dif­fer­ences are blurred. The risk that conceptual elasticity may also turn the concept into a ‘catch-­all’ notion should not be overlooked either. The concept of patrimonialism was the object of such criticism in the 1970s and, today, these extend to neopatrimonialism as well (Chapters 1 and 2). While showing aware­ness of such methodo­logical issues, this volume keeps to an ana­lyt­ical thread that stresses dif­fer­ences in responses and points to specific traditions of in­ter­pretations associated with these. Such an approach proceeds from the type of ‘ecumenism’ that was once ad­voc­ated by Jean Blondel, for whom the tools used for the purpose of comparison are not to be stringently pegged to any estab­lished research com­mun­ity and its traditions (Blondel 1994). The concept of neopatrimonialism has nurtured canonical debates among polit­ical sci­ent­ists, and is inscribed within empirical configurations that are not specific to any peculiar regional area. Neopatrimonialism, was origin­ally a by-­ product of the encounter between Weberian soci­ology and scholars working in different areas and dis­cip­lines (Chapter 1). The issue-­areas covered by students of neopatrimonialism en­com­pass a broad array of questions, e.g. what used to be known as ‘under-­de­velopment’, but also the emergence of capit­al­ism, strat­egies towards the conquest and perpetuation of power, the structural or stra­tegic determinants of conflicts within polit­ical sys­tems, or the con­tri­bu­tion of corruption to the build-­up of polit­ical legitimacy. It is therefore hardly surprising that the concept should have become endemic to the study of con­tempor­ary African polities. Yet there is no need to be a comparativist to notice that these questions invite the adoption of a cross-­cutting grid of ana­lysis. They also span many areas that used to appear unrelated to them. The question is therefore to assess in which sense neopatrimonialism is discriminating. The polysemy of the concept of neopatrimonialism is underscored by a federating concern for the ana­lysis of the state, espe­cially with regards to the question of its inter­actions with private inter­ests. In other words, neopatrimonialism refers to configurations where the state, while claiming to be modern, combines pub­lic and private norms, unlike the Weberian bur­eau­cratic state that relies upon im­per­ sonal rules. These rules are ‘partially interiorized’ by actors who therefore find themselves in an intermediary position. Neopatrimonialism refers less to the absence of legal norms or the pre-­eminence of tradition, than to the co-­existence of conflicting norms (Médard 1979). The outcome is a constant interpenetration

Introduction   3 between private and pub­lic inter­ests, but also the management of official mandates for private purposes, the imprint of nepotism in the recruitment of civil ser­vants and in the selection of the entourage of officials. In the pro­cess, personal loyalties prevail over institutionalized relations, with the result of a correl­ at­ive weakness of institutions and legal frameworks since they lack the capa­city to shape the beha­vi­our of actors. We may add to this list the low account­abil­ity of the leadership and a lack of incentive or com­mit­ment to adopt de­velop­mental policies. Neopatrimonialism is often equated with a quintessential expression of the failings of the African state. Yet, this is clearly too restrictive a framework of ana­lysis. The NGOs, think tanks and International Financial Institutions (IFIs) that seek to benchmark the in­tens­ity of corruption or the interplay between bur­ eau­cra­cies and business circles – as in the case of Transparency International or the Euro­pean Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) – simul­tan­ eously point to the global spread of such phenomena. The Mani pulite opera­tion in Italy and the large-­scale corruption scandals which repeatedly shook France in the 1980s and 1990s offer timely reminders that the issues at stake cannot be dis­ connected from broader reflections on the future of the state, including in advanced Western demo­cra­cies. At the end of his career, J.-F. Médard felt the urge to revisit the concepts and break away from their strict confinement to the African continent. His writings on large-­scale corruption in corporate France and the French milit­ary–industrial complex, or his work on Françafrique,2 bear testimony to this desire to ex­plore less conventional avenues. Neopatrimonialism, if understood as the interpenetration and en­tanglement between pub­lic and private inter­ests, can no longer be construed as the exclusive preserve of ‘de­veloping’ soci­eties, including in Africa. The concept refers to pro­cesses that con­trib­ute to reconfigure state functions and can apply to both de­veloping and industrialized countries. In order to address these issues, the book is divided into three sections. A first set of con­tri­bu­tions discusses the meaning and relev­ance of the concepts. Hinnerk Bruhns (Chapter 1) reviews the different strands of ref­er­ences to patrimonialism in Weber’s writings and argues that, although Weber’s typology of the pure types of domination is closed, it remains open with respect to empirical forms of transcription. This legitimates applying the concept of neopatrimonialism to a broad range of con­tempor­ary situ­ations. H. Bruhns identifies a perceptible weakness in con­tempor­ary conceptual reflections, but ac­know­ledges the heur­istic value of the concept to account for the post-­colonial African state or empirical forms of con­tempor­ary domination in gen­eral. Daniel Bach (Chapter 2) discusses the overarching impact of neopatrimonialism and its assimilation, espe­cially in Sub-­Saharan Africa, to a teleology of the post-­colonial state’s decline. He argues that such a trend results from the under­lying as­sump­tion that neopatrimonialism should be equated with patrimonialization of the entire state. This offers a sharp contrast with the notion’s use outside the continent, where patrimonialism has not been treated as ‘structurally’ incom­pat­ible with the production of pub­lic pol­icies. As illus­trated by debates in Asia or Latin Amer­ica,

4   M. Gazibo the state can be both neopatrimonial and de­velop­mental, hence the notion of patrimonialism within the state suggested by D. Bach. The key figure of the ‘polit­ ical entrepreneur’ is then reviewed by Daniel Compagnon (Chapter 3) who points to the casual means of expression of neopatrimonialism while dismissing culturalist in­ter­pretations. Political entre­pren­eurship, a notion already present in Max Weber’s work, can be therefore as rel­ev­ant to the ana­lysis of Western representative demo­cra­cies as to the study of African and Asian neopatrimonial sys­ tems. Mamoudou Gazibo (Chapter 5) dissects the relationships between author­it­arianism and demo­cracy and concludes that patrimonial practices are, his­tor­ically and empirically, the norm rather than the exception. A priori norm­ ative approaches should therefore be replaced by the exegesis of concepts or the ana­lysis of empirical ex­peri­ences. Accordingly, the initial query – ‘Can neopatrimonialism dissolve into demo­cracy?’ calls for an answer pointing to fluctuating equilibriums. Such fluc­tu­ations depend on the level of institutionalisation and the exist­ence of norms that shape polit­ical pro­cesses, both formally and in­form­ally, in all polit­ical sys­tems. M. Gazibo draws from the comparativist liter­at­ure on the ‘third wave’ of demo­crat­isation – notably the ideas of hybridization and partially demo­cratic regimes – to dem­on­strate empirically the structuring and enduring impacts of neopatrimonialism on new demo­cra­cies. The last chapter of this first section focuses on the discussion of neopatrimonialism by de­velopment eco­nom­ists. Alice Sindzingre (Chapter 6) notes that until recently their work tended to focus on strictly eco­nomic vari­ables. Political vari­ables are now­adays more frequently called upon to account for growth disparities between coun­tries. The concept of neopatrimonialism, A. Sindzingre concludes, could help to overcome the lim­ita­tions of some of the existing methodologies. Indeed, neopatrimonialism impacts de­cisively on such issues as eco­nomic pol­icy orientations, adherence to eco­nomic reforms or the mobil­iza­tion of resources. The second section of the book is devoted to trans­forma­tions that affect the actors, con­texts and pro­cesses to which neopatrimonialism has been associated in Africa. This ranges from tectonic drifts resulting from demo­cratic trans­itions or armed uprisings, to more focused patterns like the substitution of the ‘godfather’ figure with that of the ‘big man’. Nicolas van de Walle (Chapter 7) whose work played a decisive role in the diffusion of the concept of neopatrimonialism in the United States, treats clientelism, an inherent com­pon­ent to patrimonial regimes, as a de­pend­ent vari­able in the pro­cesses of demo­cratic change that are occurring across the African continent. N. van de Walle identifies three forms of clientelism (tribute, elite clientelism and mass clientelism) and argues that African neopatrimonial regimes mainly practice elite clientelism due to weak fiscal cap­abil­it­ies. Neopatrimonialism should, he concludes, recede if and when these cap­abil­it­ies strengthen. Since polit­ical clientelism is constitutive of all polit­ical sys­tems, N. van de Walle also believes that we should expect a trans­ forma­tion of the forms and functions of corruption, in parallel with the emergence of the more redistributive forms of mass clientelism that are omnipresent in all demo­cra­cies. Morten Bøås and Kathleen M. Jennings (Chapter 8) focus on the de­velopment of warlordism in the 1990s and seek to understand how armed

Introduction   5 groups that initially fought the neopatrimonial state ended up reproducing many of the very practices that initially prompted them to take up arms. Through a comparison between rebel movements in Central and West Africa, they monitor how the ‘spectre’ of the neopatrimonial state shaped their repres­enta­tions of the state. In his chapter, Chris Albin-­Lackey (Chapter 9) grapples with another and more recent phenomenon, associated with Nigeria’s return to demo­cracy in 1999: godfatherism. Political godfathers (or godfathers in pol­itics) are very different from the ‘big men’ cel­eb­rated in the 1980s by J.-F. Médard through his discussion of the trajectory of Charles Njonjo (Chapter 4). While Charles Njonjo drew his power and influence from his access to state resources and patronage, the patterns of inter­actions between godfathers and state bur­eau­cra­cies are more evocative of Asian and Russian debates on the penetration or ‘capture’ of the state by business circles and oligarchs. The Nigerian godfathers do not have the ambition to access to polit­ical offices. C. Albin-­Lackey, through detailed case studies, ana­lyses their capa­city to mobilize a broad range of resources that are put at the disposal of their protégés and their fight against competitors. Mahaman Tidjani Alou (Chapter 10) closes this section with a chronicle of the modus operandi of the neopatrimonial state on a day to day basis. His ana­lysis of the inter­ actions between politicians, customs officials and traders in the Repub­lic of Niger portrays a largely powerless state that is bypassed, dodged, or even excluded from the very customs transactions and pro­ced­ures which it has instituted. The third and last section of the book focuses on neopatrimonialism in non-­ African con­texts. Dominique Caouette (Chapter 11) examines the abil­ity of the Filipino state to produce pub­lic pol­icies when, unlike in Africa, the dominant social forces are rooted into strong eco­nomic bases that also happen to be inde­ pend­ent from the state ap­par­atus. In contrast with the classic neopatrimonial state where control of the administrative institutions is key, the gravitas of power resides outside the bur­eau­cracy. The latter is per­meated by and loyal to the inter­ ests of the various factions of the landed oligarchy and elect­oral pro­cesses are transformed into open arenas for the expression of its infighting. Through a case study of corruption in Brazil, Yves-­André Fauré (Chapter 12) suggests another reading of conventional in­ter­pretations of neopatrimonialism. He identifies an impressive lexicographical diversity that points to the vitality of patrimonial practices within a Brazilian state that simul­tan­eously retains effect­ive bur­eau­ cratic cap­abil­it­ies. The per­vas­ive imprint of patrimonial practices is embedded into the casual use of specific terms, such as jeitinho, which refers to every­day ar­range­ments, or fisiologismo that focuses on the special favours and privileges drawn from a pub­lic office. Alisher Ilkhamov’s discussion of Uzbekistan and post-­Soviet author­it­arian regimes in Central Asia (Chapter 13) builds upon the discussion of practices estab­lished during the late Soviet period to contrast President Islam Karimov’s rule from Stalin’s capa­city to produce pub­lic pol­icies. Mauro Barisione (Chapter 14) specifically concentrates on the meaning of the notion of the ‘big man’ in a Euro­pean con­text. Over the last 20 years, Italian demo­cracy has often been de­scribed as a polit­ical laboratory where some

6   M. Gazibo commonly shared tendencies of con­tempor­ary demo­cra­cies could de­velop into extreme forms of expression. Through a study of the Berlusconi ‘case’, M. Barisione shows how the privatization of the pub­lic sphere and the ‘pub­licization’ of private concerns are the ingredients of a more complex situ­ation. Berlusconi’s polit­ical legitimacy stems from his charisma and has kept being stimulated by an extra­ordinary succession of crisis affecting national pol­itics. Equally signi­fic­ant are the ideo­logical factors and elements of polit­ical repres­enta­tion drawn from a deeper social matrix. Finally, Daniel Bourmaud (Chapter 15) focuses on the interplay between patrimonialism and clientelism in inter­na­tional relations through a rein­ter­pretation of Franco-­African relations under the Fifth Repub­lic. He ana­lyses how, for nearly three decades, the African pol­icy of France was a source of inter­na­tional leverage due to an en­ab­ling inter­na­tional bipolar sys­tem. During the past 15 years, D. Bourmaud adds, France’s African pol­icy has come to reflect the erratic course of a foreign pol­icy awaiting redefinition in a globalizing world. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the structural vari­ables which fuelled the patrimonialisation of the Franco-­African relationship have almost completely vanished. The notion of col­lect­ive clientelism nonetheless remains as rel­ev­ant as ever for characterizing the asymmetric nature of inter­actions between actors, and the mutual bene­fits that they draw from these relationships. Here, as elsewhere in the book, the comparativist slant builds upon the identification of ‘clinical’ cases that are then recast into a ‘gen­eralizing’ rather than ‘indi­vidualizing’ mould (Dogan and Pelassy 1981). What is at stake is the discussion of the extent to which the concept of neopatrimonialism can travel as much as the identification of its limitations. This book could not have seen the light of day without the technical and fin­ an­cial sup­port offered by the Institut d’études politiques of Bordeaux and the Émile Durk­heim Centre, also at the University of Bordeaux. Support from the Arts and Sciences Faculty and the Political Science Department of the University of Montréal was equally im­port­ant. In addition to these institutions, we gratefully thank Christophe Albouy for his unfailing availabil­ity, Ndeye Anta Khoudia Ndiaye, who worked on the first draft of the manuscript, and Armelle Jézéquel who put the manuscript in order. Burney and Claire Médard also deserve special thanks for actively con­trib­ut­ing to the translation of Jean-­ François Médard’s chapter. L’Harmattan’s authorization to reproduce it is gratefully acknowledged.

Notes 1 On the endemic uses of the notion of the neo-­patrimonial state, see for instance Pitcher, Moran and Johnston (2009: 125‑56); Africa is completely ignored by Budd (2004), who focuses on Asia. 2 See ‘Bibliographie des travaux de Jean-­François Médard’ (2006: 711‑15). Françafrique is an expression coined to show the overly close, mafia-­like relationships between the leadership of France and its former African colonies.

Part I

Concepts and their relevance

1 Weber’s patrimonial domination and its interpretations Hinnerk Bruhns

For roughly the last 30 years, the concepts of patrimonialism and neo‑patrimonial‑ ism have been linked to the ana­lysis of certain forms of state construction and gov‑ ernance in Africa, Latin Amer­ica and Asia. As the fol­low­ing chapters emphas­ize, such ana­lyses have sought to account for various facets of the obs­tacles encoun‑ tered in the pro­cess of demo­crat­ization and polit­ical de­velopment in gen­eral. This goes back to the early 1970s, when, calling into question theories of moderniza‑ tion, Shmuel N. Eisenstadt questioned the legitimacy of using the term ‘patrimo‑ nial’, a term derived from the ana­lysis of traditional historic polit­ical sys­tems, for analysing modern polit­ical sys­tems. And he added that such a use might indeed be very fruitful – but only insofar as the term ‘patrimonial’ is used to designate not a level of ‘de­velopment’ or differ­enti­ation of polit­ical regimes, but rather a specific way of coping with the major prob­lem of polit­ical life which may cut across different levels of ‘de­velopment’ or structural complexity. (Eisenstadt 1973: 59; also 12) In the same text, Eisenstadt also suggested distinguishing between traditional patrimonial regimes and modern forms of patrimonialism, thereby introducing the terms ‘neo-­patrimonialism’ and ‘post-­patrimonial regimes’ (Eisenstadt 1973: 13 and 46). The distinction was designed prim­arily to discern between the patri‑ monial sys­tems of Antiquity and the Middle Ages, on the one hand, and modern patrimonial sys­tems on the other. Eisenstadt saw the ‘most im­port­ant’ of the dif­ fer­ences between patrimonial and neo-­patrimonial regimes as being, first ‘the polit­ical prob­lems which were faced respectively by such traditional and modern regimes, and, second, in close relation to these prob­lems, the constellations of con­ditions which could ensure the con­tinu­ity of any specific patrimonial regime’ (Eisenstadt 1973: 50). In neo-­patrimonial regimes, the links between the centre and the periphery were more intense and under pressure. The con­sequences of this were the estab­lishment of a broader and more united polit­ical framework, the integration of new groups and the emergence of new dimensions of col­lect­ ive identities. The expansive tend­ency of these regimes rendered them simul­tan­ eously more fragile and subject to crises.

10   H. Bruhns S.N. Eisenstadt was reacting here to a de­velopment in the use of the concept of patrimonialism initially put forward by Guenther Roth (1968: 194–206). Roth had observed that in many new states, tradition had lost its force as a source of legitimacy without having been replaced by legal, rational modernity. As a con­sequence, forms of personal rule that did not cor­res­pond to any of the three Weberian ideal types of legitimacy (legal-­rational, tradi‑ tional or charismatic) essentially owed their maintenance to mater­ial incen‑ tives and rewards, notably clientelism and corruption. To take account of this de­velopment, G. Roth suggested grasping these forms of domination conceptually by distinguishing between traditional patrimonialism and de-­traditionalized, personalized patrimonialism, later referred to as neo-­ patrimonialism. Since then, certain nuances and distinctions have been introduced in the use of the term neo-­patrimonialism. One first example is the definition provided by Jean-­François Médard who, in contrast to Eisenstadt, views the dif­fer­ence as lying within the in­ternal functioning of the two regimes: The neo-­patrimonial conception of power is situated in the historic continu‑ ity of the traditional patrimonial conception, how­ever it must not be con‑ fused with it, to the extent that it is not rooted in any traditional legitimacy. There exists a dif­fer­ence between ‘rationalized’ neo-­patrimonial states, i.e. those regulated by a form of specific regulation based upon par­ticu­larist redis­tribu­tion, and purely pred­atory and kleptocratic states leading to the criminalization and privatization of the state. This pattern recalls ‘sultanism’ as de­scribed by Max Weber, and cor­res­ponds to the most extreme and ex­acer­bated case of neo-­patrimonialism, which destroys the state which feeds it. It is the ultimate state of neo-­patrimonialism. (Médard 1999a: 15) Our second example is drawn from a more recent text in which the central prob­lem with discussions on the concept of neo-­patrimonialism between special‑ ists on Africa is defined as follows: All the attempts to define neopatrimonialism (or ‘modern patrimonialism’) deal with, and try to tackle, one and the same intricate prob­lem: the relation‑ ship between patrimonial domination on the one hand and legal-­rational bur­eau­cratic domination on the other, i.e. a very hybrid phenomenon. [. . .] The term clearly is a post-­Weberian invention and, as such, a creative mix of two Weberian types of domination: of a traditional subtype, patrimonial domination, and legal-­rational bur­eau­cratic domination. (Erdmann and Engel 2007: 104) The dif­fer­ence between patrimonialism and neo-­patrimonialism is found by the authors of this text in the relationship between the private and pub­lic spheres. In patrimonialism, all (polit­ical and administrative) relations between

Weber’s patrimonial domination   11 the governing and the gov­erned are private relations: ‘there is no distinction between the pub­lic and private realms.’ In neo-­patrimonialism, the distinction between the pub­lic and private exists, at least formally, and is accepted. The ‘neo-­patrimonial’ exercise of power is conducted ‘within the framework of, and with the claim to, legal-­rational bur­eau­cracy or “modern” stateness’ (Erdmann and Engel 2007: 105). These two authors con­sequently propose a definition of neo-­patrimonialism which draws from the concepts of patrimoni‑ alism and legal-­rational bur­eau­cracy in Weber. They add that neo-­ patrimonialism is a ‘mixture of two, partly interwoven, types of domination that co-­exist: namely, patrimonial and legal-­rational bur­eau­cratic domination. [. . .] Elements of patrimonial and legal-­rational bur­eau­cratic domination pene‑ trate each other’ (105). These spheres are not isolated from each other. Quite to the contrary, they per­meate each other: the patrimonial penetrates the legal-­ rational sys­tem and twists its logic, functions, and output, but does not take exclusive control over the legal-­rational logic (105) The prefix ‘neo’ is not to be understood as a syn­onym of ‘modern’ (114). Weber was in­ter­preted somewhat differently by Blundo and Médard who with regard to the neo-­patrimonial nature of African states, wrote: This is a prolongation of the notion of traditional patrimonial domination de­veloped by Max Weber and which is based upon the idea of the confusion of the pub­lic and private in the con­text of traditional legitimacy. The recourse to the prefix ‘neo’ serves to emphas­ize that we are no longer in a traditional con­text. We understand the neo-­patrimonial state as a state that is structurally and formally differentiated from soci­ety, while, with regard to the way it functions, the pub­lic and private spheres in­form­ally tend to get mixed up. In a sense, the state is privatised for their bene­fit by those who hold a position of authority, first at the summit of the state, but also at all levels of the state pyramid. The polit­ical leader behaves like a patrimonial chieftain, i.e. like the true owner of his realm. (Blundo and Médard 2002: 10–11) These two conceptions are a reminder of debates of the 1970s on Weber’s typology: [the prefix . . .] neo indicating a different type of regime characterized by a specific interpenetration of elements of traditional and legal-­rational legitimacy, or is the prefix aiming at grasping the dif­fer­ence between traditional and modern con­texts, and the impact of this dif­fer­ence on the nature of the patrimonial regime. The constant reminders as to the Weberian origin of these terms invited us to observe that the concept of patrimonialism (or the more recent concept of neo-­ patrimonialism) has become part of the gen­eral vocabulary of the social sciences and proved its use­fulness. The ref­er­ence to Weber seems for the most part to serve only a legitimating function, or even a purely decorative one. It is true that studies that have recently been devoted to the concept of patrimonialism in Weberian soci­ology are rare,1 and have hardly resonated among con­tempor­ary analysts of neo-­patrimonial regimes. These are manifestly two completely

12   H. Bruhns distinct fields of research: the concept of patrimonialism has in a sense become auto­nom­ous with regard to the function Weber accorded it in his sociology. This is one of the cases where the shifts in defining the terms invite to return to the origin of the concept of patrimonialism and also to the moment of its re-­interpretation as neo-­patrimonialism. The ob­ject­ive is then to provide these two terms with a precise meaning and true instrumental function in a situ­ation in which the terms tend to be transformed into catch-­all concepts (Theobald 1982).2 However, such a return to the ori­ginal meaning (or sup‑ posed ori­ginal meaning) of the concept in Weber is not the easiest thing to estab­lish and raises a prob­lem of method. For it is not enough to draw an apparently un­equi­vocal definition from the only text which is gen­erally cited in modern pub­lications on patrimonialism and neo-­patrimonialism: Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Economy and Society). For the use of the concept of patri‑ monialism is not uniform in this work, and the ana­lysis of the evolution of this concept is complicated by the fact that in the five successive editions of this major work, and thus in all translations into foreign languages that pres‑ ently exist, the order of the chapters does not reflect the chronological order in which this group of texts was written, as the order was arranged by Mari‑ anne Weber and Johannes Winckelmann fol­low­ing Max Weber’s death. To find their orientations within these texts as well as in the parts of the work published posthumously, readers have access to a growing number of special­ ized studies. However, they are addressed more to specialists of Weber’s work rather than to ‘outside’ users of his conceptual ap­par­atus. The non-­ German reader more­over remains dependant upon translations which, given the numerous inaccuracies, or indeed errors, do not always facilitate the understanding of the texts. A more in-­depth study of the use of the concept of patrimonialism by Weber should also take other writings into account, par­ticu­larly the author’s major study on the polit­ical, social and eco­nomic sys­tem of China, Confucianism and Taoism. In this text, which has been rarely read by researchers inter­ested in con­ tempor­ary neo-­patrimonial regimes, he very frequently used the concept of patri‑ monialism (Zingerle 1972; Schmidt-­Glintzer 2001; Breuer 2006: 85; Bünger 1977 and Hermes 2003). For all of these reasons, it does not seem pointless to rapidly review the intro‑ duction and use by Max Weber of the concept of patrimonialism in his sys­ tematic and historic sociological writings. This does not mean that we ad­voc­ate ‘a return to the texts’ or seek to oppose some Weberian or­tho­doxy to modern in­ter­preters. We simply wish to draw attention to a few points of in­forma­tion and method which may prove use­ful to the current debate.

The concepts of patrimonialism and patrimonial domination in Weber Max Weber neither invented the concept of patrimonialism (Patrimonialismus), nor that of patrimonial domination (Patrimonialherrschaft). These terms are part

Weber’s patrimonial domination   13 of the polit­ical vocabulary of polit­ical reactionaries and con­ser­vat­ives in the German states of the nine­teenth century. They are to be found in the polit­ical theory and German polit­ical texts throughout the nine­teenth century, and Weber himself reminds us that ‘the concept itself, as is well known, has been most con‑ sistently de­veloped by Haller in his Restauration der Staatswissenschaften’ (Weber 1972: 137 and 1968: 237). The use made by M. Weber of the term, pat‑ rimonialism and its deriv­at­ives, first reflects the idea of those polit­ical theorists and legal his­tor­ians of the nine­teenth century who had instituted a genetic rela‑ tionship between pat­ri­archalism and patrimonialism.3 In this sense, patrimonial domination is initially a decentralization of the com­mun­ity of the oikos (Weber 1972: 583 and 1968: 1010; cf. Breuer 2006: 83). It was the im­port­ant work of the medi­evalist Georg von Below, Der Deutsche Staat des Mittelalters, pub‑ lished in 1914, that led M. Weber to introduce a clear distinction between pat­ri­ archalism and patrimonialism, i.e. between the level of the ‘household (oikos)’ and that of a polit­ical entity (Breuer 1991: 88).4 In his defence of the idea of a medi­eval German ‘state’, von Below opposed con­tempor­ary evolutionist theo‑ ries, notably those de­veloped by Karl Lamprecht, for whom Landesherrschaft, the form of polit­ical rule in the German ter­rit­ories, origin­ated in the position of lord of the land, i.e. in patrimonial relationships gov­erned by private law. Prior to the second decade of the twentieth century, when Weber worked both on those pub­lications which were to become Economy and Society and his studies on The Economic Ethics of the World Religions, the term patrimonialism did not appear very frequently in his writings. For instance, the notion of patri‑ monial jurisdiction (Patrimonialgerichtsbarkeit) is to be found in his writing on Prussia, or the Latin term, patrimonium appears in his studies on Roman agrar‑ ian his­tory. In the third version of Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum (1909), Weber uses the concept of the patrimonial right of rule (patrimoniales Herrschaftsrecht), for instance and observes that ‘the despot (in contrast to the bur­eau­cratic king) has a polit­ical inter­est (as Napoleon I still showed) in ensuring that no right of patrimonial domination founded on the possession of land be constituted without an expli­cit agreement coming from himself.’ (Weber 2006: 367; Weber 1976: 74) In that part of the work that can now be consulted in digital form,5 we find 68 occurrences of the adjective patrimonial, 107 occurrences of Patrimonialismus, 18 of patrimoniale Herrschaft or Patrimonialherrschaft. Patrimonialstaat appears 20 times, and Patrimonialbeamtentum (patrimonial officialdom) four times, without counting other compound nouns that include Patrimonial. In Economy and Society, ref­er­ences to patrimonialism should be clas­si­fied according to the dates on which they were written. We may distinguish two sets, which we shall refer to as A and B. This classification, it should be emphas­ized, does not cor­res­pond to the order of the chapters in the editions which have been studied for more than 80 years. The texts on ‘Sociology of domination’ (Soziologie der Herrschaft) were written prior to the First World War and are to be found in the second part of Economy and Society.6 The first part of the work, Soziologische Kategorienlehre, on the other hand, dates back to 1919–1920. Translated into English as ‘Conceptual Exposition’, the first part consists of three chapters:

14   H. Bruhns (1) Basic concepts of soci­ology (translated into English as ‘Basic Sociological Terms’), (2) Sociological Categories of Economic Action, and (3) Types of domination (translated into English as ‘The Types of Legitimate Domination’). In his overall plan of the work, Weber had placed these texts, which have a sys­ tematic character and were written later, in front of those written before the war, which are more charac­ter­istic of historic soci­ology. We now have a more com‑ plete pre­senta­tion of the various versions and stages of writing of the Herrschaftssoziologie thanks to a recent pub­lication by Edith Hanke (2001). There, she distinguishes eight stages of writing. However, I shall con­tent myself with indicating the major dif­fer­ences between the two major chronological strata of the manuscripts of Economy and Society. We can observe a de­velopment and change in the use and the scope of the concept of patrimonialism (Breuer 2006: 83). In the oldest version of the text, (A), the concepts of pat­ri­archalism and pat‑ rimonialism are used in such a way as to suggest clearly a genetic relationship between the two phenomena they designate. In the later version, (B), on the other hand, Weber no longer writes of a pat­ri­archal version of patrimonialism, instead making a clear distinction between (i) pri­mary pat­ri­archalism, the struc‑ tural prin­ciple related to the household (Hausverband or oikos) and (ii) patrimo‑ nialism as a form of polit­ical rule. The dif­fer­ences in conceptualisation combine with queries which differ between the two versions of the soci­ology of domination to be found in Economy and Society. In the oldest part of the text (Soziologie der Herrschaft), the guiding question is how does domination function? In the most recent part (Typen der Herrschaft), the question is: how is domination legitimized? (Hanke 2001: 33). These questions provide structure, even if Weber does not distinguish them with abso­lute clarity in his efforts at categorizing and constructing typologies. We grant that this is not very im­port­ant for the ordinary user of the concept of patrimonialism. However, these questions should be im­port­ant when looking at the his­tory of the concept. This is why we are going to sketch the thrust of Weber’s argument, starting by identi­fying various pertinent themes and fol­low­ ing the chronological order in which the texts were written. Thus, we shall suc‑ cessively allude to the line con­tri­bu­tions presented in the soci­ology of domination (gathered together in Economy and soci­ety, second part), before pre‑ senting the types of domination to be found in the sociological cat­egor­ies (Economy and soci­ety, first part). The sociology of domination Weber’s Herrschaftssoziologie, (translated as ‘Sociology of domination or soci­ ology of authority’), was essentially written between 1911 and 1914. In current editions, it includes eight major sections, ranging from a chapter on the structural forms of domination to bur­eau­cracy, pat­ri­archal and patrimonial domination, char‑ ismatic domination, polit­ical and hierocratic domination, ‘non-­legitimate domina‑ tion (typology of cities)’ right down to the soci­ology of the state, composed by Johannes Winckelmann from different Weberian texts. In the crit­ical edition of

Weber’s patrimonial domination   15 Weber’s works, currently being published, this ar­range­ment has been dropped, and the volume entitled Domination does not include the text on ‘The City’ (already published in a separate volume) and the ‘soci­ology of the state’.7 The two forms of domination dealt with in the section ‘Patriarchal and patri‑ monial domination’ are for Weber the two major pre-­bureaucratic structural prin­ciples. Patrimonial domination was born on the soil of the oikos, and consti‑ tutes a par­ticu­lar case of pat­ri­archal domination. Weber defines it as ‘a special case of pat­ri­archal domination – do­mestic authority decentralized through assignment of land and sometimes of equipment to sons of the house or to other de­pend­ents’ (Weber 1972: 584 and 1968: 1011). He then emphas­izes that ‘patrimonial con­ditions have had an extra­ordinary impact as the basis of polit­ical structures’ (Egypt, China) (Weber 1972: 585 and 1968: 1013), and concludes that, ‘We shall speak of a patrimonial state when the prince in prin­ciple or­gan­izes his polit­ical power, i.e. his domination which is not related to his domain, through phys­ical coercion vis-­à-vis those he rules, over extra-­patrimonial areas and men (= polit­ical subjects), in just the same way as he exercises his pat­ri­archal power’ (Weber 1972: 585 [translation mine – compare with Weber 1968: 1013]). In the fol­low­ing passages of the text, he goes on to historic ana­lyses, and studies the rise of the civil ser­vice and patrimonial offices (patrimoniale Ämter), empha‑ sizing the dif­fer­ence with regard to modern bur­eau­cracy (Weber 1972: 594 sq. and 1968: 1025 sq.). He is inter­ested in ‘the first totally consistent patrimonial-­ bureaucratic administration (patrimonial-­bürokratische Verwaltung) known to us’, that of ancient Egypt (1972: 607 sq. and 1968: 1044) before addressing a very dif‑ ferent case, that of the Chinese Empire, and then Rome, modern Europe, etc. In the fol­low­ing section ‘Feudalism, Ständestaat and Patrimonialism’: (1968: 1070 sq.), Weber addresses patrimonialism from a number of different angles. He estab­lishes a first distinction between feudalism on the one hand and ‘pure’ patrimonialism on the other, based upon the im­port­ance of arbit­rary rule and con­sequently the in­stability of positions of power. Feudalism is con­sidered a borderline case of patrimonialism because of its tend­ency to be stereo­typed and to create fixed relationships between suzerains and vassals (Weber 1972: 625 and 1968: 1070). Weber also envisages the trans­ition of feudal patrimonialism to bur­eau­cracy: the trans­ition of the patrimonial office (Amt) to a bur­eau­cratic func‑ tion is fluid (flüssig), for it gen­erally implies occasional administration (Gelegenheitsverwaltung) and favouritism (Günstlingswesen), for which patrimonialism offers a ‘specific space for de­velopment’ due to its ‘structural prin­ciple (1972: 638 and 1968: 1088). Lengthy de­velopments are then devoted to the relationship of patrimonialism to the eco­nomy, on the one hand, and patrimonialism to life conduct on the other. Patriarchal patrimonialism and feudalism promote diver‑ gent polit­ical and social ideo­lo­gies, and thus very different forms of life conduct (Weber 1972: 650 and 1968: 1104). These de­velopments are followed by a section entitled ‘The City. Non-­ legitimate domination’. It is in point of fact the essay better known under the title The City. It is here that we find Weber’s first de­velopments on patrimonial

16   H. Bruhns bur­eau­cracy and patrimonial bur­eau­cratism. He uses the terms here so as to char‑ acterize both phenomena such as ‘a bur­eau­cratic patrimonial storehouse adminis‑ tration’ during the Mycenaean epoch and the nature of the modern con­tin­ental state – differing from England, where, because of the different status of cities, pat‑ rimonial bur­eau­cracy never de­veloped (1999: 235 and 1968: 1282). Weber confirms even greater im­port­ance to patrimonialism, the patrimonial state and the patrimonial bur­eau­cracy in Confucianism amd Taoism (Weber 1989),8 the first version of which was written during the same period as the older parts of Economy and Society and the unfinished text, ‘The City’. However, Weber does not provide any definition of patrimonialism. He writes instead that ‘the feudal elements of the social order receded, and in all essential points patri‑ monialism, as will be seen, became the funda­mental structural form for the spirit of Confucianism’ (Weber 1989: 201). When evoking the eco­nomic con­sequences of patrimonial bur­eau­cracy, Weber seeks to show that the con­sequence of specu­la­tion on the chances of a purely polit­ical ex­ploita­tion of official charges meant that it was not ‘prim­arily rational eco­nomic acquisition’ that prevailed in the accumulation of prop­erty and in par­ticu­lar land, but ‘apart from trade, which also led to accumulations of money in the coun­try, par­ticu­larly pred­atory capit­al­ism based upon do­mestic pol­icy (innenpolitischer Beutekapitalismus)’ (Weber 1989: 258). We have pointed out above that the guiding question of the soci­ology of dom‑ ination is how domination functioned. In a parallel manner, M. Weber thought about the founda­tions of various forms of domination; he thus elaborated his famous theory of the three pure types of legitimate domination. The types of domination Weber wrote several versions of his typology of three pure types of legitimate dom‑ ination. The first three versions are rel­at­ively brief, dating back to before the First World War. Just as in the chapters on the soci­ology of domination, patrimonialism appears here mainly as a vari­ant of pat­ri­archalism, con­sidered to be the most im­port­ant form of traditional domination.9 Here, we shall concentrate on the most recent version, written after the end of the First World War, which he places at the beginning of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. First of all, let us note that the chapter in question (Chapter 3) is entitled ‘The types of domination’ rather than ‘The three pure types of legitimate domination’. The latter are addressed in a par­ticu­lar para‑ graph within Chapter 1, entitled Die Legitimitätsgeltung, or ‘The validation of legit‑ imacy’. This notion and the concepts of belief in legitimacy (Legitimitätsglaube) and claim for legitimacy (Legitimitätsanspruch) are dealt with as supplementary aspects, gen­erally neces­sary to guarantee stability in domination (Herrschaft). According to Weber, the type of obedience and of administrative staff (Verwaltungsstab) required for exercising domination, but also the nature of domination depend upon the nature of the legitimacy being claimed. For this reason, it seems appropriate to him to distinguish forms of domination on the basis of the claims to legitimacy specific to each of these (Weber 1972: 122 and 1968: 212).

Weber’s patrimonial domination   17 We have here a clear case of distinction between ideal types: Weber identifies three types of legitimate domination, the bases of which he seeks to de­scribe. Domination may be rational, traditional or charismatic in character. The relation‑ ship of domination with which he is most concerned is that between a lord and his administrative staff (Verwaltungsstab), and only secondarily between the power ap­par­atus and the masses of the dominated. The logic of this perspective is the result of his gen­eral approach, which, in this part of the work, focusses on the soci­ology of action. The point is to determine the nature of obedience and of faith in forms of legitimacy (in their ideal type forms), which are not to be found in a ‘pure’ form in historic reality. Even then, Weber does not see these three pure types as the only way of analysing forms of domination. The members of the administrative staff may be bound to obedience to their superior (or superiors) by custom, by affective ties by a purely mater­ ial complex of inter­ests, or by ideal (wertrationale) motives. The quality of these motives largely determines the type of domination. Purely mater­ ial inter­ests and calculations of ad­vant­ages as the basis of solid­arity between the chief and his administrative staff result, in this as in other connexions, in a rel­at­ively unstable situ­ation. Normally, other elements, affective and ideal, supplement such inter­ests. In certain exceptional cases the former alone may be decisive. In every­day life these relationships, like others, are gov­erned by custom and mater­ial calculation of ad­vant­age (zweckrationales Interesse). But custom, personal ad­vant­age, and purely affective or ideal motives of solid­arity do not form a sufficient reli­able basis for a given domination. In addition, there is normally a further element, the belief in legitimacy. (Weber 1972: 122 and 1968: 212 sq., translation modified by the author) As we have recalled, Weber bases his ana­lysis of domination, and sub­ sequently his typologies on the nature of the relationship between the ruler and the administrative staff (Verwaltungsstab). When analysing legitimacy, Weber is inter­ested in stable forms of domination or rule, with solid founda­tions. ‘Illegiti‑ mate’ or non-­legitimate instances of domination are con­sidered unstable because they are not based (apart from other motives) on a belief in legitimacy. The discussion of types of domination (Chapter 3) is only partially structured around the three types of legitimacy. Weber saw the cri­terion of legitimacy as having only a com­plement­ary although decisive function for analysing forms of domination. Thus, he does not regard it as the sole structural prin­ciple for his ana­ lysis. The three types are themselves dealt with and sub-­divided into sub-­types that relate to distinctive legitimacy criteria (Legitimitätsgeltung). Thus, the term, rational domination disappears from the title of the cor­res­ponding chapter, the title of which becomes ‘Legal domination with a bur­eau­cratic administrative staff ’ (Die legale Herrschaft mit bürokratischem Verwaltungsstab). Then, the author appears to deal with feudalism, collegiality and the separation of powers, par­ties, repres­enta­tion and other phenomena on the same level as traditional or charismatic domination.

18   H. Bruhns The term patrimonialism appears, without prior definition, in the chapter on traditional domination (Traditionale Herrschaft). As elsewhere in Soziologische Kategorienlehre, but also in numerous other texts, Weber’s approach consists in estab­lishing typologies and specifying concepts so as to render them opera­tional. Regarding traditional domination, he first introduces a dis‑ tinction which seems funda­mental to him (Weber 1972: 131 and 1968: 226 sq.) between traditional domination without and traditional domination with an administrative staff. The former is divided into two sub-­types: gerontocracy and pri­mary pat­ri­archalism. The second may be based upon traditional recruit‑ ment, i.e. patrimonial recruitment – Weber enumerates six differing sub-­types: kinsmen, slaves, de­pend­ents who are officers of the household, espe­cially min­ is­ter­iales, clients, colonists, emancipated slaves (Weber 1968: 228) – or upon extra-­patrimonial recruitment. He identifies three cases of extra-­patrimonial recruitment, of ‘persons in a relation of purely personal loy­alty such as all sorts of “favorites”, persons standing in a relation of fealty to their lord (vassals), and finally, free men who voluntarily enter into a relation of personal loy­alty as officials.’ Max Weber insisted upon the link between patrimonialism and bur­eau­cracy: ‘In China and in Egypt, the prin­cipal source of recruitment for patrimonial offi‑ cials lay in the clientele of the king. “Bureaucracy” first de­veloped in patrimonial states with a body of officials recruited from extra-­patrimonial sources; but [. . .] these officials were at first personal followers of their master’ (1972 and 1968: 228 sq.). For him, this link is essential: ‘Patrimonialism, and in the extreme case, sultanism, tend to arise whenever traditional domination de­velops an administra‑ tion and a milit­ary force which are purely personal instruments of the master’ (Weber 1972: 133 and 1968: 231). This is followed by the definition of these two types: Where domination is primarily traditional, but exercised by virtue of the ruler’s personal autonomy [kraft vollen Eigenrechts], it will be called patrimonial authority; sultanistic domination shall be used to designate a patri‑ monial domination the administration of which is to be found primarily in the sphere of free arbitrary rule, not bound to tradition. (Weber 1972: 134, my own translation). The distinction operated by Weber is definitely fluid. Both forms of domination are distinguished from elementary patriarchalism due to the presence of a per‑ sonal ‘administrative staff’. A new distinction is then introduced, clearly showing that these types and cat­ egor­ies are elaborated on the basis of historic material: Estate-­type domination (ständische Herrschaft) is that form of patrimonial domination under which the administrative staff appropriates par­ticu­lar powers and the cor­res­ponding assets (ökonomische Chancen. (Weber 1972: 134 and 1968: 232)

Weber’s patrimonial domination   19 Weber then suggests a long list of distinctions, adopting as the defining cri­ terion the question of who takes oppor­tun­ities, how these oppor­tun­ities are appropriated, what the objects of such appropriations are, and so on. The last part of the chapter dwells upon the question of the effect of traditional domina‑ tion, and par­ticu­larly of patrimonialism, on the nature of eco­nomic activity (Weber 1972: 137–40 and 1968: 236–41). These con­sequences for the eco­nomy, Weber emphas­izes, depend first and foremost upon the typical mode of financing of a structure of domination (Weber 1972: 137 and 1968: 238). And he adds all sorts of distinctions, cat­egor­ies and types. The nature of the patrimonial adminis‑ tration intervenes at a secondary level. ‘It is not only the fin­an­cial pol­icy of most patrimonial regimes which tends to restrict the de­velopment of rational eco­ nomic activity, but above all the gen­eral character of their administrative prac‑ tices’ (Weber, 1972: 138 and 1968: 239). This is notably due to the traditionalism inherent in patrimonialism, which perturbs the elaboration of formally rational regulations. In addition, there is the lack of specialization of officials, and then the vast field of arbit­rary rule and personal favours related to of the lord and the administrative staff. The validation of legitimacy and the nature of its foundations tend, finally, to regu‑ late the eco­nomy according to ‘utilitarian or social ethical or mater­ialistic “cul‑ tural ideals” ’,10 rather than through a formal orientation (in the sense of formal ration­al­ity oriented around ‘pos­it­ive’ law). As a result, patrimonial rule is not incom­pat­ible with forms of capit­al­ism related to trade, to “tax farming” ’ (1968: 240), to the enrichment of state powers, to the financing of wars, and pos­sibly to plantation capit­al­ism and co­lo­nial capit­al­ism. Nevertheless, this precludes entrepreneurial capit­al­ism, rationally or­gan­ized with fixed assets, targeting a market of private consumers and operating within a (formally) free labour market. Weber never­the­less takes par­ticu­lar care to point out that ‘this situ­ation is funda­mentally different only in cases where a patrimonial ruler, in the inter­est of his own power and fin­an­cial pro­vi­sion, de­velops a rational sys­tem of administration with technically special­ized officials’ (Weber 1972: 139 and 1968: 240). In the later version of his soci­ology of domination, Weber thus clearly distin‑ guishes between pri­mary pat­ri­archalism as a structuring prin­ciple of the oikos, on the one hand, and patrimonialism as a form of polit­ical domination: ‘in a pure type, patrimonial domination, espe­cially of the estate-­type household (ständischpatrimoniale Herrschaft), regards all governing powers and the cor­res­ponding eco­nomic rights as privately appropriated eco­nomic ad­vant­ages’ (Weber 1972: 137 and 1968: 236). As regards in­ternal distinctions within this type of domination, the modifi‑ cations with regard to the earl­ier version are minor (Breuer 2006: 83). When the personalization of ties with the administrative ap­par­atus is maximised, the extension of the space for arbit­rary behaviour means that pure patrimonialism takes on the extreme form of sultanism. If the lord loses control of the admin‑ istrative staff, the case becomes one of ‘estate-type patrimonialism’ (ständischer Patrimonialismus).11

20   H. Bruhns Weber distinguishes between two types of configurations: on the one hand prebendalism, the ruler, in exchange for milit­ary or administrative ser­vices, cedes purely eco­nomic rights to members of the administrative staff, and on the other feudalism, if he also has to yield lordly rights. In his ana­lyses of his­tor­ical and con­tempor­ary polit­ical configurations and regimes, Weber never uses the term patrimonialism as an isolated conceptual instrument, defined un­equi­voc­ally upon the basis of a single determining cri­ terion, but instead inserts one or more conceptual sys­tems and typologies which respond to the variety and wealth of empirical situ­ations. This dimension disap‑ pears almost entirely in the often reductionist ref­er­ences to this author that are found in recent pub­lications on (neo-)patrimonialism. If we accept the logic of Weberian typologies, and par­ticu­larly that of the ideal type, it is obvious that in empirical, historic or con­tempor­ary reality, all forms of existing domination mix various ‘pure’ types of domination: ‘Histori‑ cally, there has never been a purely patrimonial state’ (Weber 1972: 137 and 1968: 237). If, as in certain chapters of Economy and Society, the cri­terion of classification is the nature of legitimacy claimed, the main question is whether Weber’s typology and concepts can ana­lyse the historic configurations that served to construct it, but also recog­nize con­tempor­ary un­pre­ced­en­ted situ­ations. From a pragmatic vantage, we might well ask whether the list of sub-­types of traditional domination elaborated by Weber (including pat­ri­archalism, patrimo‑ nialism, sultanism) should be complemented by other sub-­types on the basis of new empirical data and configurations. Weber’s typology of ‘three pure types of legitimate domination’ is a closed one, but the list of sub-­types, drawn from empirical forms of domination, con‑ ceptually resulting from mixes of two or even three ‘pure types’ is open by definition. Given this, there is no reason not to call neo-­patrimonialism a par­ ticu­lar combination of elements which are traditional (patrimonial) and legal-­ rational, or even charismatic, i.e. a specific combination of elements that was not dealt with in Weber’s studies of historic soci­ology. The distinction made by certain modern authors between patrimonialism and neo-­patrimonialism depending upon the nature and the con­text of the private to pub­lic relationship cor­res­ponds, albeit, to the logic of the Weberian typology, but would bene­fit from greater thought as to pro­cess and dynamism. This is what Jean-­François Médard undertook when he suggested reserv­ing the concept of neo-­ patrimonialism to forms of the state which, in contrast to the Euro­pean de­velopment, are the product of ‘two pro­cesses of bur­eau­cratization and patri‑ monialization [which] have gone hand in hand and are intimately linked.’ He thus added to the Weberian idea of bur­eau­cratic patrimonialism that of a patri‑ monialized bur­eau­cracy (Médard 1998: 311 sq.). G. Roth’s already mentioned proposal that traditional patrimonialism should be distinguished from personalized, de-­traditionalized patrimonialism, initially served as the basis for the concept of neo-­patrimonialism, nonetheless seems to contradict the logic of Weber’s typology, for, as Stefan Breuer has observed, it mixes what Weber had gone to great pains to separate: legitimate domination

Weber’s patrimonial domination   21 and illegitimate or non-­legitimate domination.12 As we have seen, the main cri­ terion behind Weber’s typology is, the validation of legitimacy (Legitimitätsgeltung). Neo-­patrimonial domination, as understood by G. Roth, can be maintained for a certain time through sup­port that has been secured. It can also generate new forms of sup­port, but no belief in legitimacy. As S. Breuer observed, with respect to personal domination in more or less rationalized consti­tu­tional states, Weberian soci­ology offers the concept of plebiscitary demo­cracy, but this is based upon a specific belief in a legitimacy (spezifischer Legitimitätsglauben) that neither exclusively relates to custom or inter­est, nor to ‘purely affective or value rational reasons for forming a social relationship.’ (Weber 1972: 122). This does not apply to neo-­patrimonialism. For an outside ob­ser­ver and occasional reader of pub­lications on (neo-)patri‑ monialism in Africa or elsewhere, ref­er­encing to Weber’s works raises three lines of comment. The first concerns the choice of the texts consulted. When Weber is cited first hand, which is far from the most frequent case, pub­lications gen­erally refer to the same passages, with the desire to find un­equi­vocal defini‑ tions which can be applied to differing con­texts. However, Weber deals with patrimonialism in many places in his work, and the reader might find numerous points for comparison as well as models of conceptual construction. These need not neces­sar­ily be imit­ated or taken on board in their present state, but they might enrich present-­day discussions on the concept of neo-­patrimonialism and its links with phenomena such as corruption, clientelism, or par­ticu­lar forms of bureaucracy. The second point concerns the very nature of conceptual work. Weber expressed himself very clearly on this point, and I do not think it useless to cite an excerpt from his writings of 1904: The his­tory of the sciences of social life is, and thus remains, a constant shift from the attempt to order facts in thought through conceptual construc‑ tion – the dissolution of cognitive constructs so realised by the exten­sion and displacement of the sci­ent­ific horizon – to the reformation of concepts on this changed founda­tion. It is not the error of seeking to construct con‑ ceptual sys­tems in gen­eral that is expressed by this – every science, includ‑ ing simple descriptive his­tory, operates with the conceptual stock-­in-trade of its time – it expresses instead the circumstance that in the sciences of human culture the construction of concepts depends on the posing of prob­ lems, and the latter change with the con­tent of the culture itself. The relation within the cultural sciences of the concept to the conceived implies the tran‑ sience of all syntheses. Large-­scale attempts at conceptual construction have in the domain of our science often been of value in revealing the limits of the significance of the per­spect­ives that founded them. The greatest advances in the domain of the social sciences are substantively connected to the shift of prac­tical cultural prob­lems and disguise themselves as critiques of conceptual construction. (Weber 2004: 398 sq.)

22   H. Bruhns This excerpt might be read as a simple (albeit very strong) justification of recent or present-­day attempts at redefining the concept of patrimonialism (so as to remain within the framework of our example). But there is more to it: Weber emphas­izes his ‘conceptual sys­tems’, and this dimension appears to me to be neg­lected in discussions on patrimonialism and neo-­patrimonialism yet, it is not missing in Eisenstadt’s work, Traditional Patrimonialism and Modern Neopatrimonialism (1973). My third observation concerns the use of the notion of ideal type. We recalled earl­ier that some authors appreciate Weber’s ideal type ‘because of its gen­ erality’ and that from this vantage point, ‘patrimonialism, as an ideal type, is the common denominator of very diverse practices which are charac­ter­istic of African pol­itics’ (Médard 1991b: 338). This does not mean that such concerns and reflections are al­to­gether missing in liter­at­ure on neo-­patrimonialism, to the contrary. In 1991, J.-F. Médard, upon the basis of his own reading of M. Weber, reviewed a series of conceptual approaches to patrimonial domination and neo-­patrimonialism, as well as the criticisms of the use of these concepts in analysing con­tempor­ary African states. By conclusion, he reproached certain authors with having understood ‘neither the essence of patrimonialism, i.e. the confusion of the pub­lic and the private, and what such a definition implies, nor what the use of an ideal type entails’ (Médard 1991b: 328). This discussion should be taken up in greater depth. For the same author was not immune to risks of confusing the ideal type and the dif­ fer­ence between patrimonialism and neo-­patrimonialism. The Weberian ideal type was in his view use­ful and illu­min­ating because it is so gen­eral. Patrimoni‑ alism as an ideal type is, he wrote, the common denominator for very diverse practices charac­ter­istic of African pol­itics: nepotism, clanism, tri­bal­ism, region‑ alism, clientelism, patronage, prebendalism, corruption, pred­atory practices, fac‑ tionalism, etc. (Médard 1991b: 329 sq.). The concept ‘offers the ad­vant­age of making it pos­sible simply to take account of the common logic behind all of these practices, without confining oneself to a single type of soci­ety.’ Respond‑ ing to one of his critics, Médard ac­know­ledged that he might have ‘confused an ideal type and a mixed type. The ideal type is patrimonialism, and neo‑patrimo‑ nialism is a mixed type’ (1991b: 332). Without going into detail, let us remem‑ ber that for Weber, an ideal type is formed by a one-­sided accentuation of one or several per­spect­ives, and through the synthesis of a variety of diffuse, discrete, indi­vidual phenom‑ ena, present sometimes more, sometimes less, sometimes not at all; sub‑ sumed by such one-­sided, emphatic viewpoints so that they form a uniform construction in thought. In its conceptual purity this construction can never be found in reality, it is a utopia. (Weber 2004: 388) It is the research inter­est which defines the point of view from which a phe‑ nomenon is unilaterally accentuated and how the ideal type is constructed. This is clearly vis­ible in the chapter entitled ‘The types of domination’ in Economy

Weber’s patrimonial domination   23 and Society. The unilateral accentuation does not concern the same points of view when dealing with the trilogy of pure types of legitimate domination or when constructing sub-­types of traditional domination, among which is patrimo‑ nial domination, or finally sub-­types of the latter. The ideal type is the oppos­ite of a gen­eral type and cannot be the common denominator of a variety of phe‑ nomena. As for mixed types, they are the making of historic reality. The pro­posi­tion that ‘African states are gen­erally more neo-­patrimonial than patrimonial to the extent that they are mixed types, mixing traditional and modern features (notably bur­eau­cratic features) in a complex and unstable com‑ bination’ (Médard 1991b: 332) is nowadays commonly accepted in works on the neo-­patrimonial African state. Although this pro­posi­tion may pose ser­ious dif­ ficult­ies from the vantage of the Weberian conceptualization of types of domina‑ tion, the use­fulness of the concept of (neo-)patrimonialism in analysing the mech­an­isms and functioning of the post-­colonial African state must not be underestimated. It should also be made clear that references to Weber keep requiring a critical discussion of his typology so as to avoid that they turn into a formal exercise.

Notes   1 Cf. pub­lications by Zingerle, F. Bünger, S. Breuer, H. Schmidt-­Glintzer and S. Hermes are cited in the ref­er­ences at the end of this book.   2 R. Theobald’s criticism appeared in the journal in which G. Roth had opened up the debate in 1968.   3 M. Weber had encountered pat­ri­archalism in his studies on Roman agrarian his­tory and his surveys on the con­ditions of farm workers in Prussian ter­rit­ories east of the Elbe.   4 In a letter to Georg von Below of 21 June 1914, in which he announces his intention to produce a con­tri­bu­tion comparing and sys­tematically dealing with polit­ical groups, Weber writes ‘Terminologically I shall stick to the concept of patrimonialism precisely for certain types of polit­ical authority. But the abso­lute distinction between power in the house, over the body and over land and polit­ical rule – for which there is no other cri­ terion apart from that it is not any of the above (but milit­ary and court power) will be hopefully sufficiently emphasised for your taste’. Max Weber (2003a: 725).   5 The essential part of his work is concerned. Cf. CD-­ROM Max Weber – Gesammelte Werke. Digitale Bibliothek vol. 58. This edition is incomplete. It is not based upon the new complete and crit­ical edition (Max Weber Gesamtausgabe), but upon the older editions, which nonetheless include the essential Weber.   6 We draw the ref­er­ences to Economy and Society from the German edition of 1972 and the English translation of 1968.   7 Regarding the soci­ology of the con­tempor­ary state cf. Anter 1995; Anter and Breuer 2007.   8 Numerous occurrences are referred to in the index at the end of the work.   9 This typology is very rapidly sketched in the soci­ology of domination (Weber 1972: 549 sq.), and then de­veloped in the last pages of the Economic Ethic of the World Religions (Weber 1996: 370 sq.). The typology also appears in a text which was post‑ humously published in 1922 in the Preußische Jahrbücher: ‘Die drei reinen Typen der legitimen Herrschaft’. This text was then included in the Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (1st edn 1922), Tübingen, J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1988 [7th edn, J. Winckelmann (ed.)]. English translation in: Sam Whimster (2004).

24   H. Bruhns 10 This is inac­cur­ately translated in Weber (1968: 240) as: ‘in terms of utilitarian, wel­ fare or abso­lute values’. 11 To translate ‘ständischer Patrimonialismus’, Parsons chose ‘decentralized authority’ rather than ‘estate-­type domination’ because the members of the administrative staff are inde­pend­ent of their master. The term ständisch derives from the con­tin­ental medi­eval sys­tem of the Estates, while implying high social rank. 12 In the sense of domination, the stability of which is guaranteed by an accepted claim to legitimacy; Breuer (2006: 90) does not specify this.

2 Patrimonialism and neopatrimonialism Comparative receptions and transcriptions Daniel C. Bach When Guenther Roth suggested in the late 1960s that the notion of patrimonial rule should be applied to the regimes of ‘new’ states (1968: 194), this had already been experimented in Latin Amer­ica and Asia. It was another mat­ter in Africa, where the concept of ‘charismatic authority’ had been more commonly used to de­scribe the rise to power of nationalist leaders and par­ties (Ake 1966: 6–13; Zolberg 1966). More gen­erally, the adoption of patrimonialism was restrained by a deep ambivalence towards ways of conceptualizing, in so-­called ‘modern’ states, features that Max Weber had associated with traditional authority. Aristide Zolberg had accordingly suggested the introduction of a dichotomy between ‘traditional’ and ‘neo-­traditional’ regimes (1966: 140–1). In a sim­ilar vein, Guenther Roth argued that two forms of patrimonial dominance should be con­sidered – one proceeding from the survival of ‘traditional’ patrimonial regimes, and the other associated with ‘de-­traditionalized’ forms of patrimonialism. In this latter model, the leader’s personal power rested upon loy­alty linkages ‘in­ex­tric­ably linked with mater­ial incitements and rewards’ (1968: 196). It was in the end Shmuel Eisenstadt who settled the terminology by suggesting the addition of the neo prefix to elim­in­ate any ambiguity over the distinction between modern ‘traditional’ and ‘post-­traditional’ regimes. Accordingly, the concept of neopatrimonialism refered less to a traditional, or tradition-­derived mode of domination, than to modern bur­eau­cratic polit­ical sys­tems and domination pro­cesses. The introduction of this neologism also paved the way for the ana­lysis of un­pre­ced­en­ted situ­ations – namely polit­ical sys­tems where ‘or­gan­ ized forms of polit­ical life’, associated with bur­eau­cra­cies, pop­ular movements and polit­ical par­ties, were signi­fic­antly more de­veloped than those of ‘traditional’ and rel­at­ively undifferentiated polit­ical sys­tems (Eisenstadt 1973: 11). Neopatrimonialism was conceived as a par­ticu­lar vari­ant of patrimonialism – a hybrid model-­type intended to account for new power sys­tems in the ‘post-­ traditional’ soci­eties of Latin Amer­ica, South Asia and the Middle East (Eisenstadt 1973: 15). Africa was ab­sent from Eisenstadt’s list and concerns but it is there that the dissemination of the concept of neopatrimonial rule was to be most successful. The fol­low­ing pages first discuss how the model of neopatrimonial state has pro­gressively become the archetype of the African anti-­developmental state. It is

26   D.C. Bach argued that this pattern was stimulated by the combination of a sharp dissociation between patrimonialism and neopatrimonialism, with the sys­tematic assimilation of the latter to in­teg­ral and pred­atory forms of domination. In its second part, this chapter contrasts this trajectory with those observed in Latin Amer­ica, South-­East Asia and Russia, where the ongoing use of patrimonialism, stigmatized for conceptual laxity in the 1980s, has often been counterbalanced by innov­at­ive lexicological adjustments. The outcome is the asso­ci­ation of patrimonialism with greater axiological neutrality due to the persistance of the ana­lyt­ical distinction between regulated or capped forms of patrimonialism (patrimonialism within the state) and pred­atory forms of patrimonialism (the patrimonialization of the entire state).

Africa: the neopatrimonial state as a model and a prototype In Africa, as earl­ier in Latin Amer­ica or Asia, ref­er­ences to the notion of the patrimonial state were initially designed to account for institution-­building pro­ cesses rooted into a traditional, neotraditional or traditionalist turf. In Ethi­opia, for example, the dynastic founda­tions of Haile Selassie’s regime were viewed as an exemplary case of what Max Weber meant by patrimonial rule (Jackson and Rosberg 1982: 120–6). Aside from this textbook case, few were the students of Sub-­Saharan Africa who tied patrimonialism to the ongoing imprint of preco­lo­ nial or co­lo­nial polit­ical sys­tems. As they undertook to conceptualize sys­tems of personal rule in Sub-­Saharan Africa, Robert Jackson and Carl Rosberg argued that ‘rather than traditional “patrimonialism” in most new African states . . . we find forms of personal rule based on clientelism . . . but not polit­ically rel­ev­ant tradition’ (1982: 74). The relev­ance of the concept of patrimonial domination was dismissed on the grounds of its lack of inscription within clearly estab­lished ‘traditional’ dynamics. In contrast with the liter­at­ure on Latin Amer­ica, which prim­arily viewed patrimonial rule as an inheritance of the Spanish or Portuguese co­lo­nial sys­tems, most students of the patrimonialization of the African state also focused on the study of post-­colonial states. Crawford Young and Thomas Turner argued for instance that: Even though the co­lo­nial state, in its origins, was a personal fiefdom, over the years its rule became increasingly bur­eau­crat­ized. The hege­mony of the state was upheld by a socially distant Euro­pean bur­eau­cracy, paternalistic yet im­per­sonal. . . . Administrative agents were equipped with ample dis­cre­ tionary authority . . . but co­lo­nial rule was highly institutionalized, operating through a dense matrix of laws and regulations. (1985: 164; Young 1994: 291 sq.) The quest for continuities between con­tempor­ary and pre-­colonial patrimonial rule still remains of mar­ginal concern to his­tor­ians and polit­ical sci­ent­ists, despite the inter­est triggered by Victor Le Vine’s early attempt to dem­on­strate

Patrimonialism and neopatrimonialism   27 how African soci­eties were gen­erally closer to ‘a diffuse form of patrimonialism’ than to pat­ri­archal rule, with the result that they had no difficulty evolving towards ‘more focused “modern” personalist [forms of] patrimonialism’ (Le Vine 1980: 658; On the perception of pub­lic space in pre-­colonial soci­eties, see Dahou 2005: 329–36). Through the adoption of such notions as that of ‘decentralized despotism’, the relev­ance of debating the inter­actions between pat­ri­ archal or patrimonial forms of rule and late co­lo­nialism has nonetheless been suggested in recent years (Mamdani 1996: 53–61). Until the concept of neopatrimonialism took over, discussing patrimoniaism in Africa went along with bifurcated in­ter­pretations of its impact on the African post-­colonial state. J.-C. Willame’s notion of ‘decentralized patrimonialism’ was crafted to monitor the central gov­ern­ment’s loss of control over the territory of Zaïre and the ‘appropriation of pub­lic offices as the elite’s prime source of status, prestige and reward’ (1972: 28). T. Callaghy sim­ilarly called upon the concept of patrimonialism to account for Mobutu’s polit­ical ascent in the early 1970s, but the im­plica­tions were radic­ally distinct (Callaghy 1984). Drawing upon a description of the evolution of author­it­arian states in Latin Amer­ica, and on the record of France’s abso­lute mon­archy in the seven­teenth century, Callaghy viewed the Mobutist state as an ‘early modern state’ and an ‘administrative mon­ archy’. Zaire’s polit­ical sys­tem was ambivalently repres­ented as ‘neo-­traditional and patrimonial’ (Callaghy 1984: 46), or as a ‘patrimonial-­administrative’ regime. Indeed, the author argued, ‘the consolidation of viable state structures is still un­cer­tain in much of black Africa’, where ‘patrimonial forms of rulership are still dominant [and] only partially affected by intermittent bur­eau­cratisation and nascent class structures and struggles’ (1984: 66). Indeed, author­it­arian and single-­party sys­tems in Africa were still widely associated with the notion of ‘early modern states’ that warranted ana­lo­gies between Houphouët Boigny’s rule and Bonapartism (Zolberg) or Mobutu and ‘bur­eau­cratic cesarism’ (Willame).1 The concept of neopatrimonial rule was first applied to Africa in the late 1970s, as Jean-­François Médard undertook to account for the Cameroonian state’s lack of institutionalization and ‘underde­velopment’. Under the Ahidjo regime, he noted, Cameroon is simul­tan­eously a ‘strong, author­it­arian, abso­lute . . . and impotent’ state, where political-­administrative authority is converted into a private patrimony by a bur­eau­cracy and a party closely controlled by President Ahidjo (Médard 1979: 39). Personal rule, the confusion between pub­lic and private spaces, and lack of distinction between office and officeholder, Médard went on, are masked behind discourses, juridical norms and institutions that nourish the illusion of a legal-­bureaucratic logic. While officially pro­claimed through bur­eau­cratic norms and institutions, the distinction between pub­lic domain and private inter­est is, in practice, ‘negated and voided of its con­tents’ (Médard 1979: 68). Devoid of a legitimizing ideo­logy, the ruler owes his abil­ity to remain in power to his capa­city for transforming his monopolistic control over the state into a source of oppor­tun­ities for family, friends and clients. Médard’s approach drew extensively from the study of polit­ical clientelism and patronage in Africa, an area of investigation that, besides him, had been

28   D.C. Bach extensively ex­plored by C. Clapham, R. Lemarchand and S. Eisenstadt (Médard 1982; Eisenstadt and Lemarchand 1981). The patterns of articulation of state– soci­ety inter­actions under personal rule were key to the study of neopatrimonialism. They have been en­cap­sul­ated through the ‘big man’ figure, borrowed from the typology suggested by Marshall Sahlins (1963). The achievements of the politician as an entrepreneur, ana­lysed and re-­interpreted by Médard, and later Yves-­André Fauré through a study of the Kenyan politician Charles Njonjo (Médard 1987; Fauré and J.-F. Médard 1995), proceed from the ‘straddling’ of eco­nomic and polit­ical positions. The big man must imperatively retain the ruler’s total confidence, as he depends on him for access to institutional resources that are the basis of his influence. In short, the big man’s social and eco­nomic achievements are tied to the success of his investment in politics. Neopatrimonialism in Africa is classically defined as the expression of a confusion between office and officeholder within a state endowed, at least formally, with modern institutions and bur­eau­cratic pro­ced­ures. The introduction of ‘neo’ as a prefix means that neopatrimonialism is freed from the his­tor­ical configurations with which patrimonialism had been associated by Weber (Bourmaud 1997: 61). The display of legal-­bureaucratic norms and structures coexists with relations of authority based on interpersonal rather than im­per­sonal interactions: In neopatrimonial regimes, the chief executive maintains authority through personal patronage, rather than through ideo­logy or law. As with classic patrimonialism, the right to rule is ascribed to a person rather than to an office. In con­tempor­ary neopatrimonialism, relationships of loy­alty and dependency pervade a formal polit­ical and administrative sys­tem and leaders occupy bur­eau­cratic offices less to perform pub­lic ser­vice than to acquire personal wealth and status. The distinction between private and pub­lic inter­ests is purposely blurred. The essence of neopatrimonialism is the award by pub­lic officials of personal favors, both within the state . . . and in soci­ety . . . (Bratton and van de Walle 1994: 458) The concept of neopatrimonialism, due to its key emphasis on the coexist­ence of patrimonialism with legal-­bureaucratic elements, begs the question of the forms of inter­action and their outcomes. What is at stake in fine is the neopatrimonial state’s capa­city (or lack thereof ) to produce ‘pub­lic’ pol­icies. Daniel Bourmaud touches on the mat­ter when he defines neopatrimonialism as a ‘dualistic situ­ation, in which the state is characterized by patrimonialization, as well as by bur­eau­cratization’ (1997: 62). Bratton and van de Walle also refer to con­ tempor­ary states where ‘patrimonial logic coexists with the de­velopment of bur­ eau­cratic administration and at least the pretense of legal-­rational forms of state legitimacy’, even though elements of legal-­bureaucratic legitimacy may be a mere facade (van de Walle 1994: 131). Such dualism can effect­ively result in a wide array of empirical situ­ations. J.-F. Médard, who had grown increasingly aware of the conceptual drift caused by undifferentiated descriptions of

Patrimonialism and neopatrimonialism   29 neopatrimonialism, sketched, in the late 1990s, a tax­onomy based on the mode and in­tens­ity of the regulation of patrimonial practices. His suggestion was to identify two types of African states representing two polar points, with all pos­sible inter­medi­ate situ­ations: at one end of the spectrum, neopatrimonial states characterized by a patrimonial mode of polit­ical regulation based on redis­ tribu­tion (Côte d’Ivoire under Houphouët-Boigny), and, at the other end, purely pred­atory states that cor­res­pond to a sultanic type of patrimonialism (Mobutu’s Zaïre). (Médard 2000: 854) Political sys­tems where patrimonial practices tend to be regulated and capped should be distinguished from those where the patrimonialisation of the state has become all-­encompassing, with the consequent loss of any sense of pub­lic space or pub­lic policy. Regulated forms of neopatrimonialism The ruler’s person­al­ity exerts a decisive influence in the implementation of regulated forms of neopatrimonialism, usually through the introduction of a pol­icy of ethnoregional balance. The distribution of resources and prebends is sometimes formalized and takes place on an inclusive base. Regulated forms of neopatrimonialism are expected to alleviate the imprint of social, ethnoregional and religious identities while promoting loy­alty and intra-­elite cohesion. The emphasis laid on co-­optation and redis­tribu­tion, rather than coercion, con­trib­utes to promote a culture of mutual accomodation. The outcome is an increased state capa­city to penetrate soci­ety and ensure com­pliance. Even though notions such as pub­lic ethics and common good may be undercut, regulated neopatrimonialism conveys its own brand of ‘moral eco­nomy’, in so far as it favors redis­tribu­ tion pro­cesses that target the national territory (Olivier de Sardan 1999). The inclusive nature of such practices may also go along with a modulation in scope and in­tens­ity: some administrative sectors operate according to legal-­bureaucratic rules with the result of a capa­city to generate ‘pub­lic’ pol­icies. The imprint of regulated neopatrimonialism is capped and ringfenced. The regimes of Jomo Kenyatta (1964–78) and Félix Houphouët-Boigny (1960–93) offer good examples of regulated neopatrimonialism. The notion of ‘rationalized clientelism’ that has been applied to Kenyatta’s rule gives a convincing account of the way his régime attempted to re­con­cile contra­dict­ory imperatives in a functional way. Indeed, within the Kenyan bur­eau­cratic state, im­per­sonal rules were made to co-­exist with neopatrimonial practices designed to alleviate the risks that polit­ical com­peti­tion might carry for the Nation-­State (Bourmaud 1991: 262). Synergies between pres­id­en­tialism, the single-­party sys­tem and what amounted to an institutionalized sys­tem of patronage facilitated the incorporation of the periphery by the center.

30   D.C. Bach In Côte d’Ivoire, the régime of F. Houphouët-Boigny (1960–93) sim­ilarly exemplified the combination of personal rule with regulated neopatrimonialism. The trademark of Houphouët, a protoype of the ‘big man’ in pol­itics, was his capa­city to combine intra-­elite co-­optation with limited usage of coercion. Direct control was exerted over the recruitment of the polit­ical elite so as ‘to balance ethnic, generational and even personal rivalries’ (Crook 1989: 214). The outcome was a hybrid polit­ical sys­tem where ‘strong personal power . . . through patron–client relations [combined with] the use of modern bur­eau­cratic agencies’. Patrimonial interference in the bur­eau­cratic ac­tiv­ities of the state was restricted (Sandbrook 1985: 119–21). The coun­try’s polit­ical and administrative elites appear, observed Richard Crook in the late 1980s, far less divided than in the ‘patrimonial bur­eau­cra­cies’ of other African states. Patrimonial elements within the polit­ical sys­tem, ‘have . . . not been allowed to override the com­mit­ ment set from the top to legal-­rational forms of control, effect­ive role performance and the implementation of an eco­nomic programme’ (1989: 227–8). The routinization of regulated practices over a rel­at­ively long period also invited parallels with the coun­try’s remark­able polit­ical stability. The 1970s were the golden age of regulated neopatrimonialism in Africa. Commodity export prices were still high and the states often had access to signi­ fic­ant resources for redis­tribu­tion. Comforting the rulers’ personal power seemed com­pat­ible with ensuring state- (if not nation-) building. The integ­rat­ive virtues of the resulting pro­cesses were often extolled (Theobald 1982: 550). Kenya and Côte d’Ivoire were far from being the only cases of regulated neopatrimonialism. Cameroon under Ahidjo was also, for instance, labelled as a case of regulated neopatrimonialism. Although Cameroon was then frequently de­scribed as a police state, noted retrospectively J.-F. Médard, the use of viol­ence by the Ahidjo regime remained, in the final ana­lysis, ‘functional, discreet and circumscribed’, as the pres­id­ent kept actively pursuing strat­egies designed to co-­opt his op­pon­ents – the pres­id­ent’s so-­called equilibrium pol­icy based on a sharing of offices and prebends among the different geo-­ethnic groups (Médard 1995: 360–1). Predatory forms of neopatrimonialism Predatory forms of neopatrimonialism are associated with sys­tems where personal rule and control of resources reach a paroxysmic level, with a consequent ‘failure of institutionalisation . . . and thus of the state’ (Médard 1991b: 339). The corollaries are the absence of a pub­lic space, and of any capa­city to produce ‘pub­lic’ pol­icies. Indeed, the privatization of the pub­lic sphere is carried to such extremes as to finally dissolve it (Englebert 2000: 104–5), as observed in the Central African Repub­lic, where, under the Bokassa regime, deinstitutionalization and the rise of informal practices challenged the very notion of a state (Bigo 1988). Patronage and the distribution of resources also rest upon more select­ive and/or markedly discriminatory geo-­ethnic founda­tions with the result, as in Angola during the 1980s, of a collapse of the clientelist distribution sys­tems that

Patrimonialism and neopatrimonialism   31 were meant to ‘bring rulers and ruled together, link centre and peripheries, urban and rural areas’ (Vidal 2008: 127). It is the evolution of the Mobutu regime (1965–97) after 1974 that still offers the purest illustration of a thoroughly patrimonialized state. Mobutu’s neopatrimonial rule, observes René Lemarchand, differed from others on the continent due to an ‘unparalleled capa­city to institutionalize kleptocracy at every level of the social pyramid and his unrivalled talent for transforming personal rule into a cult and polit­ical clientelism into cronyism’ (2003: 31). Mobutu’s ‘pred­atory’ rule, C. Young and T. Turner also noted, involved the permeation of the state by a level of corruption so per­vas­ive as to have become its most vis­ible and defining prop­erty (1985: 165). Qualified as arbit­rary, pred­atory or kleptocratic, Mobutu’s Zaire has also called for parallels with sultanism – the term coined by Max Weber to characterize those extreme instances where the ruler’s domination relies less upon traditional founda­tions than on the leader’s arbit­rary and uncontrolled power (Chehabi and Linz 1998). The distinction between regulated and pred­atory forms of neopatrimonialism signals the two extremes of a diversity of empirical configurations. The idea of a dissociation between pub­lic office and the ruler’s private inter­ests tends to become irrel­ev­ant in the case of in­teg­ral and pred­atory forms of neopatrimonialism. Conversely, regulated neopatrimonialism infers some capa­city to craft ‘pub­ lic’ pol­icies. To put it differently, an opera­tional distinction should be drawn between neopatrimonialism within the state and patterns of neopatrimonialism that per­meate the entire state.2 Dissemination: from model to paradigm By the early 1990s, repres­enta­tions of the African state as neopatrimonial went along with the as­sump­tion that the concept was espe­cially atuned to the study of pol­itics on the continent. Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle argued that while neopatrimonial practice can be found in all polities, it is the core feature of pol­itics in Africa . . . [P]ersonal relationships are a factor at the margins of all bur­eau­cratic sys­tems, but in Africa they constitute the founda­ tion and superstructure of polit­ical institutions. The inter­action between the ‘big man’ and his extended retinue defines African pol­itics, from the highest reaches of the pres­id­en­tial palace to the humblest village assembly. (Bratton and van de Walle 1994: 459) The same authors also earmarked some 40 African states where the constituent elements of a routinization of neopatrimonial practices could be observed. Such ‘institutionalization’, they went on, was manifesting through sys­tematized resort to clientelism, the redis­tribu­tion of state resources as a legitimizing device, and the use of pres­id­en­tialism as the founda­tion for concentrating power to the bene­ fit of a single individual.

32   D.C. Bach The wave of criticism to which the ‘de­velop­mental’ and ‘dependency’ para­ digms were being subjected since the 1970s (Bayart 1989: 20–64; Médard 1991b: 323–4), largely con­trib­uted to the diffusion of neopatrimonialism. The concept was able to account for an extraordinarily diverse range of polit­ical ar­range­ments. It could also interact fruitfully with research that proceeded from related, yet distinct theor­et­ical premises, such as the quasi-­Weberian typology of personal rule de­veloped by Robert Jackson and Carl Rosberg (1982), or the concept of the ‘prebendary state’ borrowed from Weber and applied by Richard Joseph to Nigeria (Joseph 1987). The notion of ‘quasi-­states’ was also de­veloped during this period by Jackson to characterize states endowed with a limited capa­ city to assert their sover­eignty (Jackson 1990). In France, par­ticu­larly, Jean-­ François Bayart’s para­digm of the ‘pol­itics of the belly’ (Bayart 1989),3 the related attention paid to the study of ‘pol­itics from below’ (Bayart, Mbembe and Toulabor 2008), and the launching of the journal Politique africaine con­trib­uted to inspire research agendas focusing on the neopatrimonial state. The dissemination of the concept of neopatrimonialism was also closely en­tangled with debates on the decline of the African post-­colonial state’s administrative and bur­eau­cratic capacities. Médard’s pioneering discussion of Cameroon already de­scribed neopatrimonialism as a pro­cess whereby the assertion of expanding ‘modern’ bur­eau­cratic norms masked a deterioration of administrative capa­city (Médard 1979). Neopatrimonialism was also viewed as an indic­ator of the degree of deconstruction of the co­lo­nial state: At first, observed Crawford Young, patrimonial practices in the post-­ colonial state were of modest scale. But a steady inflation of prebendal costs set in, and by the 1970s, the amounts diverted from pub­lic treasuries to lubricate the patrimonial ma­chinery were very large – colossal in such cases as Nigeria and Zaire. (Young 1994. See also: Hyden 2000: 24) Regulated forms of neopatrimonial rule were also under­mined by the effects of the eco­nomic crisis that affected African states in growing numbers during the 1970s. With the ruler’s reduced capa­city to distribute prebends and capture rents, unrestrained and pred­atory forms of neopatrimonialism gained currency. The concept became a sub­sti­tute for discussing ‘the polit­ical decay, eco­nomic collapse and administrative grotesqueries of African states’ (Crook 1989: 206). The patrimonialization of the state nurtured the spiral of a permanent eco­nomic crisis as incumbent rulers sought to preserve the status quo through the mobil­iza­tion of inter­na­tional aid trans­fers and the nego­ti­ation of reform programs with International Financial Institutions (van de Walle 2001: 49–63). Declining growth rates, deteriorating living con­ditions, and the contraction of the resources avail­able for redis­tribu­tion sim­ilarly led to interrogations over the pos­sible rise of sultanism through a ‘degeneration [of neopatrimonialism] into an eco­nomic­ally irrational form of “personal rule” ’ (Sandbrook 1985: 12–13 and 89 seq.).

Patrimonialism and neopatrimonialism   33 In its own way, the wave of demands for demo­crat­ization and the polit­ical trans­itions that followed the end of the cold war, highlighted the resilience and institutionalization of neopatrimonialism. Only a handful of African regimes was not labelled as neopatrimonial. Botswana, the Gambia, Mauritius, Senegal and Zim­babwe were, for example, de­scribed as ‘multi-­party polyarchies’ on the grounds that ‘while these regimes are imperfectly demo­cratic, personal power is signi­fic­antly checked by formal-­legal rules, leadership turnover, and a meas­ure of objectivity in decision-­making’ (Bratton and van de Walle 1994: 473–4). At a time when the African neopatrimonial state tended to be equated to in­teg­ral and pred­atory pro­cesses, a distinctive terminology need to be employed to account for regulated forms of neopatrimonialism. The African state, Thandika Mwandawire quipped, at the turn of the mille­ nnium, ‘. . . is today the most demonized social institution in Africa, vilified for its weakness, its over-­extension, its interference with the smooth functioning of the markets, its repressive character, its dependence on foreign powers, its ubi­ quity, its absence, etc.’ (Mkandawire 2001: 289). The multifaceted nature of the African state’s predicament also transpired through the accumulation of epithets and metaphors. R. Sandbrook refered to states as ‘fictitious’ while R. Jackson had coined the notion of ‘quasi-­states’, J.-F. Bayart de­scribed a ‘rhizomous state’, Callaghy a ‘lame Leviathan’ . . . Joshua Forrest forsaw the premisses of a ‘reversal’ of the state-­building pro­cess as challenges to territorial integrity would multiply (Forrest 1998). Marina Ottaway echoed what was a widely shared viewpoint at the time when she claimed: ‘the prob­abil­ity that all African states will survive intact within the borders estab­lished by the co­lo­nial powers appears remote’ (Ottaway 1999: 83). The trans­forma­tion of the concept of the neopatrimonial state into an endemic notion was stimulated by the build-­up of pub­lications on the informalization, deinstitutionalization and criminalization of African pol­itics. In his study of the Sierra Leonean civil wars, William Reno de­scribed, for instance, how the informalization of power and the rise of personal wealth accumulation networks prompted the emergence of a ‘shadow state’ (1995). The metaphor was designed to underline the contrast between the state as it was meant to operate and how it actu­ally functioned. Neopatrimonialism was associated with the rise of viol­ence and a growing asymmetry in the patterns of distribution of resources and prebends. The figure of the warlord prevailed over that of the ‘big-­man’, and the logics of gangs and criminal networks over those of patronage. Emphasis laid on the deterritorialization, informalization and criminalization of polit­ical sys­tems encouraged the assimilation of neopatrimonialism to a tele­ olo­gical expression of the decline of the African state: ‘the state in Africa is little more than an empty shell’ claimed the authors of a provocative and influ­en­tial essay (Chabal and Daloz 1999: 24). The casual asso­ci­ation of neopatrimonialism with in­teg­ral and pred­atory forms of pol­itics also con­trib­uted to turn the African state into a prototype of the ‘anti-­de­velop­mental’ state.

34   D.C. Bach The African state as a prototype of the ‘anti-­developmental’ state The founda­tions of a polit­ical eco­nomy of neopatrimonialism were laid by Richard Sandbrook as he undertook to relate ‘the private appropriation of the state’s powers’ to the de­velop­mental failure of African states (2000: 59). The neopatrimonial state, he argued, is an archetype of the anti-­developmental state, with ‘eco­nomic ob­ject­ives [subordinated] to the short-­run exigencies of polit­ical survival’ for the rulers and his regime (Sandbrook 2000: 97). A few years later, Göran Hyden stigmatized as an ‘institutionalized curse’ the spread of neopatrimonialism in Africa (2000: 19). By then, the African state, stereo­typed as desperately corrupt and ‘klepto-­patrimonial’ (McIntyre quoted in: Searle 1999: 8), also provided an anti-­model to the liter­at­ure that, globally, attempted to conceptualize the de­velop­mental state. The typology of Peter Evan, drawing from the ex­peri­ence of the first wave of emerging coun­tries in East Asia (Japan, South Korea and Tai­wan), identified three archetypes in accordance with the states’ propensity to promote eco­nomic de­velopment. The de­velop­mental state, exemplified by South Korea, was characterized as ‘embedded-­auto­nom­ous’ – i.e. able to combine its ‘embeddedness’ in the societal envir­on­ment with bur­eaucractic capa­city for ‘auto­nom­ous’ action. In the inter­medi­ate cat­egory of states, illus­trated by Brazil, bur­eau­cratic capa­city did exist but was constrained by an oligarchic sys­tem. Finally, the model of the pred­atory and anti‑de­velop­mental state was found to be in Africa, where, as in Mobutu’s Zaire, ‘the preoccupation of the polit­ical class with rent seeking has turned the rest of soci­ety into prey’ – a confirmation, Evans concluded, that ‘it is not bur­eau­cracy that impedes de­velopment so much as the lack of capa­city to behave like a bur­eau­cracy’ (1989: 570). Atul Kohli’s more recent synoptic overview of de­velopment and industrialization pro­cesses in ‘peripheral’ or ‘emergent’ coun­tries similarly refers to the neopatrimonial state (implicitly as­sumed to be African) as a counter-­model. In addition to state territorial control and institutional de­velopment, Kohli emphas­izes the need for an ‘effect­ive pub­lic arena’ clearly differentiated from private inter­ests, organ­iza­tions and loyalties (2004: 408). The absence of such an arena produces ‘highly ineffect­ive neopatrimonial’ states captured by factional inter­ests (Kohli 2004: 408). The ‘cohesive capitalist states’, deemed truly de­velop­mental, ‘concentrate power at the apex and use state power to dis­ cip­line their soci­eties’ – they include South Korea, Tai­wan, Turkey, Mexico and South Africa (Kohli 2004: 381–2). At the other end of the spectrum, the neopatrimonial state is characterized by the non-­existence of a pub­lic arena, an inefficient state and an embryonic de­velopment of indi­gen­ous capit­al­ism. Elites are chiefly bent ‘on maintaining power and on privatizing pub­lic resources for personal gain or gain by [their] ethnic com­munit­ies’ (Kohli 2004: 289). Nigeria is seen as a near-­perfect example of this neopatrimonial state model, which is also con­sidered relevant to de­scribe ‘almost all’ African states (Kohli 2004: 394–5). Africa is punctuated with pred­atory and in­teg­ral forms of neopatrimonialism.

Patrimonialism and neopatrimonialism   35

Beyond Africa: patrimonialism within the state We have dem­on­strated in the previous pages how, in Africa, the dissemination of the concept of neopatrimonial rule, stimulated by emphasis on pro­cesses of deinstitutionalization and informalization, has become equated with pred­atory and anti-­developmental forms of power. The fol­low­ing pages contrast this trend of ana­lysis with those observed in Latin Amer­ica, the Middle East, South-­East Asia and the Communist and post-­Communist soci­eties of Europe and Central Asia. While the diffusion of the concept of neopatrimonial rule has remained limited in most of these regions, ongoing ref­er­ences to patrimonialism have been adjusted to suit specific debates, as reflected by a rich crop of lexicographic innovations. Patrimonial and bureaucratic: the Latin American state In Latin Amer­ica, patrimonialism still commonly refers to the legacy of the three centuries of Spanish and Portuguese pres­ence (Zabludovsky 1989; Roett 1984). In the late 1950s, Richard Morse famously noted that patrimonialism could account for the persistence in con­tempor­ary South Amer­ica of patterns of governance that drew their roots from Spain’s imperial pol­icy (Morse 1964: 157–8; Sarfatti 1966). Henrique Florescano and Isabel Gil Sánchez also de­scribed how the Viceroys reproduced in Mexico the patrimonial nature of the Spanish state as they rewarded ser­vices ‘through the granting of prebends and the bequeathing of privileges’ (Florescano and Gil Sánchez quoted in Zabludovsky 1989: 52). After inde­pend­ence, the emergence of caudillos ushered a period during which the struggle for control of a ‘patrimonial state ap­par­atus, [now] fragmented from the ori­ginal imperial one’ oscillated between tyranny and anarchy (Morse 1964: 163). As had been the case with the conquistadores, the caudillos drew their power from their personal charisma as much as from milit­ary achievements that forced admiration from their followers. Like the ‘big man’ in present-­day Africa, the caudillo was a polit­ical entrepreneur. His personal power stemmed from a confusion between pub­lic monies and personal assets, and rested as much on milit­ary skills as on a capa­city to build up patronage networks and to distribute prebends. The caudillo, how­ever, differed from the African warlords of the 1990s in so far as his raison d’être was to estab­lish (or restore) the founda­tions of a ‘patrimonial-­bur­eau­cratic’ state for the bene­fit of an oligarchic elite.4 In Brazil, the notion of patrimonialism is still casually employed to de­scribe ‘traditional’ soci­eties in the course of ‘modernization’. In line with Weber’s sociological approach, the Brazilian state is depicted as ‘a bur­eau­cratic state that tradi­tion­ally has been at the ser­vice of a patrimonial order’ (Roett 1984: 1; Uricoechea 1980). Emphasis is laid on the persistence and reju­vena­tion of a sys­tem of domination going back to the hereditary ‘captaincies’ introduced by the Portuguese. Initially published in 1958, Raymundo Faoro’s seminal work on the roots of polit­ical patronage in Brazil paints a strongly centralized state, where polit­ical and bur­eau­cratic elites do not differentiate the office from its

36   D.C. Bach holder, with the result of a capture of pub­lic resources by private inter­ests (Osiel 1986: 39ff.). Subordinates are expected to be loyal to their superiors, and not to the office they hold. Today, such commonly used notions as ‘patrimonial soci­ety’, ‘patrimonial regime’ or ‘patrimonial order’ seek to stress the exist­ence of continuities that transcend regime changes or the type of elites in power (Roett 1984: 23). In Brazil, noted a study of the judicial sys­tem in the early 1990s, patrimonialism stems from the entrenchment of a ‘tradition . . . that tends to per­petu­ate what always existed’, namely the appropriation of pub­lic offices by private indi­viduals, and the absence of a concrete separation between the pub­lic and private spheres. The result is a ‘movement toward the privatization of pub­lic goods’ and ‘a dominant logic [marked by] attempts to informalize the current judiciary’ (Botelho Junqueira 1992: 437, 439). This dia­gnosis, despite its severity, mirrors depictions of the Brazilian polit­ical sys­tem that, refer to con­tempor­ary forms of patrimonialism through the notion of ‘patrimonial bur­eau­cratization’ (Zabludovsky 1989: 57). This carries as a corollary the rejection of in­teg­ral approaches so as to concentrate on the identification of patrimonialist practices within the state. In Latin Amer­ica, the dividing line between ‘tradition’ and ‘traditionalism’ is often blurred. This was clearly the case as ref­er­ences to patrimonialism were adopted to illus­trate the return of totalitarian rule, as in Brazil, Argentina or Peru during the 1970s. Patrimonialism became a metaphor for the assertion of the power of traditionalist corporate inter­ests within the state (Schwartman 1977). Neopatrimonialism, a term which Oszlak was the first to apply to Latin Amer­ica, simply referred to ‘con­tempor­ary cases in which personalist gov­ern­ ment turns states into the private gov­ern­ment of thoses possessing the neces­ sary power for the exercise of polit­ical domination’ (Oszlak 1986: 229). In contrast with neopatrimonialism in Africa, personal rule was not associated with pro­cesses of deinstitutionalization. The as­sump­tion was that a neopatrimonial regime could even have a de­velop­mental impact if the dic­tator happened to be surrounded by a ‘true “Court” of “trust­worthy men” . . . who act as placemen at key institutions, and a small staff of professionals in charge of the administration of certain large programmes (i.e., pub­lic works, industrial pro­ mo­tion)’ (Oszlak 1986: 232). Oszlak also con­sidered that, in an authoritarian-­ bureaucratic regime, the appropriation and alloca­tion of resources was also ‘subjected to the dis­cre­tionary whims of the ruler’ (1986: 233). In the pro­cess, he curiously overlooked the influence that the mar­ginalization of control pro­ ced­ures could have on the de­velopment of corruption or nepotism. That issue, scrutinized by Karen Remmer through a case study of the Pinochet regime, would lead to its re-­classification as neopatrimonial (1989: 150).5 Both Remmer and Oszlak used the prefix ‘neo’ to clarify that personal domination ‘coexists with a professional milit­ary, technocratic administrative staff, and all the other elements of a comparatively modernized and industrialized soci­ety’ (Remmer 1989: 165). In Latin Amer­ica, patrimonialism still prim­arily refers to the persistance of forms of domination dating back to Spanish and Portuguese co­lo­nial rule. More

Patrimonialism and neopatrimonialism   37 recent intepretations of patrimonialism have stressed the personal as much as the cor­porat­ist or oligarchic dimension of the private inter­ests at stake. In all such cases, an under­lying as­sump­tion has been the lack of incompatibility between patrimonialism and the rise of a bur­eau­cratic and capitalist state. References to neopatrimonialism are sim­ilarly exempt from any tele­olo­gical per­spect­ive on the decline of the state. Patrimonialism and patriarchalism: North Africa and the Middle East In North Africa and the Middle East, studies on patrimonial rule were initially interspersed with allusive ref­er­ences to a ‘patrimonial style of leadership in the Middle East’, or to the notion of ‘Middle Eastern patrimonialism’ so as to de­scribe a wide array of his­tor­ical and con­tempor­ary polit­ical sys­tems (Bill and Leiden 1974: 104–5). Patrimonialism was applied to polities with a strong pat­ri­archal slant, as in Yemen or Saudi Arabia, just as the notion was applied to the complex administrative sys­tems of the Ottoman empire or of Iran’s Qajar dynasty (1779–1925) (Bill and Leiden 1974: 250). King Hassan ii and Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi were con­sidered to be the rulers of his­tor­ically rooted patrimonial polit­ical sys­tems (Bill and Leiden 1974: 142; Waterbury 1973: 535). By the early 1980s, in­ter­pretations of Middle Eastern polit­ical sys­tems through the notion of patrimonialism were severely criticized on the grounds of their propensity to cultivate metaphors and conceptual overstretching, a trend exemplified by the dilution of bound­ar­ies between patrimonialism, pat­ri­ archalism and author­it­arian rule. This was equally manifest as the concept of sultanism was revived to characterize Boumedienne’s Algeria as ‘pop­ular sultanism’ or de­scribe Nasser’s Egypt as a form of ‘sultanic socialism’ (Leca and Schemeil 1983: 474 sq.). As the same authors pointed out, patrimonialism and other Weberian types of domination had become catch-­all concepts that merely sought to account for ‘situ­ations of modernity’ under which actual or as­sumed features of the traditional state could be detected. Neopatrimonialism, bolstered by the work of Africanist polit­ical sci­ent­ists, has since then gradually emerged as a sub­sti­tute to the somewhat discredited notion of patrimonialism. The concept was created in order to account for the stability of such author­it­arian regimes in Syria, Libya, Tu­nisia and, until it was milit­ar­ily attacked by external forces, Iraq (Brownlee 2002). Less euphemistically, neopatrimonialism has also been used to de­scribe how Yasser Arafat’s control over the Palestinian Authority combined author­it­arian rule with the lack of a clear distinction between the pub­lic sphere and private inter­ests (Brynen 1995; Amundsen 2000). The state that was to be built in accordance with the Oslo accords remained the ‘prop­erty’ of a leader who ruled through the distribution of favours, thus condoning the spread of corruption and clientelism that would faciliate the elect­oral victory of the Hamas in Janu­ary 2006 (Le More 2008).

38   D.C. Bach Cronyism: state and business in Southeast Asia In Africa, Latin Amer­ica and the Middle East patrimonialism or neopatrimonialism have been linked to the discussion of pro­cesses of institution- and state-­ building. In East and Southeast Asia it is the inter­actions with and impact on the de­velopment of capit­al­ism that have been the prin­cipal subject of attention. In Indonesia, patrimonialism was initially called upon to highlight the imprint on the post-­colonial state of conceptualizations of power inherited from Java’s pre-­colonial mon­archies (Brown 1994: 117). As sub­sequently noted by Harold Crouch, the years of so-­called ‘guided demo­cracy’ initiated in 1959 by President Soekarno (1947–67) were associated with the resurgence of traditional patrimonial features until such a reading was undercut by the sys­tem’s dis­integ­ration (1979: 575). The ‘New Order’ pro­ject sub­sequently launched by General Suharto (1967–98) involved the neutralization of polit­ical par­ties, the de-­politicization of the masses, and above all, what Crouch de­scribes as a pol­icy of ‘patrimonial distribution of various rewards among the elite’ so as to ensure regime stability. Suharto’s personal rule also resulted in what might be in­ter­preted as regulated forms of neopatrimonialism. His domination did not impede the implementation of macro­economic pol­icies that combined patronage with a set of clearly defined pub­lic pol­icy goals. As William Liddle puts it, Suharto: favors the nationalists prim­arily for ideal and cultural reasons. . . . The patrimonialists he uses to reward and pun­ish mater­ially those indi­viduals and groups who could threaten his position. The nationalists are in direct and funda­mental conflict with the eco­nom­ists over de­velopment politicy; the patrimonialists have no permanent friends or enemies, only a permanent inter­est in the continuing flow of funds. (Liddle 1991: 418) On the eve of the 1997–8 fin­an­cial crisis, Indonesia was viewed as the prototype of an ‘Asian’ capa­city to combine personal rule, rent-­seeking behavior and corruption with levels of macro­economic performance that were truly de­velop­ mental. In his comparative study of Indonesia and Nigeria, Peter Lewis also noted how Indonesia’s New Order regime was more personalized and centralized than most Nigerian gov­ern­ments [but] Soeharto reduced the un­cer­tainties sur­ round­ing his personal control by according influence to a team of capable eco­nomic technocrats and by locking in pol­icies through a balanced budget rule, an open capital account and close coopera­tion with donors. (Lewis 2007: 7, 65–6) In the Philippines, the concept of patrimonial rule was initially adopted to de­scribe patron–client relationships, and the networks of personal loy­alty they sup­ ported. Paul Hutchcroft’s notion of ‘oligarchic patrimonialism’ was meant to

Patrimonialism and neopatrimonialism   39 account for the control that clans originating from the elite’s leading fam­il­ies exerted over the state. This was viewed as the source of structural impediments to the build-­up of ‘legal-­rational’ pro­cesses and production-­based forms of capit­al­ism (Hutchcroft 1998: 20). Rent capture and ‘booty capit­al­ism’ (or Beute Kapitalismus to use Weber’s own term) stemmed from the weakness of the state in its dealings with eco­nomic circles. As summar­ized by Hutchcroft: ‘the influence of extrabur­ eau­cratic forces swamps the influence of the bur­eau­cracy, and major power resides not in a class of officeholders but rather in the private sector’ (Hutchcroft 1998: 52). This was a reversal of the as­sump­tions that associated (neo)patrimonialism with the firm control exerted by the ruler and office holders over the politico-­ administrative sys­tem and, in the case of an in­teg­ral state, the coun­try as a whole. Emphasis laid on the types of inter­action between state bur­eau­cra­cies and private business in Southeast Asia has produced a rich crop of expressions. These have been gen­erally associated with the identification of specific forms of capit­al­ism – labelled as ‘cronyism’, ‘oligarchic’, ‘pred­atory’, bur­eau­cratic’, ‘rentier’ and even, in the case of Malaysia, ‘ersatz capit­al­ism’ (Kunio 1988; White 2004: 389–90). Indeed, the relationship between bur­eau­crats and business has been central to the conceptualization of the ‘de­velop­mental state’. By contrast with the much cel­eb­rated eco­nomic performances of Japan, Tai­wan and South Korea in the 1960s, pro­spects for capitalist de­velopment in Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia or Thailand were initially overlooked. Corruption and cronyism among rulers, bur­eau­crats and big business were con­sidered too intense. Productive capit­al­ism, it was argued, was adversely affected by a deficit of legitimacy due to the lack of social and polit­ical integration of local business circles – the Chinese ‘pariah entre­pren­eurs’.6 Industrialization pro­cesses were also viewed as overly de­pend­ent on costly state subventions. Such criticism, Peter Searle observed, were not directed so much against state inter­ven­tionism as against the nature of such inter­ven­tions. The Southest Asian state was bluntly de­scribed as ‘unable to address the national inter­est in any long-­term and sys­ tematic way because it is captive of its own officials and operates in their inter­ ests to produce a rent-­seeking form of inter­ven­tion’ (Searle 1999: 7). The intimation of a thoroughly patrimonialized state conveyed by this pess­im­istic prognosis contrasted with the simultaneous belief that, in the cases of Japan, South Korea or Tai­wan, capitalist de­velopment and the signi­fic­ant patronage and corruption ties could easily coexist (Searle 1999: 8; Hunter 1989).7 The eco­nomic performance of Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand in the 1990s eventually led to a reappraisal of condescending descriptions of a type of capit­al­ism supposedly trapped in rentier mentality, corruption and cronyism. Malaysian entre­pren­eurs had clearly managed to free themselves from state patronage networks, and were proving capable of standing up to inter­na­ tional com­peti­tion. Such a trend was accordingly rein­ter­preted as the counterpart of a state bur­eau­cracy that was more regulated despite the persistence of ‘highly patrimonialistic relations between the state and business’ (Searle 1999: 8). It was the fin­an­cial crisis of the late 1990s, how­ever, that led to an un­pre­ced­ en­ted re-­evaluation of the money-­politics nexus in East and Southeast Asia. In

40   D.C. Bach South Korea, the myth of an eco­nomic growth based on the virtuous alli­ance between a technocratic mer­ito­cracy and an austere milit­ary hier­archy was suddenly blown away, and with it the classic model of the de­velop­mental state. As dem­on­strated by David Kang, in order to account for the contrasting evolutions of South Korea and the Philippines the links between money and pol­itics were far more rel­ev­ant than the traditional emphasis on bur­eau­crats and their pol­icies (2002: 4). The bur­eau­cracy had undoubtedly gained some degree of auto­nomy under the regimes of Syngman Rhee (1948–60), Park Chung-­hee (1963–79), or Ferdinand Marcos (1965–86), but these regimes never managed to insulate themselves from societal pressures. Thus, in South Korea, ‘Park Chung-­hee created a bifurcated bur­eau­cracy that allowed him to meet his patronage requirements and still seek eco­nomic efficiency’ (Kang 2002: 63–4). The disparity between the Philippines and South Korea ultimately stemmed, argues Kang, from the balance of power between the politico-­bureaucratic and eco­nomic circles. In the Philippines, inter­actions between state and business gen­ er­ated negat­ive eco­nomic effects due to the permanent rivalry between groups competing for a share of the state’s spoils. By contrast, in South Korea as in Tai­ wan, or earl­ier in Japan, neither the polit­ical nor the business elites were ever able to gain a decisive ad­vant­age over the other. Corruption and collusion thus went hand in hand with investments and decision-­making pro­cesses that were efficient in the long run, as they were based on a balanced relationship between gov­ern­ment and business elites. While the South Korean, as well as the Tai­ wanese, states may be termed ‘de­velop­mental’ in view of their un­deni­able capa­ city to attract productive investments, to de­velop infrastructures as well as the people’s access to ‘pub­lic goods’, this does not neces­sar­ily mean that these achievements were fully intended: as noted by Kang: ‘the production of pub­lic goods was often the fortunate by-­product of actors competing to gain the private bene­fits of state resources’ (2002: 6). State ‘capture’ and neopatrimonialism: post-­Communist systems from Europe to Central Asia In the post-­Communist states of Europe, the concept of patrimonialism still bears the imprint of Weber’s writings on the administrative sys­tem of Petrine Russia (Maslovski 1996: 295). Stalinism is also presented by some authors as a case of ‘the re-­emergence, albeit in a modified form and in an al­to­gether different his­tor­ ical situ­ation, of the patrimonial prin­ciple that was salient in Russia in the 17th and 18th century’ (Maslovski 1996: 303; Hughes 1996: 551; Ilkhamov 2007: 74). Such conventional understanding coexists with the en­dorsement of the concept of neopatrimonial state to revitalize readings of the Soviet and post-­ Soviet systems. Yoram Gorlizki resorts to neopatrimonialism to in­ter­prete the dualistic situ­ ation resulting from the co-­existence in the very midst of the Soviet state of dy­namics that were both patrimonial and modern (2002: 701–2). Soviet archives enable us to understand better how, in the state’s day-­to-day activity at the

Patrimonialism and neopatrimonialism   41 highest level, uncon­ditional personal loy­alty to Stalin by clients and de­pend­ents trumped ideo­logical or programmatic goals (Hughes 1996: 563; Gorlizki, 2002: 720–1). The Bolshevik revolu­tion initially created a favor­able envir­on­ment for Stalin’s rise to power by setting up a polit­ical sys­tem based on the Party’s ‘orchestration’ of relations among institutions and their jurisdictions. Stalin later consolidated the founda­tions of his autocratic power through the build-­up of ‘personalised patrimonial networks’, based on the appointment of loyal functionaries to pivotal positions in the party and the provincial nomenklatura’ (Hughes 1996: 551 and note 1: 565). Stalin’s dis­cre­tionary use of power proceeded from the lack of clearly defined spheres of jurisdiction as much as from the porosity of the frontiers between office and officeholders or the pub­lic and private spheres (Gorlizki 2002: 718). Stalin’s rule was neopatrimonial in the sense that it involved ‘quite rational and predictable forms of decision-­making lower down the hier­archy’, as well as an attention paid by Stalin himself to ‘certain rational-­legal forms of administration’ (Gorlizki 2002: 720–1) Stalin could decide to intervene at all levels and in all sectors of gov­ern­mental action, but he did not do this automatically. Neopatrimonialism was regulated and ringfenced, if not capped. Neopatrimonialism also tended to be reproduced and emu­lated ‘by power­ful personalities who exercised enorm­ous dis­cre­tion over their terrains, just as Stalin did over his’ (Gorlizki 2002: 727). One of the side-­effects of the post-­Soviet and post-­Communist trans­itions toward demo­cracy has been the revival of classic in­ter­pretations of the concept of patrimonialism. As early as the mid‑1980s, Ronald Linden had suggested applying that notion to the Ceaucescu regime so as to account for the longevity of a polit­ical sys­tem unaffected by polit­ical ten­sions and the macro­economic adjustment prob­lems then ex­peri­enced by Poland, Yugoslavia or Hun­gary (1986: 347). The Romanian regime was de­scribed as patrimonial on account of the combination of personal and dis­cre­tionary use of power underscored by an effect­ive network of personal loyalties. There was, how­ever, no as­sump­tion that the state incurred the risk of dissolving into informality. Indeed, Linden assim­il­ ated the Ceaucescu regime to a polit­ical pro­ject whose ration­al­ity, ‘defined by the state’, manifested itself through the implementation of a national version of Marxism-­Leninism (1986: 348). Herbert P. Kitschelt’s more recent typology of communist regimes rests upon such cri­teria as the in­tens­ity of patrimonialism within communist regimes and their propensity to repress, co-­opt or tolerate expressions of polit­ical dissidence. Three prototypes are accordingly identified: ‘patrimonial com­mun­ism’, ‘national accommodative com­mun­ism’, and ‘bureaucratic-­authoritarian com­mun­ism’ (2001). The definition of patrimonial com­mun­ism has more to do with corruption, patronage and nepotism than with personal rule. Situations where a ‘formal-­rational bur­eau­ cratic state ap­par­atus . . . rules out corruption and clientelism’ are contrasted with an ‘administration based on personal networks of loy­alty and mutual exchange’ (Kitschelt, Mandsfeldova, Markowski and Tóka 1999: 21). The list of the Communist states where this model formerly applied is par­ticu­larly long, and includes

42   D.C. Bach Russia, Albania, Armenia, Belarus, Bulgaria, Georgia, Moldavia, Romania, Ukraine and the states of Central Asia (Kitschelt 2001: 38–9). The post-­Communist regimes’ inter­actions with private business inter­ests were also an extensive subject of inter­est in the 1990s. This coincided with the introduction of the notion of ‘state capture’, a term associated with debates evocative of those on oligarchic patrimonialism and cronyism in Southeast Asia. The rise of the somewhat elusive notion of state capture was origin­ally prompted by investors and inter­na­tional donors seeking an assessment of the pro­spects for more regulated inter­actions between bur­eau­cra­cies – seen as ‘pred­atory and corrupt’ – and the oligarchs who, in Russia espe­cially, controlled a signi­fic­ant portion of the eco­nomy (Guriev and Rachinsky 2005; Gustafson 1999). The World Bank and the Euro­pean Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) then funded a number of studies and a major survey on the theme of ‘state capture’ (Hellman et al. 2000; Hellman and Kaufmann 2001). State capture was from the onset a rather fuzzy notion due to the diversity of in­ter­pretations of its scope and meaning.8 As an empirically based notion, state capture was an attempt at measuring ‘the extent to which the state is subject to “capture” – or undue influence – by power­ful vested inter­ests. “High-­capture” states would focus on providing specific ad­vant­ages to influ­en­tial firms and lobbies, while under-­providing the institutions essential to improving governance’ (Euro­pean Bank for Reconstruction and Development 1999). Surveys were undertaken for the purpose of assessing grand corruption, namely the penetration of state bur­eaucrcies by private inter­ests and lobbies and their capa­city to fashion ‘laws, pol­icies and regulations . . . to their own ad­vant­age by providing illicit private gains to officials’ (Hellman and Kaufmann 2001: 31). A 1999 study, conducted in 22 post-­Communist coun­tries, and covering several thou­sand businesses, concluded for instance that 11 states could be labelled ‘high capture eco­nom­ies’ (Hellman et al. 2000: 1–41).9 Throughout the presidency of Boris Yeltsin (1991–9), Russia stood out as the archetype of state capture. The accumulation of eco­nomic power in the hands of the so-­called ‘oligarchs’ was akin to a massive trans­fer of state assets into private hands, with the result of a weakening of the institutional and norm­ative envir­on­ ments inherited from the Communist era (Slinko et al. 2005). With the election of Vladimir Putin in 2000, a pol­icy towards restoring the federal state’s authority was inaugurated. The notion of ‘capture’ could still be used to de­scribe specific cases of external interference with state or bur­eau­cratic decision-­making (Yakovlev and Zhuravskaya 2006: 19; Favarel-­Garrigues 2008). Yet, at least in Russia, the notion was far less rel­ev­ant since the oligarchs now owed their influence to their abil­ity to dem­on­strate their unwavering loy­alty to Putin (van Zon 2008). Patrimonialism, as applied to Communist and post-­Communist polit­ical regimes, has been associated with three distinct yet closely interwined strands of in­ter­pretations. A first type of reading stems from the ana­lysis of patrimonialism as a his­tor­ical or cultural model. Mikhail Maslovski, for instance, sees the de­velopment of patrimonialism within the Stalinist sys­tem as a ‘reversal’ (1996: 302). Hans van Zon sim­ilarly depicts post-­Communist Ukraine as ‘a patrimonial

Patrimonialism and neopatrimonialism   43 state [that] . . . furthers anti-­modern tendencies in soci­ety’ (2001: 72). A second type of reading broadly coincides with what the notion of regulated neopatrimonialism stands for. The concept de­scribes modern polit­ical sys­tems with a capa­ city to produce pub­lic pol­icies. When Yoram Gorlizski characterizes the day-­to-day working of the Stalinist state as ‘neopatrimonial’, he is clearly not referring to a traditional sys­tem of domination: The enorm­ous dis­cre­tion Stalin enjoyed in . . . determining his own involvement in the party-­state will not be referred to here as ‘patrimonial’. The pic­ ture that emerges is not the traditional one of autocratic rule resting on institutional confusion and disarray, but one of patrimonial authority coexisting alongside quite modern and routine forms of high level decision-­ making. (Gorlizki 2002) A third group of readings specifically refers to situ­ations where patrimonialization tends to become in­teg­ral. This current of ana­lysis expli­citly borrows from the Africanist liter­at­ure on inter­actions between personal rule, patronage and the deinstitutionalization of the state. Accordingly, in Ukraine, the polit­ical sys­tem dominated by Leonid Kuchma (1994–2005) has been characterized as neopatrimonial, in view of ‘the dis­integ­ration of the state ap­par­atus, the capture of the state by ruling clans [and] the spread of corrupt practices in the state bur­eau­cracy’ (van Zon 2001: 72). Integral forms of neopatrimonialism, how­ever, find an almost perfect match with Islam Karimov’s regime in Uzbekistan. The assimilation of neopatrimonialism to the deinstitutionalization and informalization of the post-­colonial African state is echoed in this case by the ‘creeping capture’ of the political-­administrative sys­tem inherited from the Soviet Union by networks of patronage and private inter­ests (Ilkhamov 2007: 75). The informalization of inter­actions within the state is ex­acer­bated by a sys­tem of personal domination based on the conversion of clanship alli­ances into patronage ties and the redis­tribu­tion of state resources. The related rise of a ‘parallel power network, matching existing state hier­archy’ (Ilkhamov 2007: 71) – sketches a pattern remin­iscent of the ‘shadow state’ of William Reno (1995). Neopatrimonialism in Uzbekistan amounts to an almost perfect illustration of the de­velopment of institutional underdevelopment.

The neopatrimonial state revisited Neopatrimonialism allowed those Africanists who resorted to it to fend off in the 1980s the wave of criticism aroused by metaphorical, allusive or laxist usage of the concept of patrimonialism (Theobald 1982; Leca and Schemeil 1986: 474 sq.; Gorlizki 2002: 701–2). Since it was initially applied to Cameroon, the dissemination of the concept of neopatrimonialism in Africa remains unparalleled in other parts of the world. Neopatrimonialism in Africa

44   D.C. Bach is sim­ilarly extensively and casually discussed in studies and programmes conducted under the aegis of multi­lateral institutions, NGOs, ‘think tanks’, and inter­na­tional donor agencies,10 with the result of an asso­ci­ation of the notion with an increasingly diverse range of subjects (von Soest 2006; Rauch 2006; DeGrassi 2008). Such a trajectory, how­ever, has not been without a price. Described by some as ‘endemic’ (Pitcher et al. 2009; Erdmann and Engel 2007), stigmatized by others as ‘a para­digm for all African seasons’ (Therkildsen 2005: 36) neopatrimonialism has become commonly equated with pred­atory and in­teg­ral forms of personal rule. The outcome is a doxa that depicts the African state as quintessentially anti-­developmental and infers its inev­it­able descent into informality and capture by criminal networks. As a result, regulated forms of neopatrimonialism have been overlooked or side-­ tracked. The neopatrimonial doxa has been equally inapt to account for the high degree of empirical variabil­ity ‘in pub­lic management practices across African coun­tries and between organ­iza­tions within coun­tries’ (Therkildsen 2005: 36). Neglected for all too long, the study of regulated or capped forms of African neopatrimonial rule calls for empirical and theor­et­ical attention. A recent discussion of Botswana’s polit­ical sys­tem remains unusual in this respect since the authors argue provocatively that one of Africa’s success stories . . . may also be one of its most clearly ‘patrimonial’ or ‘neo-­patrimonial’ states. In Botswana, complex reciprocities link the gov­ern­ment and its cit­izens, legitimacy is created and reinforced through both the rule of law and personal bonds and a mutually constitutive relationship exists between the personal and the public. (Pitcher et al. 2009: 150) Reasserting the empirical relev­ance of regulated forms of neopatrimonialism should con­trib­ute to restore the founda­tions for a truly comparative approach both within Africa and across world regions. The de­velop­mental trajectory of the different waves of emerging coun­tries is a power­ful reminder that neopatrimonialism – i.e., the coexist­ence of patrimonial and legal-­rational elements within a polit­ical sys­tem – does not predetermine outcomes. In Africa as elsewhere monitoring cases of regulated or capped inter­actions between pub­lic space and private inter­ests should have never ceased to constitute a topic of study deemed rel­ev­ ant. The evolutions observed in Africa, like those previous noted in Latin Amer­ ica and Southeast Asia, invite to a reappraisal of the inter­actions between neopatrimonialism, institutionalization and the capa­city of a state to become ‘de­velop­mental’. A comparative per­spect­ive should not be con­sidered a diversion at a time when Africa is being increasingly de­scribed as a pioneering front and an emerging continent, a pattern closely associated with rejuvenated synergies between pub­lic and private spaces and interests.

Patrimonialism and neopatrimonialism   45

Notes   1 Zolberg 1971: 13–14; Willame 1972: 162.   2 My distinction borrows from C. Geffray’s discussion of the inter­actions between the state and criminality in Brazil (Geffray 2000).   3 On the inter­actions between ‘belly pol­itics’ and neopatrimonial rule, see D. Bourmaud 1997: 56‑9.   4 On that point, see Callaghy (1984: 29).   5 The massive nature of the embezzlements committed by Pinochet was disclosed by a report of the US Senate on his secret accounts with the Riggs Bank of Washington, DC. See: ‘The Secret Pinochet Portfolio: Former Dicator’s Corruption Scandal Broadens’, George Washinton University National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book, no 149, www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB149/index.htm accessed on Febru­ary 15, 2009.   6 Initially suggested by Fred Riggs in the case of Thailand, the term refers to charac­ter­ istics (domination without integration) of the Chinese preponderance in the do­mestic eco­nomic life of these four states (Searle 1999: 7).   7 In con­tempor­ary Japan, blood ties and matrimonial alli­ances still con­trib­ute to the preser­va­tion of strong inter­actions between politicians and bur­eau­crats, as illus­trated by the hereditary and intra-­familial transmission of patrimony or professional status (Seizelet 2006).   8 The notion is used by eco­nom­ists of the Chicago school and by neo-­classical eco­nom­ ists as well as by studies that refer to the works of Karl Marx or Paul Baran on the capture of the state by big capital (Laffont and Tirole 1993: 476).   9 These were Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Croatia, Georgia, Kirgizstan, Lithu­ania, Moldova, Romania, Russia, Slovakia and Ukraine. 10 In the early 2000s, studies and programs initiated by Britain’s Department for International Development (DFID) tried to opera­tionalize the neopatrimonial para­digm within their de­velopment programs (the Drivers of Change program in par­ticu­lar). Among the inter­na­tional institutes and think-­tanks which actively con­trib­uted to spread the work of polit­ical sci­ent­ists on the neopatrimonial state are the Overseas Development Institute (London) and Chris Michelsen Institute (Bergen) (Cammack 2007; Levy and Kpundeh 2004: 6 sq.; Kaplan 2008: 49–64).

3 The model of the political entrepreneur Daniel Compagnon

A great deal of aca­demic work on neopatrimonialism in Africa, including Jean‑François Médard’s pioneering ana­lyses (Médard 1982: 125–72; see also 1991b: 323–53), initially laid emphasis on the features of the ‘imported state’ (Badie 1992) and of captive civil soci­ety as they were defined during the co­lo­ nial period. These scholars stressed the role of kinship for instance, and the manipulation of eth­ni­city while trying to explain vari­ations in its empirical mani‑ festations through the his­tor­ical tra­ject­ories of the coun­tries concerned.1 However, a comparative study of African neopatrimonialism would not have been complete without an ana­lysis of the polit­ical leaders’ specific role and leadership styles (Jackson and Rosberg 1982; Wriggins 1969). J.-F. Médard clearly perceived the central part played by some social actors in the polit­ical dy­namics at work in neopatrimonial sys­tems. He origin­ally coined the notion of the ‘big man’ in Africa to account for the polit­ical career of Charles Njonjo (Chapter 4), a Kenyan ‘polit­ical entrepreneur’ cum businessman (Médard 1992). Médard also drew insights from the sociological theory of polit­ical and social exchange, the anthropological ana­lyses of the big man in Melanesia (Sahlins 1977), and a groundbreaking art­icle published by Jean-­Patrice Lacam on the polit­ical entrepreneur in France (1988). Beyond the dif­fer­ences observed in time and space, the concept of polit­ical entre­pren­eurship captures funda­mentally sim­ilar strat­egies of conquest and preser­va­tion of power, thus estab­lishing a link between the polit­ical actor and the neopatrimonial con­text in which he operates. Contrary to an ethnocentric, evolutionist understanding of this concept – largely prevailing in polit­ical science – it goes beyond modern forms of ‘polit­ical markets’ – i.e. the Western demo­cra­cies. Political entre­pren­eurship has a long his­tory indeed, and it is a tool for comparative ana­lysis in a broad sense. In the fol­low­ing pages we have tried to remain true to the eclecticism of J.-F. Médard who did not hesitate to break intellectual taboos, paid special attention to cultural dif­fer­ences in his comparative approach to soci­eties but always steered clear from culturalism. We will first stress the potentially uni­ver­sal relev­ance of the concept of the polit­ical entrepreneur through a short reconstruction of its intellectual genesis, and then highlight its heur­istic dimension for the understanding of African polit­ical systems.

The model of the political entrepreneur   47

A key concept In his well-­known conference Politik als Beruf,2 Max Weber was the first author to focus on the specificities of pol­itics, a domain in which actors ‘strive for power either as a means in serving other aims, ideal or egoistic, or as “power for power’s sake,” that is, in order to enjoy the prestige-­feeling that power gives’ (Weber 1959: 113). Weber pointed accordingly to a cat­egory of actors who live ‘off ’ pol­itics and not ‘for’ pol­itics and regard it as a permanent source of income. In his view, the polit­ical entrepreneur was a charismatic leader inasmuch as he was someone who aroused and retained the confidence of his sup­porters (devo‑ tion to his person and his qual­it­ies) thanks to his capa­city to offer rewards (1959: 156), notably through a more or less institutionalised ‘spoils’ sys­tem and the cli‑ entelist control of pub­lic offices. The polit­ical entrepreneur is always looking for resources, and positions of power may easily turn out to be less an ob­ject­ive than a means to access new prebends in order to remunerate his followers, thus con­ trib­ut­ing to the preser­va­tion and perpetuation of his power. In such a con­text, Max Weber noted himself, corruption is simply an ‘irregu­lar and formally illegal vari­ant’ (1959: 127) of the polit­ical entrepreneur’s income. M. Weber thus took a special inter­est in the figure of the ‘boss’ in the local party organ­isa­tion in the United States in the early twentieth century. This ‘polit­ ical capitalist entrepreneur’, to quote M. Weber, invested his own fin­an­cial means (drawn from a business activity or from corruption) and controlled a certain number of votes which he delivered to the party candidate in an election. In return he secured some personal influence over the decision-­making pro­cess, a kind of return on investment, so to speak, in the form of a say in the future dis‑ tribution of prebends. This meant a division of labour between the elected repre‑ sentative, the ‘boss’ and the party official – with pos­sible swapping of roles in the course of their careers – at the ser­vice of a common polit­ical enterprise. As highlighted by some later studies on local pol­itics in the United States, ‘a polit­ ical ma­chine is a business organ­iza­tion in a par­ticu­lar field of business: getting votes and winning elections’ (Banfield and Wilson 1967). Corruption, therefore, was at the core of the ma­chine’s opera­tions but was not a prere­quis­ite for its exist­ence. In addition, the Amer­ican polit­ical ma­chine was intimately linked to a specific – now vanished – his­tor­ical and social con­text: electors with an under‑ privileged background (usually recent im­mig­rants), poorly educated, motiv­ated not by ideo­logical controversies but by the rewards and ser­vices that the boss could provide. In many ways, it is in a sim­ilar con­text that polit­ical com­peti­tion takes place now­adays in many Third World societies. Throughout his­tory the ‘professional politician’ has been embodied in many different figures, the con­tempor­ary parlia­ment­ary party leader, studied in more detail by M. Weber, being just one of them. Weber mentions the figures of the band leader (without specifying whether he is the leader of a band of Neolithic hunter/gatherers or bandits), the French Farmer-­General under the Ancien Régime and the Italian condotierre in the late four­teenth and early fif­teenth cen‑ turies. The condotierre, at the head of a private army hired by a prince or a city,

48   D. Compagnon was more than a mercenary; he was an entrepreneur fighting for both power and money. The condotierre was without scruples when making war – like a busi‑ nessman when doing business – and resorted to threats in order to get land and titles, mater­ial reward and social honour, forcing his way into the very exclusive circle of the Italian aristocracy. Francesco Sforza, for instance, became Duke of Milan in 1450, while other condotierri became popes. Achieving his polit­ical aims through war, the victorious condotierre was keen on carving a prin­cipality either out of the territory of the defeated enemy or out of the prop­erty of his weakened master, thus acting more as a partner/rival than as an obedient ser­vant (Cloulas 1990). In the cities of Renaissance Italy – rich in capital but poor in means of coercion (Tilly 1992) – the condotierre coexisted with other types of polit­ical entre­pren­eurs. Some were ‘capitalists’ who reached power thanks to their wealth and the influence it gave them (e.g. the Medici), others were ‘experts’ who had become in­dis­pens­able because of their competence and skills (such as, for example, Cicco Simonetta, a lawyer/adviser in Milan). Another type of polit­ical entrepreneur who rose to power thanks to war was later illus­ trated by the career of Albert von Wallenstein who recruited and equipped several regiments during the Thirty Years’ War and offered his ser­vices to the German Emperor and King of Austria, Ferdinand II. He became the supreme commander of the armies of the Habsburg Monarchy and was rewarded with huge tracts of land in Northern Ger­many, along with the right to levy taxes. He was finally assas­sin­ated because he had become richer and more power­ful than the Emperor himself (Bérenger 1990: 298–305). Weber also saw the struggles between the Guelfs and the Ghibellines in medi­ eval Italy as the precursors of modern polit­ical party confrontations. In his view, there was no funda­mental dif­fer­ence between the polit­ical enterprises of the past and com­peti­tion on today’s ‘elect­oral market’ (dixit). Behind obvious dif­fer­ences in polit­ical discourses and programmes, beha­vi­ours had a funda­mentally sim­ilar bias. Political entre­pren­eurship was defined by the instruments that were mobi‑ lised. Admittedly, the forms taken by polit­ical com­peti­tion have changed in the course of his­tory. In par­ticu­lar, the pro­gressive ban on the use of viol­ence in the Western coun­tries is linked to the pro­cess of rationalisation of social action (the under­lying theme of Weber’s his­tor­ical soci­ology). The outcome is the profes‑ sionalisation of politicians, the emergence of an auto­nom­ous eco­nomic sphere, and a de­velopment of the state based on the mono­poly on legitimate use of force. Politics in Western coun­tries is not of a different nature than elsewhere, and the pacification and moralisation of this field of activity are both recent and fragile. Some polit­ical sci­ent­ists, on the basis of a narrow-­minded reading of Weber, made polit­ical entre­pren­eurship dependant on the exist­ence of a modern ‘polit­ ical market’ that was equated with routinised elect­oral com­peti­tion in pluralist demo­cra­cies (Offerlé 1987; Gaxie 1993).3 The concept of polit­ical entre­pren­ eurship is fully rel­ev­ant in other con­texts than the Western parlia­ment­ary demo­ cra­cies, including in soci­eties where viol­ence is once again the pri­mary instrument of polit­ical com­peti­tion, at least for a certain time. Joseph A. Schum‑ peter was adamant that armed insurrection, ‘seizing polit­ical command with the

The model of the political entrepreneur   49 people’s tacit consent’ and ‘election by acclamation’ (Schumpeter 1972: 357 note 2) do not represent demo­cratic forms of com­peti­tion since com­peti­tion is not focused on the ‘people’s votes’. Yet, and how­ever undemo­cratic these methods may be, they still involve forms of com­peti­tion. In author­it­arian regimes for instance, power struggles are shaped by com­peti­tion for factional sup­port within de facto or de jure one party state.4 Max Weber’s approach to the notion of polit­ical enterprise is embedded into a realist per­spect­ive on polit­ical com­peti­tion that contrasts with the idealistic bias of demo­cratic repres­enta­tion theories (the elected representative serving the pub­lic good), but also with neofunctionalist polit­ical soci­ology or sys­tem ana­ lysis (the as­sump­tion that all polit­ical actors pursue col­lect­ive goals or values). Studying polit­ical entre­pren­eurs’ beha­vi­our implies scrutinising their strat­egies to secure power and retain it, without being distracted by a metaphys­ical notion of polit­ical legitimacy or the par­ticu­lar ideo­logy the actors claim to sup­port (e.g. demo­cracy). The point, how­ever, is not to speculate on their inner psychology. Craving for power is not a pathological devi­ation but part and parcel of the pro‑ fessional ethos of those who live ‘off ’ and ‘for’ pol­itics. J.-A. Schumpeter shared Weber’s realist per­spect­ive and compared the polit­ical com­peti­tion for people’s votes to eco­nomic com­peti­tion. This is not just a confusion between eco­nomic entre­pren­eurship and polit­ical entre­pren­eurship, but the ac­know­ledgement of an ana­logy in the forms and logics of action.5 Schumpeter also highlighted the role of polit­ical leaders who shape the so-­ called pub­lic will thanks to propaganda and the use of tricks sim­ilar to commer‑ cial ads (Schumpeter 1972: 347, 356). Pieces of legis­la­tion and statutory instruments are the by-­products of pol­itics, argued Schumpeter, just as the pro‑ duction of commodities comes second to the quest for profit when conducting business ac­tiv­ities. In that respect, it would be meaningless for a polit­ical sci­ent­ ist to pass a moral judgment on the polit­ical entrepreneur’s ab­rupt changes of mind, on the contra­dic­tions between his discourse and his acts (such as breaking previous elect­oral promises) or on his ‘betrayals’ of past com­mit­ments, once yes­ter­day’s enemies rally behind today’s winner. Schumpeter agreed with Weber that the reason behind the polit­ical entrepreneur’s apparent amorality was the need for him to adjust to ‘the average ethical stand­ards of polit­ical conduct’ (Weber 1959: 167), just like the eco­nomic entrepreneur who abides to the mar‑ ket’s amorality. If one may claim to em­brace a polit­ical career out of idealism rather than self-­interest, there is only one way to succeed and ‘the polit­ical enter‑ prise is neces­sar­ily one based on inter­ests’ (Weber 1959: 141). The polit­ical entrepreneur is therefore aspiring to power sup­ported by a team of followers whose loy­alty is guaranteed through the combination of mater­ial and symbolic rewards. Being successful as a leader means ‘collecting more resources than one’s op­pon­ents and using them more effect­ively. Attacking an op­pon­ent means trying to destroy his resources or preventing him from acquir‑ ing some or using them efficiently’ (Bailey 1971: 50). The structural homology estab­lished by Frederick G. Bailey between the various ways of struggling for polit­ical trophies is based on a comparison between cultural and his­tor­ical

50   D. Compagnon con­texts, which apparently seem to be worlds apart.6 In the various polit­ical arenas – from the local to the global – entre­pren­eurs (the British anthropologist prefers the term ‘leader’ but clearly defines leadership as entre­pren­eurship) and their polit­ical teams fight for the control of positions of power commanding access to new resources. Competitors abide not so much by expli­cit norms but essentially by pragmatic rules of the game (cheating, lying, corruption . . .), which can deliver success, even whenever the latter contradict the former. Drawing a line between virtuous politicians and crooks is largely pointless since the pragmatic rules of com­peti­tion are the same for all players in a given soci­ety, whatever the values in which various actors claim to believe. In Frederick G. Bailey’s view, what really mat­ters is the opposi­tion between the entre­pren­eurs who succeed and those who do not. We have no desire to restrict man’s motives to the mere pursuit of mater­ial inter­ests as opposed to altruistic beha­vi­ours or the spirit of self-­sacrifice. The loy­alty of the followers is partly based on symbolic elements (religion, witch‑ craft, kinship or revolu­tionary charisma), which the entrepreneur is willing to mobilise and ex­ploit since they are often cheaper to produce. The followers’ belief in their leader’s capa­city to lead them is an essential resource. If he wants to keep the devotion of his followers, the leader must adopt a form of beha­vi­our in apparent conformity with their expectations. Any open infringement would ruin his polit­ical capital. Bailey uses the word ‘faction’ to refer specifically to polit­ical enterprises with purely transactional links, whereby the leader retains his prominent position only so long as he can redistribute mater­ial rewards to his sup­porters. Feelings of affinity and affection binding together the core members of the team and its leader are more durable while the followers bound only by self-­interest are more likely to desert the faction as soon as mater­ial resources di­min­ish. Bailey also operates a distinction between the proved and the virtual possession of resources: many entre­pren­eurs ‘live on credit’: they keep the con‑ fidence of their followers so long as their capa­city to reward remains unchal‑ lenged. But a crisis may ab­ruptly bring about a loss in value of their resources and con­sequently a loss in credit. New light is thus shed on successive sequences of betrayal and rallying and the im­port­ance of the polit­ical clientele and of the need to reward which are at the heart of African neopatrimonialism. The ana­lysis of the mobil­isa­tion/combination of resources makes it pos­sible to have a better grasp of the dy­namics at work in the polit­ical enterprise. Key to the definition of polit­ical entre­pren­eurs proposed by Warren F. Ilchman and Norman T. Uphoff (1969) is their capa­city to mobilise scant polit­ical resources and, through innov­at­ive combinations, ‘ex­ploit the polit­ical and social envir­on­ ment or limit its constraining effects’ (ibid.: 204). In the words of another author, the politician is, just like a businessman, an entrepreneur . . . in the sense that, on the one hand, he builds a capital of resources use­ful for his career and on the other hand, once he has built his capital, he marshals these resources in order to generate some power. (Lacam 1988: 24–5)

The model of the political entrepreneur   51 What the politician manages as an enterprise is not pub­lic affairs or the state as an organ­isa­tion (Chazel 1986), but his own polit­ical career. What we call career en­com­passes not only the offices successively held but also the accumulation of the various strat­egies adopted over time to reach polit­ical acme. Political entre­ pren­eurship mainly consists in mobilising and maintaining an efficient sup­port base. It also implies alleviating constraints from the actor’s envir­on­ment (includ‑ ing, but not exclusively, the institutional envir­on­ment), by activating in due course rel­ev­ant resources previously accumulated. Although the notion of polit­ical resource appeared in the liter­at­ure as early as the 1960s (Dahl 1973), it has not been further elaborated. Yet, an essential element in an entrepreneur’s success and competence is his capa­city to accu­mu­ late and per­man­ently restructure his stock of resources through time. Whatever typology we choose,7 identified pools of resources – be they mater­ial or sym‑ bolic – cannot be regarded as such until they have been mobilised by an entre‑ preneur to suit a specific strat­egy. It is his action which turns money, viol­ence, a social network or an ethnic identity into resources in a given inter­action con­text. The devotion of the followers has to be sustained, even through propaganda. Nothing comes for free in that mat­ter, even though the cost is closely related to the con­text.8 It is thus more costly to hold back sup­porters within a team that is already splitting up than to attract new ones when a polit­ical enterprise is in an ascending phase. While it is pos­sible to compare resource matrixes at the beginning and the end of a politician’s career, as was done by Lacam, one has to bear in mind their fluctuating character and the dynamic dimension of the ana­lysis of their mobil­ isa­tion. Robert A. Dahl already noted that an entrepreneur’s success depends less on the size of his initial stock of resources than on his skill at de­veloping them. The necessity of restructuring resources comes from dy­namics specific to such polit­ical enterprise over time, from the evolution of its polit­ical envir­on­ment and from the wear and tear of the elements used. Potential errors in the management of resources are numerous, espe­cially as other social actors are not easily pushed around: the politician who loses ‘is not so much he who is devoid of resources but he who no longer has the acumen of using the adequate resource’, notes Lacam (1988: 30). More what is at stake is the abil­ity to mobilise the adequate combination of resources against a better skilled competitor. Such an ana­lyt­ical per­spect­ive, devoid of any determinist or norm­ative bias, makes the entrepreneur – and resource-­based approach – a most use­ful conceptual instrument for the understanding of polit­ical domination in Africa.

On the diversity of political entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship The professionalisation of pol­itics as a function, its institutionalisation through the use of law and media cover­age may be less de­veloped in Africa than in Western demo­cra­cies.9 Yet, in Africa politicians live far more ‘off ’ and ‘for’ pol­itics. Political entre­pren­eurship appeared on the continent at the time of

52   D. Compagnon inde­pend­ences, with the emergence of national elect­oral arenas (Zolberg 1966). The phenomenon endured even after the end of the demo­cratic period and the de­velopment of single par­ties in the 1970s and 1980s. In effect, the one-­party state meant that power was monopolised by polit­ical leaders who had more resources or were more skilled than their op­pon­ents. Political com­peti­tion did not disappear by magic but moved within the party-­state ap­par­atus, fostering factionalism: a member of the polit­ical team who accu­mu­lated enough resources on his own could become the rival of the boss at any time. What was at stake was the unequal sharing of spoils and prebends, as well as the question of the succession – always postponed – of the supreme leader (Jackson and Rosberg 1982). Although the resources of the African ‘quasi-­state’ (Jackson 1990) are limited – not least in terms of pub­lic rev­enue – claiming leadership over the coun­try makes it pos­sible for the leader to control most of the extraversion chan‑ nels including inter­na­tional aid. Being the head of state offers a polit­ical rent that provides unmatched access to privileges – for instance the capa­city to barter one’s diplomatic sup­port within the inter­na­tional arena against all kinds of mater­ial ad­vant­ages (Clapham 1996). In such a con­text, competing entre­pren­eurs try to derive as much profit as pos­sible from their dominant position in order to widen their polit­ical sup­port and maximise power as head of state. In this respect Charles Njonjo’s career and downfall (Chapter 4) offer a revealing illustration of this phenomenon. In the semi-­competitive single party sys­tem of the 1970s and 1980s,10 the African big man accu­mu­lated resources, in par­ticu­lar money, so as to get to power. The social con­text at the time meant that high positions in the polit­ical and adminis‑ trative ap­par­atus were the best means of becoming rich – if one excludes employment as an executive in trans­national corporations. In Kenya, Charles Njonjo thus ‘straddled’11 pub­lic office and private positions, either concurrently or successively, for, as Médard put it ‘while it is neces­sary to have polit­ical power in order to be rich, it is also neces­sary to be rich in order to retain polit­ical power’ (1992: 172). Indeed, in a neopatrimonial envir­on­ment it is rather difficult for poor actors to take part in the polit­ical com­peti­tion – in par­ticu­lar when it comes to creating a faction. Contrary to the Western polit­ical entrepreneur who operates within a highly auto­nom­ous and special­ised polit­ical field where well defined and institutionalised norms are supposed to ward off any abuse of office and conflict of inter­est, the African polit­ical entrepreneur has no choice but to resort to corruption and embezzlement in order to succeed. The pragmatic rules of polit­ical com­peti­tion, as defined by Bailey, become predominant when the rule of law is routinely ignored. There are of course a few exceptions among African coun­tries, such as Bot‑ swana, where polit­ical and administrative corruption, while not totally ab­sent, remained rel­at­ively low. The coun­try’s gov­ern­ment also avoided the pitfalls of the ‘Dutch disease’ and widespread predation thanks to a management sys­tem of diamond export rev­enues that had been set up by the first pres­id­ent of the coun­ try, Seretse Khama. The rel­at­ive level and forms of corruption in Botswana are sim­ilar to what can be found in the West, concluded Médard (2001b). This also

The model of the political entrepreneur   53 seems to be the case in con­tempor­ary South Africa where the apartheid regime con­trib­uted to creating a strong legal-­rational bur­eau­cracy and, more paradoxi‑ cally, an influ­en­tial civil soci­ety, in spite of the growing appetite of some of current leaders. Since illegal means are but a part of the polit­ical resources which can be mobilised, the position of the ‘white knight’ fighting against corruption may also become a source of legitimacy. The ANC leaders in Pretoria still have strong his­tor­ical legitimacy, just as Robert Mugabe had for a long time in Zim­ babwe. The extent of corruption and the social acceptabil­ity of corrupt practices vary signi­fic­antly from one soci­ety to another (Médard 1997a) and the polit­ical entrepreneur knows perfectly well how far he can go in this game. The African big man accu­mu­lates resources all along his career but also spends and redistributes almost every­thing he has. He is therefore constantly searching for liquid­ity – in terms of money, but also other types of resources. For him it is a question of prestige (ostentatious consumption) but also a social obli­ga­tion (linked to kinship) and a mat­ter of polit­ical capital (rewards for the sup­port given). Accidents in his career are numerous (eco­nomic bankruptcy, periods of polit­ical disfavour or even imprisonment) and a polit­ical entrepre‑ neur’s skills should also be assessed in accordance with his capa­city to ‘get back on his feet again’ – which means regaining favour from the leaders above him. Charles Njonjo, who retired from pub­lic life in 1983, was rehabilitated in 1998 when President Moi, then struggling to retain control and facing unrest, appointed him to the largely honorary post of chairman of Kenya Wildlife Service – the administration overseeing the coun­try’s nat­ural parks and wildlife management. Since then, thanks to his personal fortune, ex­peri­ence and influ‑ ence among the Kikuyus – one of the largest ethnic groups – Njonjo has once again taken an active part in Kenya’s polit­ical life, notably in 2006 when he pub­ licly announced his sup­port for the op­pon­ents of President Kibaki (a member of the same ethnic group but his lifelong rival). The ruling cliques in African neopatrimonial states can be ana­lysed as ‘fac‑ tions’ – in the sense given to the word by Bailey. The supreme polit­ical entrepre‑ neur is constantly obliged to extract new resources from his soci­ety in order to regulate polit­ical com­peti­tion. Being at the same time a polit­ical ser­vant and a potential rival to the super ‘big man’, i.e. the head of state, the polit­ical entrepre‑ neur must manage his own resources in an ever-­moving con­text of changing fac‑ tional configurations. A famous illustration is provided by the ten­sions among Zim­babwe’s elites about the hypo­thet­ical succession of Robert Mugabe (Compa‑ gnon 2011). At the top of the pyramid of power, the head of state is also affected by the obsol­es­cence and wear-­and-tear of his polit­ical resources. Ultimately, there comes a moment when all his restructuring efforts become useless. He is obliged to give up, as was the case for Daniel Arap Moi, Hissène Habré or Charles Taylor, but he can also try to survive on a short-­term basis with dev­ast­ ating social and eco­nomic con­sequences for the coun­try, as in the case of Mohamed Siyad Barre in Somalia (Compagnon 1995), Mugabe in Zim­babwe or Gbagbo in Côte d’Ivoire. In such circumstances, the polit­ical capital spent to consolidate personal rule is not invested in the institutionalisation of the state.

54   D. Compagnon As clearly illus­trated by the example of Félix Houphouët-Boigny in Côte d’Ivoire, such practices do not give birth to sys­tems that can outlive their found‑ ers. Although neopatrimonial practices cut across gov­ern­ment changes, each new leader has to craft his own personal sys­tem of domination and resource accumulation. After their successful capture of the ‘weak state’ (Migdal 1988), polit­ical entre­pren­eurs often con­trib­ute to its ultimate ruin through the erosion of both the institutions and the eco­nomy. The most arbit­rary, pred­atory and violent forms of neopatrimonialism, called ‘sultanism’ by Weber, are the best illustra‑ tions of the risks that personal rule may represent for the people when there are no in­ternal countervailing forces. The weak institutionalisation that is typical of neopatrimonial states means that the evolution of formal polit­ical norms – for example, consti­tu­tional reform and the return to multiparty sys­tems in the 1990s (Bratton and van de Walle 1997)12 – did not funda­mentally alter the trajectory of the African polit­ical entre­ pren­eurs’ careers. They can easily en­dorse the fashionable rhet­oric on demo­ cracy and human rights – once presented as unattainable goals – or even call for God’s help through some opportune religious conversions (Daloz 1999). In the extreme cases of collapsing states, the indi­vidual nexus of polit­ical resources is heavily impacted but many entre­pren­eurs manage to adapt to the new situ­ation. Lack of institutional constraints and the indiscriminate use of viol­ence help to maximise oppor­tun­ities for rapid enrichment avail­able to former politicians and army officers – who may become become the leaders of armed factions rather than true ‘warlords’, as in Somalia (Compagnon 1998). In such cases, com­peti­ tion retains a polit­ical dimension, as exemplified by the repeated efforts made by warring factions to control the capital city and have their own ‘gov­ern­ment’ ac­know­ledged by the inter­na­tional com­mun­ity. Similarly, guerrilla entre­pren­eurs are not merely motiv­ated by plundering, contrary to the norm­ative per­spect­ive of the polit­ical eco­nomy of civil wars school – for a critique, see Marchal and Messiant (2002). The big men’s dual-­track pattern of accumulation (power and money) may also adjust to the reorientations of eco­nomic pol­icies adopted under the pressure of foreign donors and global eco­nomic markets. In the imme­diate post-­ independence period, state control of the eco­nomy took various forms and was the privileged channel for the patrimonialisation of the state. This hindered the emergence of a national bourgeoisie in the capitalist sense. Since the 1980s, African polit­ical entre­pren­eurs have managed to adapt to structural adjustment packages and to the neolib­eral rhet­oric, by taking ad­vant­age of opaque privatisa‑ tion programmes and opportune deregulation. When pol­icies targetting the ‘Afri‑ canisation’ of the eco­nomy have been implemented, as in Zim­babwe, they have often been used as ideo­logical justifications for enorm­ous fund and asset trans­ fers towards specific groups, and the rapid enrichment of the ‘big men’ and their protégés – notably the enlarged family of the President (Compagnon 2001). This has resulted in a widening gap between between these small cliques of affairists, or ‘parasites’ (Iliffe 1983), and truly emerging African capitalists. Their opposi­ tion to the ‘polit­ical businessmen’ has been graphically illus­trated in Zim­babwe

The model of the political entrepreneur   55 by the tra­ject­ories of Strive Masiyiwa and Philip Chiyangwa respectively (Raftopoulos and Compagnon 2003). The conversion of Zim­babwean leaders to crony capit­al­ism in the 1990s went along with an increase in corruption and no eco­nomic takeoff, contrary to Asia (Médard 1997a) because Zim­babwean polit­ical entre­pren­eurs and those who depended on them preferred to squander their fin­an­cial resources or externalise them massively,13 in conformity with the neopatrimonial ethos (Compagnon 1999). The rejection of a truly pluralist polit­ical sys­tem in some cases, or, al­tern­ atively, sabotaging demo­cratic trans­ition pro­cesses amount to a refusal to share access to resources in a con­text where the economy is still run in a short-term predatory fashion and not in view of securing sus­tain­able and long-­term growth. New generations have not ushered any signi­fic­ant change as many of the ‘new’ African leaders have been socialised in the very neopatrimonial culture they denounced when in the opposi­tion – it’s now their turn to ‘chop’, as the expres‑ sion goes in many parts of Africa. It would indeed be sui­cidal on their part to act differently until there is an overhaul of the inter­actions between pub­lic and private patterns of governance.14 The present con­tri­bu­tion, beyond its plea for the use the concept of the polit­ ical entrepreneur in comparative ana­lysis, has sought to highlight the heur­istic value of this concept for the study of both Western representative demo­cra­cies and African – or Asian – neopatrimonial sys­tems. Indeed, a purely holistic approach would not offer a complete vision of pro­cesses that combine institu‑ tional changes and enduring actors’ practices, as, for example, in the case of the successful or aborted African ‘demo­cratic trans­ition’ pro­cesses of the 1990s. Conversely the polit­ical entre­pren­eurs’ strat­egies cannot be dissociated from their coun­tries’s polit­ical culture – largely shaped by his­tory – or from a polit­ical eco­nomy of the neopatrimonial state. Neopatrimonialism goes beyond a form of polit­ical domination; it thrives in a variety of social and eco­nomic relations that the state con­trib­utes to shape (Fauré and Médard 1995). Through the study of the actors’ beha­vi­our, it is pos­sible to understand how they may con­trib­ute to the reproduction of neopatrimonialism, across polit­ical generations and beyond the incipient his­tor­ical con­text that saw such practices emerge. Emphasis on polit­ical entre­pren­eurship also challenges the ordinary pre­ju­dices which consist in opposing ‘nat­urally’ corrupt politicians in coun­tries of the South and supposedly virtuous heads of state, defenders of widows and orphans, in the North. This fiction, upheld by all Western politicians, does not take into account the implacable logic of polit­ical com­peti­tion in which money plays an essential part. All professional politicians are clearly not corrupt, but the reason is often that they may not have had the oppor­tun­ity to be so or that they were in a position to use other kinds of resources. In that respect there is only a dif­fer­ence in degree and not in nature between the patronising Western pledges and the practices observed in Southern coun­tries. In France, it took the adoption of a more stringent law on party financing in the late 1980s to paradoxically reveal the extent of corrupt prac‑ tices and how they had been underestim­ated until then – even by polit­ical sci­ent­ists and com­ment­ators. Corruption was rampant in many areas of France’s foreign

56   D. Compagnon pol­icy, espe­cially its African (Médard 1997b; 2002a) and Arab (Styan 2006) pol­ icies, as well as in some major state-­owned com­panies, as epitomised by the Elf-­ Aquitaine ‘affair’ (see Chapter 15). The figure of the polit­ical entrepreneur, the best Euro­pean example being certainly Sylvio Berlusconi in Italy (see Chapter 14) also reveals and highlights the deep unity of human polit­ical beha­vi­our. In that sense, studying the African scene is conducive to giving us an insight into the true nature of pol­itics and polit­ical activity in our own societies.

Notes   1 Although Jean-­François Bayard challenges the concept of neopatrimonialism and prefers to refer to the notion of ‘belly pol­itics’, his major opus (L’État en Afrique: la politique du ventre, 1st edn, Paris: Fayard, coll. ‘L’espace du politique, 29’, 1989) reveals many simil­ar­ities with J.-F. Médard’s analyses.   2 Literally ‘Politics as a profession’; most translations in English euphemised the concept by replacing profession with ‘vocation’ – vocation being only the secondary meaning of the word Beruf. There is a sim­ilar difficulty with the word ‘Betrieb’ (busi‑ ness enterprise) often translated to the word ‘organ­isa­tion’. M. Weber really meant to compare the polit­ical party to a business.   3 They are paradoxically stuck in the same theor­et­ical impasse as the sup­porters of Public Choice (Tullock and Perlman 1978), in their understanding of the polit­ical exchange’s nature and the lack of a ‘currency’ on this polit­ical market.   4 Bridges allow trans­itions between these various modes of com­peti­tion as illus­trated by Hitler, Mussolini and other dic­tators who were initially ‘demo­cratically’ elected.   5 For Weber, they not only resort to sim­ilar means of action, but also, and more signi­ fic­antly, partake of the same rationalisation pro­cess. However, one should neither fall into the illusion that eco­nom­ics and polit­ical science can be merged (Ilchman and Uphoff 1969), nor settle for the equally misleading and caricatured eco­nomic ana­lysis of polit­ical life (Merle 1990).   6 Namely a state of the Indian Federation, the British polit­ical sys­tem in the early twen‑ tieth century, and some traditional African societies.   7 The concept of ‘resources’ has been depicted as the ‘soft spot’ of the theory of social movements (Lapeyronnie 1988). Many typologies of resources were offered (Uphoff 1989; Braud 1985: 335–93; and Braud 1992; Hermet 1985). Lacam’s typology remains best suited to discuss the notion of polit­ical enterprise. Political entreprise is, according to him, based on two cri­teria that combine into a matrix with nine cat­egor­ ies. According to their origin, resources may be: (a) personal (the entrepreneur’s network of relations, his tactical or oratory skills); (b) con­textual (the polit­ical or social envir­on­ment), or (c) institutional (positions held within the organ­iza­tions). According to the im­port­ance of the influence exerted, Amitaï Etzioni con­siders that resources may also be: (a) co­er­cive (use or threat of pub­lic or private force); (b) retributive (mater­ial or symbolic rewards), or (c) per­suas­ive when legitimisation stems from propaganda and re­li­ance on personal charisma (Lacam 1988: 28).   8 This paragraph draws from Bailey (1971: 51 sq.).   9 During the second round of the French pres­id­en­tial cam­paign of 2007, some of the protagonists behaved like polit­ical entre­pren­eurs who successfully turned their per‑ sonal image into a decisive polit­ical resource with the help of the media. By contrast, ideo­logy was only used episodically as a rhet­orical resource, including at the expense of intellectual coher­ence, when the right-­wing candidate associated ref­er­ences to the tutelary figures of the Left with some themes borrowed from the Far Right. In an ever more com­petit­ive elect­oral market, politicians’ speeches tend to be akin to ad­vert­ising messages. To buy or to vote become very similar.

The model of the political entrepreneur   57 10 Similar mech­an­isms can be found in the dominant par­ties of many African coun­tries. The ‘Primaries’ organ­ised within the single party de facto in control of Zim­babwe’s polit­ical life since inde­pend­ence – the Zim­babwe African National Union-­Patriotic Front (ZANU-­PF ) – have a sim­ilar function (Makumbe and Compagnon, 2000). 11 The notion of ‘straddling’ was elaborated on the occasion of the ‘Kenyan debate’ over the true nature of local capit­al­ism (Fauré and Médard 1995: 304–5). 12 By the end of the decade; frequent cases of author­it­arian restoration led to the emer‑ gence of elect­oral autocracies (Schedler 2006). 13 The year 2005 saw record imports of upmarket Mercedes cars despite foreign cur‑ rency shortages in crisis-­hit Zim­babwe. Illegal fund trans­fers by Mugabe’s big men reached un­pre­ced­en­ted levels that same year. 14 World Bank pressure to compel Chad to spare some of its oil rev­enue in order to finance sus­tain­able de­velopment programmes and fight pov­erty met with the determi‑ nation and cynicism of President Deby who eventually broke the deal.

4 Charles Njonjo The portrait of a ‘big man’ in Kenya Jean-­François Médard

In the con­tempor­ary African state, the combination of weak institutionalization with personal rule needs no reminder. Conversely, the expression personal rule does not refer to the classical ana­lyses of personalization of power, which in the case of Africa have laid too much emphasis on the notion of charismatic power. Personal rule, through its re­li­ance on pub­lic office, rapidly shatters the institutional framework. For this reason, when trying to characterize the state in Africa, one is bound to pay special attention to the head of state, the highest authority, whether or not he is charismatic. Personal rule, how­ever, is not solely associated with the head of state, who tends to monopolize the ob­ser­ver’s attention, but to anyone who holds some pub­lic office, whether he is an orderly or a Cabinet min­ is­ter, and tends to use his position and the resources tied with it so as to maximize pub­lic and private bene­fits. The state tends to fade behind the head of state, and the administration behind the civil ser­vant. Thus, in Jean-­François Bayart’s L’État au Cameroun (1979), it is im­pos­sible to identi­fy what constitutes statehood in its classical meaning. The concept of the state seems to be superseded by the actors who instrumentalize it. When analysing the African state, the personal vari­able cannot be ignored. This is well estab­lished in the case of heads of states, much less so with respect to the other bearers of official functions. Fascination for the head of state has resulted in neg­lecting other actors, in par­ticu­lar, the second(s) in command when he or they exist. The position of an im­port­ant polit­ical leader other than the pres­id­ent is fragile: he does not usually stay for very long in office, either because he replaces the head of state, or because he is elim­in­ated by the ruler or one of his presumed heirs. Kenya, in this respect, offers a rich crop of im­port­ant polit­ical leaders: Tom Mboya was assas­sin­ated; Oginga Odinga was elim­in­ated polit­ically; J.M. Kariuki was also assas­sin­ated; Charles Njonjo was elim­in­ated polit­ically.1 Charles Njonjo broke the record for polit­ical longevity. Under Kenyatta he was a national leader among many others as he drew his influence from his position as Attorney General and one of the pres­id­ent’s advisors. Under Moi, whom he helped de­cisively to become pres­id­ent in accordance with the pro­vi­sions of the Constitution (Karimi and Ochieng 1980), he truly became the number two in the gov­ern­ment (although Kibaki was formally the vice pres­id­ent). He was also

Charles Njonjo – the portrait of a ‘big man’   59 an influ­en­tial advisor to the pres­id­ent who sheltered him as he built his own polit­ical ma­chine within the state in view of replacing him. Charles Njonjo’s knack for pol­itics makes him par­ticu­larly fascinating for a polit­ical sci­ent­ist. He mobilized all sorts of polit­ical resources and knew how to accu­mu­late them in a remark­ably skilful manner to serve his polit­ical ambitions. Charles Njonjo, while he was successful, but also in his final downfall, gives us a lesson in polit­ical skills. It is on this aspect that we wish to concentrate our ana­lysis. Other dimensions of his character would be worth mentioning, for example, his polit­ical options, or his sociological significance from the standpoint of inter­actions between social class and power (Currie and Ray 1984). The mater­ial for this ana­lysis is rel­at­ively abundant in the Kenyan press which, from the onset, observed and reported Njonjo’s career closely. For instance, the Daily Nation published in extenso the findings of the judicial commission that pres­id­ent Moi appointed to investigate the accusations brought against Njonjo. The in­forma­tion avail­able is both hetero­geneous and of uneven significance and cred­ib­il­ity. In a sense, the results of the findings of the commission of inquiry were rather disappointing since it discussed minor questions in depth while only super­fic­ ially addressing major subjects. This stemmed from more or less reli­able witnesses and their attitude. Rarely were the allegations backed by sufficient evid­ence. This much said, how­ever, we are neither detectives, nor judges, nor even his­tor­ians. As polit­ical sci­ent­ists we must first try to decipher the logics of the player’s action and power. For this purpose, we did not need to collect all the in­forma­tion on Njonjo. A margin of error is accept­able if, from the facts we gathered – clearly the tip of the iceberg – we are able to reconstruct the logic of his polit­ical strat­egy in a convincing way . . . In this description of the power of a man, a ‘big man’, we will begin by describing the pub­lic image of Njonjo; such an inflated image that one may refer to it as a Njonjo myth. This myth became over time an element of his power. We will then examine the founda­tions of this power, that is its range, the nature of the resources accu­mu­lated and mobilized in his attempt to become the coun­try’s ruler. This will help us to understand his attempt to seize power and sub­sequent failure to do so.

The Njonjo myth Njonjo was certainly a star for the Kenyan press, which gave him broad cover­ age. All his movements were scrutinized, commented upon and the subject of all kinds of rumors. It would be an understatement to say that Njonjo was a pub­lic figure: his image was so inflated that it carried an almost mythical aura. Given his family, his university degrees, his polit­ical career, Njonjo was very privileged, and this extended to the way he eventually left the polit­ical scene. His private and pub­lic behavior, his lifestyle, his connections and relations, drew attention and turned Njonjo into an outstanding pub­lic figure. Perceived as all power­ful, he was also feared.

60   J.-F. Médard A privileged person Njonjo was born in 1920 in Kikuyu, in the district of Kiambu, in the Kikuyu region.2 His father, Josiah Njonjo, who recently died, had been converted by the missionary Leakey, the father and grand­father of Louis and Richard Leakey, and the English had designated him one of the four paramount chiefs in the Kikuyu region. It must be remembered that there were no traditional chiefs among the Kikuyu, and that the paramount chieftainship was an artificial device of the col­ on­izer meant to create channels for his rule. Generally speaking the Kikuyu chiefs were seen as loyalists, as ‘collaborators’, even though it was not always as simple as that. Still it was somewhat curious to hear of Njonjo’s father being de­scribed as a nationalist at his funeral oration . . . After pri­mary school in Kikuyu, Njonjo entered Alliance High School, the most famous high school in Kenya. At the time it was the only high school open to Africans. That is also why most of the Kenyan elites were educated there. Njonjo later attended King’s College (Budo, Uganda) before being admitted to Fort Hare University in South Africa. From South Africa he went to the University of Exeter in Great Britain where he studied pub­lic administration in 1946. From 1947 to 1950 he was enrolled at the London School of Economics, after which he studied Law for four years in the same city. He was then admitted to Gray’s Inn as a lawyer, and returned to Kenya in 1955 to work in the co­lo­nial administration, initially as registrar and later as registrar-­general. In 1961 he was promoted to Senior Crown Counsel, and became, in 1962, deputy pub­lic pro­secu­tor, an im­port­ant position. When Kenya became inde­pend­ent in 1962 he was appointed Attorney General, which is an administrative post, and not a polit­ical position. The fol­low­ing year he became ex-­officio a Member of Parliament and a member of the cab­inet. He had then the rank of Minister, without having been elected to Parliament. Njonjo remained Attorney General throughout Kenyatta’s presidency and also served him as his legal and personal advisor. It was he who convinced Kenyatta to reject the amend­ment which proposed a revision of the consti­tu­tion to prevent Vice President Daniel Arap Moi from succeeding him. It is thanks to Njonjo that, when Jomo Kenyatta died in 1978, Moi could become the second pres­id­ent of Kenya. When, in Decem­ber 1980, Njonjo resigned from his post in order to be elected MP for Kikuyu he was suspected of nourishing secret ambitions. He vigor­ously denied it and, after a brief period as a ‘backbencher’, was appointed Minister of Home and Constitutional Affairs. As Attorney General and as Minister Njonjo was very close to President Moi, much closer in effect than to the preceding pres­id­ent. However, after the attempted coup d’état of Au­gust 1, 1982 there was a split in this relationship: the President began to distance himself. In May 1983, during a ‘harambee’3 at Kisii, Moi denounced a traitor backed by foreign powers, without giving his name. Other politicians followed suit and went on denouncing a traitor whose name they eventually pronounced. By the end of June 1983, Moi suspended Njonjo from his ministry and opened a pub­lic inquiry which lasted close to ten months (late Octo­ber 1983–mid-­August

Charles Njonjo – the portrait of a ‘big man’   61 1984). Njonjo was compelled to resign from all his polit­ical respons­ibil­ities. In Novem­ber 1984 the commission published its report declaring Njonjo guilty. Moi, how­ever, granted him pardon. He was then elim­in­ated polit­ically after ruling in his own way for 20 years. Due to his family origins, his wealth, his power and his polit­ical career, he was also privileged in his disgrace: he was not to be condemned, but merely side-­tracked. Style of leadership Dressed in a dark three-­piece striped suit, wearing a carnation in his buttonhole and a gold chain on his watch, Charles Njonjo was fond of the style of the British aristocracy and imit­ated it in dress and manner. Married to an English cit­izen who gave him three chil­dren, ‘Sir Charles or The Duke of Kabeteshire’4, as he was sometimes called, was highly successfully in model­ ing his behavior on the style of Britain’s high soci­ety. His enemies called him therefore a ‘white African’ or a ‘white Kenyan’. It was rumored, among other things, that he imported his eggs from England. The expatriates who knew him liked him and unques­tion­ably felt friendly towards him. The courtesy and attention of a real gentleman were much appreciated. Njonjo repres­ented one of the best examples of assimilation to English soci­ety – and such an abil­ity to integrate is rare con­sidering the reputation of the English high soci­ety for not easily accepting people from the outside. His pop­ularity among expatriates, the English Kenyans and Asians did not come from the simple fact of defending them from frequent attacks: because of his lifestyle, they con­ sidered him to be one of them. This is why he charac­ter­istically accu­mu­lated im­port­ant respons­ibil­ities in various Kenyan asso­ci­ations tradi­tion­ally controlled by the British: the Safari Rally, the Automobile Association, Dr Bernado’s Homes in Kenya, the Kenya Society for the Protection and Care of Animals, the East African Wildlife Society, the World Wild Life Fund, St. John’s Ambulance, the Heart Foundation, the CORAT (Chris­tian Organisations Research Advisory Trust, Africa), the Nairobi City Players and, of course, the Presbyterian Church, a major actor in the evangelisation of the Kikuyu region, where he was an active member. In the eyes of his coun­trymen, Njonjo seemed to be a kind of foreigner in his own land. He was perceived as a man tied overseas through polit­ical and eco­nomic connections. He had personal links with the Foreign Office and the British Conservative Party whose polit­ical options he shared – he sys­tematically defended the most con­ser­vat­ive social, eco­nomic and polit­ical positions. In opposi­tion to his fellow coun­trymen and on grounds of efficiency and competence, he sought to restrain the Africanisation of pub­lic administration and par­ticu­larly the judicial sys­tem, then still dominated by the English and Indians – Njonjo claimed that African judges would be easily corrupted. He sys­tematically put forward rule of Law and the Constitution, while denouncing corruption relentlessly. Internationally, Njonjo positioned himself as a faithful ally of the West. He even had strong ties with South Africa and Israel. He had gone as far as inviting

62   J.-F. Médard Dr Barnard to Kenya and in opposi­tion to the official Kenyan gov­ern­ment pol­ icy, he defended a pol­icy of dialogue with South Africa. These positions and attitudes did not make him pop­ular. Yet, he enjoyed being outspoken and loved provoking social groups such as the aca­demic com­ mun­ity, the judicial branch and members of Parliament. He scorned his fellow compat­riots and did not hesitate to let it be known. Being white was a requirement to be hired as his personal assistant (he had an English sec­ret­ary – sent to him by Edward Heath it was rumored). It was said that the idea of flying in an airplane piloted by an African terrified him, and that he refused to have black doctors treat him. In Parliament he was formidable for his wit and irony while he overwhelmed his colleagues with sarcasm, occasionally accusing them of smoking cannabis and drinking a whisky to gather the courage to stand up and speak in Parliament. Academics were his favorite target. He accused them of being Marxists and attacked par­ticu­larly the University’s liter­at­ure de­part­ment, the law faculty and ‘lecturers’ in gen­eral because of their accent when speaking English. Only the medical school found favor with him. As for the students, he pre­scribed caning and stigmatized free education. The Ministry of Education and the whole sys­tem of education were another of his favorite targets. He once de­scribed it as a ‘cor­ ridor of confusion’ and regu­larly questioned the administration of the Ministry and the competence or morality of the teachers. This highly provocative style made him very unpop­ular among the Kenyan intellectuals he deliberately antagonized. They regarded him as the devil incarnate. His lack of pop­ularity, how­ever, went beyond this group whose im­port­ance is sometimes overrated. Njonjo challenged consciously spontaneous pop­ular sensitivities, a behavior that also con­trib­uted to reinforce the image of power that he conveyed: if he expressed himself so frankly, it was because he could afford to. This was his weak side, and, as we will see, his Achilles heel. Njonjo, the all powerful Njonjo’s power was based on specific events or facts, but also on rumors that were im­pos­sible to verify. He was meant to have files on every­one and, as a journ­al­ist remarked, who in the polit­ical world does not have a skel­eton in the cup­board? His fortune was immense and he could buy anyone he pleased. Implacable against those who resisted or dared to confront him, he had the reputation of jailing whoever he wished or, conversely, offering them a min­is­ter­ial post. Those who did confront Njonjo usually paid for it dearly. According to pub­lic rumor he was behind all the plots and polit­ical assassinations. Njonjo knew how to put to good use this image of inexhaustible power. He cultivated it carefully, thus making it even more effect­ive: reputation was transformed into an instrument that enabled him to avoid showing or using power, something akin to the relationship between confidence and credit. Reputation could, how­ever, also prove dangerous if it were to offend the head of state who might grow suspicious.

Charles Njonjo – the portrait of a ‘big man’   63 When power turns into a myth it also becomes largely immune to ana­lysis. People with usually sound judgment can express sense­less views. One feels like asking, as a polit­ical sci­ent­ist once asked Jacques Foccart (see Chapter 15): ‘Mr Njonjo who are you?’ The answer, difficult as it is, is easier today. If pub­lic rumor had been trust­worthy, Moi would have never been able to exclude Njonjo from power. He was able to do so and this is, in itself, an im­port­ant element. We will therefore try next to assess the actual polit­ical resources of Njonjo, in order to benchmark his power before observing how he used it in his attempt to seize control.

Njonjo’s power To ana­lyse the power of a politician one should first draw an inventory of his polit­ical resources, namely the instruments at his disposal to pro­gressively accu­ mu­late power. In the case of Njonjo, the diversity and close interconnection between these resources is such that they confer to his power a sys­temic dimension. The question that arises next is that of the lat­it­ude of action that such power confers to its beneficiary. Njonjo’s system of power As Njonjo entered pol­itics, a key asset was his family’s background that gave him access to fin­an­cial, higher education and relational capital, thus enabling him to secure key positions when the cards were distributed at Independence. Appointment to pub­lic functions. Njonjo’s first asset was his position as Attorney General, and later as Minister of the Interior and Constitutional Affairs where he skilfully learnt how to squeeze all potential resources. As Attorney General he had authority over almost the entire repressive sys­tem of Kenya: he controlled the judicial sys­tem, the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) and the ‘Special Branch’ in the Police de­part­ment. As he became Minister of Internal Security and Constitutional Affairs, he also retained control over the CID. Overseeing the CID opened many possib­il­ities. Njonjo had access to in­forma­ tion on the private lives of all the im­port­ant people in Kenya. As Attorney General it was he who decided whether or not to start legal proceedings. This gave him a hold over all delinquents. All the news­papers kept alluding to Njonjo’s files. These files were used either to extract fin­an­cial resources,5 or to convince stubborn MPs to keep on the right track. As the Attorney General (and later min­is­ter) for 20 years, he had immense oppor­tun­ities for patronage and the strengthening of his hold over the repressive sys­tem. Njonjo was consulted on the nomination of judges and policemen. This, along with the indirect bene­fits drawn from much pub­licized pres­id­en­tial patronage, meant that Njonjo could place friends in the judicial or administrative sys­ tems or in the police: Ben Gethi, head of the General Service Unit (a paramilit­ary wing in the army and police) and later Police Commissioner, was one of his

64   J.-F. Médard friends. Rao, Deputy Public Prosecutor, Sokhi, Superintendant of Police and Nderi, Deputy Director of CID were also friends. Influence on the President. As Attorney General Njonjo was also the President’s legal advisor for consti­tu­tional, judiciary and even polit­ical issues. From this he drew the capa­city to influence the President, prob­ably his most im­port­ant resource. This influence also gave Njonjo indirect but con­sider­able power over the conduct of pol­itics in Kenya. After Jomo Kenyatta, Njonjo’s personal influence increased with Daniel Moi. Under Kenyatta Njonjo shared his influence with other close advisors such as Koinange and members of his family. Towards the end of his life Kenyatta was dominated by his family, yet he resisted its pressure – they were afraid that power would escape them – and, fol­low­ing the advice of Njonjo, he prepared the consti­tu­tional trans­ition. With Moi as President, Njonjo truly became the eminence grise. They were good friends and Moi was grateful for the help Njonjo had given him at a decisive moment. He had complete confidence in him and appreciated his qual­it­ies and took his advice on pol­itics. The President, Njonjo, G.G. Kariuki, the min­is­ter of state respons­ible for in­ternal secur­ity and a close ally to Njonjo and to Kiereini, the Chief Secretary of the Civil Service, another of Njonjo’s friends, were in­sep­ar­able. They shared the President’s car (‘the matatu’), lunched together and shared a highly informal relationship. Intimacy with the President enhanced con­sider­ably Njonjo’s resources which were of all kinds. Yet, these resources were indirect and con­ditional: the President remained the supreme authority. Networking. Njonjo’s ‘relational’ social capital was immense and his network of relations went well beyond the national arena. On the inter­na­tional scene we have already mentioned his connections with Britain, South Africa and Israel. He was a friend of Banda, the President of Malawi, of Tiny Rowland, the head of Lonrho. He was also close to the Saudi millionaire and arms dealer Kashoggi,6 was a friend and associate to the Indonesian millionaire Haryanto. They owed him many favors which were prob­ably substantially repaid. These inter­na­tional relationships, besides giving Njonjo psychological satis­fac­tion, were of much value polit­ically and fin­an­cially. The South Africans and Kashoggi were involved, along with Njonjo, in the attempted coup d’état in the Seychelles in 1981 – the Kenyan MP Martin Shikuku produced docu­ments proving that Njonjo had received money from South Africa. In Kenya, Njonjo had strong ties with the British Kenyans: he was a close friend of Mackenzie who, after playing an im­port­ant role at the time of Independence, became Minister of Agriculture. Mackenzie remained active in the region, notably as representative of the British M16 (Bloch and Fitzgerald 1983: 153–7) until his airplane ex­ploded in the air while returning from Kampala. Njonjo was also tied to the Indian com­mun­ity which was strong eco­nomic­ ally, but polit­ically weak. In exchange for offering his protection to them, he was largely rewarded financially. Among Kenyans, Njonjo also had a solid network of friends and allies in various circles. Thanks to Githii’s help, it may be said that he had a news­paper

Charles Njonjo – the portrait of a ‘big man’   65 at his disposal, the Nation first and then the Standard. Njonjo had estab­lished solid ties within the Civil Service, not just with its boss Kiereini. In the eco­ nomic world, Njonjo was close to a certain number of Kikuyu business men, and par­ticu­larly to Githunguri, the former executive dir­ector of the National Bank of Kenya. Juma Boy, the former head of the Central Organization of Trade Unions (COTU) and MP for the Coast, was one of his allies. In the polit­ical world (KANU,7 Parliament) he also had a network of clientele and people who were indebted to him. The only sector where we never heard his name mentioned was the army. Njonjo’s relational capital could also translate into eco­nomic resources. Economic resources. Njonjo’s eco­nomic resources should not be confused with his personal fortune – he also had access to the eco­nomic resources of a number of his friends. Although Njonjo had a sizeable fortune, it would have never enabled him to meet the im­port­ant fin­an­cial obli­ga­tions that his polit­ical ambition necessitated. We actu­ally have very little in­forma­tion on his personal fortune. To begin with he bene­fited from his family’s wealth. His fortune grew, how­ever, after he became a top polit­ical figure with direct access to eco­nomic resources. He de­veloped diversified inter­ests in sectors such as agri­cul­ture (horticulture, ranches), industry (metallurgy), banking, tourism, transportation (air, auto­mo­bile).8 The extent of his eco­nomic resources provided him with con­sider­ able means to influence the polit­ical sys­tem: he employed them to get elected as a MP for Kikuyu, to buy out the muni­cipal council of Mombasa, or secure sup­ port from dozens of parlia­ment­arians. What the Weekly Review once de­scribed as the ‘Njonjo sys­tem’ was an all-­powerful machine. From the data presented here, it becomes obvious that the Njonjo sys­tem was a network that went beyond national borders, while permeating pol­itics and soci­ ety within the coun­try. Within the coun­try, Njonjo controlled directly or indirectly the repressive ap­par­atus (justice and CID, Special Branch, Police), the Civil Service, part of the polit­ical class (MPs and min­is­ters, KANU, COTU). A daily news­paper acted as his spokesman, reporting about him and cam­paigning against his enemies. His privileged relationship with the expatriates and the ‘Asians’ provided eco­nomic resources and hence helped him to assert his polit­ ical influence. If one adds to this Njonjo’s inter­na­tional networks, one gets the impression of facing a state within the state. Such an organ­iza­tion went beyond the simple idea of a polit­ical ma­chine and beyond the classical notion of faction. Controlling such an organ­iza­tion gave Njonjo con­sider­able lat­it­ude of action. Njonjo’s latitude of action Njonjo’s lat­it­ude of action served his private power as well as his influence on pub­lic pol­icies. We will look par­ticu­larly at the first aspect. As a ‘big man’ Njonjo, the man of Law, was actu­ally above the law: he did not have to abide to the rules that applied to a common cit­izen. Here are a few examples drawn from the Commission of Inquiry report. Njonjo not only traveled with several passports (the commission heavily insisted on this detail), but entered and left the

66   J.-F. Médard airport without going through immigration or customs. Every three weeks he had baggage sent from London and this was never inspected by customs. He never paid Kenya Airways for his huge excess luggage (200–40 kgs per trip), although he went to London about four times a year. When a zealous employee once sent Njonjo a bill, he complained to the boss of Kenya Airways, his friend Sir Cole, who had the employee fired.9 Njonjo also allowed his friends to share his privileges. As a friend of the head of Immigration, Mutua, Njonjo could facilitate their journeys – Giscard d’Estaing was among them when he was France’s Minister of Finance. Njonjo would go as far as having visas delivered to South African tourists in contra­ dic­tion to gov­ern­ment directives. Flamingo Tours, a travel agency in which he had shares, was in charge of these tourists. Without any due respect for the law, he also helped one of his friends, the Indonesian business man and millionaire Haryanto, to import over 100 firearms (118, including one which was a milit­ary gun). This arsenal, along with soph­istic­ated radio equipment, was kept in the house of the millionaire who was helped by Walker, the police officer who was respons­ible for re­gis­tering arms.10 The commission of inquiry studied this story carefully hoping to prove a subversive plot. This was a dubious in­ter­pretation. These arms and equipment were prob­ably used to hunt on private reserves (although hunting was forbidden) and to protect a camp in Masai Mara near the Tanzanian border. When you are rich like Haryanto, or power­ful like Njonjo, common law does not apply. It is not neces­sary to look here for dark stories and plots. The Commission of Inquiry reported in detail how Njonjo intervened on the Coast to favor the faction sup­porting him (Nassir, Hemed) and to bribe the town council of Mombasa so as to ensure the election of Rajab Sumba as mayor and Mwidani11 as his deputy. Hemed, an ally of Nassir, the polit­ical ‘boss’ of the Coast, was in charge of recruiting for Njonjo. One counselor, Maitha, later explained how Hemed, after asking him to resign from his job in order to be a candidate in the elections, had paid for his cam­paign. Hemed was supposed to penetrate the Giriama, an im­port­ant coastal group, for Njonjo. Hemed broke ties with Njonjo after refusing to use his influence to expel Giriama squatters from land owned by a friend of Njonjo, Duncan Ndegwa, head of the Central Bank. Hemed sub­sequently testified that Njonjo had spent 400,000 Ksh to bribe 21 out of the 24 muni­cipal councillors of Mombasa for those elections. Mwidau, deputy of Mombasa South, the main op­pon­ent to Nassir recalled how after refusing to cede to Njonjo’s pressure, he lost his job in the private secur­ity com­pany where he had been working for 28 years. The head of the enterprise, an expatriate, had been threatened with expulsion if he did not fire Mwidau. As he stood in the witness stand during the inquiry, the head of the com­pany did not confirm this, but recog­nized that Njonjo had threatened to cancel an im­port­ant gov­ern­ment contract.12 Njonjo never hesitated to have his enemies jailed on diverse grounds. Kanja, then the MP for Nyeri and an Assistant min­is­ter, accused Njonjo in par­lia­ment, of having been implicated in the assas­sina­tion of Tom Mboya and J.M. Kariuki,

Charles Njonjo – the portrait of a ‘big man’   67 but provided no evid­ence. The next day he had lost his post as min­is­ter. Shortly afterwards he was imprisoned for three years for a currency exchange control violation.13 Two other MPs, J. Gachago (MP for Makuyu) and G.M. Muchiri (MP for Embakasi), who had echoed allegations that Njonjo played a part in the assas­sina­tion of Tom Mboya, were imprisoned for five years for stealing coffee, which they said they had never done. Njonjo had them released before the end of their term, and taken to his home, although he was at the time no longer the Attorney General, nor Minister, but just a simple cit­izen!14 Njonjo also secured from the President a reprieve for a murderer condemned for armed robbery. Such a crime was in theory excluded from amnesty, but the bandit was from Njonjo’s Kikuyu’s constituency. There are many more such examples. Njonjo sim­ilarly protected his friends from the judicial sys­tem. The most charac­ter­istic example is Githunguri who was accused of stealing 300 million Kenyan shillings from the National Bank of Kenya when he was the executive manager. It was only after the fall of Njonjo that the accusations began to be made. Njonjo also tried to protect one of his friends who was compromised in the scandal of the Bank of Baroda,15 by calling Kamere for help, a friend who had become Attorney General. Njonjo was also tied to com­panies which were accused of fraud on the exchange controls. Njonjo was himself never subjected to the normal pro­ced­ure on exchange control. He operated directly through Duncan Ndegwa, the head of the Central Bank. The latter’s personal sec­ret­ary, who was British, did not even have a work permit. Njonjo could act illegally without fearing pursuit. For example, he imported a Mercedes illegally by making a false employment declaration. He was also accused on several occasions of involvement in the assas­sina­tion of Tom Mboya and J.M. Kariuki. There was no conclusive proof and there were other suspects. What is certain, how­ever, is that he helped to smother both affairs. Two police agents that were directly implicated in this, Ben Gethi and Sokhi, were also his friends. What was Njonjo’s power on pub­lic de­cisions? We know that he was respons­ ible for the mar­ginalization of the Luo. We also know how he favored free enterprise, sup­ported ‘Asians’ and the pres­ence of expatriates. He was also opposed to any social legis­la­tion, favored detention and the institutionalization of the one party sys­tem. It is hard to define Njonjo’s precise con­tri­bu­tion to these polit­ical options, but his influence was significant. However, when Njonjo left power such polit­ical orientations were not radic­ally altered. We could have expected a return of the Luo. It did not occur. We could have expected a more lib­eral attitude towards the opposi­tion. This did not happen either. Resentment against expatriate employment did de­velop somewhat. Internationally, too, there was no change in Kenya’s position except at the regional level. Closer coopera­tion with Tanzania and the res­olu­tion of the conflict over the assets of the former East African Community were premised on Njonjo’s departure from the polit­ical scene (Médard 1984). The combined accumulation of power with polit­ical organ­iza­tion and a wide margin of manoeuvre invite us to conclude that Njonjo’s ambition went beyond

68   J.-F. Médard the position as number two in the shadow of the President. With retrospect this seems obvious. His attempt to become the head of state was meant to be the ultimate test of his power. It revealed its limits.

The test of power The judicial commission of inquiry came to the conclusion that Njonjo was guilty. He wanted to replace Moi and was definitely a ‘Msaliti’, the Swahili word used by Moi to declare him ‘not worthy of confidence’. The English translation used the word ‘traitor’ which is purposely ambiguous – traitor refers, legally speaking, to the crime of treason. The com­ment­ators in the expatriate com­mun­ ity, how­ever, con­sidered Njonjo the vic­tim of a witch hunt16 and thought that Moi was depriving himself of an excellent advisor. What sub­sequently emerged was that Moi was right to get rid of Njonjo the way he did, for the somewhat strange pro­ced­ure applied proved to be both efficient and final. Njonjo’s attempt to seize power The judicial commission of inquiry concluded that Njonjo was a traitor from a legal standpoint. It stated that he was implicated in the Muthemba affair and the Au­gust 1982 aborted coup – not to mention the Seychelles coup that affected a foreign gov­ern­ment, Rene’s. Yet, even though Njonjo had betrayed Moi’s confidence, whether he intended to resort to viol­ence could not be proven. What is striking for anyone who tries to reconstruct Njonjo’s strat­egy to access power is his effort to appear to be acting within the realm of the Constitution, although the means employed were definitely illegal. A pos­sible recourse to viol­ence on the part of Njonjo seems to contradict what remained an over­whelm­ingly institutional logic. On the other hand this logic did not entirely preclude usage of violence. An institutional strat­egy. With hindsight, it is most likely that Njonjo’s ambitions were quite deeply rooted, although situ­ations, and therefore the strat­egy to adopted, were very different under Kenyatta and Moi. Jomo Kenyatta was already quite old when he became pres­id­ent. The prob­lem was not to replace him, but to succeed him. As Attorney General and due to his relationship with the head of state, Njonjo was able to build a powerbase that he later de­veloped under Moi. However Njonjo was not a favorite in the line of succession to Kenyatta. The interplay of factions under Kenyatta was shaped by the pos­sib­il­ity that the issue of his succession could arise at any time. Although Kenyatta often favored his family, he never entirely gave in to their pressure, seeking sup­port from others so as to keep room to manoeuvre. Vice pres­id­ent Daniel Moi kept a very low profile, the best tactic since a vice pres­id­ent, like the dauphin in the French mon­archy, must wait without showing signs of impatience to take the place of the ruler. In order to preserve the faction’s powers, the Kenyatta family and their allies, the Kikuyu of Kiambu, sought to impose a consti­tu­tional amend­ment that would

Charles Njonjo – the portrait of a ‘big man’   69 prevent Moi, as vice pres­id­ent, from succeeding automatically to Kenyatta. Njonjo had the choice between rallying the Kiambu faction and helping Moi to succeed normally to Kenyatta. The first option did not assure him of remaining a privileged advisor of the President and even less of replacing him. By choosing to side with Moi, Njonjo would consolidate his relationship with him while keeping a large freedom of action. Perhaps he may have made the mis­take of con­sidering that Moi lacked polit­ical ambitions and would give him his position. Or perhaps Njonjo thought he would be able to manipulate him without too much difficulty. Njonjo therefore de­cisively con­trib­uted to Moi’s accession to the presidency as he blocked the consti­tu­tional amend­ment. In his capa­city as Attorney General, he also announced, obviously with Kenyatta’s consent, that it was a crime carrying the death pen­alty to anticipate the death of the pres­id­ent.17 His friend Oloitipitip18 then managed to push through Parliament a motion with 90 signatures to oppose the amend­ment. That ended the mat­ter. Later on Njonjo revealed a plot to assas­sin­ate Moi when Kenyatta died. Some people, how­ever, con­sider that this ‘Ngorokos’ plot was a pure invention of Njonjo, meant to position him closer to Moi and to weaken his enemies by dividing them. In order to ensure Kenyatta’s consti­tu­tional succession, Njonjo had to side with Kibaki who became vice pres­id­ent and, therefore, heir apparent. Since Moi was still young, there was, how­ever, no real pos­sib­il­ity of Kibaki succeeding Moi. To become pres­id­ent one would have to replace Moi, not succeed him. Though the power struggle was or­gan­ized around factions in the classical sense just as had been the case under Kenyatta, their significance had changed. At first sight, the situ­ations were sim­ilar: Njonjo soon started attacking Kibaki through the Standard news­paper. Kibaki responded half-­heartedly, somewhat uncomfortable in his new position as vice pres­id­ent. Njonjo’s influence on the pres­id­ent kept growing stronger as he increased his cam­paign against Kibaki, stigmatizing him as ‘anti‑nyayo’19 that is as an ‘enemy of Moi’. Njonjo’s engagement with pol­itics grew in the shadow of Moi, as he helped him to elim­in­ate polit­ically the Luo and their leader Oginga Odinga. As Njonjo took the prerogative of declaring who was pro or anti‑nyayo, opposing him became syn­onym­ous with opposing Moi. Moi, like Kenyatta before him, was nonetheless careful not to elim­in­ate Kibaki and give in entirely to Njonjo. Right he was, for behind the battle over anti-­nyayoism Njonjo was aiming for Moi’s position. Njonjo was trying to replace Kibaki because he actu­ally wished to replace Moi. The conflict went beyond the factional fighting between Njonjo and Kibaki: it was an attempt to displace Moi. The situ­ation crystallized when Njonjo, on April 14, 1980, resigned as Attorney General to enter pol­itics and was elected MP of Kikuyu.20 As long as Njonjo was Attorney General he had not been officially party to the polit­ical com­peti­tion. He could not pretend to become vice pres­id­ent or pres­id­ent without having been first elected as a MP. As a candidate for the Kikuyu seat, Njonjo entered the national polit­ical com­peti­tion. Observers realized this and Kibaki reacted strongly.

70   J.-F. Médard The very day Njonjo resigned, the MP of Kikuyu, Amos Ng’ang’a, left his seat to Njonjo on the ground that Njonjo would know how to promote the de­velopment of Kikuyu. He was meant to have done so willingly, but he had also received 160,000 Ksh to cover the cam­paign expenses incurred six months earl­ier.21 Soon after this, Amos Ng’ang’a was named head of the Tana River Development Authority, a pub­lic enterprise. Njonjo himself claimed he had given in to the pressure of his future constituents. In reality, all this had been carefully orchestrated – it is also true that, locally, people con­sidered that electing a power­ful person would be bene­fi­cial to them. Much to the surprise of ob­ser­vers, the cam­paign revealed that Njonjo could speak Kikuyu and Swahili and even, if neces­sary, shake hands. No one dared to challenge him and he was elected unopposed. As Mwaruwa (the gen­eral sec­ret­ary of the Syndicate of Dockers of Kenya) put it then: ‘To oppose Njonjo in the next elections would be like opposing the Law.’ What was Njonjo trying to achieve, wondered analysts at the time? According to some rumors he wanted to be Prime Minister, to which he replied, ‘The Kenyan consti­tu­tion does not provide for the position of Prime Minister.’ To those who asked if he wanted to become President he answered, ‘There is no pres­id­en­tial vacancy, our pres­id­ent is young and in good health.’ He added that since he had been sup­porting Moi during the trans­ition, why would he want his post now? Moi was convinced by this and congratulated him warmly on his election. After a brief period as a ‘backbencher’, he was named at the end of June Minister for Home and Constitutional Affairs; in the pro­cess he also regained indirect control over the CID. As an MP, Njonjo was efficient, active and kept in close touch with his constituency. He became genu­inely pop­ular locally, through generous gifts and the organ­iza­tion of bus ser­vices and access to water in the area. In order to be generous, money had to be extracted some way. For instance, to get money for the estab­lishment of a Fund for Development in his constituency, Njonjo diverted money from the sale of a truck that had been given by Ryce Motors Ltd to the National Fund for the Disabled of Kenya that he chaired. To the dir­ector of Ryce Motors, who was a little puzzled when learning that his check should be written in favor of the constituency’s Fund for Development, Njonjo simply explained that there were also handicapped people in Kikuyu. Although Njonjo had previously had quarrels with the leader of the Bohra22 he suddenly re­con­ciled with him and, in 1980, became a representative of the Bohra Charity Foundation. He was able in this way to seize the lion’s share of the funds of this Muslim founda­tion. Although using their funds towards the pro­ mo­tion of other religions was forbidden, 300,000 Ksh were used to purchase a bus for Saint Paul United Seminary.23 Njonjo also trans­ferred 500,000 Ksh from the de­velopment Fund in Kikuyu into his private account, an initiative that was con­sidered to be embezzlement by the inquiry commission. Locally, Njonjo undertook to get closer to Gichuru and Karume, the polit­ical leaders of Kiambu district, with whom he had been on bad terms after he opposed the movement to change the consti­tu­tion. They were also respons­ible

Charles Njonjo – the portrait of a ‘big man’   71 for the Kanu Branch Committee of Kiambu, letting it be known that they did not en­dorse Njonjo’s candidacy for the seat of Kikuyu. While working to comfort his local base, he began pen­et­rating the Kenyan polit­ical sys­tem. Njonjo’s friends apparently laid their hands on KANU, in effect a single party, on the occasion of the elections of Octo­ber 1978.24 Two of Njonjo’s friends, Kariuki and Oloitipitip, had played a key role by drawing up a list suggesting can­did­ates for the different Party positions. This list aimed at renewing the party’s leadership con­sider­ably. Oloitipitip and Nasser had also tried, but in vain, to get it accepted by Parliament. Yet, just before the elections, Kariuki had printed 3,000 cards, using this list, thus suggesting it had been officially accepted (which was not the case). Candidates on this list were nonetheless all elected. It is likely that Njonjo was behind the drafting of the list, a move that would in such a case reflect a long term strat­egy. As the Attorney General Njonjo could not appear to be formally backing up the renewal of the party leadership. Whether Njonjo was aiming for the presidency or vice presidency he first needed to become pres­id­ent or vice pres­id­ent of the ruling party. Gaining strong sup­port within the party was therefore essential. When parlia­ment­ary elections were held in 1979, Njonjo made a big effort to build up sup­port in Parliament. Was this meant to prepare for a vote of censorship against Moi? This is what Sifuna (MP of Bungoma) later alleged.25 Support from three-­quarters of the 170 deputies would have been consti­tu­tionally required. Yet, by 1981 Njonjo’s control over 60 MPs was remark­able, but insufficient. In addition a vote of no confidence would not have automatically brought the downfall of the pres­id­ent since he could still dissolve the assembly (section 56[2] of the Constitution). Thanks to the work of the Commission of Inquiry we have a rich crop of in­forma­tion on Njonjo’s recruitment cam­paign. According to Maitha’s testimony, Njonjo had undertaken to create a powerbase by identi­fying indi­viduals who would be prepared to follow him. He funded their elect­oral cam­paign and used them as relays to reach the diverse com­munit­ies in the coun­try. Recruitment was carried out by such people as Hemed in Mombasa who, as previously mentioned, employed Maitha to contact the Giriama. We have also seen how Njonjo secured the election of the mayor and the deputy mayor of Mombasa by bribing 21 out of the 24 councillors. This testimony was confirmed by Sifuna who named the recruiting agents of Njonjo. Besides Moses Keino (deputy speaker of the legislature, MP for Kericho) who had to resign after preventing Parliament to deliberate on the prayer meeting held at Rungiri Church (see below), those involved were Said Hemed (parlia­ment­ary chief whip and MP for Mombasa North), Stephen Kiragu (MP for Kirinyaga South and deputy chief whip, the assistant to Hemed), Juma Boy (MP of Kwale Central, Coast Province and gen­eral sec­ret­ary of COTU), Jackson Kalweo (MP for Meru South and assistant min­is­ter of Culture and Social Services), Clement Lubembe (former MP) and J.M. Mutua (former Principal Officer for immigration). Sifuna recalled in detail the diverse efforts that were made to recruit him. Kalweo made a first try in 1981 threatening him with re­tali­ation if he refused to

72   J.-F. Médard join Njonjo’s faction. If he were to accept, Kalweo boasted, Njonjo’s con­sider­ able power would enable him to obtain whatever he wished. Njonjo even promised that he could ensure that the appeal of his rivals in the elections would be rejected by the judge. And this is what happened. A second attempt was made during the same year as Kalweo informed Sifuna that Njonjo would soon come to power and that it was in his inter­ests to be on the right side. Njonjo could find him a min­is­ter­ial post just as he did for Kitele (MP for Iveti) and for Ambala (MP for Gem – later compromised in the assas­sina­tion of his rival Owit, he was found dead in prison) who both became assistant min­is­ters. The third attempt to recruit Sifuna occurred in Septem­ber 1982. Mutua then promised to return Sifuna’s passport so that he could travel to Italy if he agreed to talk to Njonjo after his return. He added that his hostility to Njonjo was misguided because it was him that gov­erned Kenya and could get him any position or money: ‘You are like my child and I am trying to help you become a “big man” in this coun­try’. Since Sifuna eventually refused to see Njonjo after his return from Italy, Mutua withdrew his passport. Lubembe also tried twice to have him meet Njonjo and Kiereini. Njonjo, Lubembe argued, was a good man, the only one who was apt to become the pres­id­ent of the coun­try, and a very generous person: thanks to Njonjo’s help Mutua had risen from President of the National Construction Company to Head of the Kenya Sugar Authority. On one occasion, in Parliament, Njonjo also tried to force money into Sifuna’s pockets in front of witnesses. Mutvol, a MP of Kalenjin origin (the pres­id­ent’s ethnic group) also narrated how Njonjo had offered him money, not to rally his clan – since he was already part of it – but to recruit Kalenjin MPs. Njonjo had gone as far as offering him a Mercedes. He had also pressed him to tell the pres­id­ent to dismiss Kibaki, and, most im­port­antly, not to replace him with a Luo, because Njonjo could do the job. His plot failed.26 As a final example, let us discuss another attempt by Kalweo to win over Mwachofi, a rad­ical MP. Kalweo, after several un­pleas­ant remarks about Moi, allegedly told him that ever since he had started working with Njonjo, his fin­an­ cial prob­lems had been solved, before adding: ‘If you don’t change your attitude towards Njonjo, we are going to shut you up like your brother Wamwere’.27 Wamwere, the former MP of Nakuru was then in detention. Njonjo’s tactical skills did not solely involve de­veloping his network in Parliament. According to Maitha, Hemed was in charge of securing fin­an­cial sup­ port in Arab coun­tries and improving Njonjo’s reputation – these coun­tries con­sidered him a friend of Israel. Hemed was also seeking funds from the Indian com­mun­ity. Later on, as a reward, Hemed was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs. Oloitipitip was simul­tan­eously assigned the job of discrediting Moi’s gov­ern­ment, even though he was Minister of Local Government, by prescribing programs im­pos­sible to realize, by reclassifying dozens of muni­cipal­ities, by promising funds which were not avail­able and by naming additional councillors without any legal base. According to the evid­ence of an MP, the damage Oloitipitip did to local authorities within two years would take ten years to repair. Another method was to initiate and finance de­velopment pro­jects through

Charles Njonjo – the portrait of a ‘big man’   73 ‘harambee’ or­gan­ized by the Njonjo clan so as to prove their greater efficiency than Moi and his gov­ern­ment.28 These examples point to what seems to have been a planned offensive involving the mobil­iza­tion of all of Njonjo’s resources against President Moi. The strat­egy was deployed within existing institutions, but what the final act would have been remains unclear. Was resorting to viol­ence con­sidered? It is difficult to answer to such a question and we can only guess. Resorting to violence? On two occasions Njonjo was implicated in plots to overthrow the gov­ern­ment. In 1981, Njonjo’s cousin and a businessman, Muthemba, was arrested and taken to court for treason. He had tried to secure weapons from the army in order to train ‘experts’.29 An officer who had pretended to be part of the game sub­ sequently testified that the plot was to assas­sin­ate the Pres­id­ent. Muthemba claimed he had taken this initiative with Njonjo’s backing in order to test whether access to weapons was adequately protected. Such an affair would have never come to light when Njonjo was the Attorney General. His successor, Karugu, used to get along very well with Njonjo when he was his subordinate, but he decided to take what looked like a bold initiative, most likely en­dorsed by the President himself. The Special Branch, which Njonjo no longer controlled, dealt with the investigation. Njonjo reacted by denying that he was related to Muthemba, before recognizing that he had episodically met him. Thanks to the help of his friend Rao, the deputy pub­lic pro­secu­tor, Njonjo finally got Muthemba acquitted in ob­scure con­ditions. This seemed like a cover up. Was Njonjo guilty? We have no proof. Njonjo argued that he was the vic­tim of a machination by Kibaki and the Special Branch, but there again we lack evid­ence. A cover up doesn’t neces­sar­ily mean that he was guilty. Be that as it may Njonjo was certainly a suspect. After the acquittal Njonjo took his revenge: Karugu was forced to resign and the deputy dir­ector of Special Branch, Mureithi, was displaced and, when he protested, placed in detention. On Au­gust 1, 1982 a mutiny in the lower ranks of the Air Force turned into an attempted coup of populist inspiration. Kenya’s reputation for stability vanished. After some delay, other com­pon­ents of the armed forces took the offensive and crushed the putsch. The Air Force was disbanded and the leaders of the rebellion fled to Tanzania. Several days earl­ier a friend of Njonjo, Githii, the head of the Standard news­paper, had published a much-­commented-on editorial that vigor­ously condemned detentions. He was accused of trying to desta­bil­ize the coun­try and was fired. Njonjo was suspected of being behind the editorial, which is difficult to understand as both Githii and Njonjo had always been in favor of detention. It is hard to ima­gine Njonjo having a hand in the coup of Au­gust 1982 since it was a leftist coup. The leaders at their trial justified their acts saying they had taken action to prevent Njonjo from seizing power. Raila Odinga, the son of Oginga Odinga, was arrested after the coup. In his testimony

74   J.-F. Médard to the Commission he declared that, according to rumors the GSU was to have staged a coup on behalf of Njonjo on 5 Au­gust. Africa Now30 even wrote that three plots had actu­ally been in the making and suggested that Kibaki and Njonjo were behind the other two. No sus­pi­cion was ever mentioned concerning Kibaki. This was not the case for Njonjo, though there is no clear evid­ence – Oginga’s account cannot be con­ sidered as such. Police Commissioner Ben Gethi had torn up Oginga’s testimony implicating Njonjo – he was to be arrested two days later. This was no proof, how­ever. Nothing was ever proved against Njonjo, although a number of events called for sus­pi­cion. Githii’s editorial never got a satis­fact­ory explanation. The attitude of the Armed Forces, police, GSU and Air Force was strange. Everyone actu­ally seemed to have been informed in advance of the putsch. Kariuki, the Commander in Chief of the Air Force, although he was informed, was near Thika, going about his private business. Ben Gethi, the commissioner of Police was slow to react. The armed forces had intervened four hours later, once the rebels were estab­lished in the centre of town. This was perhaps because the army was on manoeuvre in the North and took time to return South. What is certain is that Moi felt aban­doned, if not betrayed by Njonjo and this caused the rupture between the two men, signalling the end for Njonjo. Njonjo suffers defeat Njonjo’s fall from grace and his failure are closely related. One was the cause of the other.31 The fall of Njonjo. There were clear signals to Njonjo’s fall, even though it occurred over a period of time. First the ties with Moi weakened, then they broke apart and this signalled the end. We have seen how the link between Moi and Njonjo weakened after the attempted coup of Au­gust 1, 1982. From then onwards, the bond between the two men subsisted, but they were never again as intimate. Njonjo kept his official functions, but Moi withdrew the escort to which only he and Kariuki remained entitled. This de­cision underlined the fact that Njonjo had fallen back in line with the others. He had lost his privileged access to the President and thereby to the con­sider­able indirect power that this meant. Although this was rarely noted, it was his most im­port­ant resource. With hindsight, how­ever, it would appear that the rupture was less brutal than it first appeared. Two warning signs may be noted. The first was the Muthemba affair: it is difficult to believe that the Attorney General Karugu opened the case without the President’s approval. Moi must have had his doubts about Njonjo at the time, even though he had given his benediction to his entry into pol­itics. In the end, Njonjo managed to re-­establish the situ­ation and appeared even stronger after the Muthemba affair. The other event of key significance was not prop­erly understood at the time. It was the cab­inet reshuffle of Febru­ary 1982: Kibaki then lost the ministry of finances which was given to Maguyu, a friend of Njonjo. Njonjo scored points for he had triggered through the Standard news­paper a cam­paign against

Charles Njonjo – the portrait of a ‘big man’   75 Kibaki’s eco­nomic pol­icy. Kibaki remained vice pres­id­ent, how­ever. Njonjo also lost part of his attributions as Minister for Home and Constitutional Affairs: he merely retained the port­folio of Minister of Constitutional Affairs. Losing Home Affairs meant that he also lost control over the CID – he nonetheless kept immigration, a very sensitive sector. The other changes were less im­port­ant. His friend Kariuki was no longer Minister of State at the Office of the President, in charge of Internal Security; he became instead Minister for Land and Settlements. Obsessed with the Njonjo–Kibaki rivalry, ob­ser­vers concluded the match ended in a draw. Kibaki and Njonjo had both lost, but were still equal. African Contemporary Record32 was isolated in observing that Njonjo had lost the CID while Kariuki was no longer in charge of secur­ity. This was the first time that Njonjo’s power di­min­ished. This cab­inet reshuffle marked Moi’s desire to regain control, concentrate power to his bene­fit and put a stop to the conflict between Njonjo and Kibaki. The final rupture came in the speech at Kisii on May 8, 1983. The speech was made at a huge ‘harambee’ in favor of the schools of the district. Although Njonjo’s name was not pronounced, he was clearly targeted when Moi complained about min­is­ters who did not dance to his tune, while a foreign power sup­ported a ‘traitor’. Again there had been precedents: On April 15, Mwangala, then Minister of Tourism had asked the anti-­Moi min­is­ters to leave the Cabinet. The same day Shikuku had alluded to a plot meant to destroy the gov­ern­ment. The same idea was repeated by Ole Tipis, Minister of State in the Office of the President. Moi’s speech appeared to be part of this cam­paign. Some well-­informed sources have argued that Moi, without thinking of Njonjo par­ticu­larly, launched this theme that then spiraled out of control. This seems rather unlikely since, when looking back, events seem to have unfolded very logically. Moi’s speech gave the signal of the anti-­traitor cam­paign that kept growing in strength. The portrait of the traitor was sketched slowly, in small strokes: we first learned that he was a min­is­ter, then that he traveled abroad often and finally that he wore a three-­piece suit. Ngei, a polit­ical leader of the Akamba and former companion of detention of Jomo Kenyatta also claimed that the traitor had received 40 million Ksh from Israel and South Africa. On 15 May Njonjo was returning from London. On that day, it was learnt that the traitor had been mentioned in the Muthemba affair. Everyone knew then who the traitor was, but there was still no name. On 17 May, Njonjo protested he was not the traitor and declared his loy­alty saying, ‘At times like this you know who your friends are and who your enemies are.’ It was an implicit threat. Some friends of Njonjo had begun to distance themselves, while others remained. The KANU council was due to meet on 19 May and it was widely believed that the name of the traitor would then come out. Moi, how­ever, confirmed what he had said without naming the traitor. The pro­cess speeded up while prayers for peace were held on June 13, at the Presbyterian Church in Rungiri (Kikuyu). Njonjo attended the meeting and one of the parti­cip­ants declared in Kikuyu, ‘When the leader of the herd of sheep

76   J.-F. Médard limps, the herd finds no grass’. The allusion seemed to be aimed at the President (Martin 1986). That was the final touch. On June 16, during a parlia­ment­ary debate Mwangale was the first to name Njonjo as the traitor. Njonjo tried to defend himself, claiming that the allusions concerned him, Njonjo, and not the President, adding that he had not or­gan­ized the prayer meeting. The parlia­ment­ ary debates were not transmitted on the radio, and the Minister, Mwamunga, a friend of Njonjo was accused of being respons­ible for this. On June 29, came the final episode: during a large debate in Parliament accusations against Njonjo began to multiply. Sifuna accused him of having tried to bribe him. Shikuku passed around docu­ments showing that Njonjo received large sums of money from overseas for unknown reasons; he also accused him of having an inter­est in a South African firm (it turned out that this was not true). Ngei denounced his ties with South Africa and revealed that Njonjo was involved in ac­tiv­ities of contraband at the airport. As the Githunguri affair came to be mentioned, Rao’s attitude was criticized, along with that of Judge Simpson. Oloitipitip dropped his friend saying: ‘Njonjo was my friend because he was close to the President. He is no longer my friend since it has been discovered that he is the traitor.’ That same day, Moi suspended Njonjo from his min­is­ter­ial post and ordered the consti­tu­tion of a judicial commission of inquiry into the various allegations. Moi hoped that the Octo­ber elections would elim­in­ate Njonjo’s friends. He was to be disappointed: Kamotho lost, Kariuki also, but Ngumba beat Waiyuki in Mathare, while Rubia, Gachanja, Oloitipitip, and Magugu were elected. In Kikuyu another friend of Njonjo, Kinyanjui, replaced him. The electors did not vote according to national con­sidera­tions . . . By the end of Octo­ber the judicial commission presided by Justice Miller began investigating. They were to look into the various charges brought against Njonjo, namely: conspiracy against the gov­ern­ment in Au­gust 1982, complicity with the illegal ac­tiv­ities of Muthemba, complicity in the convening of the prayer meeting in Rungiri; ac­tiv­ities against national inter­est such as the polit­ical coup in the Seychelles, close ties with South Africa and abuse of power as Attorney General and Minister. The investigation started at the beginning of Janu­ary 1984 and con­tinued until mid-­August. Njonjo aban­doned the idea of jus­tifying himself and made a declaration offering his apology, but this was in no way a confession. Njonjo was then expelled from the party, along with his close allies who lost their positions as MP and Minister and could no longer be can­did­ates for elections. This amounted to a ban from pol­itics.33 The report34 was published in Novem­ber 1984 and found Njonjo guilty of most of the accusations, in par­ticu­lar treason. On Kenyatta Day (Decem­ber 12, 1984), Moi granted him pardon, which caused an outburst of student agitation. Njonjo was elim­in­ated polit­ically and his departure from pol­itics could be con­ sidered as final. He was lucky to have been treated with indulgence, something he never did to his own enemies. Did he strike a bargain with Moi? One may wonder. It was more im­port­ant for the President to get rid of Njonjo, than to take vengeance. The reasons for the downfall of Njonjo concerned both Moi and Njonjo.

Charles Njonjo – the portrait of a ‘big man’   77 The reasons for Njonjo’s downfall Moi got rid of Njonjo because Njonjo wanted to take his place either through a sort of consti­tu­tional coup or by other means. In any case, Moi would have wanted to distance himself from Njonjo without neces­sar­ily depriving himself of his ser­vices. This was the purpose of the min­is­ter­ial reshuffle of Febru­ary 1982. Njonjo’s power was too great for Moi who felt humiliated and obliged to him. There were many ways for Moi to get rid of Njonjo. The method he chose was somewhat disconcerting, but efficient in the end. In most African coun­tries the ruler would have resorted to quicker and more brutal methods. Njonjo had underestim­ated the President and this led him to make some tactical mis­takes. Perhaps events did not go as planned for reasons we ignore. If he intended to act consti­tu­tionally, the putsch of Au­gust 1, must have surprised him. If the putsch was planned, its failure shows that he had neg­lected the army too much. Njonjo also overestim­ated his own resources. He had not realized that his power was indirect and de­pend­ent on the pres­id­ent. Too sure of himself, belittling his compat­riots, scornful of pub­lic opinion, he did not understand that power was not just a question of force and manipulation, but also per­sua­sion and propaganda. Njonjo was in a way too honest, intellectually speaking, to hide his thoughts: he was not a demagogue. He manipulated the elite through money and threats, but that was not enough. He lacked deep sup­port, espe­cially ethnic sup­port which would have balanced his lack of personal pop­ularity. You cannot win loy­ alty with bribes. Even if he had come to power it is difficult to ima­gine that he would have ruled for long, unless he had changed his attitude towards the gen­ eral pub­lic. Most African leaders are neither pop­ular nor legitimate, but if they want to stay in power they cannot totally ignore pop­ular sensitivity. To conclude, let us mention a double paradox concerning Njonjo. The first is the contra­dic­tion which existed between the highly respected efficient, com­pet­ent, punctual Njonjo, the British aristocrat, the incarnation of law, the keeper of the Constitution, the enemy of corruption; and Njonjo as a ‘big man’ without scruples, mobilizing all his resources to satisfy his ambitions. The second paradox is that Njonjo is much less exceptional than we might think. What was extra­ordinary with Njonjo was the power accu­mu­lated by a polit­ical leader who was not the head of state. However Njonjo behaved like all polit­ical leaders do. His abuse of power was great, but it was in proportion to his strength. He con­sidered himself above his contemporaries and was openly contemptuous of them, yet he obeyed the common rule whereby anyone holding power will ex­ploit it to the maximum.

Notes

This chapter is a slightly edited version of an art­icle published in Emmanuel Terray (ed.) L’État contemporain en Afrique, Paris: L’Harmattan, 1987 (49–87). This detailed case-­study of the rise and fall of a ‘big man’ went beyond the exclusive focus on rulers. In an overall con­text where institutional resources were as im­port­ant as behind the scene strat­egies of alli­ance, intimidation and corruption, Médard con­sidered the story of

78   J.-F. Médard Njonjo to be an em­blem­atic case of ‘straddling’ due to his skills at combining eco­nomic and polit­ical resources while shifting between the pub­lic and private spheres.   1 On the polit­ical con­text in Kenya during this period, see Gene Dauch and Denis Martin, L’Héritage de Kenyatta, la trans­ition politique au Kenya 1975–1982, L’Harmattan/Presses universitaires d’Aix-Marseille, 1985.   2 For the biography of Njonjo see ‘The outspoken Charles Njonjo’, Weekly Review 25 April 1980.   3 A typ­ic­ally Kenyan method of fund raising for de­velopment pro­jects which plays an im­port­ant role in the polit­ical as well as eco­nomic life.   4 His home was in Kabete.   5 See The Express, vol. II(2), 1985. This is the story of a Kenyan businessman who ordered bank robberies with the protection of Njonjo and the CID who demanded money from him in return. Such romanticized versions of the life of Njonjo should be taken with precaution.   6 Weekly Review, Janu­ary 20, 1984.   7 The Kenya African National Union was at the time the only polit­ical party in Kenya.   8 For in­forma­tion on the many connections and eco­nomic inter­ests of Njonjo see Weekly Review Janu­ary 20, 1984 (ranches) and Janu­ary 27, 1984. This concerned only the affairs mentioned at the inquiry.   9 Weekly Review Janu­ary 20, 1984. 10 Weekly Review Janu­ary 12, 1984. 11 Weekly Review March 20, 1984. 12 Weekly Review March 16, 1984. 13 Weekly Review March 9, 1984. 14 Idem supra. 15 The Bank was involved in a fraud for tax evasion and currency exchange. To resolve the prob­lem it lent 3 million Ksh to Kamere and 1 million Ksh to Mbathi, the labor Minister. Also compromised in the deal were Rao, Sokhi respons­ible for the inquiry, and a number of other friends of Njonjo. 16 Newsweek, May 30, 1983. According to the review Njonjo made many enemies in his fight against corruption. 17 Weekly Review, Octo­ber 18, 1976. 18 Oloitipitip, polit­ical leader of the Masai: He was a MP since Independence. According to certain reports he was to be vice pres­id­ent in Njonjo’s government. 19 ‘Nyayo’ means ‘in the steps of ’. The slogan, adopted by Moi after Kenyatta’s death, meant that he would en­dorse the legacy of Kenyatta. Later, the word changed meaning and started referring to Moi’s own polit­ical philosophy. 20 See New African Au­gust 1980. Africa Confidential June 4, 1980. Weekly Review April 26, 1980. 21 Weekly Review April 26, 1980. 22 Bohra: a small sect of Ismaili with branches in Kenya. 23 Weekly Review May 25, 1984. 24 Weekly Review March 30, 1984. 25 Weekly Review March 16, 1984. 26 Weekly Review March 16, 1984. 27 Weekly Review March 23, 1984. 28 Weekly Review March 30, 1984. 29 Weekly Review May 11, 1984. 30 Africa Now Septem­ber 1982. 31 See Ahmed Rajab ‘The Man Kenyans love to hate’, Africa Now Au­gust 1983. 32 Africa Contemporary Record, 198 B 1–82, Kenya B 181-B 208. 33 See Lettre de l’Océan Indien Novem­ber 23, 1984, no. 207. 34 Repub­lic of Kenya, Report of Judicial Inquiry appointed to inquire into the allegations involving Charles Mugane Njonjo, Nairobi Novem­ber 1984, 95 p.

5 Can neopatrimonialism dissolve into democracy? Mamoudou Gazibo

One of the best accounts of demo­cracy refers to it as a sys­tem in which ‘some par­ties lose elections’ (Przeworski 1992: 10). Such a sys­tem is characterized by the exist­ence of a pub­lic sphere that is auto­nom­ous from the polit­ical and social forces within which it operates, the institutionalization of the rules of the polit­ ical game, com­peti­tion for power and a lack of pre-­determination of outcomes. In short, these features require the exclusion of any form of paternalism (Beetham 1992). On the other hand, Jean-­François Médard’s conceptualization of neopatrimonialism, as argued in the previous chapters, defines a sys­tem driven by arbit­rary rule, author­it­arianism, the privatization of power, clientelism and, above all, confusion of the pub­lic and private spheres. Neopatrimonialism and demo­cracy are obviously based on antithetical logical bases and are, at first glance, incom­pat­ible. Gero Erdmann and Ulf Engel (2006) even point out a con­ sensus of the fact that neopatrimonial power should be con­sidered a sub-­category of authoritarianism. From a norm­ative per­spect­ive bent on promoting demo­cracy, that conclusion is preordained. But from an ana­lyt­ical per­spect­ive where empirical polit­ical situ­ ations, either his­tor­ical or con­tempor­ary, are key, such a highly ab­stract vision of demo­cracy does not quite stand the test of factual observation. In this chapter, I use textual exegesis to achieve three goals: first, to show how, at a theor­et­ical level, neopatrimonialism and demo­cracy are mutually exclusive. We shall see that this is not unrelated to the very par­ticu­lar reading of the his­tory of the state and demo­cracy, and of their emergence out of the West, a reading whose premises can be found not only in Max Weber’s seminal work, but also in Africanist his­tor­ical and polit­ical soci­ology. I will then stress how, at a his­tor­ical level, patrimonial practices are closer to the polit­ical norm than the polit­ical aber­ra­tion. Indeed, the nature of regimes (either bur­eau­cratic or patri­ monial) depends on either the institutionalization of the formal rules organ­izing polit­ical life, or on the prevalence of certain types of traditional conducts (in Weber’s meaning), which are forever returning in any polit­ical sys­tem. Finally, using the examples of Third Wave demo­cra­cies (Huntington 1993) which are said to be hybrids, I will illus­trate the notion of the solubility of neopatrimonial­ ism in demo­cracy, notably as regards these new regimes whose identities it seems to define in a stable, enduring, non-­transitory way.

80   M. Gazibo

From Weber to Médard: the tension between democracy and (neo)patrimonialism Neopatrimonialism and demo­cracy are, a priori, hardly com­pat­ible. This state­ ment is prim­arily based on the work of M. Weber and the comparative soci­ology of the state and demo­cracy. In Weberian soci­ology, which is a soci­ology of the state, bur­eau­cracy, and par­ties – in short, ‘modernity’ – patrimonialism is one of the sub-­categories of traditional domination. According to Weber (1968: 231), ‘patrimonialism and, in the extreme case, sultanism, tend to arise whenever tra­ ditional domination de­velops an administration and a milit­ary force which are purely personal instruments of the master.’ Traditional domination is in turn opposed to legal domination. These two forms, con­sidered as ‘specific every­day forms of domination’, are opposed to the ‘charismatic’ form, which is ‘extra­ ordinary’ or ‘revolu­tionary’ (Weber 1968: 244). Therefore, of inter­est here are the connections that may be estab­lished between traditional and legal domina­ tion. Weber thinks that the ‘purest type of exercise of legal authority is that which employs a bur­eau­cratic administrative staff ’ based on functionaries appointed on the merits of their skills and expertise (1968: 220). Legal domina­ tion is also associated with demo­cracy, but cannot be reduced to it. According to Weber legal domination occurs when ‘the legal power holder who is not a “func­ tionary”, is for instance [. . .] the elected pres­id­ent of a state.’ He also points out that the spirit of rational bur­eau­cracy, from the point of view of both functionar­ ies and the populace, is related to issues that have to do with ‘the theory of “demo­cracy” ’ (Weber 1968: 217, 226). On the other hand, traditional domination, which includes patrimonialism, would be more adequate in the characterization of the polit­ical sys­tems of small com­munit­ies. Such sys­tems are not very complex and are based on rudimentary eco­nom­ies, as in the case of most pre-­colonial African chieftaincies (Bratton and van de Walle 1997: 62). In comparing the forms of domination, and in par­ticu­lar legal-­rational domi­ nation and traditional domination, Weber seems to estab­lish a pecking order that de­velops within a norm­ative per­spect­ive. These two models appear to differ not only in their form, but also qualit­at­ively. The degree of power differ­enti­ation and function institutionalization can be contrasted with the confusion of person and role, the im­port­ance of rules with the chemistry of human relations, and the merit-­based recruitment of staff and personnel with the status-­based cooptation of rel­at­ives and clients. Legal domination – which cor­res­ponds to the first term in each of these divergent dyads – thus appears of a higher qualit­at­ive order, more refined than traditional domination, which is associated with the second term in each dyad (Weber 1968). In addition, Weber highlights the im­port­ance of the achievement of a purely personal administrative (and milit­ary) leadership’ when the ending of the ‘early types of traditional domination’ leads to the emer­ gence of patrimonialism, which is negat­ively com­par­able to legal domination through what it lacks: im­per­sonal official obli­ga­tions, free contractual relation­ ships, non appropriation of his position (Weber 1968: 220).

Can neopatrimonialism dissolve into democracy?   81 Although his­tor­ical soci­ology is greatly indebted to Weber’s work (Déloye 2003: 33; Gazibo and Jenson 2004; and most im­port­antly, Kalberg 1994), it cannot be reduced to his work alone. However, con­sidera­tions of neopatrimoni­ alism are few and far between (See Eisenstadt 1973 and 1987), including when it comes to works on Africa (Médard 1991b: 324). Such works have led quite logically to in­ter­pretations on the relationship between patrimonialism and demo­cracy, since that linkage is inherent to the two modes of sover­eignty; that is, national sover­eignty as embodied by the state, and pop­ular sover­eignty as embodied by demo­cracy. These relationships have also been rationalized a pos­ teriori when non-­Western con­texts have been studied against the benchmark of the West. The best illustration of this is very likely offered by his­tor­ians of the state (Bloch 1978; Bergeron 1990; Tilly 1992; Elias 1976). The linkage between studies in his­tor­ical soci­ology and the premise of an opposi­tion between neopatrimonialism and demo­cracy is highlighted in the work of Norbert Elias (1976), who de­scribes the state as an ‘oppor­tun­ity mono­pol­ ization’ pro­cess whose origins hark back to feudal Europe. Elias shows how, in Europe, state building de­veloped through the stages of a gradual centralization pro­cess. Beginning with the vagaries of wars, matrimonial alli­ances and crown successions, the state became a pro­ject of its own when ter­rit­ories acquired on the basis of the mono­poly rule were pro­gressively demarcated and institutionalized. Initially, that is, between the elev­enth and thir­teenth centuries, there was a ‘free com­peti­tion period’, in the course of which the king was only a primus inter pares and had to rely on the lords for rev­enue and for levies (Elias 1976: 43). Then, between the four­teenth and fif­teenth centuries, arose the ‘era of the appanages’, after the kings of England lost out in their claims over con­tin­ental lands and ter­rit­ ories (61). This ushered in a period marked by the ‘triumph of the royal mono­poly’ (83). Two elements are paramount here: on the one hand mono­pol­ization, since rel­at­ively im­port­ant ter­rit­ories were now concentrated in the hands of kings, pre­ figuring the era of the modern states with their neatly demarcated bound­ar­ies. On the other hand, and most im­port­antly, once the mono­poly became entrenched, there was the occurrence of something which Elias calls ‘the pub­licization of the mono­poly’; that is, the pro­cess through which the state acquired an administration, a national army, pub­lic budgets, and started to differentiate itself from the person of the king. In short, what is de­scribed here is the gradual consti­tu­tion of a distinc­ tive pub­lic space. In parallel to the pro­cess of the construction of the state, there was the evolution leading to pop­ular sover­eignty, which began as early as 1215, with the Magna Carta, in King John’s England. This as yet unnamed pro­cess cul­ min­ated in the nine­teenth century with the emergence of cit­izen­ship, polit­ical par­ ties and uni­ver­sal suffrage (Weber 1963: 171). This leads us to note that even though, with Elias and the socio-­historians, these state-­building pro­cesses were to some extent based on chance occurrences (Elias 1976: 26; Bergeron 1990: 17), the temptation of an after-­the-fact rationali­ zation of the state and demo­cracy remains great. These are viewed as conquests over ‘tradition’, ‘arbitrariness’, and the ‘personalization of power’; in short, the reverse of ‘patrimonialism’.

82   M. Gazibo Directing research efforts toward obs­tacles to state-­building and demo­crat­ ization is prac­tically inev­it­able for scholars who are not so much inter­ested in these sui generis pro­cesses as in African states that are seen as ‘imported’ from elsewhere (Badie 1992), and whose polit­ical sys­tems pertaining to the Weberian type of traditional domination are, after the Euro­pean takeover, enjoined to rationalize themselves, and then, afterward, to demo­cratize. The state-­building and demo­crat­ization pro­cesses typical in these polit­ical sys­tems bear out the notion that the two kinds of power are antithetical, as it appears that the legal-­ rational domination of demo­cratic power can only be built on the ruins of tradi­ tional African forms. J.-F. Médard’s take on the linkage between neopatrimonialism and demo­ cracy is greatly influenced by the legacy of M. Weber and of his­tor­ical soci­ ology, but it is devoid of any tele­olo­gical dir­ec­tion, as may be ascertained by how Médard conceives of the shared cri­teria of the state-­based and demo­cratic sover­eignty. In his view, ‘if the modern state pre­sup­poses the institutionalization of power, the demo­cratic state also demands such institutional mech­an­isms that may limit the arbit­rary use of power’ (Médard 1990: 25–36; Médard 1991b: 341). When discussing that linkage at the time when many African states were entering the Third Wave of demo­crat­ization, he upholds the incompatibility thesis by arguing, for instance, that ‘patrimonialism finds a nat­ural channel of expression in author­it­arianism while con­trib­ut­ing to the subversion of demo­ cracy.’ (Médard 1991a: 93). He con­siders that given that neopatrimonialism favors the personalization of political-­administrative relationships, it constitutes the reverse of power institutionalization, which is a hallmark of demo­cracy. Judging that ‘demo­crat­ization attempts are an effort to go beyond patrimonial­ ism, inasmuch as demo­cracy can only be based on a high degree of power insti­ tutionalization’, he deems that ‘demo­cracy, in so far as it would succeed in rendering leaders account­able, would be a way to curb patrimonialism through compelling it to “eat more slowly and in a less solitary fashion” ’ (Médard 1991b: 353). The dilemma that he raises derives from the fact that ‘a curbing or a bringing under control of the pol­itics of the belly [. . .] appears as a sine qua non con­dition of the introduction of demo­cratic regimes in Africa.’ However, J.-F. Médard’s work did not focus very much on Third Wave demo­ crat­ization, and it was not concerned with a thorough ana­lysis of the ways in which patrimonial practices may affect them. Transitologists, on the other hand, debated this at great lengths. Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle are very likely the scholars who went farthest in that dir­ec­tion by making neopatrimonialism the key inde­pend­ent vari­able of African demo­crat­ization, whether it concerned the dy­namics of demands for demo­crat­ization, or trans­ition modes or yet again long term consolidation. In view of the charac­ter­istics of patrimonialism, they note that a number of coun­tries in the de­veloping world show, in modified forms, some of the defining traits of neopatrimonialism, which influence the structure of their polit­ical dy­namics (Bratton and van de Walle 1997: 61–2). This includes the per­ sonalization of power by big men, clientelism and the utilization of pub­lic resources for private ends. Given these charac­ter­istics, such regimes lack

Can neopatrimonialism dissolve into democracy?   83 legitimacy and have to resort to coercion. Although there are wide vari­ations among them, these regimes are not very hospitable to com­peti­tion or cit­izen parti­ cipa­tion, and they stifle civil soci­ety (Bratton and van de Walle 1997: 68–76; Young 1994: 87–9). The im­plica­tions for demo­crat­ization are signi­fic­ant: dic­tators leave power only under compulsion, gen­erally after massive pop­ular mobil­iza­tion; elites are divided between in­siders enjoying the privileges of power and outsiders who feel excluded and unable to negotiate and engage in a zero-­sum game, which means that demo­crat­ization is always under the threat of those who lose out. Bratton and van de Walle conclude that in the neo-­patrimonial con­text demo­cratic gains are quickly eroded by the fact that patronage, author­it­arianism and the unfair manipulation of the rules of the game all combine to prevent the institutionaliza­ tion of demo­cracy (Bratton and van de Walle 1997: 233). This ana­lysis has the merit of reminding us of something that was already emphas­ized by Alexis de Tocqueville (1952), which is the fact that it is hard to have a clean slate in polit­ical practices and institutions when pursuing polit­ical change. From that per­spect­ive, neopatrimonialism appears as a set of informal institutions which, deeply rooted in the polit­ical landscape, guides the behavior of actors who reject the implementation of formal demo­cratic institutions and practices (Young 1994: 292). The notion of an incompatibility between patrimonialism and demo­cracy is in fact related to norm­ative con­sidera­tions and a partial and one-­sided in­ter­pretation of the key scholars (Médard, Weber) and of his­tor­ical soci­ology. If they are read more attentively, and if this is combined with a look at the empirical charac­ter­ istics of the ex­peri­ence of Third Wave demo­crat­ization, a more nuanced pic­ture emerges.

Neopatrimonialism and democracy What balance between formal norms and informal practices? The hypo­thesis of a mutual exclusion between demo­cracy and neopatrimonial­ ism has to do with the Weberian in­ter­pretation of the linkage between traditional and legal domination, but also with the a posteriori rationalization of the his­tory of the state, of demo­cracy and of the ana­lysis of the obs­tacles to demo­crat­ization in Africa. This, how­ever, is a conclusion drawn from a one-­sided understanding, tied to a norm­ative a priori and the need to install and entrench demo­cracy instead of simply studying it. A thorough examination of the works of Weber (and then of Médard) shows indeed that between neopatrimonialism and demo­ cracy the relationship is not so much one of opposi­tion as one of a balance between legal and informal norms: ‘in the neopatrimonial state, we do not observe only a lack in the distinction between private and pub­lic domains, but also a conflict between private norms and partially interiorized pub­lic norms’ (Médard 1991b: 334). However, I shall come back to M. Weber, whose typology prim­arily aims at helping in the comprehension of domination phenomena. Since ‘every such

84   M. Gazibo sys­tem attempts to estab­lish and to cultivate the belief in its legitimacy’, he sug­ gests that ‘it is use­ful to classify the types of domination according to the of claim to legitimacy typ­ic­ally made by each’ (Weber 1968: 213). That cri­terion implies the adoption of ideal types. For Weber, ideal types ‘are used by social and cultural sci­ent­ists to provide clarifying models of complex social actions’ (Whimster 2004: 2). The approach requires therefore a sim­pli­fica­tion of phe­ nomena that are presented in their purest and most ab­stract traits, and are thus constructed rather than given to the scholar. This is very clearly underscored by Weber, when he asserts that: we have taken for granted that soci­ology seeks to formulate type concepts and gen­eralized uniformities of empirical pro­cesses. [. . .]. As in the case of every gen­eralizing science the ab­stract character of the concepts of soci­ ology is respons­ible for the fact that, compared with actual his­tor­ical reality, they are rel­at­ively lacking in fullness of concrete con­tent [. . .]. For example, the same his­tor­ical phenomenon may be in one aspect feudal, in another pat­ rimonial, in another bur­eau­cratic, and in still another charismatic. In order to give a precise meaning to these terms, it is neces­sary for the sociologist to formulate pure ideal types [. . .]. It is prob­ably seldom if ever that a real phe­ nomenon can be found which cor­res­ponds exactly to one of these ideally constructed pure types. (1968: 19–20) The distinction between forms of domination, from which the ana­lysis of pat­ rimonialism derives, has therefore as its first ob­ject­ive to achieve ‘their concep­ tual formu­la­tion in the sharpest pos­sible form’ and to enable comparison among types and against an ideal-­type, given that ‘none of these three ideal types [. . .] is usually to be found in his­tor­ical cases in “pure” form’ (Weber 1968: 216). The neces­sary conclusion here is that, a priori, each type of domination – including demo­cracy – is by definition a mixed type, very much bound to incorp­or­ate legal and traditional or charismatic elements. While each type of domination is mixed, they are distinguished by being prim­arily charismatic, traditional or legal. It is therefore logical to conceive of a kind of mixed demo­cratic domination, and not only in Africa, where the legal aspect would prevail. Such coexist­ence would not be surprising to anyone famil­ iar with Médard’s view of the hybrid character of the state in Africa. The ideal-­ typical vantage point opens the door to an in­ter­pretation of the linkage between neopatrimonialism and demo­cracy that hinges on the issue of norm­ative conflict. In sound Weberian fashion, Médard dem­on­strates that one of the differ­enti­ation cri­teria of the African states – all of them con­sidered to be neopatrimonial – rests in their greater or shorter proximity to the patrimonial ideal‑type. In other words, good questions to ask when studying these real life cases are: ‘To what extent does patrimonialism link up with “modern” logics that are its obverse? To what extent are such logics subverted? To what extent do they have a specific effect?’ (Médard 1991b: 351) Médard dem­on­strates ‘the abil­ity to combine these

Can neopatrimonialism dissolve into democracy?   85 contra­dict­ory logics in a more or less viable neopatrimonialism . . . one of the keys to explaining, beyond the shared patrimonial kernel, the often large dif­fer­ ences in performance among states and leaders’ (1991b: 351–2). From this per­ spect­ive, the dif­fer­ence between coun­tries has less to do with strict patrimonial or legal identities and more to do with the degree to which formal legal norms or informal patrimonial norms prevail. Thus there is no longer the notion of an abso­lute opposi­tion between the neopatrimonial character of author­it­arianism and demo­cratic sys­tems that are free from patrimonial practices. The concept of neopatrimonialism is inherently hybrid and has been elaborated in order to account for mixed situ­ations. This leads G. Erdmann and U. Engel (2006: 17–18) to observe that any approach that seeks to define or opera­tionalize neopatrimoni­ alism must start from the idea that, since it is a mixed concept, it can actu­ally account for situ­ations that are very close to the pure patrimonial model, as well as for configurations that are associated with the legal-­rational model. As a result, sound reflection on demo­cracy and neopatrimonialism may be reduced neither to the quest for a native form of the sys­tem, nor to notions of futility and a smokescreen (Chabal and Daloz 1999; Bayart 2006). A re-­examination of the im­plica­tions of the ideal-­typical approach that under­ scores the notion of hybridity evoked by the concept of neopatrimonialism leads us out of exclusive bin­ary cat­egor­izations, and allows us to ana­lyse polit­ical regimes that resist such classifications (Carothers 2002: 9).

The new democracies as sites for the institutionalization of contradictory norms The coexist­ence of contra­dict­ory norms extends well beyond the regimes orig­ inating in the trans­itions attempted in so-­called neopatrimonial African coun­ tries. It has to do, more gen­erally, with the nature of the ‘new demo­cra­cies’ – those from African trans­itions, or in the post-­Soviet world, or under Latin Amer­ica’s author­it­arian bur­eau­cra­cies. As early as the beginning of the 1990s, the theme of hybrid regimes became prominent in studies on demo­crat­ization, leading to a reflection on the pos­sib­il­ity and the con­ditions for their survival, notably in the Third World (Riggs 1993). Larry J. Diamond (1999: 22) notes for instance that many among the coun­tries engaging in demo­crat­ization pro­ cesses are distinguished by the fact that their new regime endures without becoming institutionalized or legitimate – the two key features of so-­called consolidated demo­cra­cies (Bratton and van de Walle 1997: 236). In fact, Thomas Carothers (2002, quoted art­icle: 9) shows that in 2002, among the 100 or so coun­tries in demo­cratic trans­ition, only about 20 were in a consolidation phase. As for the others, while a few receded to author­it­arianism, the greater number resided in what he termed a ‘grey area’. Those are the coun­tries which neither return to the author­it­arian status quo ante, nor firm up the gains of polit­ical lib­eralization. The in‑between situ­ation explains the great multiplica­ tion of adjectives (Carothers 2002, quoted art­icle: 11) with which scholars strive to characterize these sys­tems (Collier and Levitsky 1997). T. Carothers

86   M. Gazibo suggests then that grey area coun­tries be clas­si­fied in two cat­egor­ies: coun­tries with feckless plur­al­ism and those with dominant-­power sys­tems. In the first cat­egory, which is remin­iscent of delegative demo­cra­cies (O’Donnell 1994) or demo­cra­cies marred by the elect­oralist fallacy (cf. Karl 1986), demo­cratic pro­ ced­ures are respected, sometimes leading to power alternation, but the sys­tem remains confined within the limits of pure elect­oral formalities. Corrupt and selfish politicians take the popu­la­tion hostage, depriving it of any tan­gible improvement in living con­ditions. The second cat­egory, which includes dominant-­power states, is close to the idea of illib­eral demo­cra­cies (Zakaria 1997): civil and polit­ical liberties are held back and more im­port­antly, one party, or even one man, completely dominates the polit­ical stage, to the point of blending with the state and leaving little chance for the pos­sib­il­ity of polit­ ical alternation. This is obviously not a very far cry away from the neopatrimo­ nial model of the ‘big man’ (Médard 1991a), that type of leader who personalizes power on the basis of a network of loyal followers and de­pend­ ents, and who manages to dominate the polit­ical and eco­nomic scene in his coun­try or region. The bin­ary classification of T. Carothers is an effort at condensing a great variety of pos­sible regimes. The two types that he identifies re­con­cile and add together key elements of the definitions of demo­cracy and of neopatrimonialism, which are supposed to be contra­dict­ory terms. He presents us with the incorpora­ tion of elements of demo­cracy such as elections, the exist­ence of a plurality of polit­ical par­ties, respect for a number of civil liberties, and the pos­sib­il­ity left open to the populace to parti­cip­ate in the polit­ical game. Yet at the same time, elements of neopatrimonialism, such as elite corruption, elite seizure of state power, resources and institutions, and big man paternalism, feature prominently. It is how­ever im­pos­sible to apply the concept of demo­cracy to all the new regimes without falling into the trap of conceptual elasticity (Sartori 1994). At the same time, we cannot relegate these sys­tems to the cat­egory of author­it­ arian regimes, from which they clearly differ, owing to the demo­cratic gains they made through polit­ical lib­eralization. To stick to one position is most cer­ tainly to renounce the abil­ity to capture the essence of hybrid regimes (for Latin Amer­ica, see Karl 1995). As L.J. Diamond (2002: 21) indicates, the question of whether coun­tries such as Russia, Turkey, Venezuela or Nigeria are or are not demo­cra­cies can no longer call for a simple answer. Many among these coun­tries have adopted demo­cratic forms without demo­cratic sub­ stance, and have thus become quite ambiguous sys­tems. Scholars have multi­ plied conceptualizations as a way out of this dilemma. David Collier and Steven Levitsky (1997) show that there has been a proliferation of cat­egor­ies as bizarre as ‘author­it­arian demo­cra­cies’, ‘neopatrimonial demo­cra­cies’, ‘military-­dominated demo­cra­cies’ or ‘protodemo­cra­cies’. Others have attempted even more complex explan­at­ory typologies. In contrast, G. Erdmann and U. Engel (2006: 29) suggest three types of regimes: demo­cra­cies, hybrids and author­it­arianisms. In their view, neopatrimonialism is not an auto­nom­ous cat­egory, but one pos­sible mode in each of these three types, fol­low­ing the

Can neopatrimonialism dissolve into democracy?   87 form of the gov­ern­ment and the bur­eau­cracy. In this model, one may conceive of author­it­arian regimes, sim­ilarly to a hybrid regime, being neopatrimonial. One may also conceive, among demo­cra­cies, of a sub-­category suit­able for many African regimes, that of the ‘neopatrimonial multiparty sys­tems’, in par­ allel with the sub-­categories that are specific to other regions, such as defective demo­cra­cies or illib­eral demo­cra­cies. Here the idea of norm­ative conflict and of fluctuating equilibrium between legal norms and patrimonial norms re­appears. While the previous typology is largely conceptual, and its authors do not provide any example coun­tries, L.J. Diamond’s typology divides coun­ tries into five cat­egor­ies. Criteria relate first to the distinction between so-­ called lib­eral demo­cra­cies and elect­oral demo­cra­cies, according to whether or not they enshrine an actual rule of law. The next two cat­egor­ies are pseudodemo­cra­cies, which de­scribe coun­tries that or­gan­ize elections (com­ petit­ive author­it­arian and hege­monic elect­oral author­it­arian regimes) and non-­ democracies, which are those coun­tries that have completely closed sys­tems (polit­ical closed author­it­arian regimes). The last cat­egory consists of ambigu­ ous regimes. Whether they speak of neopatrimonialism in Africa; of bossism or cacique demo­cracy in the Philippines; of democradura or dictablanda in Latin Amer­ica; or more gen­erally of feckless plur­al­ism, scholars usually refer to one or another of the practices which J.-F. Médard (1991b: 330) includes under the heading of neopatrimonialism. Besides the methodo­logical issues related to conceptual elas­ ticity that were mentioned above, a number of questions come to mind here: are these regimes transitory or will they endure? To what extent do they challenge the usual ana­lyt­ical models of democratization? The response to the first question is rel­at­ively straight­forward since we cannot understand these regimes as pre-­democratic formations that are meant to change into demo­cra­cies in due course. As early as the 1980s the first transitologists (O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986) did assert that trans­itions may lead to several pos­sible outcomes, demo­cracy being just one among these. Table 5.1  Authoritarian, hybrid and democratic regimes

Type of regime

Representative instances

Liberal democracies Electoral democracies Competitive authoritarian regimes Hegemonic electoral authoritarian regimes Politically closed authoritarian regimes Ambiguous regimes

Canada, Chile, Japan, Botswana, Cape Verde Brazil, Ghana, India, Niger, Mali, Philippines Russia, Malaysia, Gabon, Cameroon, Iran Kazakhstan, Singapore, Burkina, Uganda, Egypt Turkmenistan, Cuba, Sudan, Syria, China, Swaziland Armenia, Venezuela, Nigeria, Turkey

Source: adapted from L.J. Diamond (2002, quoted article: 30–1)

88   M. Gazibo This then brings us to the second question, which bears on the issue of ana­lyt­ ical models. These regimes seem not only to be able to endure (Weffort 1998), but even to become ‘stable com­pon­ents’ of the polit­ical landscape, that is to say, pos­sibly permanent forms, as is indicated by Fareed Zakaria (1997, quoted art­ icle) and Richard Banégas (2003). Such permanence calls for innov­at­ive takes with respect not only to their nature, but also to the issues of consolidation. It is gen­erally accepted in the current liter­at­ure that such regimes cannot consolidate (Weffort 1998: 226; Diamond 1999: 22). Yet hybrid regimes challenge a model grounded in the ana­lysis of less ambiguous, more classic cases. Some scholars offer insights in that dir­ec­tion. For example, R. Banégas draws our attention more specifically to neopatrimonialism and shows, on the basis of ‘vote com­ moditization’ in Benin, that far from undermining local logics of the ‘pol­itics of the belly,’ demo­cracy can be reinvented to link up with these polit­ical regimes. Wolfgang Merkel (2004) remarks, for his part, that the different hybrid regimes suggested by scholars differ only by the type of flaws that they present, and he suggests that demo­cracy may be conceived of as a set of five interde­pend­ent partial regimes, the elect­oral regime being the central com­pon­ent around which gravitate the four other regimes, which are: polit­ical rights; civil liberties; sepa­ ration of powers and the effect­ive power for governing. Each regime cor­res­ ponds to certain exigencies. According to the way in which such exigencies of a regime are affected, W. Merkel identifies four kinds of flawed demo­cra­cies: illib­eral demo­cracy, domain demo­cracy, exclusive demo­cracy and delegative democracy. Up to this point, there is nothing strikingly new in this ana­lysis, since these concepts have also been suggested by other scholars. The really innov­at­ive idea has to do with the fact that the bin­ary approach which distinguishes consolidated demo­cra­cies from those which are not is shown to be reductive. It is also ana­lyt­ ically im­port­ant that consolidation can be seen as a flex­ible pro­cess that varies from one partial regime to another. These pro­posi­tions also provide a first answer to J.-F. Médard’s questions about the pos­sib­il­ity of combining contra­ dict­ory neopatrimonial and legal-­rational logics. From a norm­ative viewpoint, W. Merkel’s approach appears open to criticism, since it risks leading to a low­ ering of demo­cratic stand­ards. But ana­lyt­ically, it offers a richer spectrum, in terms of cases and nuances; after all, that is what Third Wave demo­cratic ex­peri­ ences make obvious. The idea of hybrid regimes is not new, but it is with the third wave of demo­ crat­ization that interrogations have been raised with respect to the capa­city for demo­cracy to be grounded in neopatrimonial or related regimes (Diamond 2002, art­icle quoted: 23–5). Such a debate, it may be argued, goes back to the 1990s, characterized in Latin Amer­ica by a stagnation in polit­ical reforms that were then unable to entrench demo­cracy (O’Donnell 2001; Morlino 2001). In Africa, too this period was marked by difficult attempts to transform patrimonial regimes into consolidated demo­cra­cies (Quantin 2000). One may be tempted to see in these evolutions an anomaly, but such an in­ter­pretation would result from a norm­ative per­spect­ive oblivious of both theor­et­ical founda­tions and empirical

Can neopatrimonialism dissolve into democracy?   89 teachings. The exegesis of the writings of Weber, Médard and other scholars along with the examination of empirical pro­cesses reveal the coexist­ence, but also the pos­sib­il­ity of an ‘institutionalization’ of regimes, that mix bur­eau­cratic and patrimonial com­pon­ents. This phenomenon has nurtured debates on hybrid regimes, although, as indicated by G. Erdmann and U. Engel (2006: 30), we still remain short of the conceptual tools required to fully understand these regimes in their diversity. In addition to this, the more im­port­ant debate on the consolida­ tion of demo­cratic regimes remains open. If these regimes are a new phenome­ non and are to last, it is urgent to ponder in a more sys­tematic fashion our understanding of demo­cracy and of its functioning. We need to re­think the issue and call upon indic­ators and meas­ure­ments different from those atuned to the classic and less ambiguous cases. And finally, we have to depart from norm­ative templates since these generate an a priori impediment to the appraisal of a-­symptomatic situations.

6 Neopatrimonialism and its reinterpretations by development economics Alice Sindzingre

Economics tradi­tion­ally explains growth by factors such as phys­ical investment or human capital. In the last two decades, how­ever, the poor performance of many low-­income coun­tries, espe­cially in Sub-­Saharan Africa, has intensified the ex­plora­tion of al­tern­ative vari­ables in the list of pos­sible determinants of growth, in par­ticu­lar vari­ables related to eco­nomic and polit­ical institutions. Development eco­nom­ics thus makes an increasing use of concepts borrowed from polit­ical science, such as predation and corruption, in order to explain the dif­fer­ences in growth rates and income levels between countries. Disciplines that belong to the broad field of eco­nom­ics, such as de­velopment eco­nom­ics, polit­ical eco­nomy of de­velopment, and neo‑institutional eco­nom­ics use concepts that stem from the neoclassical conceptual framework, for example gains and costs (e.g. transaction costs), incentives, prop­erty rights, inter­est groups and the like. They explain polit­ical institutions, for example, and facili‑ tate the latter’s trans­forma­tion into ‘vari­ables’ that may be tractable in mathem­ atical models. Indeed, models and econo­metric ana­lyses (usually cross-­country regressions) have become over the second half of the twentieth century the key tools of validation in eco­nom­ics. Yet these tools rarely allow for an in-­depth understanding of the causalities at stake, as vari­ables refer to the forms of phe‑ nomena, which more­over are supposed to be ident­ical throughout his­tory and whatever the context. Other theor­et­ical approaches in eco­nom­ics, how­ever, have departed from the neoclassical framework. They emphasised that growth tra­ject­ories may be subject to mul­tiple ‘equilibria’ – ‘high’ and ‘low’ – that may be triggered by shocks or random devi­ations, which may be small. These growth tra­ject­ories are characterised by path dependence, feedback pro­cesses, increasing returns, cumu‑ lative causation and threshold effects, and depend on the combinations of various factors (Arthur 1994; David 2000; Durlauf and Young 2001; Sindzingre 2005b). For example, if corruption does not neces­sar­ily impede growth, it may stabilise coun­tries in low equilibria and pov­erty traps. This chapter ana­lyses the concept of neopatrimonialism in the per­spect­ive of de­velopment eco­nom­ics and assesses the uses which that dis­cip­line has made of the concept. A key observation, how­ever, is that the concept is rarely mentioned expli­citly in the de­velopment eco­nom­ics liter­at­ure, being viewed as belonging to

Neopatrimonialism and development economics   91 polit­ical science and polit­ical soci­ology. The chapter reveals the richness of the concept, as the latter gathers and links together phenomena that simul­tan­eously resort to the polit­ical and eco­nomic domains; it dem­on­strates the lim­ita­tions of the purely quantitative methodologies that are now favoured by stand­ard eco­ nom­ics in the understanding of the impacts of such phenomena and their con­tri­ bu­tion to dif­fer­ences in eco­nomic growth. The chapter finally shows the use­fulness of the concept of neopatrimonialism for the understanding of lock-­in mech­an­isms, as this concept ana­lyses polit­ical and eco­nomic vicious circles which typ­ic­ally lock coun­tries into pov­erty traps. A theory of institutional trans­ forma­tion is therefore suggested which would re­con­cile the neopatrimonial approach and de­velopment eco­nom­ics in highlighting the multidimensionality of polit­ical institutions and the en­do­geneity of polit­ical and eco­nomic processes. The chapter is structured as follows. First, it discusses the concept of neopat‑ rimonialism and shows that the concept has greatly enhanced the understanding of the under­lying causes of the poor performance of some de­veloping coun­tries, espe­cially in Sub-­Saharan Africa; it reveals the multidimensionality of the concept of neopatrimonialism, as neopatrimonialism refers to composite pro­ cesses and phenomena that are simul­tan­eously ‘pub­lic’ and ‘private’, polit­ical and eco­nomic, indi­vidual and social, ‘old’ and ‘new’. The chapter also emphas­ ises that the relationships between neopatrimonial dy­namics, on the one hand, and specific polit­ical institutions and regimes, on the other, remain inconclusive. Second, the chapter highlights the distinctions between the concept of neopatri‑ monialism and related concepts such as, among others, clientelism, corruption, cronyism and capture, as well as the plurality of their relationships with growth. Third, this con­tri­bu­tion examines the studies of polit­ical pro­cesses by de­velopment eco­nom­ics and its uncrit­ical use of modelling. It discusses the ana­lyses of the diverse phenomena that are subsumed under the concept of neopatrimonialism by de­velopment eco­nom­ics and the polit­ical eco­nomy of de­velopment, for which, signi­fic­antly, these dis­cip­lines have used the notion of corruption rather than neopatrimonialism. These dis­cip­lines’ studies are over­ whelm­ingly based on modelling and quantitative ana­lyses (usually via econo­ metrics). The chapter shows the lim­ita­tions inherent in modelling in regard to the understanding of the impact of these phenomena on eco­nomic growth, since neopatrimonialism refers to composite and multidimensional pro­cesses and phenomena. It argues that the concept of neopatrimonialism has been a precursor in putting together and demonstrating the im­port­ance of the phenom‑ ena, which eco­nom­ics now conceptualises in terms of threshold effects and stable ‘low equilibria’, and in par­ticu­lar the pos­sib­il­ity of vicious circles, self-­ reinforcing pro­cesses and ‘traps’, such as the ‘traps’ where neopatrimonial pro­cesses and eco­nomic stagnation reinforce themselves. The neopatrimonial approach and these concepts elaborated by de­velopment eco­nom­ics can mutu‑ ally enrich themselves as both focus on the multidimensionality of institutions and beha­vi­our as well as the en­do­geneity of polit­ical and eco­nomic dy­namics, and thus result in a more refined theory of institutional and eco­nomic transformation.

92   A. Sindzingre

Neopatrimonialism, states and development The first two chapters of this volume have shown how the concept of neopatri‑ monialism, initially coined by Eisenstadt (1973) and further deepened by Médard (1982, 1992), was sub­sequently applied to a growing diversity of con­texts. ‘Pat‑ rimonialism’, Eisenstadt argued, referred to cases of ‘traditional’ and personal domination, while neopatrimonialism could prosper in modern soci­eties (Erdmann and Engel 2006, for an assessment of the liter­at­ure). As a result of its dissemination, it lost its precision and became assim­il­ated to ‘predation’, thus transforming the African neopatrimonial state into a ‘global prototype’ of the anti-­developmental state (Bach 2011). The polit­ical science liter­at­ure on de­veloping coun­tries, and more specifically on Sub-­Saharan Africa, has also elaborated a series of concepts, thought to be more apt to characterise key fea‑ tures of the neopatrimonial state: for example, the concept of ‘quasi-­states’ or notions of ‘kleptocratic’, ‘prebendal’, pred­atory rule – the latter being opposed to the ‘de­velop­mental’ states of East Asia, such as Japan, Tai­wan and South Korea (Evans 1992). Neopatrimonialism as a multidimensional concept In contrast to patrimonialism, which has highlighted dualism and differentiated between two regimes (im­per­sonal and personal), the concept of neopatrimonial‑ ism has emphasised the overlap and exchanges between a series of domains: the pub­lic and the private, the polit­ical and the eco­nomic, the indi­vidual and the col­ lect­ive, and the ‘old and the ‘new’. It refers to modes of indi­vidual beha­vi­our that may be shared by groups – domination by certain cat­egor­ies of indi­viduals, privately appropriated gains – and mech­an­isms that blur the distinction between the pub­lic and the private domains – state resources are ‘privatised’ in the sense that indi­viduals treat them as private prop­erty – and the distinction between the polit­ical and eco­nomic domains – power over indi­viduals is simul­tan­eously a power over resources (e.g. land, production, workforce and so on). The concept gathers the dimensions of concentration of polit­ical power, the redis­tribu­tion of personal favours, and the private use of state resources (von Soest 2007). Neo‑ patrimonialism also includes sociological and psychological dimensions, as the norms of beha­vi­our of ruling groups may spread to all levels of society. A crucial point is that this beha­vi­our is not the expression of ‘traditional’ norms. Modern polit­ical sys­tems in de­veloping coun­tries, as well as in Sub-­ Saharan Africa, are no longer traditional (Médard 1983). The phenomena linked to ‘neo’ patrimonialism are ‘new’ in that they are not the mere translation of ‘traditional’ patrimonial institutions (e.g. village) but result from a trans­forma­ tion and borrowing of elements of these ‘traditional’ institutions. Political ‘entre­ pren­eurs’ utilise the overlapping of positions in the public-­private and political-­economic spheres, in addition to elements from tradition, but give them different forms or con­tents. Neopatrimonial phenomena may, for example, allo­ cate new con­tents to old institutional forms. For example, the idiom of witchcraft

Neopatrimonialism and development economics   93 may be applied to com­peti­tion over new markets; old con­tents may be alloc­ated to new forms – e.g. ‘traditional’ legitimacies may drive formal demo­cratic institutions. The trajectories of post-­independence African states In Sub-­Saharan Africa, the dy­namics of the aftermath of inde­pend­ence con­trib­ uted to the formation of neopatrimonial states. In the imme­diate post-­ independence period in the 1960s, Sub-­Saharan Africa rulers were faced with the dual constraint of a limited industrial base for priming the pump of de­velopment and of building their legitimacy (Englebert 2000). The existing private sector consisted mostly of foreign firms. These rulers relied on foreign investors (as in Côte d’Ivoire), built their eco­nom­ies through state inter­ven­tion, pub­lic ownership and ex­ploita­tion of resources (e.g. via state-­owned enterprises), and fostered private entre­pren­eurs who were chosen among their polit­ical allies and whose wealth did not represent a threat (Sindzingre 2000, on the case of Ghana). Fragile polit­ical legitimacy often incited rulers to discourage do­mestic private ac­tiv­ities that were not under their control. In this con­text state resources and rents (e.g. nat­ural resources, state-­owned enterprises, rights to specific ac­tiv­ities, access to credit) constituted the basis of private accumulation, either for the private gains of politicians and civil ser­vants, or for private firms and indi­viduals. The do­mestic private sector was composed either of polit­ical allies who were ‘bought’ by rulers through pub­lic resources, or of entre­pren­eurs who had to choose between harassment and pol­itics. This ambivalence – and sometimes antagonism – of rulers towards the do­mestic private sector is typical of many Sub-­Saharan Africa coun­tries and has been con­ sidered to be one of the factors in eco­nomic stagnation. The ‘pub­lic’ and the ‘private’ spheres have been built both on overlap and mistrust, which has been compounded by bur­eau­cra­cies that also functioned along the extractive and rentier model. In an eco­nomic per­spect­ive, these pro­cesses gen­er­ated a ‘locking­in’ stable equilibrium, indeed a ‘low’ equilibrium’ or a pov­erty trap. Most post-­independence Sub-­Saharan Africa eco­nom­ies never escaped the ‘small open eco­nomy’ structure that had been built during co­lo­nialism, where colonies exported pri­mary commodities to the metropole and imported manufac‑ tured goods from it (Hopkins 1973), with their fiscal rev­enues depending heavily on the export of pri­mary products (coffee, cocoa, oil, etc.). The above self-­ fulfilling pro­cesses were reinforced in the 1980s when the fiscal balance of Sub-­ Saharan Africa coun­tries was affected by the fall and sub­sequent increased volatility of the inter­na­tional prices of commodities. Most gov­ern­ments had no choice but to turn to the inter­na­tional fin­an­cial institutions (IFIs), notably the IMF and the World Bank, which con­ditioned their lending to the implementation of reform programmes, and in par­ticu­lar a tight control of pub­lic spending. Neo‑ patrimonial mech­an­isms – private appropriation of pub­lic resources, ambiva‑ lence towards the do­mestic private sector – were also compounded by large informal sectors that con­trib­uted to the formation of ‘traps’, i.e. vicious circles

94   A. Sindzingre where states were under pressure from the IFIs to collect rev­enues whereas indi­ viduals were seeking to escape taxation because of the weak cred­ib­il­ity of gov­ ern­ments and their pol­icies, the latter being perceived as mostly driven by motives of personal enrichment. IFI programmes – implemented from the 1980s to the 2000s – did not cause growth rates to rise, which in most Sub-­Saharan Africa states were close to zero (Easterly 2001). It was only the boom in commodity prices (which started in the mid-­2000s), that boosted growth in most Sub-­Saharan Africa eco­nom­ies. The recurrence of civil wars, combined with eco­nomic stagnation and the emergence of a ‘globalised’ world in the 1990s, led to ana­lyses of Sub-­Saharan Africa states as ‘post-­patrimonial’, or ‘collapsed’ and ‘fragile’ in the IFI liter­at­ure. Being an extreme modality of neopatrimonialism and the ‘quasi-­states’ per­spect­ive de­veloped by Jackson and Rosberg (1982), a ‘warlordism’ polit­ical eco­nomy has viewed as a sufficient con­dition for a state the exist­ence of a group that controls the extraction of a rent that can be marketed inter­na­tionally (mines, etc.) (Reno 1998). In this approach, globalisation did not modify the relev­ance of the neo‑ patrimonial model, but has rather made it pos­sible to ‘globalise’ the circulation and profitabil­ity of resources. Neopatrimonialism as a political process inducing economic outcomes In the liter­at­ure of de­velopment eco­nom­ics and polit­ical eco­nomy of de­velopment, the phenomena gathered together in the concept of neopatrimoni‑ alism have been explained by eco­nomic factors such as the types of avail­able resources (Sachs and Warner 1997). The so-­called ‘nat­ural resource curse’ is thus associated with ‘bad governance’, corruption and predation (Leite and Wei‑ dmann 1999; Auty 2001), high levels of in­equal­ity (Engerman and Sokoloff 1997; Easterly 2000), a distorted export structure and lack of diversification of exports and slower growth. In contrast, the concept of neopatrimonialism emphasises that it should be understood in the first place as a polit­ical device inducing specific beha­vi­our and modes of exercising power. It is the outcomes of polit­ical sys­tems that may be ‘de­velop­mental’ or pred­atory. The his­tor­ical formation of Sub-­Saharan Africa states made de­velopment the pri­mary ob­ject­ive of post-­independence gov­ern­ ments, but due to the weakness of ‘im­per­sonal’ institutions, and con­texts of polit­ical and eco­nomic in­stability, this ob­ject­ive became con­ditional on polit­ical consolidation, and therefore, in a vicious circle, on accumulation of wealth by politicians. This polit­ical consolidation, in the absence of a large labour-­intensive industrial base, often relied on the alloca­tion of rents from nat­ural resources. The rationalities that underlie neopatrimonialism are prim­arily polit­ical, but the concept en­com­passes their eco­nomic im­plica­tions. In neopatrimonial con­ texts, incentives to de­velopment are con­ditional on the polit­ical calculations of par­ticu­lar groups; oppor­tun­ities for eco­nomic trans­forma­tion are seized upon provided they fit into the polit­ical inter­ests of rulers or elites. Individual

Neopatrimonialism and development economics   95 charac­ter­istics of rulers are im­port­ant vari­ables, in par­ticu­lar their time frame, as revealed by Olson (1993): a short-­term time horizon may be an incentive for the siphoning off of resources; a long-­term horizon makes rentier beha­vi­our rational. In the former case rulers may be genu­inely pred­atory; they may even have an inter­est in the destruction of polit­ical and eco­nomic institutions that would foster de­velopment (Robinson 1996), as these institutions could allow for a more equal redis­tribu­tion of resources and wealth that would not be controlled by the ruler and would therefore constitute a potential polit­ical threat. An inconclusive link between neopatrimonialism and specific political regimes By construction, the concept of neopatrimonialism explains the dis­connection from specific forms of polit­ical regimes of this specific polit­ical eco­nomy mech­ an­ism and treatment of the public-­private divide, as it underscores mech­an­isms of overlapping (public-­private, political-­economic) and personal power that may fill different forms and formal institutions. Neopatrimonialism does not appear to be linked to a par­ticu­lar type of polit­ ical regime, e.g. demo­cracy or author­it­arianism. Similarly, it is not linked to par­ ticu­lar types of pub­lic pol­icies, e.g. less ‘account­able’, or ‘transparent’ pol­icies, as neopatrimonialism refers to sets of indi­vidual pref­er­ences, social mech­an­isms and functions, which may be conveyed by a great variety of ‘forms’, by many types of formal pol­icies and institutions. For example, pol­icies whose forms have been devised in order to improve account­abil­ity may in fact strengthen neo‑ patrimonial dy­namics, as shown by Soest (2007) in the case of auto­nom­ous rev­ enue collection agencies in Zambia, where their effect­iveness – increasing rev­enues – in fact increased the resources avail­able for neopatrimonial redis­ tribu­tion and hence reinforced the neopatrimonial system. Democracy is a telling example. Rulers may ruin their coun­tries while respecting demo­cratic forms. There is indeed no robust relationship between neopatrimonial or ‘de­velop­mental’ states and types of formal polit­ical sys­tems, and sim­ilarly the relationships between growth and a formal polit­ical regime such as demo­cracy remain highly debated (e.g. Bardhan 1993; Przeworski and Limongi 1993). The ‘de­velop­mental states’ in East Asia emerged under the aegis of author­it­arian regimes (as in Korea, or Singapore and China1). In many de­veloping coun­tries in the 1950s, author­it­arian regimes were reputed to be better equipped to introduce modernisation. In contrast, many neopatrimonial states are formally demo­cratic. The author­ it­arian ‘restorations’ that followed the wave of demo­crat­isation in Sub-­Saharan Africa in the 1990s revealed that setting up formal demo­cratic institutions was insufficient to modify the ‘low equilibria’ created by neopatrimonialism and the conception of polit­ical power as representing an access to state resources, which over decades had stabilised and become routine beha­vi­our (Médard 1991a). Access to state resources being both a con­dition and promise of wealth indeed constitutes a power­ful and self-­perpetuating incentive, where formal demo­cratic

96   A. Sindzingre institutions may in fact provide new oppor­tun­ities for pred­atory practices (Médard 1992) – the un­cer­tainties stemming from failed demo­crat­isation and the sub­sequent fights over resources may also consolidate neopatrimonialism, as shown by Englebert and Ron (2004) in the case of the relationships between oil and civil war in the Repub­lic of the Congo. This is why it is difficult to ana­lyse neopatrimonialism solely through formal vari­ables and with the tools of econo­ metrics and cross-­country regressions. Neopatrimonial and de­velop­mental regimes result from various combinations that involve polit­ical inter­ests, indi­ vidual and group charac­ter­istics, polit­ical and eco­nomic institutions, social norms, the eco­nomic envir­on­ment, among many elements that are specific to given coun­tries and time periods. More im­port­ant than the forms of polit­ical regimes, the polit­ical determinants of the stability of neopatrimonial sys­tems and growth refer to factors such as the trust of cit­izens vis-­à-vis elites, the ways rulers use and alloc­ate pub­lic resources, and the nature of institutions (captured by the groups in power, providing checks and balances, and so on) as well as their form (e.g. proportional or polarised pres­id­en­tial sys­tems, etc.). The size of middle classes thus seems an im­port­ant de­velop­mental factor (Easterly 2002). Capital flight is also a classic indic­ator of the lack of trust of cit­izens in their own gov­ern­ments and eco­nom­ies, and indeed Sub-­Saharan Africa is one of the regions where it is the highest (Ajayi 1997), espe­cially when compared to East Asian states, where cronyism and corruption may prevail but cit­izens invest rents in the region. Capital flight amounted to 3 per cent of Asia’s wealth vs. 37 per cent in Sub-­Saharan Africa during the 1970‑1990 period (Collier and Gunning, 1997). Between 1970 and 2004, Sub-­ Saharan Africa private external assets exceeded its pub­lic external liabil­it­ies: total capital flight amounted to $420 billion (in 2004 dollars), compared to the external debt of $227 billion (Ndikumana and Boyce 2008).

Neopatrimonialism, corruption, cronyism: commonalities and differences The concept of neopatrimonialism has deepened the understanding of other phe‑ nomena that are related to, but distinct from, neopatrimonial pro­cesses, as well as their respective determinants and con­sequences, in par­ticu­lar corruption, clien‑ telism, cronyism and ‘capture’. These latter concepts, how­ever, have supplanted that of patrimonialism in polit­ical science and are signi­fic­antly more investigated than it, whereas eco­nomic ana­lyses have mainly focused on that of corruption. When contrasting neopatrimonialism with related concepts, the key point is that the concept of neopatrimonialism refers to a full polit­ical and eco­nomic sys­ tem, where both levels reinforce themselves, which shapes polit­ical and eco­ nomic institutions, social norms, and indi­vidual beha­vi­our and beliefs. Also, neopatrimonialism subsumes and differs from the concepts of corruption, clien‑ telism, nepotism, and personalisation of power because it refers to a par­ticu­lar mode of formation and functioning of the state, to specific polit­ical relationships between its constituents – gov­ern­ments, civil ser­vants, inter­est groups – and to

Neopatrimonialism and development economics   97 precise mech­an­isms, such as the appropriation of pub­lic rents for private accu‑ mulation, which have specific impacts on de­velopment (Médard 1990). Corruption as a set of heterogeneous activities Corruption is a concept that is narrower than that of neopatrimonialism, as it does not refer to a full polit­ical and eco­nomic sys­tem, as does neopatrimonial‑ ism, but to a set of certain ac­tiv­ities. Also, there may be polit­ical and eco­nomic settings where corruption is per­vas­ive, which are not neces­sar­ily neopatrimonial. Corruption is also broader than the concept of neopatrimonialism, as it an activ‑ ity that can be attached to a great diversity of other ac­tiv­ities. Corruption is diffi‑ cult to define and, par­ticu­larly in eco­nom­ics – that typ­ic­ally uses it as a factor of explanation of many other eco­nomic phenomena – en­com­passes many hetero­ geneous ac­tiv­ities, such as bribery, influence peddling, embezzlement, mis-­ invoicing, vote-­buying, etc. (Sindzingre and Milelli 2010). Corrupt ac­tiv­ities are never­the­less a recurrent dimension of neopatrimonial‑ ism. Likewise, simil­ar­ities between neopatrimonialism and corruption may be found in terms of their impacts. There is now a consensus on the detrimental con­sequences of corruption (Sindzingre 2004b, 2005c): impoverishing the poor even further, profiting the rich, aggravating in­equal­it­ies because it ex­ploits the poor who, by definition, are less capable of defending themselves polit­ically (Gupta et al. 1998; Banerjee 1997). Creating a vicious circle, corruption increases even further the low cred­ib­il­ity of the state and fosters the informalisa‑ tion of eco­nomic ac­tiv­ities. This in turn lowers fiscal rev­enues, hinders the build‑ ing of infrastructures and social redis­tribu­tion that precisely would improve the state’s reputation (Sindzingre 1998). The size of eco­nom­ies and markets also mat­ters and corruption has a more dev­ast­ating impact in coun­tries, which are poor, that often export only one product and have only a handful of formal firms and banks, as is the case in much of Sub-­Saharan Africa. The export structure also influences the impact of corruption: pri­mary commodities create low added value, require little local human capital and favour less labour-­intensive invest‑ ments than capital-­intensive ones, which are prone to corruption (e.g. ports, roads) (Tanzi and Davoodi 1997). In view of the high risk premium associated with Sub-­Saharan Africa, investors prefer investments that yield rapid, high returns, but which are typ­ic­ally exposed to inter­na­tional corruption (such as en­clave investment in oil and minerals). Neopatrimonialism shares many commonalities with clientelism. As shown by the title of his 1982 paper (‘Political clientelism or neo-­patrimonialism’), for Médard both sys­tems had to be distinguished. Patronage and patron–client rela‑ tionships, how­ever, may be viewed as being a central element of a neopatrimo‑ nial sys­tem (Erdmann and Engel 2007) – typical examples of clientelism being par­ticu­lar indi­viduals or groups that target trans­fers taken from private resources or pub­lic funds to other indi­viduals or groups in order to buy their support. The concept of ‘capture’ (‘polit­ical’, ‘elite’ capture, Bardhan and Mookherjee 2000) is also related to that of neopatrimonialism: it is narrower than it, how­ever,

98   A. Sindzingre as the ‘capture’ of polit­ical pro­cesses, pol­icies and institutions by private interest-­groups is a dimension of neopatrimonialism. ‘Regulatory capture’ is the capture of pol­icies and legal institutions by specific groups in order to accu­mu­ late wealth and power, both of which are conducive to one another in such a sys­ tem; this latter concept has been widely used to trans­ition eco­nom­ies after the fall of com­mun­ism in 1989 (Hellman et al. 2003), with this set of studies, inter­ estingly enough, having ignored the concept of neopatrimonialism. The contrast with ‘productive’ cronyism The concept of cronyism also relates to that of neopatrimonialism but may be distinguished from it. The concept of ‘cronyism’ has been more widely used in studies of Asian settings. It de­scribes the overlapping between the polit­ical elite, on the one hand, and business groups and their networks, on the other, which are typ­ic­ally based on the exchange of resources: on polit­ical funding and bribes on the part of businessmen, and alloca­tion of rents, control over resources and rights on the part of politicians. Cronyism refers to the polit­ical connections of firms, with firms that are connected to the gov­ern­ment enjoying sub­sidies and bene­fits that unconnected firms do not. Cronyism does not always hinder growth or the de­velopment of the private sector and investment, as is shown by certain South East Asian coun­tries (Malaysia, Thailand), as it relies on mutual inter­ests and incentives to maintain the two-­way flows of resources. This is why it is often referred to as ‘crony capit­al­ism’ (Bhagwati 2000; Kang 2002). In contrast, neopatrimonial sys­tems rely more on the appropriation of pub­lic resources by indi­viduals for their personal bene­fit (or their social networks) than on reciprocal exchanges of pub­lic and private assets, and they do not require the exist­ence of a signi­fic­ant private sector. Cronyism has been therefore often been viewed as more bene­fi­cial for growth and being more ‘productive’ than neopatri‑ monialism, as the latter includes an intrinsic dimension of ‘unproductive’ extrac‑ tion levied on pub­lic resources and private entre­pren­eurship. This may explain the dif­fer­ence in eco­nomic performance between East Asia and Sub-­Saharan Africa (Sindzingre 2002). Contrasting neopatrimonialism and cronyism refines the comparison between Sub-­Saharan Africa and Asian states and highlights phenomena that may be spe‑ cific to the latter, for example Korea with the collusion between politicians and the industrial conglomerates (chaebols), Southeast Asia with the business net‑ works between politicians and their cronies, and vote buying as in Thailand. Cronyism, how­ever, exhibits common features with neopatrimonialism as their effects on growth remain a mat­ter of debate. Well before the 1997 fin­an­cial crisis the East Asian ‘miracle’ had been viewed as an ‘ersatz capit­al­ism’ relying on the redis­tribu­tion of rents to connected firms (Yoshihara 1988; Bello and Rosenfeld 1990; Clad 1989), and despite its unques­tion­able spectacular growth, sim­ilar questionings have been applied to China, e.g. re­gard­ing the role of the well-­ known ‘connections’ (guanxi) (Taube 2009). Asian gov­ern­ments never­the­less used these ar­range­ments for channelling rents into productive sectors and

Neopatrimonialism and development economics   99 investment (Malaizé and Sindzingre 1998). Politicians and the business sector had common inter­ests towards growth in order to strengthen their legitimacy and profits respectively (on Korea, Kang 2002) according to an ‘alli­ance capit­al­ism’ (Wade 2000). Collusion between politicians, banks and firms, and the family ownership and management of firms, have not been detrimental to growth and may even have con­trib­uted to it (on Thailand, Suehiro 2001). The ad­vant­ages of the polit­ically connected firms, how­ever, may have decreased after the fin­an­cial crisis of 1997–8 (on Malaysia and Thailand, Johnson et al. 2006). A lesson of these comparisons is that it is the inter­actions of these different phenomena with other institutions, the specific social groups involved and the type of use of rents, that determine in fine their effects on growth. Conversely, high growth rates may occur in coun­tries that are plagued by kleptocracy, cor‑ ruption, and state capture, such as commodity-­dependent coun­tries where growth is driven by the fluc­tu­ation of the inter­na­tional prices of nat­ural resources – as has been the case since the mid-­2000s in oil producing coun­tries, e.g. in Nigeria, Angola or Equatorial Guinea.

Neopatrimonialism and development economics: prospects for shared conceptualisations The phenomena that are subsumed in the concept of neopatrimonialism have been ana­lysed by de­velopment eco­nom­ics and the polit­ical eco­nomy of de­velopment. These dis­cip­lines, how­ever, have much more used the notion of corruption – and in the IFI and pol­icymaking liter­at­ure, related terms such as ‘weak institutions’, ‘poor governance’ and the like, than that of neopatrimonial‑ ism, which is prac­tically ignored in economics. Current stand­ard de­velopment eco­nom­ics uses sim­ilar concepts in order to explain eco­nomic and polit­ical prob­lems: indeed, if eco­nom­ics addresses a polit­ ical phenomenon, it is in order to ana­lyse it with the conceptual toolkit of the eco­nom­ics dis­cip­line, via concepts such as incentives, contracts, costs and gains, in­forma­tion asymmetries, collusion, and various theor­et­ical frameworks such as the principal-­agent theory, institutional eco­nom­ics – with the concepts of trans‑ action costs and prop­erty rights (which are sometimes even sub­sti­tutes for the concept of institutions) – and ‘polit­ical macro­economics’, which models the eco­ nomic and pol­icy con­sequences of different forms of gov­ern­ment and polit­ical institutions (e.g. the fiscal impacts of elections, the eco­nomic effects of consti­tu­ tions, etc., Persson and Tabellini 2000, 2003). Explanations of growth tra­ject­ ories via concepts such as path dependence, lock-­in pro­cesses, pos­it­ive feedbacks, threshold effects and traps have remained rel­at­ively peripheral in de­velopment economics. The economic modelling of political processes and its limitations Numerous studies in the fields of de­velopment eco­nom­ics and the polit­ical eco­ nomy of de­velopment confine themselves to the use of ‘institutional’ vari­ables in

100   A. Sindzingre econo­metric regressions that ex­plore the determinants of growth within or across coun­tries (Kenny and Williams 2001). These include cat­egor­ies of polit­ical regimes (e.g. demo­cracy, dic­tatorship) and the number of polit­ical par­ties or elections, with little reflection on the concept of institution itself or of the nature of the polit­ical or eco­nomic institution con­sidered. The necessity of modelling and quantifying obliges finding proxies, which may only be remotely linked with what they aim to represent (e.g. the number of news­papers as a proxy of rule of law), and with ‘institutional vari­ables’ aggregating hetero­geneous phenomena. In order to estab­lish quantifiable causalities, these ‘institutional vari­ables’ are posited as discrete entities that are stable across time and inde­pend­ent of their con­text and their relationships with others in a given soci­ety, e.g. the judiciary, the Parliament and so on (Sindzingre 2005a). These vari­ables usually refer to ‘formal’ institutions and legal sys­tems, the remaining phenomena being sub‑ sumed in notions such as ‘informal’ social norms – ‘social capital’, ‘informal’ redis­tribu­tion, and so on, with corruption as a central variable. Comments of the coef­fi­cients of the vari­ables, or of the residuals, and imple‑ mentation of series of tests, which are the common format in cross-­country regressions-­based studies, cannot be viewed as ‘explanations’, e.g. an explana‑ tion of a par­ticu­lar growth trajectory and its determinants (Sindzingre 2004a). The sci­ent­ific rigour of growth regressions is also exposed to risks, among them collinearity, misspeci­fica­tion, and model un­cer­tainty (Brock and Durlauf 2001). As shown by Kittel (2006), macro-­quantitative comparative research findings are often not robust due to the inherent difficulty of stat­ist­ical ana­lyses in dealing with complex macro-­phenomena. Studies of the relationships between polit­ical regimes and eco­nomic per‑ formance are therefore often inconclusive, e.g. between growth and demo­cracy (Tavares and Wacziarg 2001; Bratton and van de Walle 1997), or between types of polit­ical regime and types of eco­nomic reform, or occurrences of eco­ nomic crises (Drazen and Easterly 1999; Drazen 2000), whereas the relation‑ ship between growth and polit­ical stability seems to be stronger (Przeworski et al. 2000). The vari­able of polit­ical stability per se, how­ever, provides no in­forma­tion about the nature of the polit­ical regime and the fact that gov­ern­ ments may be neopatrimonial, autocratic, demo­cratic and the like. As is well-­ known, it is milit­ary regimes that achieved stability for de­velop­mental strat­egies in coun­tries such as Korea and Thailand. In contrast, disastrous examples in terms of growth may be note­worthy cases of polit­ical stability (e.g. ex-­Zaire). Models also ex­plore the links between growth and ‘legiti‑ macy’: they remain ques­tion­able, how­ever, as the con­tents of a concept such as ‘legitimacy’ are highly context-­dependent. Legitimacy, more­over, may be an attribute of diverse forms of institutions and regimes, and neopatrimonial rulers may enjoy a high degree of legitimacy (Wantchekon 2003 on elections in Benin; Vicente and Wantchekon 2009, on a comparison between elections in Benin and Sao Tome and Principe). Similar indeterminacy concerns models that try to assess the impact of the vari­able of corruption, for example on growth or foreign investment. Indeed,

Neopatrimonialism and development economics   101 corruption has limited effects on growth when rents are channelled towards pro‑ ductive sectors (Baumol 1990; Bhagwati 2000) and the ‘corruption’ vari­ables conflate hetero­geneous phenomena, such as bribes, over-­invoicing, smug­gling, vote buying, and so on. Corruption typ­ic­ally exemplifies the prob­lems of en­do­ geneity of causalities: for example do ‘collapsed states’ aggravate corruption or does corruption accelerate state collapse? Econometrics has difficulty in analys‑ ing non-­linearities, as well as the macro-­effects of micro determinants, such as indi­vidual expectations and perceptions of un­cer­tainty vs. stability or legitimacy – for example, rules of the game that do not change arbit­rar­ily and according to the inter­ests of the groups in power (e.g. consti­tu­tional laws).2 Some econo­metric studies also explain corruption, civil war, polit­ical in­stability, author­it­arianism, low growth, and so on, via the loose use of the vari­able of ‘eth­ni­city’. Some econo­metric models have associated ‘ethnic’ frag­menta­tion and ‘fractionalisation’ with lack of growth (e.g. Easterly and Levine 1997; Alesina et al. 2003; Alesina and La Ferrara 2005). Yet, ‘eth­ni­ city’ is typ­ic­ally a vague concept (Médard 2002b): social groups combine and overlap with many vari­ations in degrees of mem­ber­ship, and include sub-­ groups with antagonisms that are revealed only in specific situ­ations.3 Ethnic mem­ber­ship is often an idiom that reflects pre-­existing conflicts. It may not be the outcome of any ‘tradition’ and may even be created by state polit­ical insti‑ tutions (Posner 2005); it is a marker of a social identity among many others, identity itself having many different meanings (polit­ical, social and psycholog‑ ical) (Fearon 1999). Moreover, homo­gen­eous coun­tries do not de­velop better and may even exhibit more civil wars, while coun­tries with numerous ‘ethnic’ groups may enjoy pos­it­ive growth rates. Such econo­metric studies have been called into question. ‘Ethnicity’ depends on the capa­city of the state and of its pol­icies, i.e. the management by a central polit­ical authority of the access to eco­nomic and polit­ical resources and the alloca­tion of rights. A more rel­ev­ant vari­able and better predictor of conflict is the level of wealth of coun­tries (Fearon and Laitin 2003): this is an additional example of the vicious circles and traps created by the private appropriation of pub­lic resources whereas the latter are increasingly limited. Econometric models also seek to link the lack of growth with vari­ables such as ‘social norms’. Here again the proxies are ques­ tion­able (e.g. the concept of ‘social capital’ as well as its meas­ure­ment, this concept aggregating hetero­geneous phenomena in a unique and simplistic meas­ure, Englebert 2002) or do not constitute inde­pend­ent units outside con­ texts (e.g. ‘reputation’, ‘status’). The results are therefore inconclusive. Common ‘ethnic’ mem­ber­ship may foster col­lect­ive action, which may be a factor in growth, but it may also generate exclusion. Furthermore, social frag­ menta­tion may rely on many other cri­teria and mech­an­isms outside ethnic mem­ber­ship, e.g. occupation, education or the absence of coopera­tion or con‑ tract enforcement devices (McBride and Skaperdas 2005). More soph­istic­ated eco­nomic studies have been carried out of phenomena that have been ana­lysed using the concept of patrimonialism. These include the studies of Acemoglu and Robinson, who model the en­do­geneity of the polit­ical

102   A. Sindzingre and eco­nomic institutions that lead to stagnation. They as­sume that polit­ical atti‑ tudes are determined by eco­nomic incentives and that the form of polit­ical and eco­nomic institutions results from conflict between groups that have diverging inter­ests (the ‘elites’ and the ‘cit­izens’). In certain con­ditions, for example, elites and inter­est groups have incentives to demo­cratise or enfranch­ise other groups of cit­izens, increase their level of education and achieve a more equal distribu‑ tion of assets (e.g. land) that fosters growth. Certain con­ditions generate incen‑ tives for predation or, in contrast, for the setting up of institutions that are conducive to growth (Acemoglu et al. 2001, 2004, 2006). Notions such as personal power, the exchange between the pub­lic and the private, the polit­ical and the eco­nomic spheres, the theorisation of neopatrimoni‑ alism as a full sys­tem, on the one hand, and the eco­nomic theories of path dependence, traps and threshold effects, on the other, underscore the lim­ita­tions of stand­ard models and econo­metric studies, with the latter relying on the as­sump­tion that the vari­ables they use are separable from other phenomena and fixed across his­tory and space. Notions such as ‘demo­cracy’, ‘freedom’, ‘account­abil­ity’ and even ‘incentives’, how­ever, refer to eco­nomic, polit­ical and institutional settings that are transformed in time and space and are en­do­genous to each other. Neopatrimonialism emphasised that certain types of beha­vi­our – ‘cronyism’, ‘corruption’ – are the result of unique evolutions and hetero­geneous mech­an­isms involving polit­ical ob­ject­ives, eco­nomic incentives, formal state institutions, social norms and psychological repres­enta­tions. Neopatrimonialism is a multidimensional concept which put in coher­ence polit­ical pro­cesses, eco­ nomic outcomes and social phenomena (e.g. statuses, norms), and due to their simplistic as­sump­tions and vari­ables, most modelling exercises in eco­nom­ics overlook this complexity. The mutual consolidation of economic characteristics, political mechanisms and social norms: the emergence of vicious circles Neopatrimonialism is a par­ticu­lar outcome of the pro­cesses of state formation and the shaping of polit­ical institutions and their associated incentives. It is a typical example of virtuous and vicious cycles, feedback causalities, and increas‑ ing returns that may entrap entire coun­tries, which have been highlighted by the approaches defended by Brian Arthur and Paul David. Neopatrimonialism, under its dimensions of per­vas­ive corruption, trans­fers targeted to clients, private appropriation of pub­lic resources, frag­menta­tion of civil ser­vices, ter­rit­ories and markets in mem­ber­ship groups built by personal allegiances and collusion, and the preventing or erosion of pub­lic ser­vices, may generate the formation of stable polit­ical and eco­nomic equilibria, the exiting from which is difficult and implies high polit­ical and eco­nomic costs for governments. Economic con­texts and neopatrimonialism may mutually reinforce them‑ selves, although the causalities between low levels of incomes and corruption (as the dis­cip­line focuses on corruption and ignores neopatrimonialism) are a

Neopatrimonialism and development economics   103 much-­debated subject in de­velopment eco­nom­ics. Poverty is viewed as fuel‑ ling corruption in low-­income coun­tries, which in turn accentuates disrespect for state rules and civil ser­vices. In addition, civil ser­vants are often said to earn higher wages rel­at­ive to GDP per capita (or to the mean or median wages), although in some coun­tries civil ser­vice sal­ar­ies do not cover basic needs (when they are paid), which is compounded by very limited formal sys­ tems of social secur­ity. The determinants of sub­ject­ive ‘fair’ incomes, how­ ever, remain complex (e.g. rel­at­ive status, do­mestic level of in­equal­ity, rich coun­tries’ living stand­ards). IFI reforms that modify the rel­at­ive wages of civil ser­vants have less impact on the reduction of corruption than the fact that an eco­nomy has not yet stabilised into a ‘low equilibrium’ and self-­fulfilling expectations that all transactions include corruption and that sanc­tions are not cred­ible (Van Rijkeghem and Weder 1997). Such en­do­geneity between charac­ter­istics of rulers and eco­nomic institu‑ tions has been highlighted by Olson (1993) in regard to the tradeoff of rulers between the choice of taxation (if rulers anticipate they will stay) instead of predation (in the oppos­ite case): the stabilisation of neopatrimonial pro­cesses depends on the time frame of the rulers and the associated contractual ar­range­ ments and prop­erty rights. Individuals with a long‑term time frame and who have built a centralised sys­tem of resource trans­fers and corruption foster a stable equilibrium of (privately enforced) prop­erty rights that may facilitate transactions, market de­velopment, and hence growth. Corruption is stabilised here through a centralised device with a ‘dic­tator’ seeking to seize the mono­ poly of corruption and to use it in a dis­cre­tionary way to distribute the rights to rents to other officials in exchange for their sup­port. This device is less detri‑ mental to growth than ‘decentralised’ corruption, where corrupt indi­viduals compete with each other without control and co­ordination and take a levy on every­thing that is produced, which leads to the equilibrium of an eco­nomy in ruins, which in turn prevents the consolidation of state-­enforced legal prop­erty rights (Shleifer and Vishny 1993; Charap and Harm 1998). Thresholds may emerge, under which ‘corruption traps’ stabilise, as shown by Gaviria (2000) in the case of the upsurge of crime in Colombia. Neopatrimonial ‘equilibria’ are typ­ic­ally prone to stabilisation, due to both the dif­ficult­ies of getting out of them and the incentives to their perpetuation. The enforcement of rules against corruption may entail high polit­ical and eco­ nomic costs in coun­tries that have stabilised in an equilibrium of gen­eralised corruption, which maintains the vicious circle of states impoverished by corrup‑ tion but lacking the means to pull themselves out of the corruption trap. In this con­text of pov­erty and high corruption rulers may calculate that low wages may entail lesser costs in terms of pub­lic spending and control, even if they foster corruption (coined as ‘capitulation wages’ by Besley and McLaren 1993). Indeed, fighting against corrupt clients may be risky for illegitimate and fragile gov­ern­ments. In contrast, capturing and sharing pub­lic resources is an efficient instrument for maintaining clientelism, which precisely requires both weak insti‑ tutionalisation and civil ser­vices recruited via personal allegiances and not

104   A. Sindzingre technical skills or merit. The absence of sanc­tions against the private appropria‑ tion of pub­lic goods and against power­ful indi­viduals who challenge the rule of law – or excessive sanc­tions, which may be perceived as expressing personal antagonisms rather than im­per­sonal laws – sets in motion vicious circles that per­petu­ate personal rule and reinforce the lack of cred­ib­il­ity of pub­lic pol­icies and institutions. Neopatrimonialism is thus often associated with secrecy and low incentives for the delegating of power. For some IFI eco­nom­ists, when neo‑ patrimonialism has not stabilised in repressive dic­tatorships or gen­eralised pre‑ dation, these pro­cesses may be limited by a free press and pub­lic know­ledge re­gard­ing the alloca­tion of gov­ern­ment’s funds (Reinikka and Svensson 2004). The cred­ib­il­ity of pub­lic ‘im­per­sonal’ institutions is a crucial element for getting out of the trap of neopatrimonialism, but cred­ib­il­ity is a pro­cess that is typ­ic­ally path-­dependent and built over the longue durée. Making an ana­logy with the building of cred­ible pol­icies through inde­pend­ent central banks, other studies emphasise that sanc­tions against neopatrimonial practices may be achieved through external ‘agencies of restraint’ that would improve the cred­ib­ il­ity of state institutions (Collier 1991; Collier and Pattillo 2000). As for legiti‑ macy, how­ever, it is a neces­sary but not sufficient con­dition. The con­tent of cred­ib­il­ity remains under-­determined: external agencies may be themselves not cred­ible (as has happened to IFI con­ditionalities or sanc­tions) and neopatrimo‑ nial rulers may be perfectly credible. Neopatrimonial polit­ical mech­an­isms generate eco­nomic outcomes and are reinforced by them and which may achieve ‘low equilibria’. As underlined by Acemoglu and Robinson (2000), it is both eco­nomic oppor­tun­ities and the con‑ straints imposed by polit­ically power­ful groups that determine institutional struc‑ tures and eco­nomic pol­icies. An example of the eco­nomic effects of the polit­ical nature of neopatrimonial mech­an­isms is the attitude towards eco­nomic reforms, espe­cially IFI con­ditionalities. These reforms are accepted by gov­ern­ments if they are com­pat­ible with their do­mestic polit­ical agendas and inter­ests (Vreeland 1999). Reforms are ‘filtered’ more according to the do­mestic polit­ical calcula‑ tions of the groups in power than the ob­ject­ives of de­velopment. Vicious circles and pov­erty traps may emerge where neopatrimonialism, eco­nomic stagnation and dependence on IFI lending mutually reinforce themselves, e.g. when the manipulation of IFI reforms and financing lead to worse eco­nomic performance and hence an increase in the external influence of IFIs on do­mestic pol­icy choice and therefore resistance to reform by neopatrimonial gov­ern­ments. Neopatrimo‑ nialism thus fosters, and is fostered by, the massive pres­ence of IFIs and donors in some Sub-­Saharan Africa coun­tries, by these coun­tries’ dependence on aid, which finances a high proportion of pub­lic investment and where dozens of external agencies promote hundreds of pro­jects and try to orient recipient gov­ ern­ments’ pol­icies (Easterly and Pfutze 2008). Together with pub­lic resources, aid flows constitute in aid-­dependent coun­tries crucial resources and oppor­tun­ ities for jobs and rents – while the gen­eral functioning of the aid industry, which claims to be apolit­ical, provides donors with incentives to ignore the neopatri‑ monial character of the recipient gov­ern­ments (Cammack 2007). In such

Neopatrimonialism and development economics   105 situ­ations of vicious circles, the cred­ib­il­ity of donors erodes due to the recurrent inefficiency of reforms, lending to illegitimate gov­ern­ments and lack of sanc­tion of reform postponement. The inter­est of donors is to maintain aid flows, which recipient gov­ern­ments are fully aware of (Sindzingre 1998). Social norms are also en­do­genous to neopatrimonial settings, which shape social norms and are reinforced by them, and affect in cascade all indi­vidual transactions. The spread of neopatrimonial routines is a self-­reinforcing mech­an­ ism, as in such states im­per­sonal rules, e.g. legal rules pro­hibiting corruption, are not cred­ible and there is no meta-­level, no ‘super­visor of the super­visor’ who would not be caught in the same routines and who have the will, power, and cred­ib­il­ity to enforce their pro­hibition and trans­forma­tion. Judicial sys­tems are an outgrowth of personal rule in neopatrimonial sys­tems and numerous reforms of the pub­lic ser­vice (based on merit or auto­nomy of technocrats in, e.g. customs or taxation ser­vices) have therefore failed. These reforms as­sume the effect­ iveness of eco­nomic incentives: the latter, how­ever, are also shaped by the polit­ ical envir­on­ment and by social norms. For a civil ser­vant, for example, incentives to please external donors may be weaker than securing polit­ical and eco­nomic survival via mem­ber­ship in clientelist networks, com­pliance with social obli­ga­ tions stemming from kin group mem­ber­ship or with norms organ­ising social status (as for the ‘big men’, see Médard 1992). In de­veloped coun­tries institutions, laws, norms and incentives limit corrup‑ tion, and are ‘in­ternalised’ by indi­viduals. In many low-­income coun­tries indi­ viduals may even be unaware of existing laws, either because of the deliberate strat­egy of the gov­ern­ment, because states are too poor to inform their cit­izens, or because the latter view laws as irrel­ev­ant, as when state rules differ from the social norms that organ­ise mem­ber­ship groups (such as norms based on kinship). Indeed a key prob­lem in neopatrimonial states and with a weakly cemented cit­ izenry is that rules originating from the state may be viewed as irrel­ev­ant, both because of the pred­atory beha­vi­our of those who enact them and the competing norms stemming from group mem­ber­ships. Rules and sanc­tions are neces­sary but not sufficient: sanc­tions may be ‘filtered’ by local norms and beliefs, being perceived, for example, as determined only by the inter­ests of politicians. Legal sanc­tions are effect­ive when they fit in with in­ternalised norms (Posner 1998; Berkowitz et al. 2000). Social norms are the basis of formal institutions, which in turn en­do­genously influence social norms, the latter also resulting from education (Boyer 1994), while education results not only from private social norms but from pub­lic rules and pol­icies. Compliance with state rules requires that indi­viduals are incited to apply them and to control the actions of other indi­viduals (Olson 1998): this depends on equilibria and threshold effects resulting from indi­vidual calculations on the gains and costs of com­pliance and ensuring that other indi­viduals comply. In de­veloping coun­tries rules stem from several sources and create different spheres of obli­ga­tion, for example, the state, soci­eties, and inter­na­tional aid agencies. The plurality of the sources of rules, both ‘informal’ and ‘formal’, gen‑ erates overlaps and in­forma­tion asymmetries that are easily ex­ploited by

106   A. Sindzingre par­ticu­lar inter­ests: this adds to the difficulty of transforming neopatrimonial regimes and curbing corruption. A concept such as neopatrimonialism thus explains the feedback pro­cesses, where indi­vidual beha­vi­our is shaped by par­ticu­lar ‘institutional equilibria’, while at the same time the degree of de­velopment and the forms of the institu‑ tions are the result of par­ticu­lar ‘polit­ical equilibria’, which in turn are influenced by the structure of eco­nomic inter­ests (North 1990: 48). Their inter­actions give rise to specific institutional forms, prop­erty rights and contracts. Development eco­nom­ics has elaborated the notion of ‘missing markets’ (such as the credit market) that impede growth in de­veloping coun­tries: the concept of neopatrimo‑ nialism has highlighted the ways some institutions in de­veloping coun­tries may be ‘missing’, ‘fragile’ or purely formal, which according to feedback pro­cesses reinforces personal rule and the segmentation of the cit­izenry in cen­tri­fugal groups that are driven by the appropriation of avail­able resources. As shown by Evans (1997: 80), strong civil soci­eties go hand in hand with strong states and effect­ive institutions. These political-­institutional inter­actions are typ­ic­ally caught in prisoner’s dilemmas, where indi­viduals (or groups) are unable to see that coopera­tion would entail larger ag­greg­ate gains for every­one, which has dev­ast­ating con­sequences in terms of eco­nomic growth.

Building upon neopatrimonialism’s insights The understanding of the determinants that reinforce neopatrimonial or pred­atory, on the one hand, and de­velop­mental states, on the other, requires a theory of insti‑ tutional change that can re­con­cile the neopatrimonialist approach and de­velopment eco­nom­ics, i.e. which highlights the multidimensionality of institutions and norms and the en­do­geneity of polit­ical and eco­nomic pro­cesses. Institutions are not con‑ crete objects but sets of mental repres­enta­tions that have a norm­ative dimension and are held col­lect­ively (Sindzingre 2005a, 2005b, 2007). They are composite entities, with forms and con­tents that transform over time and constantly borrow from other settings. Their meanings and functions are delimited through their rela‑ tionships and combinations with other institutions (e.g. demo­cratic institutions have a different con­tent depending of the pres­ence of sys­tems of social protection, the level of education, and so on). Their meanings or functions are not fixed ex ante (e.g. those of ‘pub­lic ser­vice’, or ‘privatisation’), and combinations of institu‑ tions and their outcomes are not stable over time. In several Sub-­Saharan Africa states, for example, the demo­cratic institutions set up in the 1990s were pro­gressively emptied of their con­tent and ‘filled’ by neopatrimonial routines. In contrast, institutions and linkages may also be missing: a coun­try may have a press that denounces corruption but judicial insti‑ tutions are lacking. Neopatrimonialism may indeed be characterised by confu‑ sion between the pub­lic and private domain, but also by discontinuities between the various pub­lic spheres of legitimacy. The fact that polit­ical and eco­nomic institutions are composite entities, which combine their forms and con­tents in mul­tiple ways according to past tra­ject­ories

Neopatrimonialism and development economics   107 precisely de­scribes the self-­reinforcing pro­cesses that are ana­lysed by eco­nomic theories that focus on mul­tiple equilibria, path dependence and the prob­lems of cred­ib­il­ity that are inherent in the exercise of power and pub­lic pol­icies (the lack of ‘super­visors of super­visors’ who would be situated ‘outside’ existing norms). Neopatrimonial sys­tems may constitute power­ful ‘basins of attraction’ towards mimetic beha­vi­our and pov­erty traps. This chapter has ex­plored the concepts of neopatrimonialism in the light of de­velopment eco­nom­ics. It has discussed the con­tri­bu­tions of neopatrimonialism to the understanding of the stagnation of Sub-­Saharan African eco­nom­ies as well as its complex relationships with polit­ical institutions and regimes. It has assessed the ana­lyses of the phenomena subsumed in the concept of neopatrimo‑ nialism by de­velopment eco­nom­ics, and has highlighted the lim­ita­tions inherent to modelling in the understanding of the impact on de­velopment of the phenom‑ ena gathered under the concept. It has shown that the concept links composite phenomena that have many dimensions – referring to polit­ical domination, eco­nomic gains, social norms, as well as the public-­private divide – and that neopatrimonialism should be under‑ stood as a sys­tem that results from dynamic en­do­genous pro­cesses. The concept of neopatrimonialism has con­trib­uted to the ana­lysis of vicious circles and traps (pov­erty and corruption traps), which eco­nom­ics has conceptualised in terms of threshold effects and stable ‘low equilibria’. This latter approach can re­con­cile neopatrimonialism and concepts from de­velopment eco­nom­ics, and sup­ports a theory of institutional trans­forma­tion, which is more refined than model-­based eco­nomic theories that explain growth by ‘institutional vari­ables’. It highlights the multidimensionality of institutions and the en­do­geneity of polit­ical and eco­ nomic processes.

Notes 1 Though Singapore and China are not ‘de­velop­mental states’ in the initial sense of the term, which refers to the growth of Japan, Korea and Tai­wan, and has been elaborated by Johnson (1982), Amsden (1989) and Wade (1990). 2 As in Côte d’Ivoire, though it is not specific to Sub-­Saharan Africa, as was shown by Italy under Silvio Berlusconi. 3 What anthropology coins as ‘segmentary processes’.

Part II

New orientations and debates in Africa

7 The path from neopatrimonialism Democracy and clientelism in Africa today Nicolas van de Walle

The nature, extent and impact of the polit­ical and eco­nomic changes taking place in Sub Saharan Africa are the source of much con­tempor­ary debate. Not all agree on the nature and extent of recent polit­ical reforms, but clearly, at least at the level of formal institutions, signi­fic­ant changes are in the pro­cess of taking place. Since 1989, polit­ical reform has witnessed the sys­tematic introduction of multi-­party elect­oral pol­itics in a region where single party and milit­ary rule had been the rule for most of the 1970s and 1980s (Bratton and van de Walle 1997). In its wake, elect­oral com­peti­tion has brought polit­ical demo­crat­ization with the greater inde­pend­ence of the judicial and legis­lat­ive branches of gov­ern­ment, as well as the lib­eralization of the press, and the emergence of a much more lively civil soci­ety, or at least of more numerous organ­iza­tions not controlled by the state. Of course, the extent of these reforms vary enorm­ously across the states in the region, but at least on the surface, author­it­arian pol­itics seems to be retreating. The more signi­fic­ant debate concerns the impact of these reforms on the deeper under­lying structures of African pol­itics. The dominant para­digm for understanding African pol­itics for most of the post-­colonial era was some vari­ ation of the neopatrimonial thesis with which Jean-­François Médard is so prominently associated (e.g. Médard 1991b). By this, I mean that most scholars agreed that African polit­ical dy­namics were structured by a set of informal institutions they labeled as ‘big man pol­itics’, ‘personal rule’, ‘pol­itics of the belly’ or neopatrimonialism, to use some of the favorite labels, and without getting into the internecine debates between the practitioners of this gen­eral line of ana­lysis (Erdmann and Engel 2007, for a recent review).1 Most ob­ser­vers have agreed on two theses: first, that neopatrimonialism was inherently anti-­democratic. In other words, it was constituted by a set of mech­an­isms and norms that ensured the polit­ical stability of author­it­arian regimes and under­mined polit­ical parti­cipa­tion and com­peti­tion. Second, most analysts have agreed that neopatrimonialism played a central role in preventing capitalist accumulation in the region, and thus was a key explan­at­ory factor in Africa’s longstanding eco­nomic crisis (Chabal and Daloz 1999; van de Walle 2001). As a result, the removal of neopatrimonialism has been widely seen as a prere­quis­ite for sustained eco­nomic growth and structural trans­forma­tion in the region.

112   N. van de Walle This chapter thus briefly addresses a central question posed by the recent polit­ical and eco­nomic evolution in the region: what effect will the introduction of multi‑party elect­oral pol­itics have on neopatrimonialism in Sub-­Saharan Africa? In addition, the answer to this first question can serve to shed some limited light on the region’s eco­nomic pro­spects. I argue that neopatrimonialism is largely incom­pat­ible with demo­cracy, and will thus weaken as demo­cracy in the region consolidates. Indeed, I believe that the medium-­term survival of neopatrimonial tendencies in a coun­try despite the regu­lar convening of com­petit­ive multi-­party elections provides a good sign that the regime is in fact an elect­oral autocracy (Schedler 2007), rather than a consolidating democracy. It is ana­lyt­ically use­ful to think of neopatrimonialism as having three constituent com­pon­ents. First, such regimes are characterized by pres­id­en­tialism, in which both formal and informal rules place one man – usually the pres­id­ent – largely above the law and not subject to the checks and balances that demo­cratic executives face in mature demo­cra­cies. In such cases, one effect of demo­crat­ ization is neces­sar­ily the weakening of the pres­id­ent rel­at­ive to the other branches of gov­ern­ment. Second, such regimes rely on sys­tematic clientelism by the pres­id­ent and his imme­diate followers to maintain the status quo and ensure polit­ical stability. Third, and unlike more traditional patrimonial regimes, neopatrimonial sys­tems rely on the fiscal resources of a modern state to provide the resources that are distributed fol­low­ing a clientelist logic. The main focus of this chapter, because I believe the comparative liter­at­ure to be largely im­pre­cise and even ana­lyt­ically confused on the issue, will be what happens to polit­ical clientelism fol­low­ing the demo­crat­ization of neopatrimonial regimes. This chapter is avowedly comparative. It starts with some observations about the his­tor­ical evolution of polit­ical clientelism and the nexus between capitalist growth, the evolution of the state, and demo­cracy. The central argument of the chapter is that polit­ical clientelism is a ubiquitous feature of modern pol­itics, and will not disappear from Africa any more than it can be expected to disappear from the United States or Italy, but that its function and form will evolve in signi­fic­ant ways related to the nature of African polit­ical regimes and their eco­nom­ies. This is admittedly a ridiculously overambitious topic for a short chapter, and the ob­ject­ive will be to use a handful of empirical and theor­et­ical observations to set out some broad hypotheses to be investigated more fully at some later time. The chapter starts with some observations about polit­ical clientelism. I distinguish between types of clientelism, which I link to the regime type and level of eco­nomic de­velopment. I then examine the likely effects of demo­crat­ization on polit­ical clientelism. I argue that neopatrimonialism is incom­pat­ible with demo­cracy, and that its manifestations will pro­gressively become less im­port­ant in coun­tries of the region, provided, at least, that they do demo­cratize, and not all will. The chapter argues that there is no reason to believe that clientelism will disappear, since it appears to be a ubiquitous charac­ter­istic of the modern state, but it suggests that the specific nature of clientelism will change signi­fic­antly because of democratization.

Democracy and clientelism in Africa today   113

Political clientelisms In the classic anthropological definition, polit­ical clientelism can be defined as an exchange relationship between unequals, which provides a polit­ical ad­vant­ age to the more power­ful agent and a mater­ial ad­vant­age to the less power­ful agent (Schmidt et al. 1977; Eisenstadt and Lemarchand 1981). Perhaps because of its roots in anthropology, journ­al­istic discussions of clientelism in Africa, and indeed too many aca­demic ana­lyses as well, have tended to view clientelistic practices as an prim­or­dial atavism, left over from traditional polit­ical culture. This is surely wrong on two counts. First, the atavism view can not be right because clientelist dy­namics exists in virtually all polit­ical sys­tems, albeit in sometimes very different guises. Indeed, a new liter­at­ure has re-­energized theorizing about its manifestations in demo­cra­cies in Europe and Latin Amer­ica (Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007; Piattoni 2001; Helmke and Levitsky 2006). Second, clientelism seems likely to exist in all modern states, as long as polit­ ical actors are able to use the preferential alloca­tion of resources over which they have dis­cre­tion for polit­ical ad­vant­age. State structures with any degree of either fiscal or regu­latory capa­city will have dis­cre­tionary resources at their disposal. Fiscal capa­city will provide state agents with resources to redistribute, while the abil­ity to regulate the pro­vi­sion of goods and ser­vices in the eco­nomy will provide them with dis­cre­tion over the alloca­tion of those goods and services. Instead, it seems more use­ful to think of polit­ical clientelism as a modern phenomenon that is inherent to the modern state, but that changes as a function of the type of state. Political clientelism exists in all modern states in one form or another, but just as clearly, its precise manifestations vary enorm­ously. More specifically, this chapter will argue that the form that polit­ical clientelism takes varies as a function of eco­nomic structure and the nature of the polit­ical regime. Though they are often conflated in careless and ethnocentric ana­lyses, three rel­at­ively distinct types of clientelism can be identified in the liter­at­ure (see van de Walle 2007 for a more complete discussion and citations). First, tribute constitutes the traditional practice of gift exchange in peasant soci­eties and traditional kingdoms, in which patron and client are engaged in bonds of reci­pro­city and trust. It is embedded in a communitarian ethos, even if eco­nomic anthropologists offer a perfectly rational explanation for its prevalence in terms of risk-­sharing. African big men may sometimes adopt the rhet­oric and cultural repertoires of traditional forms of tribute to legitimate the clientelist practices they want to pursue, but their clientelism is funda­mentally different, and indeed the ref­er­ence to specific tribute traditions are not neces­sar­ily ac­cur­ ate, but may be invented in the modern era. In other words, there is no reason to believe that the level of polit­ical clientelism in an African coun­try today is related to tribute traditions that may or may not exist in that coun­try’s past. Second, what can be called elite clientelism is limited to a narrow polit­ical elite. The charac­ter­istic form of this kind of clientelism is prebendalism, or the stra­tegic polit­ical alloca­tion of pub­lic offices to key elites, granting personal access over state resources. Significantly, it can be associated with author­it­arian

114   N. van de Walle states of limited capa­city in a resource poor envir­on­ment. I will argue this has been the dominant form of polit­ical clientelism in the author­it­arian coun­tries of Sub-­Saharan Africa. Third, it can be distinguished from mass clientelism, which relies on the practice of using state resources to provide jobs and ser­vices for mass polit­ical clienteles, and usually involves party organ­iza­tions and elect­oral pol­itics. Pervasive use of patronage, defined as the polit­ical instrumentalization of the distribution of pub­lic jobs and ser­vices, is designed to gain sup­port for the more or less institutionalized polit­ical party that dispenses it. It should be associated with mass pol­itics, including in the mature demo­cra­cies of the west. These three types of clientelism are often conflated in the liter­at­ure, but it is im­port­ant to realize the dif­fer­ences between them. The discussion that follows will focus mostly on the dif­fer­ence between mass and elite clientelism for ease of ex­posi­tion and because tribute is much less rel­ev­ant to pol­itics in modern states. Most gen­erally, it is im­port­ant to distinguish between polit­ical sys­tems that rely prim­arily on patronage from those that rely on prebendalism. Prebends and patronage overlap, of course, but I wish to emphas­ize their funda­mental dif­ fer­ence. Hiring a member of one’s ethnic group to a senior position in the customs office is an example of patronage. Allowing the customs officer to use the position for personal enrichment by manipulating import and export taxes is an example of a prebend. From this example can be deduced three funda­mental dif­fer­ences between patronage driven pol­itics and prebendalism. First, they have very different fiscal im­plica­tions. Prebendalism is a feature of most early states, in­vari­ably characterized by the absence of a professional civil ser­vice and weak extractive capa­city (e.g. Ardant 1975). Prebendalism constituted one of the basic fiscal institutions of the Euro­pean feudal state, in which the king had little choice but to allow his barons to pocket a large proportion of the rev­enues they had control over. As a polit­ical mech­an­ism, prebendalism is attractive to leaders who do not control either a high level of resources or much capa­city within the state ap­par­atus. Patronage, on the other hand, requires a reasonably healthy and growing state, since it is expensive. The poor, small states of Sub-­Saharan Africa have for the most part, and with minor subregional vari­ations, not been in position to afford major patronage strat­egies. Observers have sometimes erroneously suggested that patronage was an im­port­ant feature of African pol­itics, but such a claim it seems to me constitutes a conflation of patronage and prebendalism. In fact, low income African states command few resources and a smaller share of national GDP than gov­ern­ments in richer coun­tries. In the late 1990s, roughly one in three African states had gov­ern­ment rev­enues under 15 percent of their national GDP (van de Walle 2001: 74), a remark­ably low number that compares to levels in the OECD that regu­larly attain half of much higher levels of national GDP. In sum, I am not denying that polit­ical patronage has existed in Africa, just that its polit­ical im­port­ance is easily exaggerated, and almost certainly less im­port­ant to ensuring polit­ical stability than an elite clientelism, strictly circumscribed to the hundreds or maybe several thou­sand people who constitute the coun­try’s top polit­ical elite.

Democracy and clientelism in Africa today   115 Table 7.1  Government employment, early 1990s Region

Africa (n = 20)   Botswana   Senegal Asia (11)   Maldives   Bangladesh Eastern Europe and Former USSR (17)   Armenia   Turkey Latin America and Cari. (9)   Barbados   Chile Middle East and North Africa (8)   Egypt   Lebanon OECD (21)   Sweden   Greece Total (86)

Employees % of which (as % of Pop.)

in Central Gov’t

2.0 5.8 0.8 2.6 4.9 0.6 6.9 10.5 2.6 3.0 6.8 0.9 3.9 6.2 1.4 7.7 17.4 2.7

45 60 50 35 61 67 14 8 38 40 59 33 36 29 14 23 24 41

4.7

26

Source: Salvatore Schiavo-Campo, Giulio de Tommaso, and Amitabha Mukherjee (1997), ‘An International Statistical survey of Government Employment and Wages’, World Bank Working Paper no. 1806, Washington (DC): the World Bank. Note: High and low countries given for each region; other categories are local government, teaching and health.

One direct result of this reality is that African state structures have tended to be comparatively small, with a con­sider­ably smaller number of state em­ployees than states in other regions of the world (Goldsmith 2000). The avail­able stat­ist­ ics, presented in Table 7.1, thus suggest that the average African state’s pub­lic workforce represents around 2 percent of the labor force, compared to 7.7 percent for the rich coun­tries of the OECD. Put in simple terms, African pres­id­ ents could not afford mass clientelism strat­egies. Indeed, the regimes that sought to build up large patronage states in the imme­diate inde­pend­ent period were all too soon facing fiscal crises and inviting the IMF to pre­scribe its stabilization medicine. By the late 1970s, any pro­ject to substantially expand the state ap­par­ atus had crashed and burned and the regime was committed to fiscal dis­cip­line under the attentive gaze of the donors. In sum, I posit that the wealth of the eco­nomy and the resources avail­able to the state con­dition the scope of clientelism, re­gard­less of the nature of the polit­ ical regime. In poor states that cannot afford mass patronage, clientelism is more likely to be limited to the distribution of elite offices. On the other hand, patronage is more likely in rich states overseeing substantial and diversified eco­nom­ ies, which are more likely to be able to afford a large and expensive state.

116   N. van de Walle Second, and related to this first distinction concerns the impact of clientelism on state capa­city. Whereas prebendal practices weaken the state or at least limit its capa­city, patronage is quite com­pat­ible with an effect­ive and responsive state ap­par­atus. We know from a wide variety of regimes across time that patronage polit­ical ma­chines can be responsive to cit­izen concerns and deliver ser­vices. Indeed, the so-­called ‘polit­ical ma­chines’ of urban Amer­ican and Euro­pean pol­ itics in the early twentieth century were elect­oral ma­chines that received sup­port because they addressed constituent concerns. On the other hand, the prebendalism of elite clientelism can be associated with regimes that seek to limit parti­cipa­tion and are not responsive to their cit­izens. Even as a small polit­ical aristocracy bene­ fits lib­erally from its links to the state ap­par­atus, the average cit­izen does not receive adequate social ser­vices or bene­fit from an adequate pub­lic infrastructure. Third, the relationship to legality differs across types of clientelism. Patronage is often perfectly legal and many mature demo­cra­cies have officially codified it and circumscribed its extent. Though the favoritism it implies is frowned upon and constitutes a ‘grey area’ of accept­able practice; it remains present in the state structures of the most advanced eco­nom­ies of the world. Theobald cites the estim­ate of four million patronage positions in state and local gov­ern­ment in the US during the early 1980s, for example (1990: 56). These positions are almost entirely controlled by the Repub­lican and Democratic Parties, who thus provide steady employment to their rank and file, and use state resources to engage in signi­fic­ant amount of recruitment. At the Federal level, the spoils sys­tem expli­citly allows the President to make several thou­sand polit­ical appointments in the federal gov­ern­ment. Individuals hired as ‘polit­ical appointees’ face a different set of administrative regulations than regu­larly appointed federal appointees, and are, for instance, expected to leave office when the pres­ id­ent who appointed them leaves office. Prebendalism, on the other hand, in­vari­ably entails practices in which im­port­ ant state agents unambiguously subvert the rule of law for personal gain. As a result, these practices are in­vari­ably illegal and illegitimate, even in coun­tries in which they are quite common. Finally, and a direct result from much of the previous discussion, the different types of clientelism have a specific causal relationship with the nature of the polit­ical regime. In par­ticu­lar, elite clientelism is not com­pat­ible with the parti­ cipa­tion and com­peti­tion of demo­cratic pol­itics. The practice of prebendalism is com­pat­ible with closed polit­ical sys­tems, in which elites are little account­able to the cit­izenry, and in which their illegal actions are not sanc­tioned. On the other hand, patronage pol­itics meets the needs of politicians engaged in elect­oral com­ peti­tion, and is com­pat­ible with the high levels of parti­cipa­tion of demo­cratic pol­itics. Put more gen­erally, I argue that the amount of demo­cracy in the sys­tem determines the nature of clientelism; the more demo­cratic the sys­tem, the more clientelist practices will bene­fit mass pub­lics; and the more they will be limited to legal and codified behaviors. The less demo­cratic the sys­tem, the more the bene­fits of clientelism will favor elites, and the more clientelist practices will subvert the rule of law and under­mine prop­erty rights.

Democracy and clientelism in Africa today   117 A corollary of this last point is that the locus of elite clientelism is typ­ic­ally the executive branch of gov­ern­ment, while the locus of mass clientelism is more likely to be polit­ical par­ties and the legis­lat­ive branch. In the former, the ob­ject­ ive of clientelism is to keep the pres­id­ent and his cronies in power; analysing the single and no-­party regimes in Africa before the demo­crat­ization of the 1990s, the subordinate status and mar­ginality of polit­ical par­ties is striking. The pres­id­ ent and his inner sanctum of followers dominated pol­itics, in what were highly pres­id­en­tial regimes, both on the level of formal and informal institutions. The party may have been an instrument of pres­id­en­tial power, but between the end of the elect­oral com­peti­tion of the imme­diate post-­independence period and the demo­crat­ization wave in the first half of the 1990s, par­ties pro­gressively declined in polit­ical im­port­ance. Even in coun­tries like Kenya or Ivory Coast where the regimes had built rel­at­ively strong gov­ern­ment par­ties, over time the regime’s clientelist practices bypassed the party ap­par­atus, and came to be dominated by the state itself, notably the office of the presidency. In mass clientelist sys­tems, on the other hand, the ob­ject­ive is to win elections, and the key instrument of elect­oral com­peti­tion is likely to be the polit­ical party. The centrality of party com­peti­tion is the hallmark of elect­oral pol­itics, and the re­li­ance of patronage to buttress par­ties a fairly stand­ard feature of a wide number of demo­cra­cies. Indeed, the codification and circumscribing of clientelistic practices that took place in rich coun­tries a century ago, was accompanied by a broader reformist cam­paign to professionalize and dis­cip­line the civil ser­vice, and in effect move the remaining clientelism outside of the state and to polit­ical parties. Table 7.2 summar­izes the discussion so far, distinguishing the different kinds of clientelisms. Democratization and clientelism in theory Of course, this distinction between mass clientelism and elite clientelism is idealized. Most regimes in the modern world exhibit both types, and in practice it is not always easy to distinguish between them. In addition, other factors shape the nature of polit­ical clientelism, from the prevailing elect­oral regime and other consti­tu­tional pro­vi­sions that con­dition appeal of par­ticu­laristic pol­itics (Cox 2001; Haggard and McCubbins 2001), to the nature of party cleavages and party de­velopment (Shefter 1994). Nonetheless, and with these caveats in mind, it is use­ful to argue that the neopatrimonial states of Sub-­Saharan Africa were characterized by elite clientelism because of both their author­it­arian nature and the eco­nomic structure of their eco­nom­ies. Despite claims often made in the liter­at­ure, there was rel­at­ively little mass patronage in the region, largely because these coun­tries were not rich enough to afford it, and because their author­it­arian nature lessened the need to be responsive to their cit­izenry. Instead, pol­itics was more often characterized by elite accommodation pro­cesses in which different ethnic groups were in­teg­rated into the polit­ical sys­tem through elite clientelism. The state brought in big men

Tribute

Patronage

Prebends

Traditional Clientelism

Mass Clientelism

Elite Clientelism

Key Mechanism

State

State

Patrons’ own

Resources involved

Presidential network

Political party

Patron

Dispensed by

Table 7.2  Characteristics and correlates of different kinds of clientelism

Illegal

Grey area

Customary

Legality

Undermines state capacity, legitimacy

Bias for larger state

Alternative legitimacy to state

Implications for Central State

Incompatible

Depends on quality of state intervention Negative: undermines property rights

Positive: Rational risk sharing mechanism

Incompatible

Compatible

Relationship to Economy

Relationship to Democracy

Democracy and clientelism in Africa today   119 from different ethnic groups into the pres­id­en­tial majority, and the former were expected to bring with them the sup­port of their ethnic group, as has been well de­scribed by a large Africanist liter­at­ure (e.g. Bayart 1989). I am now in a position to offer an answer to the question this chapter began with: what happens as these types of regimes move to elect­oral com­peti­tion? In gen­eral, I argue that demo­cratic consolidation in the region will result in the decline of neopatrimonialism and the evolution from elite to various forms of mass clientelism. What does this imply? First, I hypothesize that prebendal ar­range­ments will pro­gressively disappear; in their place will be the kind of patronage pol­itics which we observe in mature demo­cra­cies, usually focused around party pol­itics. These practices may be more or less signi­fic­ant, in much the way that vari­ation is observed between, say, Belgium, the Neth­er­lands and Denmark in the locus and scope of party patronage, but on the whole they will fall far short of the egregious illegality that we observe in the current set of neopatrimonial polit­ical systems. An im­port­ant caveat to the argument relates to the resources avail­able to these consolidating demo­cra­cies to engage in redis­tribu­tion. Fiscality constitutes the Achilles heel of poor demo­cra­cies. As emphas­ized above, the ad­vant­age of elite clientelism is its cheapness, and the more ambitious expenditures of mass clientelism will bring with it huge eco­nomic risks, par­ticu­larly in the absence of rapid eco­nomic growth. Indeed, the his­tory of post World War II Latin Amer­ica is in many respects a his­tory of a failed trans­ition from elite to mass clientelism, as the populist regimes that emerged as the elect­oral franch­ise was extended in the 1960s and 1970s estab­lished polit­ical eco­nom­ies that relied on a populism their eco­nom­ies could not ultimately sustain (Huntington and Nelson 1976; Remmer 1986), leading directly to the eco­nomic crises of the 1980s. In Africa, a successful trans­ition will include the abil­ity to shepherd limited resources into productive pub­lic expenditures, notably in social sector investments, that both promote productivity growth and eco­nomic de­velopment, and accommodate polit­ical co­ali­tion building. In sum, sustained eco­nomic growth is prob­ably a re­quis­ite of the polit­ical regime trans­ition I am hypothesizing can take place. Second, and provided the eco­nomy allows it, the move to mass clientelism will bring about a greater degree of eco­nomic redis­tribu­tion to coun­tries that demo­cratize. Economists like Milanovic (2003) have shown in recent years that post-­colonial Africa has undergone a rapid increase in in­equal­ity. This seems to me inev­it­able, as neopatrimonial institutions generate social and eco­nomic stratification. Again despite some careless scholarship on the contrary, the elite clientelism of neopatrimonial states is not redistributive, but is rather directed to an exceedingly narrow elite, which accu­mu­lates a disproportionate wealth. There is, more­over, little eco­nomic redis­tribu­tion in these regimes through taxation, social programs or pub­lic spending which is minimal and rarely pro­gressive. By definition, demo­cratic regimes are more responsive to their electorates. As the clientelist networks expand with an elect­oral logic, we can expect greater eco­nomic redis­tribu­tion. Clientelist networks are more likely to work themselves down the social ladder, and demo­cratic elections are more likely to result in greater

120   N. van de Walle spending on social ser­vice. In sum, the more demo­cratic a coun­try, the more redistributive its clientelism will be, even if the logic of clientelism will always be to give a rel­at­ively privileged minor­ity access to pub­lic goods. The size of this minor­ity increases with com­petit­ive pol­itics. Moreover, whether they are clientelist or not, demo­cra­cies almost certainly engender greater pub­lic expenditure, notably in the social sectors, than do author­it­arian states. Third, the evolution from elite to mass clientelism in the new demo­cra­cies will entail the growing im­port­ance of polit­ical par­ties in polit­ical exchange. Rather strikingly, in mature demo­cra­cies, the biggest single cause of polit­ical corruption appears to be the in­sa­ti­able appetite of polit­ical par­ties for funding in order to wage elect­oral cam­paigns. Politicians across a wide variety of OECD coun­tries regu­larly get caught with illicit schemes to finance their par­ties in rapidly escalating elect­oral cam­paigns. Rarely is indi­vidual gain the major mo­tiva­tion in these scandals. To be sure, occasionally a civil ser­vant is caught in an influence peddling exercise, but this is much more rare. For instance, in perhaps the biggest scandal in Amer­ican pol­itics in the last two decades, the Abramoff influence peddling scandal, involving a so called ‘K Street’ lobbyist and his mostly Repub­lican friends in Congress and the White House, virtually no career civil ser­vants appear to have been involved. In sum, when African politicians go to jail on a regu­lar basis for having steered illicit money to polit­ical par­ties in the months before elections, rather than to enrich themselves, we will know that Africa’s demo­cratic trans­ition is complete.

Democratization and clientelism in practice I hasten to add that these last several points do not constitute a prediction for Africa’s future. Instead, I am offering a hypo­thesis for what will happen if African coun­tries successfully demo­cratize. It is far from clear that demo­cratic consolidation is taking place in more than a handful of states (see Lindberg 2006 for recent comprehensive and fairly op­tim­istic survey), even if Michael Bratton is correct to surmise, from Afrobarometer data, that multi-­party com­ petit­ive elections have become entrenched enough in pop­ular attitudes that they can now be ‘regarded as an institutionalized norm of African pol­itics’ (Bratton 2007: 8). In a larger proportion of African states, how­ever, neopatrimonial rulers have adapted remark­ably easily to the new rules of the game by instituting ‘façade demo­cra­cies’ (Joseph 2003) or ‘elect­oral autocracies’ (Schedler 2007) that under­mine neither their hold on power nor the main instruments that buttress their rule. It may be use­ful to remind ourselves that much of Africa is not demo­ cratizing, since so many ob­ser­vers are now willing, somewhat perversely, to point to elect­oral autocracies to highlight the alleged flaws of demo­cracy (e.g. Carothers 2002). Even in coun­tries that have undergone signi­fic­ant demo­cratic pro­gress, the resulting regimes are often best characterized as ‘hybrid’ (Diamond 2002) or ‘illib­eral demo­cra­cies’ (Zakaria 1997), as author­it­arian dy­namics subsists side

Democracy and clientelism in Africa today   121 by side with the new demo­cratic dispensations. None of Africa’s new multi-­ party regimes have aban­doned pres­id­en­tial consti­tu­tions, for instance, for parlia­ ment­ary rule, which is in force in just a handful of Africa’s 48 polit­ical sys­tems. Though demo­crat­ization has often included concerted efforts to curtail pres­id­en­ tial power and empower mech­an­isms of ver­tical and horizontal account­abil­ity, more often than not, pres­id­en­tial prerogatives remain signi­fic­ant. If Mainwaring (1999) and others are correct, pres­id­en­tialism weakens polit­ical par­ties in low-­ income states, and makes good governance less likely. Certainly, given the logical connection between neopatrimonialism and pres­id­en­tialism in Africa, the latters’ continuing stranglehold on African pol­itics is a cause for pess­im­ism re­gard­ing more profound democratization. Moreover, the evolution away from neopatrimonialism is likely to be long and slow, for several other reasons. First, the national charac­ter­istics which facilitate neopatrimonialism and elite clientelism remain there in the short to medium term, even after formal polit­ical institutions have been altered. Economic stagnation and fiscal crisis will militate against attempts to move towards patronage strat­egies. Low state capa­city had been en­do­genous to the old neopatrimonial ruler, that had no great incentives to promote an effect­ive state ap­par­atus; but the legacy of that rule will take years to overcome even if the new regime is entirely sincere about increasing state capa­city and elim­in­ating corruption. If Przeworski et al. (1996) are correct to suggest that demo­cra­cies are unlikely to survive in low-­income coun­tries unless they are able to generate rapid eco­ nomic growth, at least some of these weakly institutionalized demo­cra­cies will not survive. For a long time, the biggest danger facing them will be their in­abil­ ity to promote eco­nomic growth, which could lead to an anti-­democratic backlash. Rapid eco­nomic growth, on the other hand, can help finance the growth of the state ap­par­atus and the ser­vices it provides, which fuels both the growth of patronage oppor­tun­ities and legitimacy for the regime. Second, the trans­ition to demo­cracy can occur virtually over night, but demo­ cratic culture takes a longer time to de­velop. In Jonathan Fox’s felicitous phrase (1994), it takes time and effort to transform clients into cit­izens: civic organ­iza­ tions, the press, and the expectations of the cit­izenry will not imme­diately adjust to the new dispensation, but need to be nurtured and encouraged. For their part, many politicians and their followers were socialized in the ancient regime and bring certain expectations to the new one. The old kind of clientelism will remain a convenient solution to day to day prob­lems for these politicians, par­ticu­larly as long as the instruments of the new kind of pol­itics, polit­ical par­ties, are weak and poorly or­gan­ized. Schattsneider (1942) may be right that demo­cracy is not con­ceiv­able without par­ties, but the building of strong party organ­iza­tions takes time and skill, and requires the passage of time, if for no other reason than that elections are discrete events that only occur every once in a while. In the meantime, resorting to the tried and true methods of African pol­itics will be tempting. Moreover, as Helmke and Levitsky (2007) remind us, in consolidated demo­ cra­cies, a pan­oply of well-­established informal institutions buttress the demo­ cratic order, and shape both expectations and behaviors of polit­ical actors. These

122   N. van de Walle include norms and informal understandings re­gard­ing the relationship between polit­ical par­ties, mech­an­isms of accommodation and compromise between the branches of gov­ern­ment, and broadly understood stand­ards of not only what is legal, but also what constitutes accept­able behavior in the polit­ical game. Again, these rules do not imme­diately emerge in the aftermath of demo­crat­ization, but require the passage of time, and the ex­peri­ence of repeated elections, budget cycles and legis­lat­ive sessions. In the meantime, the old culture of neopatrimonialism will repeatedly be invoked by actors who find it use­ful to their ends, and it is far from clear that other actors will always be able to proscribe the resultant behavior. Finally, the inter­na­tional relations of most African coun­tries on balance serve to maintain the polit­ical status quo. To be sure, since the end of the Cold War, the West has ad­voc­ated demo­cracy in the de­veloping world with slightly more consistency and sincerity. But the $20 billion in annual foreign aid that is mostly directed to the region’s gov­ern­ments both on balance prob­ably serves to buttress their hold on power and may actu­ally weaken the bur­eau­cratic institutions needed to counterbalance neopatrimonialism (Moss et al. 2007). Indeed, some ob­ser­vers have suggested that the current modalities of aid distribution are easily and consistently instrumentalized in clientelistic fashion by African state elites (Olivier de Sardan 1998; van de Walle 2001).

Concluding remarks A regu­lar claim that is made today suggests that demo­crat­ization has actu­ally increased clientelism in sub Saharan Africa. It is argued that greater com­peti­tion around elections fuels the buying and selling of votes, and that the end result may be greater clientelism than in the past. Other analysts have argued that demo­crat­ization has increased ethnic identity and sharpened ethnic pol­itics, through the lubricant of pub­lic resources and elect­oral competition. I am skep­tical about such claims. First, even if ac­cur­ate, the increase in clientelism may result not from demo­cracy, but from the recent demo­crat­ization. In at least some cases, it does seem that the demo­crat­ization of pub­lic life has enlivened ethnic com­peti­tion and increased corruption. Regime trans­itions can be a Pandora’s box, in which a number of old polit­ical resentments and conflicts that had been kept under wraps get new life, as new polit­ical actors emerge and heightened polit­ical com­peti­tion takes place. The issue at stake is not neces­sar­ily the nature of demo­cracy or of elect­oral com­peti­tion, how­ever, but rather the un­cer­tainty and chaos of moving from one set of polit­ical rules to another. Second, many of these accusations are made about elect­oral autocracies, and it seems slightly perverse to blame demo­cracy for the ills of what are essentially author­it­arian regimes with only falsely com­petit­ive elections. One should rebut such criticism by arguing these deficiencies are often due to the non-­democratic aspects of these regimes. Third, I would argue that the increased attention to polit­ical corruption often does not suggest an actual increase in its occurrence, but rather a freer press that

Democracy and clientelism in Africa today   123 is more able to report accusations of corruption than in the past, combined with a less cowed pub­lic that is more pub­lic about criticizing abuses of power than in the past. One of the paradoxes of demo­cracy is precisely that its more open and participatory nature will generate a greater volume of sometimes delegitimating criticism than is the case for author­it­arian regimes. In any event, this chapter has posed the more pertinent question, not whether polit­ical corruption would increase or decline, but instead, whether its function and forms are likely to evolve. I have sought to show that in beginning to demo­ cratize its pol­itics, Sub-­Saharan Africa has started the long road away from neopatrimonialism. Does that mean that pol­itics will entirely escape various imperfections? Hardly. Entering the end of the second decade of demo­crat­ ization, nonetheless, a tone is creeping into the ana­lyses of experts on the region that is quick to harp on the imperfections of multi-­party elections in the region. It is im­port­ant to avoid Panglossian op­tim­ism. Nonetheless, in suggesting that polit­ical clientelism is an essential and ubiquitous feature of all demo­cra­cies, this essay has sought to inject greater op­tim­ism into the study of African demo­cratic practices. Vote buying, jobs for the boys, schools being built in key constituencies in the weeks before elections, party finance scandals, corruption scandals in the press, influence peddling in the legislature – all these things should not be cel­eb­rated, of course, but they do mean that Africa is becoming less neopatrimonial and more democratic.

Note 1 For the rest of this chapter, I will use the gen­eral term neopatrimonialism as an all purpose label for this set of informal institutions.

8 Rebellion and warlordism The spectre of neopatrimonialism Morten Bøås and Kathleen M. Jennings

Recent decades have seen substantial parts of Central and West Africa plagued by civil war. Attempts to explain these wars commonly stress the prob­lem of state recession, combined with the emergence of warlords and warlordism (see Thomas et al. 2005; Lezhnev 2005; Green and Ward 2004; Mackinlay 2002; Rashid 2001; Shawcross 2000; Rich 1999; Reno 1998). Less examined is the beha­vi­our and actions of the nonstate armed groups fighting these conflicts, and how these may change over time.1 Why do movements that began as a social – albeit violent – rebellion against an author­it­arian and deeply corrupted state end up as a perverted mirror-­image of the state they origin­ally set out to destroy? Greed and increased access to resources provide one explanation for the mutabil­ ity of armed groups’ beha­vi­our over time (Keen 2000). A greed-­based approach may capture groups’ increasing re­li­ance on resource extraction and marketing over the life of the conflict. However, the profit motive itself does not explain why or to what extent groups turn away from their ori­ginal polit­ical agendas – and why many end up replicating certain pathologies of the states they contest. We therefore ad­voc­ate a different approach. We argue that the pro­cess by which rebel groups forsake polit­ical agendas to become profit-­seeking, market-­based entities may best be understood using a dual ana­lysis. The first aspect of this ana­lysis is to con­textualise the insurgency with regard to the pre-­conflict levels of structural and actual viol­ence in soci­ety. In this, we echo Richards’s (2005: 1) con­tention that the violent character of these movements needs ‘to be understood in relation to patterns of viol­ence already embedded in soci­ety’. The second aspect builds outward from the first. It centres on the questions: Did the state structures – specifically, the par­ticu­lar logic of dysfunctional neopatrimonialism – place insurgencies in the affected coun­tries on a path-­dependent track to a violent profit-­seeking warlordism? To what extent are these structures, and this path, common throughout West and Central Africa? The second element of the ana­lysis thus reflects our conviction, in line with Bøås and Dunn (2007), that ‘just because these guerrillas act within local, social, eco­nomic and his­tor­ical con­texts does not mean that their tra­ject­ories are entirely unique’. Certain commonalities are shared across space. These are grounded in meta-­narratives that reflect and expound col­lect­ive ex­peri­ences of corruption,

Rebellion and warlordism   125 abuse of power and position, and pov­erty (see Bøås 2004). Thus, while the backdrop of unrelenting, sys­tematic state recession and predation is sim­ilar to the conflicts of Central and West Africa, so too, to some degree, is the worldview of those fighting these conflicts. Shared perceptions and ex­peri­ences of social and eco­nomic exclusion, disenfranch­isement, and mar­ginalisation inform this worldview. What our approach seeks to illuminate is whether, and the extent to which, movements that may have emerged from sim­ilar worldviews have sim­ilar paths; and whether these shared paths derive from and depend on structural factors determined by the neopatrimonial state and encapsulating the soci­ety.2 Our approach is premised on the as­sump­tion that the actions of armed groups and rebel movements can be ana­lysed sys­tematically. Although some of the movements at the forefront of these conflicts – such as the Revolutionary United Front (RUF ) in Sierra Leone, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Northern Uganda, the Mai Mai in Eastern Congo, or the many factions active in the Liberian civil war – seemingly bear little resemb­lance to estab­lished polit­ical science typologies of insurgency movements, this does not mean that the viol­ence they wreak is irrational. In this chapter, we will de­scribe how situ­ations of mar­ginalisation and exclusion, in patrimonial soci­eties with the pos­sib­il­ity of nat­ural resource extraction, seem to lead to rebellions characterised by the same features as the soci­ety against which the ori­ginal grievances were targeted. We do not argue that this is bound to happen, but rather that a certain path-­dependency exists, and that the strength of this dynamic depends on local, national, and inter­na­tional responses to the conflict. Thus, the extent to which an armed movement with an agenda for social and polit­ical change can sustain, and act consistent with, that vision argu­ ably depends to some degree on how the group is treated by the sys­tem and soci­ ety it is rebelling against. The RUF was never presented nor treated as anything other than thugs, delinquent youths, and greedy bandits. Eventually, this was what they became. Currently, dispatches from the Niger Delta tend to downplay the very real social causes that the armed groups put forth, and focus on the piracy tactics they employ. This is worryingly evid­ent in the Nigerian state’s approach, which treats the armed youth as bandits that can legitimately be crushed using the full force of the state.

Neopatrimonialism as social practice Neopatrimonialism is usually seen as a sys­tem of rule in which bur­eau­cratic and patrimonial norms co-­exist (see Médard 1991a, 1996; Braathen et al. 2000). If such a sys­tem of rule exists on a nationwide scale, the outcome is a state able to extract and redistribute resources. However, this extraction and redis­tribu­tion is privatised. This circumstance is not unique to Central and West Africa, or even Sub-­Saharan Africa: neopatrimonial aspects can be found in polit­ical sys­tems worldwide. Yet there are im­port­ant distinctions between these sys­tems, both in the degree to which neopatrimonial logic has penetrated the polit­ical sys­tem in question, and in its functionality. In essentials, neopatrimonialism is a sys­tem of rule like any other: it lays

126   M. Bøås and K.M. Jennings the founda­tion for the polit­ical game of distribution and redis­tribu­tion and, as illus­ trated by the longevity of many African regimes, can provide both stability and order. Yet neopatrimonial sys­tems are also prone to extreme vul­ner­abil­ity. For example, Mobutu’s regime in Zaire shows how rapidly state frag­menta­tion occurs once the sys­tem can no longer reproduce itself. Dysfunctional neopatrimonialism follows the same logic as before, but without the same abil­ity to deliver. Even when functioning, how­ever, a pri­mary con­sequence of this kind of rule is that the various patrimonial paths of redis­tribu­tion divide the popu­la­tion along regional, ethnic and, at times, even family lines. This has obvious im­plica­tions for the regime, state institutions, and competing elites, but is equally im­port­ant for the popu­la­tion as a whole. For our purposes, the questions that arise are: what are the con­ditions for resistance within and against such a sys­tem? To what degree is it pos­sible to design an al­tern­ative polit­ical organ­isa­tion when such logic is embedded, not just in the state and its macro-­institutions, but also in people’s daily life – when it has become the order of things, the main prin­ciple of socio-­economic inter­actions at all levels of soci­ety? It is the social sys­tem that all are implicated in and part of, willingly or not; it forms the fabric of daily life and practices even for those far removed from the spoils. Thus, instead of seeing neopatrimonialism only as vari­ant of Weber’s (1947) typology of rule, it is perhaps more fruitful to in­ter­pret it as an iterated social practice that creates an informal institutional structure, which is not easily broken or bent. We do not argue that resistance is useless and change im­pos­ sible. Yet in examining why pro­jects for change morph into distorted agents of the status quo, one explanation is that per­vas­ive and increasingly dysfunctional neopatrimonial sys­tems have created a machine-­like character of African pol­ itics. This machine-­like character may recreate itself in various armed insurgencies, par­ticu­larly those that are long lasting and occurring in an envir­on­ment where resource extraction is pos­sible, and victory (in any meaningful sense of the word) more and more unlikely.

Rebel movements and warlordism If we accept that there is a relationship between pre-­war state structures and the character of the armed insurgency, we must then ask: what kind of social norms are in­ternalised, and what kind of mind-­sets and cosmologies de­veloped, under such circumstances as those de­scribed above? This brings back in the first aspect of our ana­lysis. Both Sierra Leone and Liberia are productive sites for this exercise; below we focus on the former. According to Fithen and Richards (2005: 123), ‘the RUF represents a paradox. It claimed to have an ambition for a more just soci­ety, and yet ended up a random and arbit­rary killing ma­chine’, seeking whatever profit could be gained for its members. A closer look at pre-­war societal con­ditions in Sierra Leone war zones may give us further insight into whether this was bound to happen, and to what degree the evolution of the RUF was linked to the state structures that the movement was initially estab­lished to resist and reform via armed revolution.

Rebellion and warlordism   127 The his­tory of governance and management in Sierra Leone is characterised by corruption, mismanagement, and neg­lect, which eventually led to complete state decay and civil war. The majority of Sierra Leoneans were (and remain) poor and unable to access ser­vices typ­ic­ally associated with the pub­lic sector, such as education – even where those ser­vices existed. Political and eco­nomic disenfranch­isement and mar­ginalisation were common to both urban and rural areas. Kono District, the his­tor­ical centre of diamond mining in Sierra Leone, is par­ticu­larly illustrative as to the relationship between the structural and the social. Diamonds were discovered in Kono District in the 1930s. By the 1930s, Sierra Leone’s main export commodities were diamonds, iron ore, bauxite and rutile, illustrating the rather rapid shift from dependence on forest products (e.g. palm oil, coffee and cocoa) to a mineral eco­nomy. Control of diamond mining has always been vested in the wealthy, power­ful, and/or connected, notwithstanding the fact that the mining itself was typ­ic­ally done by poor young men.3 Indeed, a brief sketch of the diamond mining industry in Kono shows both the sys­tematisation of corruption and clientelistic relationships – between both young miners and local chiefs and local chiefs and the centre – and how issues of autochtony and exclusion were in­teg­ral to the functioning and control of a diamond-­based patrimonial economy. For most of the period prior to inde­pend­ence (from 1935 to 1956), Sierra Leoneans were legally pro­hibited from mining their own diamonds (Keen 2005).4 A British com­pany, the Sierra Leone Selection Trust (SLST), had exclusive mining rights. To avoid illicit mining, SLST demanded the removal of those not con­sidered autochthonous to the diamond regions from those areas. The co­lo­nial administration gave paramount chiefs the respons­ib­ility to control settlement in and migration to those areas, and thereby also the power to decide who belonged to the ‘soil’ of the diamond-­producing regions (and who did not). Nevertheless, signi­fic­ant migration into diamond mining areas con­tinued in the 1950s, and many managed to circumvent the SLST mono­poly through bribery or the estab­lishment of patron-­client relationships to local chiefs. This was the beginning of what Reno (1995) later termed the ‘shadow state’ structure in Sierra Leone. Following violent protests in Kono District in 1955, diamond mining for Sierra Leoneans was legalised. In the areas previously controlled by SLST, the Alluvial Diamond Mining Scheme (ADMS) was estab­lished to grant mining licences to Sierra Leoneans and Sierra Leonean com­panies. Issuance of licences was subject to agreement by local chiefs and landowners. The pri­mary beneficiaries of this reform were the rich and well connected: for the most part, only chiefs, politicians, civil ser­vants, and traders could afford the licences and the neces­sary equipment. The Leb­an­ese com­mun­ity in Sierra Leone was also able to penetrate and dominate the new, supposedly ‘native’ mining sector by virtue of its access to capital. In turn, the chiefs in diamond-­rich areas, such as Kono, got rich from their power to grant licences and alloc­ate mining sites. Meanwhile, licence holders estab­lished themselves and engaged and equipped others to dig

128   M. Bøås and K.M. Jennings for them. This sys­tem provided some short-­term stability, and production and sales through legal and taxable channels even increased slightly. However, as early as the late 1950s, it was estim­ated that up to 75 per cent of the total value of diamond production was being smuggled (Keen 2005). The loss of formal control over the diamond areas, already underway during the last stage of the co­lo­nial period, further con­tinued after inde­pend­ence in 1961. When Siaka Stevens came to power in 1968, attempts were made to re-­impose gov­ern­ment control over the diamond areas, by sending the army to sup­port the police in their attempt to halt illicit mining. This ultimately resulted not in a decrease in illicit mining, but the expansion and entrenchment of a culture of corruption, as both police and army personnel accepted bribes from miners lacking the neces­sary permits. At the same time, Stevens’s new Government Diamond Office (GDO) – which essentially adopted a ‘buy cheap, sell high’ pol­icy – only increased the incentives for smug­gling. Although diamond smug­gling posed a severe prob­lem for state rev­enue and institutions, it was to the mutual bene­fit of licence-­holders and state em­ployees. The latter profited from turning a blind eye to (or cooperating in) smug­gling opera­tions. Thus, the state structures charged with controlling the diamond sector for the bene­fit of the coun­try essentially degraded into fleecing opera­tions for personal enrichment. By the late 1980s, some estim­ates say, up to 95 per cent of the diamonds produced in Sierra Leone were smuggled out of the coun­try (Sesay 1993; Keen 2005). When Joseph Momoh as­sumed power in Janu­ary 1986, he was pressured by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF ) to control and curb the smug­gling. In 1987, the army was yet again sent into the diamond-­producing regions. Rather than improve the situ­ation, this resulted in a widening of the coopera­tion and cooptation between mining inter­ests and the army, sim­ilar to that which unfolded during Stevens’ attempt to re-­regulate the sector in the late 1960s. Although the purported reform opera­tion was ineffect­ive, the army’s expulsion of about 10,000 miners from Kono created a huge pool of discon­tented young ex-­miners. This popu­la­tion later came to constitute the main recruitment pool for the RUF, the army, and the Civil Defence Force (CDF ) during the civil war (see Abdullah 1998, 2004; Richards 1996; Reno 1998; Fithen 1999). Thus, as the state lost formal control over its diamond resources, diamonds became the cornerstone of a culture of corruption and mismanagement of national resources for the personal enrichment and bene­fit of polit­ical and eco­ nomic elites, the armed forces, and foreign inter­ests. Meanwhile, the gen­eral pub­lic and most of the miners themselves remained in a situ­ation of pov­erty and vul­ner­abil­ity (Bøås and Hatløy 2006; Reno 2003). Migrant miners’ circumstances may have been espe­cially precarious, as they were double outsiders: outside the eco­nomic and polit­ical channels through which spoils were claimed and distributed; and outsiders or ‘strangers’ (Reno 2003) to the diamond areas, and thus de­pend­ent on the ‘goodwill’ of local chiefs to carry out their ac­tiv­ities (this goodwill typ­ic­ally the result of purchase through a protection racket). Miners also may have been unprepared for the difficulty of the mining life, and disillusioned by their in­abil­ity to realise their hope of finding the big diamond

Rebellion and warlordism   129 that would secure their future comfort. Even if they did strike it rich, their share of the spoils would likely be limited, indeed. This state of affairs was not lost on people like the infamous RUF warlord, Sam ‘Maskita’ Bockarie, who grew up in Kono during this period. When killed in early May 2003, Bockaire was gen­erally regarded as one of the most dangerous men in West Africa: rebel, bandit, but also a regional powerbroker whose actions could threaten the stability of the whole West Africa region. Yet his background was utterly ordinary. Born in 1964, the son of a diamond miner, Bockarie grew up in Koidu town in Kono. He left school at an early age to become a diamond miner – a typical fate in a coun­try with high school fees, and where fam­il­ies are poor and depend on the income that chil­dren can provide – and worked at the bottom rung of the diamond mining hier­archy in Kono. As many others, Bockarie eventually left mining to earn his living by other means: first as professional disco dancer in Sierra Leone, and then as a hairdresser in Abidjan, where he met a group of RUF recruits and decided to try his luck with them instead. There is little special about ‘Maskita’s’ background. In its seeming aimlessness and constraints, it is sim­ilar to many others who ended up as rebels or soldiers. It illus­trates, how­ever, that in coun­tries like Sierra Leone, it is not only the state and its institutions that is damaged and broken by an increasingly dysfunctional sys­tem, but the inhabitants as well (Bøås 2007). Youth may be par­ticu­larly susceptible to the deadening effect of exclusion from oppor­tun­ities for advancement or change (Honwana and De Boeck 2005). Is it therefore so strange that, in rebellion, and facing stronger resistance than perhaps anticipated, these movements retard to the same practices witnessed and ex­peri­enced by the parti­cip­ants in their form­at­ive years? In so doing, corrupting their ‘revolu­tion’ and mirroring the dysfunctional patrimonial state they origin­ ally had rebelled against. As Foday Sankoh, leader of the RUF, said in 2000, ‘They ask us why we mine diamonds. Why didn’t they ask Jamil [Said Mohammed] or Shaki [Siaka Stevens] that when the [All Peoples Congress] was in power? Yeah, we mine! . . . We are not going to give up diamonds or our guns to anybody (cited in Reno 2003: 59)’.6 5

Social banditry and neopatrimonial structures The case of the Niger Delta rebellion illus­trates this point from a slightly different angle – albeit with the hope that this rebellion may yet produce a different outcome than in Sierra Leone. However, this rebellion is even more embedded in a patrimonial structure than in Sierra Leone: all social relations between groups and inter­ests in the Delta region revolve around oil and oil rev­enue. Despite mismanagement of oil resources, corruption, pov­erty, and mar­ ginalisation, some sort of order still prevails in the Delta (ICG 2006). This order enables oil production, but at a cost. Oil com­panies conduct their business in an uneasy co-­habitation (or coopera­tion) with a range of actors, including rebel movements like the Movement for Emancipation in the Niger Delta (MEND), other armed factions, bandits, local politicians, private secur­ity com­panies, the

130   M. Bøås and K.M. Jennings Nigerian Army, and national politicians (Yates 2006; ICG 2006). Yet local com­ munit­ies that receive few bene­fits from oil production – and struggle under the weight of pov­erty, underemployment, envir­on­mental prob­lems, crime, and corruption – have fuelled a milit­ant uprising that threatens both Nigeria’s oil production, and the coun­try’s fragile demo­cratic trans­ition (see Omeje 2006; Kaldor and Said 2007). Over recent years, different insurgency groups have fought against the army, destroyed oil installations, taken oil com­pany em­ployees hostage, and carried out several car bombings (ICG 2006). After a recent wave of hostage taking in Au­gust 2006, President Olusegun Obasanjo threatened to crush by force the so-­called ‘criminal elements’ in the Niger Delta. Thus far, the most tan­gible result is the razing of hundreds of slum houses in Port Harcourt, in proximity to where a soldier was killed during the kidnapping of foreign oil workers (BBC 2006a). Such heavy-­handed tactics have been tried in the past: they did not produce the desired outcome then, nor is there reason to expect they will be effect­ive now (Lindsay 2006). The growth of militias, whether defined as armed factions with a polit­ical agenda, bandits, or something in-­between (e.g. social bandits), are a con­sequence of local grievances that must be addressed. Two aspects of the situ­ation in the Niger Delta are note­worthy. First, there is little doubt that connections exist between militia groups and local polit­ical elites in the Delta. Indeed, one of MEND’s demands is the release of Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, a former Bayelsa State governor charged with corruption. The link between militia groups and polit­ical elites is also evid­ent in the conduct of recent elections. The ‘convergence of militancy and pol­itics (ICG 2006: 21)’ is not foreign to Nigerian elections. In the Delta, previous elections have featured the harassment of can­did­ates and their sup­porters by armed groups, mainly consisting of young men, in the ser­vice of another candidate; and clashes between armed groups controlled by different polit­ical opponents. The second notable aspect of the Niger Delta rebellion is the degree to which young armed men wear different hats (BBC 2006b). Under the banner of MEND, they attack oil installations and take oil workers as hostages, in order to put forward polit­ical demands for increased regional auto­nomy and control of oil rev­enues. The same people also take hostages for local com­munit­ies, as a means of addressing – or at least highlighting – local company-­specific grievances. This was for instance the case with four sailors taken hostage in Au­gust 2006. The hostages were taken by a group of armed young men, who then handed them over to a local com­mun­ity that had grievances against a Nigerian oil com­pany, Peak Petroleum.7 Both the ori­ginal kidnapping and the sub­sequent holding and nego­ti­ations, although different in type and nature, could be con­sidered polit­ical acts, stemming from legitimate grievances and demands. However, the same groups of men also take hostages purely for ransom, with no polit­ical pretence; and work as hired thugs for local strongmen and politicians, espe­cially during election cam­paigns. Their roles and ac­tiv­ities overlap. They are conducting an armed polit­ical insurgency, but also operating as bandits. The rebellion in the Niger Delta is thus both an attempt to address social injustice, but also a mode of production and a way to make a living. Whether the

Rebellion and warlordism   131 Niger Delta rebellion will con­tinue to have a social profile or deteriorate solely into criminality remains to be seen. However, the way in which its parti­cip­ants are embedded in patrimonial clientelistic relationships with local strongmen, and the multitude of oil money and actors in the region, implies that those rebelling walk a fine line between ‘greed’ and ‘grievances’. If they overstep this boundary, they may turn what is a legitimate rebellion into a market-­based entity operating in an downward-­spiralling, dysfunctional patrimonial order. We concur with Fithen and Richards’s (2005) argument that, in the case of the RUF in Sierra Leone, a collapse into fatalistic viol­ence, random killing, and profit-­ seeking warlordism could have been avoided if – rather than trying to deny the movement – more attention was paid to the under­lying reasons for its exist­ence. In the case of the Niger Delta, it is not foregone that MEND will take the path of the RUF. MEND has put forward legitimate polit­ical claims that should be taken ser­ iously, including their suggestion for nego­ti­ations on the distribution of oil rev­ enues, under the supervision of a neutral third party. If these claims are ignored or denied, there is every likelihood that the patrimonial pol­itics in which the armed youth of MEND are implicated will come to dominate the movement – and it will end up as another perverted facsimile of the soci­ety it rebelled against.

Notes 1 Two exceptions are Clapham (1998) and Bøås and Dunn (2007). 2 Will Reno’s (1995, 1998, 2000) concept of the ‘shadow state’ in West and Central Africa is key in showing how shadow state structures come to characterise soci­eties, as neopatrimonalism becomes the norm for socio-­economic inter­action between elites and counter-­elites, as well between people of all classes and strata. 3 For a description of the living con­ditions of diamond miners in Kono District, see Bøås and Hatløy (2006). They also de­scribe the ways in which young miners are discouraged from attempting to keep and market ‘their’ diamonds because they gen­erally lack the contacts and know­ledge neces­sary to sell the diamond at an ad­vant­ageous price, and because they know that they would be vigor­ously pursued and pun­ished were such ac­tiv­ities to be discovered. 4 Parts of this section are adapted from Bøås and Hatløy (2006). 5 Hope followed by disappointment or desperation is not unique to miners in Sierra Leone. In De Boeck’s (1999) examination of the bana Lunda (young urban Zaireans that migrated to the Angolan province of Lunda Norte to mine diamonds), he de­scribes how these youth migrate in order to try their luck and hope for a quick profit, and will go so far as self-­mutilation (amputating fingers or pulling teeth) in order to lift the curse (mpiaka) preventing one from digging up any diamonds over a certain period of time. 6 Jamil Said Mohammed was a Sierra Leone-­born Leb­an­ese partner of Siaka Stevens, who took over the Government Diamond Office in the 1970s and, through this mech­ an­ism, controlled with Stevens a vast amount of diamond rev­enue. See Reno (2003). 7 Two Norwegian and two Ukrainian em­ployees of Trico Supply AS were kidnapped off their ship. Trico Supply AS is a Norwegian affiliate of a US-­based com­pany, Trico Marine, which supplies marine sup­port ser­vices to the oil and gas industry. The supply boat had been let by Peak Petroleum. The men were later set free, unharmed. See Bøås (2006a, 2006b), and author inter­view with the released Norwegian hostages.

9 The origins and meaning of Nigeria’s ‘godfatherism’ phenomenon Chris Albin-­Lackey

Médard’s portrayal of Kenya’s Charles Njonjo as a ‘big man’ has become in­ex­tric­ ably associated with his understanding of patronage and neopatrimonial govern­ ance in Africa (Médard 1987). Two and a half decades later, that cat­egor­ization has been parsed into a series of vari­ations that attempt to capture the many distinct and im­port­ant elements of the broader theme. Not least among these has been the need to de­scribe the use of viol­ence as a polit­ical resource. Médard was aware of this issue when he suggested borrowing from debates on power and domination in New Guinea the distinction between ‘big men’, associated with the abil­ity to redis­ tribute resources, and ‘strong men’, whose power was prim­arily sustained by the abil­ity to instrumentalize viol­ence and coercion (Médard 1982). It is, how­ever, in Nigeria that these issues have become an em­blem­atic feature, deeply engrained into the coun­try’s return to ‘demo­cracy’ since 1999. What has become known as polit­ical godfatherism refers, in Nigerian parlance, to indi­viduals who are able to dominate pub­lic institutions by maneuvering their protégés into elected office and other im­port­ant gov­ern­ment positions (Ibrahim 2003). Godfathers are not mere fin­an­cial sponsors of these officeholders; they succeed because of their abil­ity to mobilize viol­ence and corruption effect­ively enough to hobble any and all of their protégés’ would-­be competitors while guaranteeing impunity for the numerous illegalities this entails (HRWA 2007a). It has been suggested that Nigeria’s godfathers might be thought of as a dis­ tinct outgrowth of the phenomenon of violent ‘strong men’ who have risen to challenge the dominance of the ‘big man’ in many parts of Africa: While the big man combines eco­nomic power with key polit­ical functions as broker in a neopatrimonial setting; the strongman does so through his abil­ity to control ‘illicit’ forms of viol­ence, if need be through the manipula­ tion of pub­lic means of coercion. The strong man may be a warlord or the boss of a gang; he may also be, as observed in Nigeria under the fourth repub­lic, a rogue politician or his ‘godfather’. (Bach 2005: 67) Nigeria’s godfathers represent a phenomenon that is funda­mentally distinct from the typical patterns of ‘big man’ and then ‘strong man’ pol­itics dominant in

Nigeria’s ‘godfatherism’ phenomenon   133 many parts of Africa since inde­pend­ence. Nigeria’s godfathers grew out of a framework sim­ilar to those that produced, and were then influenced by, ‘big men’ like Charles Njonjo in Kenya. But on the basis of research conducted in Nigeria during the past two years, the fol­low­ing pages argue that Nigeria’s present-­day godfathers are funda­mentally different creatures even from the ‘strong men’ who dominate gov­ern­ment institutions in other con­texts. Their rising power and influence have also increasingly pushed Nigeria’s polity in uncharted new directions. Since 1999, the pub­lic institutions of Nigeria’s Fourth Repub­lic have become increasingly dominated by patterns of uncontrolled criminal activity that have subsumed many of the legitimate aims of gov­ern­ment.1 The result is an undemo­ cratic and often violent perversion of the coun­try’s federal ideals.2 Nigeria’s polit­ical sys­tem is not author­it­arian in the traditional sense of the word. It more closely re­sembles an ‘elect­oral autocracy’ (Schedler 2006) where a formal emphasis on elections purports to mask the absence of real account­abil­ ity and the continuing im­port­ance of elite-­centered patronage pol­itics. Federal­ ism remains the intellectual core of Nigeria’s polit­ical sys­tem. But on the ground Nigerian fed­eral­ism has degen­er­ated into a structure that simply accommodates a multiplicity of decentralized and lawless polit­ical spaces – its 36 states and 774 local gov­ern­ments, along with smaller patches of polit­ical turf that are not for­ mally delineated.3 The funda­mental character of Nigeria’s current polit­ical configuration has both created and is reflected in the power, the actions and the proliferation of polit­ical godfathers within the coun­try. These godfather’s ‘pol­itics’ focus nar­ rowly around personalized control and enjoyment of some portion of the ‘national cake’ – that is, straight­forward access to Nigeria’s oil rev­enues rather than any broader attempt at estab­lishing polit­ical hegemony. While the typical conception of polit­ical clientelism implies that the more power­ful of two actors provides the lesser power­ful with mater­ial rewards in exchange for polit­ical power (Eisenstadt and Lemarchand 1981), the godfather– protégé relationship postulates the oppos­ite. Nigeria’s polit­ical godfathers have no inter­est in occupying the pub­lic offices: they work to dominate these by proxy by filling them with protégés who would be in­cap­able of winning office on their own. Their behavior reflects a perception that gov­ern­ment institutions mat­ter only as investments that can yield greater personal wealth and power; it is also as­sumed that the institutions concerned can be effect­ively dominated from the outside. Godfathers demand regu­lar fin­an­cial ‘returns’ from those they install into positions of pub­lic confidence. Those returns take the form of money stolen from pub­lic coffers by polit­ical officeholders – gen­erally either directly or through the awarding of phantom or grossly inflated gov­ern­ment contracts – and handed over to the godfathers. Godfathers also typ­ic­ally demand the power to control appointments to gov­ern­ment positions that fall within formal remit of their pro­ tégés and to ensure that many lucrative contracts are awarded to indi­viduals of their choosing. In effect, godfathers appropriate their sponsored officeholders’

134   C. Albin-Lackey abil­ity to dispense patronage as their own and in doing so create still more pro­ tégés who are each sources of additional fin­an­cial returns to the godfather. The phenomenon is perhaps most pronounced at the state and local levels in Niger­ ia’s three-­tiered sys­tem of federalism. Godfathers in Nigeria are also unique in that their relev­ance and power derives entirely from their proficiency in criminal activity. Godfathers finance gangs of polit­ical thugs to rig elections and bribe gov­ern­ment and police officials who could stand in the way of their protégés’ success. By doing this they place the politicians they sponsor in a permanent state of debt, and ensure that those debts are repaid with the cred­ible threat of unleashing viol­ence or other forms of criminal retribu­ tion against recalcitrant debtor politicians. That gov­ern­ment rev­enues are lucrative enough to be worth fighting for in such brutal fashion is testament to the scale of Nigeria’s centralized stream of gov­ern­ment oil rev­enues and to the weakness of all other sectors of its eco­nomy (Lewis 2004; Rotberg 2004).

Portraits of two godfathers It is perhaps easiest to understand Nigeria’s godfather phenomenon – and the degree to which those godfathers reflect a broader criminalization of pol­itics in Nigeria – by discussing indi­vidual examples in some detail. The fol­low­ing pages will discuss two of Nigeria’s best-­known polit­ical godfathers – Chief Lamidi Adedibu of Nigeria’s southwestern Oyo State and Chris Uba of Anambra State in Nigeria’s southeast. The emphasis will be on the role of both men in pol­itics under the Fourth Repub­lic rather than on presenting their biographies. In the case of Adedibu, there has been at least one recent attempt to lay out in more detail his origins and his­tory (Obadare 2007). Both Adedibu and Uba were inter­viewed by this author in 2007 for research that focused partly on the per­vas­ive human rights abuses gen­er­ated by the ac­tiv­ities of both men (HRW 2007a). Except where other­wise indicated, most of the in­forma­tion below is drawn from that research. Lamidi Adedibu Lamidi Adedibu claimed to have been involved in pol­itics in southwestern Nigeria since 1951, nine years before Nigeria’s inde­pend­ence. Initially and as a much younger man, he is widely de­scribed as having worked prim­arily as a local or­gan­izer of polit­ical thugs for Obafemi Awolowo’s Action Group (AG). After the death of Awolowo in 1987, Adedibu successfully worked himself into a much more prominent polit­ical position.4 By the time of Nigeria’s return to civil­ ian rule in 1999, he had already handpicked and tightly controlled at least one past Governor of Oyo State, Kolapo Ishola.5 From 1999 until his death in 2008, Adedibu did much more than simply retain his prominence as a polit­ical power broker in Oyo State. By all ap­pear­ances his power and relev­ance both increased under Nigeria’s nom­inally demo­cratic gov­ ern­ment, along with his abil­ity to mobilize viol­ence, corruption and other illegal

Nigeria’s ‘godfatherism’ phenomenon   135 modes of polit­ical com­peti­tion with complete impunity. He became one of the iconic examples of the godfather phenomenon under Nigeria’s Fourth Republic. Adedibu openly flauted his polit­ical power; in one television inter­view he casually asserted that, ‘I have the last say on polit­ical de­cisions in Oyo State today.’ In another inter­view with Human Rights Watch he sim­ilarly stated that ‘I sponsor them, all of the politicians.’ Nor have the ‘sponsored’ politicians denied this. Former Oyo State Governor Christopher Alao-­Akala ac­know­ledged that ‘Chief Adedibu has sponsored everybody. Everybody who is who and who in Oyo State pol­itics has passed through [his house].’ Akala is a longtime protégé of Adedibu’s. As Adedibu tells the story, ‘I sponsored him to become chairman of his local gov­ern­ment council. At the end of his time, I said it is better to become deputy governor.’ And so it was. Akala became deputy governor to PDP Governor Rashidi Ladoja after the 2003 elections that brought the latter to power; the polls were blatantly rigged throughout Nigeria.6 Adedibu’s polit­ical power did not by itself make him em­blem­atic of the god­ father syndrome. The way he secured power and enforced loy­alty among his protégés is equally crucial. Adedibu was a very blunt player, relying prim­arily on a capa­city to mobilize viol­ence on demand to assert polit­ical relev­ance and ensure the polit­ical loy­alty of Oyo politicians. The predominant reser­voir of polit­ical thugs in Oyo State is the state’s chapter of the National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW). Oyo’s NURTW chapter is dominated by violent motor park ‘touts’ with no legitimate employment, as opposed to the drivers and others who make up most of the Union’s mem­ber­ship in some other parts of the coun­try. Before 2003 Adedibu maneuvered another of his protégés, Latif Akin­ sola – pop­ularly known as ‘Tokyo’ – into the position of chairman of Oyo’s chapter of NURTW. Through Tokyo and through Adedibu’s regu­lar dispensa­ tion of petty cash and food to a core group of NURTW members, Adedibu for years had the abil­ity to mobilize large-­scale viol­ence with little difficulty. Adedibu did not hesitate to put his power to effect­ive use. The candidate he successfully sup­ported for Governorship in 2003 under the PDP ticket, Rashidi Ladoja, attempted to break free of Adedibu’s control almost imme­diately after assuming office. Ladoja alleges that Adedibu demanded huge cash payments in money stolen from the state treasury; the right to dispense appointments to Ladoja’s cab­inet to cronies of Adedibu; and the right to channel lucrative gov­ ern­ment contracts to himself and those close to him in order to embezzle most of the money involved. Ladoja’s Government charged Tokyo with murder and imprisoned him without bail to try and partially break Adedibu’s power, and installed one of his own sup­porters in his place as NURTW Chairman. Adedibu, for his part, consistently referred to Ladoja as an ‘ingrate’. Adedibu showed no restraint in fighting to re-­establish his control over the state gov­ern­ment. In 2005 Adedibu even arranged for his sup­porters in the Oyo state legislature – 18 out of 32 members – to launch an attempt to impeach Governor Ladoja. Ladoja and his followers in the assembly allege that the pro-­impeachment camp was largely bribed, blackmailed or other­wise beholden to Adedibu.

136   C. Albin-Lackey The impeachment saga deeply split the Oyo State House of Assembly and led to widespread viol­ence as pro-­Ladoja legislators tried to prevent the vote. At one point a pro-­Adedibu legislator stabbed one of his colleagues from across the aisle on the floor of the House. When the vote to constitute a panel of inquiry that ultimately led to Ladoja’s impeachment was finally held, it was preceeded by a gun battle between sup­porters of the two rival camps and was followed by an attack by pro-­Adedibu thugs who ransacked Government House and destroyed Ladoja’s office. In the end, Ladoja was briefly removed from office in 2006, but he was to be soon reinstated because the vote against him failed to satisfy the consti­tu­tional requirement of a two-­thirds majority vote of the state legislature. From then on Adedibu took his battle against Ladoja to the streets. With Nigeria’s 2007 elections approaching, Ladoja sought the PDP’s nomi­ nation for a second term, while Adedibu sought to displace him in favor of Deputy Governor Akala. Both sides mobilized rival factions of NURTW, along with other gangs of thugs, to battle with one another in the streets. Pro-­Ladoja NURTW leader Tawa took up residence in the same compound as the Gover­ nor’s official residence.7 The war between Adedibu and the Governor came to a head in Febru­ary 2007 in the town of Akure in neigh­boring Ondo State, when the PDP formally invested Akala with the gubernatorial nomination. Bloody clashes imme­diately broke out between armed sup­porters of both sides, claiming at least four lives. Once Ladoja was out of the way, Adedibu, along with the ma­chinery of the Oyo PDP, easily managed to force Akala into office at the April 2007 polls. Interna­ tional and do­mestic election ob­ser­vers reported widespread rigging and intimi­ dation as gangs of NURTW thugs as­saulted voters and opposi­tion sup­porters while attacking polling centers to steal ballot boxes in many areas. Adedibu’s position in Oyo State remained as strong as ever. Indeed, Governor Akala showed every sign of remaining loyal to his benefactor. Most of what Adedibu did to retain his grip over Oyo state after 2003 was in clear violation of the law. Far from being pursued by the police, Adedibu had a detail of Mobile Police Officers per­man­ently attached to him for his protection. When Adedibu was pub­licly discovered to have illegally induced elect­oral officials to provide him with six voter registration ma­chines for his personal use, the police refused even to investigate the crime, which carries a prison sentence of one year under Nigeria’s elect­oral law. There has also been no hint of police investigation into Adedibu’s open sponsorship of polit­ical viol­ence against Ladoja’s sup­porters before and during the 2007 elections. There was no police or federal gov­ern­ment response to curb the ac­tiv­ities of NURTW gangs linked to Akala and Adedibu. These kept staging bloody attacks on sup­porters of Ladoja – including Tawa, Ladoja’s former NURTW protégé – and well as on ordinary civilians. Despite Adedibu’s central and no­tori­ous asso­ci­ation with viol­ence, corruption and other violations of the law, he was treated by those in power with respect and as a legitimate player in the polit­ical pro­cess. Adedibu enjoyed access to the cor­ridors of power far beyond his own state. Throughout the period of the

Nigeria’s ‘godfatherism’ phenomenon   137 Obasanjo Administration Adedibu secured regu­lar meetings with the President, who treated him as a partner in realizing the PDP’s ambitions in Oyo. Former PDP Chairman Ahmadu Ali once referred to Oyo State as a ‘gar­rison’ and to Adedibu as its ‘Commander’. Nor was his position shaken after Obasanjo left office: when the head of Nigeria’s National Agency for Food, Drug Administra­ tion and Control (NAFDAC) was accusing Adedibu of marketing counterfeit medicines in Octo­ber 2007, Oyo’s Commissioner of Police responded by pub­ licly denouncing the NAFDAC boss.8 Six months after leaving power, Obasanjo stirred up con­tro­versy by pub­licly referring to Adedibu as the ‘father of the PDP’.9 Adedibu died in June 2008 at the approximate age of 80 (though it is pos­sible that no one other than Adedibu himself knew his true age). His death attracted comment from across Nigeria and from nearly every segment of the pub­lic. Many com­ment­ators expressed relief and satis­fac­tion that he had faded from the scene. One columnist wrote: Adedibu is gone. We should prob­ably not rejoice at the death of a fellow human being, but we are certainly relieved to hear the exit of such a rascal who ensured that demo­cracy made no pro­gress during his days. May he never have successors. And may all like him, who have been holding this nation to ransom, follow him to wherever he has gone. Nigeria will defi­ nitely be a happier place without them. (Sam Nda-­Isaiah, June 16, 2008) The reaction of Nigeria’s polit­ical elite, how­ever, was for the most part entirely different. There is perhaps no better testimonial to the central role men like Adedibu have played in shaping Nigeria’s polit­ical trajectory than the emo­ tional testimonials leading politicians paid him after his death. The PDP called on Nigerians to partake in seven days of mourning to mark his death.10 Major news­papers were filled with paid, full-­page advertisements lamenting his passing. Former pres­id­ent Obasanjo called Adedibu’s death ‘the end of an era’ and declared that ‘nobody can replace him’; Obasanjo said that Adedibu had called him to say hello just two days before he died (Jide Ajani and Ola Ajayi 2008). A spokesman for the Nigerian Senate said that, ‘We [the Senate] mourn his departure and hope that all and sundry would have profited one way or the other from his life style giving freely to the needy and placing the wel­fare of his followers above every con­sidera­tion.’11 But perhaps the most inter­esting reaction was that of Adedibu’s protégé Alao-­Akala. ‘I am a lucky one’, the Governor said. ‘With the tutorial I had from Baba, I can deal with anybody.’12 Chris Uba Chris Uba is a polit­ical godfather just as famous and no­tori­ous across Nigeria as Chief Adedibu of Oyo State. Uba reached the apex of his power in 2003, when he ‘sponsored’ and helped rig into office PDP can­did­ates for elective offices

138   C. Albin-Lackey across the state, including then-­Governor Chris Ngige. After those polls Uba pub­licly referred to himself as ‘the greatest godfather in Nigeria’ while describ­ ing his achievement as ‘the first time an indi­vidual single-­handedly put into posi­ tion every politician in the state’ (Ibrahim 2003). Chris Ngige became Governor of Anambra State through rigged elections with Uba’s backing in 2003. He had been compelled to sign away much of his power to Uba in return for his sup­port. The ar­range­ment between the two men was spelled out in remark­ably clear terms in a written ‘contract’ and ‘declaration of loy­alty’ signed by both of them and seen by this author.13 Under the agreement, Governor Ngige swore ‘abso­lute loy­alty’ to Chris Uba and agreed to allow Uba control over appointments to im­port­ant gov­ern­ment positions including the Governor’s cab­inet; the awarding of all gov­ern­ment contracts; and other im­port­ant decisions. As in the case of Adedibu in Oyo State, the viol­ence associated with Uba’s sway over Anambra pol­itics would come to light in a very pub­lic fashion once the man he helped install as Governor tried to break free of his influence. Ngige and Uba give differing accounts as to the reason for their falling out shortly after Ngige’s inauguration. While Uba has denied making any expli­cit demands for fin­an­cial compensation beyond the right to appropriate and apportion lucrative gov­ern­ment contracts, Ngige claims that money was at the heart of their dispute. Uba, according to him, kept making ‘personal demands that I go to the treasury, take money and give it to him,’ almost from the moment he was elected. Shortly before his inauguration as Governor, Ngige also claims that armed men broke into his home and forced him at gunpoint to sign a pledge stating he would pay Chris Uba N3 billion from state gov­ern­ment funds. Uba has denied this, but ac­know­ledges that Ngige’s attempt to assert inde­pend­ence was at the heart of their dispute. His position is that Ngige broke the terms of their agree­ ment and did not give Uba the returns he was entitled to for securing Ngige access to office in the first place. In an inter­view at his luxurious home in Enugu, Uba said that: The Governor was trying to be smart, trying to run the gov­ern­ment on his own. . . . The prob­lem is Ngige being a politician who did not invest one Naira, not even one kobo, wanted to run away with every­thing and not even share one appointment. Uba’s attempts to reassert control over the polit­ical empire he thought he had an­chored through Ngige’s election took a violent turn, com­par­able in several respects to what transpired in Oyo. In 2003, Governor Ngige was kidnapped, alleg­ edly by armed policemen, and forced to sign a ‘letter of resignation’ at gunpoint. Ngige alleges Uba was behind this. The state legislature, packed with Uba’s sup­ porters, accepted Ngige’s resignation despite the circumstances under which it had been obtained. As one legislator put it later, most lawmakers including himself were then ‘in bondage’ to Uba. The courts, how­ever, quickly overturned the move. Faced with that reversal in the courts, Uba resorted to even more violent tactics. In 2004 a large gang of armed thugs attacked State gov­ern­ment buildings

Nigeria’s ‘godfatherism’ phenomenon   139 including Government House itself, burning part of it to the ground. The police stood aside and watched as this took place – 24 people were also killed in the crossfire. Governor Ngige, like most of Nigerian civil soci­ety and the press, accuses Uba of having orchestrated the attack, pointing to the refusal of the police to intervene as evid­ence of his involvement. The feud between Uba and Ngige came to a sudden end in March 2006, as a Federal Court of Appeal ruled that the 2003 polls that had brought Ngige to power were so per­vas­ively rigged that their results should be overturned. Ngige left office, and his op­pon­ent in those elections, Peter Obi of the opposi­tion All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) took his place. Ngige’s departure argu­ably left Uba in no worse of a position since he had long since lost any influence over the Governor. Later during the same year Chris Uba’s power and ambitions suffered a dev­ ast­ating blow as he was forced aside by his more power­ful brother Andy Uba.14 Andy Uba had secured the PDP nomination for Governor in 2007 with the power­ful backing of the Presidency in Abuja, and he pursued that ambition by pushing his brother aside to take control of Anambra’s pol­itics himself. Andy forced out the entire leadership of the Anambra State PDP, which had been com­ posed of Chris Uba loyalists, while Chris was out of Nigeria on vaca­tion. Chris Uba de­scribed this move as a ‘coup,’ and Andy Uba then successfully and quickly mar­ginalized Chris Uba from the polit­ical scene al­to­gether. Chris Uba’s already-­waning influence over the state legislature con­tinued to dwindle, and he largely faded from the forefront of the polit­ical scene. Andy Uba won the PDP nomination as well as the April election, which was rigged on a level that exceeded even the dismal nationwide norm in elect­oral authorities’ brazen manipulation of the pro­cess. Chris Uba suffered what was perhaps his greatest humiliation around the days of the elections, when he was detained in a prison cell in Abuja for two days for fear that he would disrupt the election. Andy Uba’s ambitions were also ultimately reversed. While he had been tri­umph­antly elected in Anambra through rigged elections, days after he as­sumed office Nigeria’s Supreme Court ruled that the elections should never have been held in the first place because Governor Obi had not had the chance to serve out his full four-­year term. Chris Uba’s own power over Anambra State had largely evaporated by the time these events had run their course, but he did not fall to any great depth. After the 2007 elections he remained a member of the PDP’s national board of trustees, and the thought of prosecuting or even investigating him for the numer­ ous violent abuses and acts of corruption attributed to him and those around him was not ser­iously broached in any gov­ern­ment circles.

The bigger picture Adedibu and Uba are both exaggerated figures and the scale of their excesses and polit­ical achievements is not ‘typical’ of Nigeria’s polit­ical elite. But their actions and manner of influ­en­cing events around them help to illus­trate the ele­ ments of godfatherism as an idiosyncratic phenomenon. Most godfathers in

140   C. Albin-Lackey Nigeria are far less famous and flamboyant than Uba and Adedibu, but they all share some basic charac­ter­istics in common. What caracterizes a godfather is his (or her, in the cases of at least a few ‘godmothers’) abil­ity to estab­lish control, through viol­ence and corruption, over resources that flow from polit­ical offices that he does not hold himself. Some godfathers once held pub­lic office themselves, and seek to control their successors after hand-­picking them and helping to rig them into their position. During the run-­up to the 2007 elections several former governors, having served the two terms the Nigerian Constitution limits them to, were widely accused of attempting to position themselves as ‘godfathers’ to their successors. Critics of former (and no­tori­ously corrupt) governors such as Peter Odili of Rivers State and James Ibori of Delta State have accused them of falling into this category. In their cases, mo­tiva­tions would include not only retaining access to and control over oppor­tun­ities for patronage, but also a desire to avoid criminal investigations over abuses committed during their own terms in office. Former President Olusegun Obasanjo himself has been accused of attempting to turn himself into an extremely power­ful godfather to his successor, the late President Umaru Yar’Adua-Obasanjo hand-­picked Yar’Adua, oversaw the deeply flawed election that installed him into office, and ensconced himself as chairman of the PDP’s power­ful Board of Trustees. It is im­pos­sible to ascertain whether the motives imputed to Obasanjo, Odili, Ibori and other former officials are real. But given the nature of Nigeria’s polit­ical sys­tem since 1999, it is not hard to under­ stand why so many Nigerians find the allegations credible. In other circumstances, godfathers themselves occupy positions in gov­ern­ ment – and leverage the power and resources of those offices to install protégés into positions that their own offices lend them no formal control over. They then demand returns from those protégés in the same manner as any other godfather. For example, Rivers State’s Commissioner of Sport up until the 2007 election is widely understood to have used his influence and access to gov­ern­ment rev­enue to install a no­tori­ously violent protégé as chairman of his home local gov­ern­ ment, Etche. In return, he is alleged to have claimed regu­lar fin­an­cial returns from the local gov­ern­ment’s monthly alloca­tion of rev­enues. At the time, Etche’s administration was indeed deeply mired in corruption and mismanagement that crippled basic ser­vices in the local gov­ern­ment, though it was im­pos­sible to ascertain precisely what had become of its substantial rev­enues (HRWA 2007b). The per­vas­ive spread of polit­ical godfatherism in Nigeria is a unique phenom­ enon, crit­ically linked, this author would like to conclude, to the evolution of the coun­try’s federal sys­tem of gov­ern­ment In many other African states, struggles for polit­ical control focus on the center, but in Nigeria the most com­petit­ive and vicious polit­ical struggles often unfold at the state and local level. Federalism in the con­text of Nigeria’s corrupt and criminalized sys­tem of governance has decentralized billions of dollars in rev­enue to 774 separate state and local gov­ ern­ment administrations, most of them open to capture by the most power­ful local polit­ical entrepreneur. It is that multiplicity of undemo­cratic polit­ical spaces – none of them of any direct personal inter­est to the politicians who

Nigeria’s ‘godfatherism’ phenomenon   141 control the center – that allows Nigeria’s proliferation of godfathers to succeed indi­vidually while co-­existing with one another. Godfatherism is closely en­tangled with Nigeria’s corrupt and violent brand of pol­itics. The mere exist­ence of Nigeria’s godfathers is a remark­able statement about the nature of the Fourth Repub­lic, since their influence is premised on an abil­ity to parti­cip­ate in viol­ence, corruption and other criminal activity openly and with complete impunity – without the shield of any pub­lic office to protect them from the law. The com­pon­ents associated with creating and securing a god­ father’s position – along with their rewards – are all illegal, yet there has not been a single reported case of a godfather at any level who was pro­sec­uted for his crimes between 1999 and 2011. This reflects the sys­temic impunity that gave rise to the phenomenon of godfathers to begin with and has helped entrench viol­ ence and corruption in Nigerian politics.

Notes   1 ‘Criminal activity’ is a broad term, as it must be to en­com­pass the range of criminal offenses committed by pub­lic officials in Nigeria. Here, the term is intended in the most expansive pos­sible sense, en­com­passing any ser­ious violation of Nigerian crimi­ nal law from elect­oral fraud to corruption to as­sault and murder.   2 For a discussion of how this trend manifested itself in the run-­up to Nigeria’s 2007 elections (see HRWA 2007a, 2007b). The criminalization of pol­itics in Nigeria has led to con­sider­able disillusionment with the coun­try’s nom­inally demo­cratic sys­tem of gov­ern­ment. A 2007 survey found that just eight years after the end of milit­ary rule, only 36 percent of Nigerians had a pos­it­ive view of demo­cracy in their coun­try (Pew Global Attitudes Project 2007).   3 For a broader discussion of the decline of gov­ern­ment institutions in Nigeria since inde­pend­ence and the cor­res­ponding rise in polit­ical viol­ence and corruption, see Eghosa E. Osaghae 1998.   4 Adedibu’s rise to polit­ical prominence is discussed in detail in Obadare (2007, op. cit.).   5 Ishola served during the brief civilian interlude that accompanied the abort­ive ‘trans­ ition’ initiated (and later derailed) by Ibrahim Babangida in 1992. Ishola himself, in an inter­view at Adedibu’s home in Ibadan, confirmed that ‘When I was governor, Adedibu was supposed to have been banned [from pol­itics] by the milit­ary, but nearly all of us came secretly to seek his sup­port.’   6 Euro­pean Electoral Observation Mission (EUEOM) in Nigeria, 2007a; and 2007b.   7 Several NURTW members were shot and wounded by members of their opposing factions in the period leading up to the elections.   8 Vanguard, Octo­ber 31, 2007.   9 This Day, Novem­ber 21, 2007. 10 ‘PDP Declares 7 Days of Mourning,’ This Day, June 12, 2008. 11 Sufuyan Ojeifo, June 12, 2008. 12 ThisDay, June 19, 2008. 13 Portions of the contract are also reprinted as an annex in Human Rights Watch, Octo­ ber 2007. 14 The three Uba brothers have all ranked among the most power­ful polit­ical figures from their native Anambra State since 1999. Ugochukwu Uba served as a Senator until 2007, while A. Uba served as Special Advisor to President Obasanjo for nearly the entirety of his eight-­year tenure and was then widely and only half-­jokingly referred to as ‘godfather to the whole of Nigeria’.

10 Monitoring the neopatrimonial state on a day-­to-day basis Politicians, customs officials and traders in Niger Mahaman Tidjani Alou It was not without much hesitation that, in the early 1980s, the state of Niger started to promote macro-­economic reform pol­icies under the aegis of the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF ). In response to the fin­an­cial crisis ignited by the slump in rev­enue from the uranium rent (Guillaumont and Guillaumont 1991; Woba 2002), many meas­ures were taken to lib­eralize the eco­nomy and better mobilize national resources. This implied first the broadening of the fiscal base through more efficient tax collection and a reduction of the informal eco­nomic space, that is to say the section of the eco­nomy still ‘untamed’ by the state. Other meas­ures were aimed at increasing customs rev­enue through the partial privatization of customs ser­vices, which were partly devolved, in 1997, to COTECNA, a Swiss-­based multi­ national, respons­ible for the control and verification of the value of imported goods.1 However, with regard to that specific aspect of the gov­ern­ment’s pol­ icies, the record shows that a great number of business people stuck to informal networks and not felt the need to formalize their commercial ac­tiv­ities, or even pay the duties carried by inter­na­tional transactions. This situ­ation has brought about scores of practices aimed at dodging or evading the state. The state has thus become, in a sense, a third party, excluded from many of the transactions occurring on its territory, at the expense of the rules that it has established. The fields of expression of neopatrimonialism in Niger are therefore many and host a great variety of players. However, my goal here is not to study the neopatrimonial state from a gen­eral per­spect­ive concentrating on the behavior of politicians in the every­day management of power, but rather to examine the middle-­range levels of power, which have more to do with the action of its agents in their relationships with pub­lic ser­vice consumers (Darbon 2001; Copans 2001; Olivier de Sardan 2001). Therefore, I will spe­cially focus on interface bur­eau­cra­cies (Lipsky 1980; Dubois 2003; Jeannot 1998). I have chosen to ex­plore the eco­nomic terrain, focussing in par­ticu­lar on mercantile ac­tiv­ities and the pro­cesses they generate through their many inter­actions with certain state administrations, espe­cially the customs administration. Merchants and customs officers are therefore the two key elements of observation of neopatrimonial practices within the state. In that respect corruption-­based relationships are

Politicians, customs officials and traders in Niger   143 con­sidered as topical areas to observe certain modes of patrimonialism as they express themselves in Niger. This configuration involves the state, which appears as an omnipresent actor. It chiefly takes shape through the rules that it estab­lishes. These rules give an ab­stract and disembodied image of the state while they symbolize it and bestow on it some permanence beyond the people who apply these rules. Customs officers make up an entire state organ­iza­tion, shaped by a unique his­tory (Chalfin 2006). They may be said to be the state objectivized in a specific domain of activity; on the other hand, merchants are just one cat­egory of consumers for that administration. For customs officers and merchant circles, the relationship with the state is a central concern. The state’s situ­ation is all the more paradoxical since it has played a key role in the structuring of merchant circles (Amselle and Grégoire 1987; Grégoire and Labazée 1993; Fauré and Médard 1982). Political power holders are directly involved in the emergence of large traders who, in turn, signi­fic­antly con­trib­ute to financing the ac­tiv­ities of incumbent polit­ical par­ ties. In fact, large traders hold the regional dir­ectorship of most of the major par­ties – a choice that is not accidental. It is part of the patrimonialization of par­ties. Moreover, the Nigerien state also draws signi­fic­ant rev­enue from collecting customs duties, which make customs officers a key tool of Niger’s eco­ nomic pol­icy. When they collect them through the taxation de porte (imports taxation)2 bearing on merchandise entering the Nigerien territory, customs officers work in the name of the state, put on all the official state finery and identi­fy with it in order to enforce their power through their function. While official discourse presents them as accredited state officials, they are in fact widely perceived as working for themselves, owing to the fact that they charge consumers in return for relief in the execu­tion of the rules regulating their ac­tiv­ities (Tidjani Alou 2001: 11–20). Indeed, customs officers possess comparatively large elbow room, which opens up genu­ine oppor­tun­ities for auto­ nom­ous actions. As a result, the officers often do work for themselves, which turns their profession into a rentier occupation. The traders who form what I call here the merchant circles often seek to use the officers, or bypass them, in order to minimize the costs incurred by border crossing for their merchandise. They want to find means of evading state regulations, through, if need be, the subjection of state agents (build-up of personal networks within pub­lic administrations), or at least through one-­time settlements made outside of any legal framework. There is here a very clear dissociation between the state and its functionaries. In essence, customs officers as­sume state prerogatives which they subvert to their personal ad­vant­age (Olivier de Sardan 2001). Thus, they turn their position as pub­lic agents into a way of creating a prof­it­able situ­ation at the expense of the state. This is made pos­sible by the collusion between customs officers who are appointed to ‘juicy positions’ often in relation to their polit­ical color, and large traders with strong polit­ical orientations. From that per­spect­ive, it becomes pos­sible to ana­lyse the corrupt practices of customs officers in their relationships with consumers, more specifically, mer-

144   M. Tijani Alou chants, as a fertile turf to identi­fy and understand patrimonialization practices within Niger’s state bureaucracies. In the fol­low­ing pages, I will first discuss how borders constitute the privileged terrains in which oppor­tun­ities for bypassing the state occur. I will then look at some corruption practices that are specific to customs and which can be ana­lysed as fields of expression of neopatrimonialism. A final aspect of this work will help determine the corruption mech­an­isms which emerge in the relationships between customs officers and merchants, and which shed light on the way the neopatrimonial state functions in this par­ticu­lar sector. This ana­lyt­ical pro­gression will help us highlight the impotence of the state, confronted with the neopatrimonial practices of the very actors who operate and embody it.

Customs posts and boundary-­lines as sites for bypassing the state The customs administration is first and foremost a segment of the Nigerien state, although it is only active at the coun­try’s borders. Customs is certainly not the only state administration present in those areas, but it holds a predominant position, espe­cially with respect to the import of merchandise. In fact, customs officers were called garde-­frontières (‘border guards’) when the corps was created in the early twentieth century. The name douanier (‘customs officer’) came into use later. Today, the administration is one of the oldest state organ­iza­tions. Indeed, the estab­lishment of a customs regime in Niger dates back to Novem­ber 1913, even though it was suppressed in 1918 and finally reinstated in 1938 (Idrissa 1998: 132). The customs administration appeared therefore from the start as a strong symbol of the co­lo­nial state in its dominating actions and undertakings.3 In effect, Customs was, from its earliest moment of activity, conceived of as a surveillance administration,4 and perceived by the populace as an ex­ploitative, racketeering body serving the co­lo­nial powers. These images persist in a landlocked coun­try where Customs has long been the main rev­enue for the state. The ex­ploita­tion of uranium resources in the 1970s reduced the position of this administration as the pri­mary budget provider. But with the dwindling of the uranium rent, Customs very much regained its former rank and it unques­tion­ably now holds a prime position in the state’s pol­icy of in­ternal resource mobil­iza­tion. Between 1995 and 1998, customs rev­enue increased from 29.3 billion CFA francs to 55.8 billion CFA francs accounting for more than 40 percent of the in­ternal resources of the national budget.5 Moreover, in a structural adjustment con­text, Customs, as has been shown, at the heart of the state’s eco­ nomic and fin­an­cial policy. The customs administration of Niger is today staffed by about 1,000 agents6 of all ranks, positioned throughout the territory, more par­ticu­larly at the borders and along the coun­try’s highways. The administration seems to be well regulated and or­gan­ized. Furthermore, it operates in a way sim­ilar to that of a

Politicians, customs officials and traders in Niger   145 modern private corporation. At the beginning of the year, the state sets ob­ject­ ives that must be achieved in terms of fiscal rev­enue production. The gen­eral manager (or gen­eral dir­ector) of the customs administration makes every effort to reach those ob­ject­ives, since they are the key to measure his aptitudes and efficiency. He, in turn, uses the same cri­terion for assessing office managers and overseers working under his authority. In an attempt to give them the right incentives and protect their integrity, customs officers receive monthly efficiency bonuses (extra legal taxes or TEL) as well as a discount taken on the litigation files that they pro­cess. Yet despite all the meas­ures set up by the state, the customs sphere remains an ideal site to observe state bypassing practices. Such practices occur through the personalized relationships that de­velop between customs officers and merchant circles. One of the most striking features of the Nigerien merchant circles is their heterogeneity. The merchants who symbolize them can be de­scribed through a variety of figures. The classic figure of the trader is well known. He is illit­er­ate and works in the informal sector. He handles a great amount of business ac­tiv­ ities that may range from the transportation of goods and merchandise to undifferentiated rentier investments. He runs his ventures with no formal accounting sys­tem and likes to indulge in ostentatious behavior. In his noted work on the Alhazai of Maradi, Emmanuel Grégoire attempted to reconstruct the pro­gressive shaping of the profession by distinguishing three successive stages: an early one in the late nine­teenth century and early twentieth century, which saw the emergence of merchants with limited commercial stature, who mainly traded a variety of products (garments, kola) that they brought from Kano, where they would sell cattle, hide and skin. This was followed by a second period, spanning the co­lo­nial era, in which new traders rose thanks to their role as middlemen between Euro­pean commercial houses and local producers and consumers. In E. Grégoire’s view, this group bene­fited not only from the post-­1945 trading eco­nomy, notably with the expansion of groundnut production and the organ­iza­tion of transport, but also from the coming of manufactured products. The group also bene­fited from the sup­port of the Nigerien state, which propped up their rise after the Euro­pean commercial houses closed. A third stage saw the emergence of a newer generation of traders, far more modernist and enterprising in outlook, investing in real estate, transportation and even industry. They were able to build use­ful connections with the existing banking sys­tem and with trading networks that went beyond the regional level.7 Since then, new networks have stemmed from the pol­icy of privatization and the pro­mo­tion of the private sector. The pol­icy is part and parcel of the structural adjustment programs (various meas­ures favoring the cre­ation of small businesses) and is tied to the opening of markets in a globalizing world. To the older figures, should be added another cat­egory marked by different charac­ter­istics (Tidjani Alou 2004). The emergence of these new traders in the market is recent but over­whelm­ing. They compete for the capture of pub­lic markets and in their abil­ity to supply them at lower prices, through, if need be, dodging or ‘negotiating’ with the customs.

146   M. Tijani Alou

A small inventory of corruption and evasion practices Corruption practices are key areas to identi­fy the figures of neopatrimonialism in Niger. On the one hand these practices stress the fact that the state is bypassed by its own agents as well as by pub­lic ser­vice consumers. On the other hand, the magnitude taken by the practice of lump sum clearance uncovers pro­cesses of nego­ti­ations which bring together customs officers and traders at the expense of the state funds. Bypassing the state In its official discourse, the customs administration de­scribes fraud as ‘a gangrene undermining Nigerien eco­nomy.’ It affects a variety of products, such as printed cloth, garments, tea, cigarettes, hydrocarbons, music players, etc., which reach the market without being subjected to the required customs pro­ced­ures. The idea is to evade customs regulations by going through two pos­sible channels. Firstly, customs posts and offices can be circumvented. Here, the strat­egy is not so much to bribe customs officers as to bypass them, and to elude the circuits that are covered by their ser­vices as much as pos­sible. Secondly, attempts can be made to ‘shut the eyes’ of customs officers and buy their silence, so to speak. Such practices are common and hard to tackle owing to the institutionalization of fraud networks uniting a broad variety of actors: the customs officers themselves, but also the popu­la­tion which takes ad­vant­age of the de­velopment of ‘informal free zones’ toler­ated by the state. The permeabil­ity of Niger’s borders, notably those with its first eco­nomic partner, Nigeria, probably explains the scale of these practices. Their origins are old. For his­tor­ians, they reach back to the early co­lo­nial era. Between 1914 and 1918, fraud practices seem to have led to the estab­lishment of the first temporary border monitoring posts (Idrissa 1998: 175). But fraud was not halted, and has now extended to all the regions of the coun­try. In addition, ‘at the beginning smug­gling was a night affair, but today, with techno­lo­gical evolution, it occurs at any time, day and night.’8 It even seems to have de­veloped into a culture: When you take the example of a mobile brigade hunting down a smug­gler, well, you know very well that the main predicament of the coun­try is the informal stuff. Well, now, when a brigade hunts down a smug­gler in a village or even a town, automatically we see the people for­get­ting that the customs officers are here to work for the coun­try, for every­one. Instead of lending a hand, the first move is to assist the fraudster so that he may run away, and escape the customs officers, you see. (A customs officer working in Niamey) The fight against fraud and smug­gling, to which pub­lic authorities increasingly pay attention,9 is seen as ‘the appropriate way to guarantee effect­ive protection of the national production against unfair com­peti­tion’.10 It is also seen as

Politicians, customs officials and traders in Niger   147 a key instrument for ‘mobilizing rev­enue, safeguarding the inter­ests of the fiscal sys­tem and of eco­nomic activity’.11 Many explain the persistence of fraud and smug­gling through customs overtaxing and the abil­ity of fraudsters to estab­lish numerous linkages, even within the customs administration itself. Negotiating with the state: lump sum clearance Customs clearance is based on the collection of a specific tax which, in order to be effect­ive, demands that customs officers sys­tematically check all imported merchandise.12 The opera­tion implies a detailed identification (number, quality and value) in order to determine the appropriate level of taxation. The job is therefore simple – applying the existing regulation. The customs officer’s task is to verify and validate the work of the transit agent. This is tedious, time-­ consuming work. A transit agent explains that a file must go through several stages: 1) Head of the office, 2) eligibility (verification of docu­ments) 3) registration (computing) 4) distribution (identification of the agent to whom the file is addressed) 5) verification, 6) discharging, 7) clearance. This circuit could take just about two hours, but the customs officer has the legal right to keep a file with him for 48 hours. So in fact the time-­length of the circuit depends on the generosity of the transit agent or of the customer himself, that is, it is de­pend­ent on his abil­ity to pump money into the circuit and thus accelerate the pro­cessing of his file. (A transit agent) Traders are often in a hurry to complete the clearance formalities for their merchandise. The practice of lump sum clearance partly derives from the dis­ cre­tionary power of the customs officer in the assessment of any given amount of goods and of their quality and value. For merchandise imported from Europe and subjected to the Inspection and Verification Program set up by COTECNA, the customs officer does not have much leeway. But with regards to all other merchandise, he can play on the loopholes in juridical norms in order to legally reduce customs duties; he can also choose to apply, illegally, a flat rate to issue clearance on merchandise whose value he does not know. That is one of the best strat­egies for those who indulge in corruption practices. The idea is to issue clearance at the expense of state duties and receive in exchange a payment that can be negotiated as to its amount and nature. These very common practices favor large scale complicities between customs officers and traders. The emblematical case of the transit convoys The case of the transit convoys (Tidjani Alou 2004) aptly illus­trates the collusion that exists de facto between customs officers and certain traders. Convoys

148   M. Tijani Alou reveal a strat­egy set up by businessmen with a view to evading the new regulations that result from the Nigerien state’s implementation of structural adjustment meas­ures.13 They are of course not the only identi­fi­able merchant strat­egy. But it is pos­sible to see them as a peculiar case due to its nature and con­ sequences. What is a convoy? It is not a pro­cession of heavy trucks or trailer trucks carrying imported goods; neither is it one of those endless lines of imported cars which leave the port of Cotonou to head towards Niger or Nigeria. The convoy, as presented here, is not a formal organ­iza­tion, but rather some traders’ mutualization of the expenses connected to the transportation and clearance of their imported merchandise. This merchandise is extremely diversified and reveals a very active and prof­it­able business. As shown by Karine Bennafla in the case of Chad (1997; 2000) the business is related to products imported from Asia and Europe: garments and rugs from the East, gold jewellery, tableware, hi-­fi and household appliances, Jap­an­ese cars, and auto parts. There are also all sorts of hardware, including personal com­puters, furniture, ironmongery, etc. All of this merchandise is sold on local markets and the very com­petit­ive prices help traders fulfil the pub­lic contracts that they secure. As a mat­ter of fact, the convoys in their daily opera­tion create forms of soci­ abil­ity that are strongly personalized, as they are directly rooted into the pre-­ existing socio-­cultural relationships. In their outward structure, convoys factor in values such as seniority, anteriority in the profession or personal relationships, hence the im­port­ance of the social capital accu­mu­lated by actors over their trading career. Whereas the state pre­scribes gen­eral and im­per­sonal rules, the convoy sys­tem works out al­tern­ative strat­egies that focus on the actors and their networks, and favors a code of behavior based on personal relationships at the expense of state norms and rules. So the convoy sys­tem circumvents customs regulations. The heads of the convoy work without generating any bills; there is thus no paper trail to their transactions with Customs. The value of the merchandise is therefore assessed through a flat rate sys­tem that secures the lowest pos­sible clearance cost to the direct bene­fit of the traders involved in the convoy. The effect­iveness of the circuit and even the con­ditions for its functioning are largely related to a chain of corruption which must build functional networks and craft the habits and complicities that make it pos­sible for the sys­tem to endure.

Exploitation of intermediation rules and practices As corruption mech­an­isms grow within the customs administration, they reveal how the state is ex­ploited through its very rules. The state is also extensively cannibalized by numerous intermedi­ation practices that oblit­er­ate its autonomy. Customs ser­vices operate on the basis of a great number of juridical texts which are known for their complexity and their opacity. Only a few professionals in the trade and their agents have the neces­sary competence for

Politicians, customs officials and traders in Niger   149 decoding them. So the customs officer detains a know­ledge based on the manifold rules that he is supposed to apply to his ser­vice consumers. In addition to the classic rules of Customs there is a body of in­ternal regulations defined by the Customs gen­eral dir­ector or the incumbent Finance min­is­ter, which relate to the specific orientation that is being given to the coun­try’s eco­nomic pol­icy, and which Customs is to execute on the ground. Customs officers are thus endowed with professional prerogatives which grant them diverse and changing powers, the extent of which the consumer has neither the time nor the means to know and master: the power of checking weight, merchandise origin and value, the power of signature, the power of sanc­tion when an offense is observed, but also the power of transaction and nego­ti­ation. All of these are norm­ative resources which confer dis­cre­tionary powers of control to the customs officers. Taking advantage of the rules In his encounters with the customs administration, the trader faces a number of issues: how to gain time by evading customs regulation? How to minimize clearance costs through manipulating pro­ced­ural rules? Whatever the option, it cannot be implemented without the involvement of a customs officer. There are two possibilities. In the first instance, the trader tries to gain time by paying a ‘deflated’ commission to the customs officer who lets him go without performing his appointed job. He buys at a low price the lenience or laxity of the customs officer by preventing him from exercising his stand­ard task of control. From the per­spect­ive of the consumer, queuing up, unloading and searching, are a ‘waste of time’ and must be avoided. Time is key to the essence of profit. The testimony of a driver is, in that sense, quite enlightening: let’s say that some traders often do want to avoid the unloading of goods, because sometimes there are folks who hide under the load or it is about pro­ hibited stuff or stuff that didn’t get clearance; so the unloading must be avoided to prevent being busted and the customs officer must be bribed imme­ diately, so as to get the idea of unloading out of his mind. Also, we know that some customs officers who threaten to unload a truck do not actu­ally have the means to do it in the middle of the bush and so when he tells you to unload, you know that it is just a threat and he wants you to give something and that’s all. The relationships between the trader and the customs officers are mercantile, and they both shut their eyes on national inter­est . . . (Tidjani Alou 2001: 18) The second option implies that the consumer will try to minimize the clearance costs of merchandise. It is prob­ably at this level that the more nefarious effects of customs corruption can be found. In effect the customs officer’s power of transaction gives him legal authority to negotiate settlements with the

150   M. Tijani Alou consumer. Such a settlement, which is supposed to bene­fit the state, often masks purely personal ends. One of the mech­an­isms of this kind of corruption occurs at the level of the establishment of the ECOR.14 At this point, the customs officer is free, after being paid, to handle texts as he sees fit and to produce a ‘negotiated’ statement which will then be the basis for clearance pro­ced­ures. But the opera­ tion is pos­sible only if both the customs officer and the consumer buy complicities within the circuit for import pro­ced­ures. Each stage might necessitate a renego­ti­ation of the terms of the initial transaction. And even when out of the circuit, the merchandise is not in fact sheltered from an ex-­post control from the rel­ev­ant administrative ser­vices. So it is apparent that at this level, corruption can work only if there is a chain of complicities within the customs administration. The practice of minimizing costs can be illus­trated through the example of lump sum clearance, a widespread practice which is based on the abuse of the customs officer’s power of transaction. The practice is made pos­sible by un­cer­ tainties about the value of imported goods. The extensive use of convoys today is testimony to the gen­eralization of a behavior which greatly reduces state rev­ enue through procuring for customs officers and traders extravagant gains thanks to easy clearance terms. A plurality of intermediation modes Intermedi­ation practices are gen­er­ated by the overregulation and complexity that are charac­ter­istic of the opera­tion of the customs ser­vice. There are three kinds of intermedi­ation: institutional, which is symbolized by the transit agent; polit­ ical, which takes shape through practices of polit­ical inter­ven­tionism; and social, which is related to the social relationships of the customs officer. Institutional intermedi­ation, initially carried out by transit com­panies, has gradually diversified. The com­panies still hold the lion’s share and their number has increased. Many work outside of legal norms. They hold a privileged position in the customs clearance pro­cess and the nature of their activity turns them into a neces­sary partner of the customs administration with which they work on a daily basis. Transit agents fill out customs declaration forms, represent the consumer in customs offices and follow through the clearance pro­cess. These tasks require that they master customs regulations in all their complexity while also managing a dense network of connections in customs circles, at all levels, from the orderly to the highest official through secretaries and a variety of agents according to their jurisdiction. In relation to consumers they are the neces­sary middlemen for customs officers, and many corrupt transactions go through them. They are often the ones who seek the settlement that would bene­fit the consumer who pays them. The scale of their business depends on their abil­ity to master the circuit and to quickly clear the merchandise of their customer. The acquisition of this skill has a signi­fic­ant fin­an­cial cost, which requires from the transit agent a strong capa­city of redis­tribu­tion through all levels of the customs hier­archy. In the con­text of gen­eralized corruption, these transit agents are the ideal vectors for corruption.

Politicians, customs officials and traders in Niger   151 The second form of intermedi­ation, which is specifically polit­ical in nature, takes shape through the mixing of polit­ical authorities in the work of the customs administration, thereby limiting their auto­nomy and impartiality in the performance of their appointed task. In this regard, throughout the inter­views I had with customs officers, they often blamed the action of polit­ical and administrative authorities as negat­ively affecting the efficiency of their work. They denounced the strong collusion between politicians and the larger traders. The latter fund polit­ical cam­paigns, and they think it perfectly normal to be repaid in case of a victory. That repayment often consists in illegal and informal exemptions from customs fees, or their lowering to the extreme. For the National Union of Customs Officers (SNAD), there has been: a de­velopment and institutionalization of ‘impunity since the advent of multi-­party demo­cracy, through the interplay of partisan solid­arity throughout the Nigerien polit­ical class, with the result of favoritism and in­equal­ity in taxation to the ad­vant­age of certain businesspeople who have created elect­oralist fin­an­cial pro­vi­sions that they need to recoup by all means, once polit­ical victory is secured. (Cf. Statement of the secretary general of the SNAD, radio broadcasted on 12 February 2001) The refusal to pay customs duties is one of the forms of repayment that they award themselves in total impunity, because they know they can count on the protection of polit­ical and administrative authorities. The latter interfere in litigious cases to exempt offenders from the legal con­sequences of their actions. We have always known the annoying interference of polit­ical, customary and administrative officials who demand favors and special privileges for themselves or their rel­at­ives and allies. We have to suffer from these same officials quite energetic requests its such or such merchandise, fraudulently introduced, be given back, or its such value be minimized. The interference is now part of our ser­vice, it is recurring and people seem to accept it. How can it be other­wise, when your opposition may be disowned by your superior in the hier­archy? This phenomenon of interference has disarticulated the ser­vice, and quite viciously sys­tematized among customs agents, unor­tho­ dox behavior which often leads them to engage in shady deals. . . . We are daily under as­sault from a group of leaders who think they are omnipotent. . . (Yacouba 2001: 15) In this way, the pub­lic authorities stimulate customs fraud and the de­velopment of an informal eco­nomic sector. Moreover, they create among customs offices personal, unnerving frustrations by disqual­ifying their duty of control and encouraging connivance between customs agents and fraudsters.

152   M. Tijani Alou Public authorities also intervene in the management of Customs’ human resources. Since Customs is perceived as a prof­it­able sector offering obvious paths to wealth, polit­ical friends and rel­at­ives lobby for being posted to the so-­ called ‘juicy’ areas, those with a high density of transactions. In such a situ­ation, the gen­eral dir­ector of Customs cannot or­gan­ize his personnel as he sees fit, since outsiders often impose appointments. Such practices do not permit him to put into action the prin­ciple that the profile of an agent should match the appointed post. In gen­eral, interference is strongly correlated, in its in­tens­ity, with the stability of polit­ical regimes. One can therefore easily ima­gine that the various transitions that occurred in Niger over the last decade have incurred a high level of turnover within the customs administration, and they have as well gen­er­ated a specific mindset in relation to the lack of guaranteed stability at appointed posts. The third and last kind of intermedi­ation, the social one, has to do with the fact that the customs officer is also often subjected to pressure from his friends and rel­at­ives who, through their constant inter­ven­tions, force him to circumvent rules and regulations in order to act in their favor. [With respect to] the function that I have fulfilled, even in Gaya, I think the most frequent word is, settlement. Every time I write a bill, I refuse a clearance on a certain basis, I hear ‘a gyara’ (let’s settle this), or yet again these are the goods of such and such, or our relationships are squarely put to work. Or they tell you that the owner of the merchandise is every­thing for you, he is the friend of your brother, or this, or that, they mention people that you know well, in order to morally break you up. (A customs supervisor) Here, repayment is not neces­sar­ily fin­an­cial. Rather, it is symbolic and may become social capital that can be converted in a variety of ways.

The impotence of the state Why are the Customs so inefficient in fighting corruption? This question leads to other interrogations on one of the peculiarities of Niger’s customs administration, its sys­tem of self-­control that should supposedly yield op­timal duties collection. This is a fairly substantial institutional device which includes the dir­ec­tion for customs investigations and territorial surveillance (DCEDST) that includes a ser­ vice inspectorate, a swift action cell that is nationally com­pet­ent, inter­ven­tion and inquiries brigades, also called mobile brigades (also nationally com­pet­ent), and a sys­tem of incentives designed to protect agents from corruption through a number of rewards (the extra-­legal tax,15 the litigation discounts, the merit medal, etc.). To these we must add the ac­tiv­ities of customs intelligence, designed to strengthen the capacities of the ser­vice in in­forma­tion gath­er­ing, such as the estab­lishment of com­puterized tools for combating fraud (Traoré 1998) and the inspection and verification program implemented by COTECNA (Palé 1998). Such an elaborate

Politicians, customs officials and traders in Niger   153 organ­iza­tion should in theory have had the effect of shielding the customs administration from fraud and corruption alike. But that did not happen. Our research points to many elements, which stress the vacuity of this sys­tem owing to the weakness of inter­ven­tion means (the fleet of vehicles is in­ad­equate and old), an un­reli­able intelligence-­gathering sys­tem, ill-­managed human resources, a hostile populace which stigmatizes the job of a customs agent and protects fraudsters, and all-­around polit­ical interference. The state, through the rules that it estab­lishes within its various activity perimeters, remains at the heart of the practices that are identi­fi­able with neopatrimonialism. The specificity of the observed configurations is related to the level of observation that was selected – interface administrations – as well as to the option to observe the patrimonialization pro­cess of the state through corruption. The patrimonialization of the state is not ob­serv­able only at the top of the state, or in the behavior of polit­ical leaders. It can also be detected in pub­lic administrations, where state agents use their power to other ends than those pre­scribed, and those ends can be very personal ones. This brings us back to the neopatrimonial logics and practices studied by Jean-­François Médard. As my ana­lysis is conducted at the level of the interface bur­eau­cra­cies, these practices implicate functionaries working at various levels in the hier­archy of their administration. In his writings on the neopatrimonial state, J.-F. Médard does stress that the significance of the confusion of the pub­lic and private domains should be con­sidered alongside the degree to which pub­lic norms are interiorized (1991b: 333). It is inter­esting to note the pro­ gressive shrinking of the pub­lic space in the cases I have examined. While it is claimed to be the norm through which the customs ser­vice operates, its rules are always bypassed and sometimes ignored. To a certain extent, the ser­vice works as if it were the private domain of the functionaries who run it. This may be justly termed a kind of ‘informal privatization’. (Blundo and Olivier de Sardan 2001: 32–3). Normative rules certainly bestow an obvious formal dimension on these ser­vices, but they are constantly flouted, giving the customs ser­vice the image of an indi­vidually appropriated and monopolized ser­vice. To be appointed to these administrative positions is a sure path to wealth which is based on the pos­sib­il­ity of triggering various pro­cesses of redis­tribu­tion which structure corruption chains and insure that the sys­tem lasts. Beyond formal rules, networked administrations are installed. They are related to personal relation networks and an­chored in the bur­eau­cratic structures of the state. The functionary is appointed to a ‘juicy position’ through personal relations, built on polit­ical or other social relations that are equally usable and convertible in various ways within the administration. The powers that be tend to install ‘their customs agents’ at stra­tegic posts where they may help ‘their traders’ who then enjoy numerous conveniences. The gains that are thus produced strongly con­ trib­ute to the financing elect­oral cam­paigns by large traders, and thereby to their gradual acquisition of the power to produce and place politicians in order to root their own influence. In such a con­text, clientelism and corruption combine to keep the state in a con­dition of impotence.

154   M. Tijani Alou

Notes   1 This is a grid used to set up an upstream and downstream control sys­tem in order to trim down as much fraud as pos­sible on the value of imported merchandise.   2 Doorway imposts are all duties owed to the state on imported products.   3 The southern band of Niger’s territory was a border area with the English sphere of influence in West Africa.   4 Cf. the map of the customs ser­vice. 1914–18 (Idrissa 1998: 175).   5 Interview with Mr Diallo Mamadou Yacouba, General Director of the Customs Administration (Revue des Douanes nigériennes 1999: 9).   6 Interview with Mrs Idrissa Zeinabou Yabo, General Director of the Customs Administration (Revue des Douanes nigériennes 1998: 8).   7 There is a sim­ilar ana­lysis in Amselle (1987). Grégoire 1986: 181–3.   8 See Revue des Douanes nigériennes, 1999: 13.   9 Cf. Report of the workshop on the drafting of a national scheme for fighting customs frauds in Niger. Revue des douanes nigériennes, 1999: 11–34. 10 Revue des douanes nigériennes, op. cit.: 5. 11 Revue des douanes nigériennes, op. cit.: supra. 12 Law no. 61–61 of 31 May 1961 designing the customs regime of the Repub­lic of Niger, Journal officiel, no. 4 of 26 July 1961. The law was modified several times. See also its various implementation decrees. 13 It is worth noting that the state of Niger suspended the programs that it ran with the Bretton Woods institutions, under pressure from the unions. The new gov­ern­mental teams that came out of the demo­cratic trans­ition regime set up after the national conference in 1991 had also counted on the mobil­iza­tion of in­ternal resources to increase state rev­enue. So they refused to mend fences with the World Bank. But faced with unproductive results, the gov­ern­ment re-­initiated talks with the World Bank in 1995. The partial privatization of Customs was part of the adjustment meas­ures that were then recommended. 14 This undefined acronym (no one could give us the meaning) refers to the first quick look at parcels and goods, before more thorough searches and checks. 15 The TEL allows deductions that would help pay for overtime. But in reality, the money collected is redistributed to all customs officers at the end of the month and would amount to an equi­val­ent of their monthly salary.

Part III

Regional transcriptions and interpretations

11 Oligarchy and caciquismo in the Philippines Dominique Caouette

In Febru­ary 2006, while the Philippines were getting ready for the celeb­ra­tion of the twentieth anniversary of the pop­ular uprising that put an end to Ferdinand Marcos’ dic­tatorship,1 pres­id­ent Gloria Arroyo Macapagal pro­claimed a state of emergency. Declaring that she had just thwarted a milit­ary coup attempted by a certain number of officers in the coun­try’s elite milit­ary forces, she banned all pop­ ular gath­er­ings, imposed a curfew, and authorized unlawful and extralegal arrests (Gomez 2006). Furthermore, she accused the communist left of having concocted a tactical alli­ance with the above mentioned milit­ary officers to bring down her gov­ern­ment. A little more than a week later, on March 3, Macapagal announced that she was now able to remove the previously imposed state of emergency, asserting that peace had returned and that she was fully in control of the situation. This new episode of polit­ical imbroglio, which characterizes the Philippines’ 20-year ‘demo­cratic trans­ition’, clearly illus­trates the dif­ficult­ies and the contra­ dic­tions inherent in an incomplete demo­cracy, transplanted on a power structure based on oligarchic power, increasingly politicized armed forces, and a civil soci­ety which sees in the streets the only avenue for expressing its frustrations. Beyond doubtful elect­oralism and the idea of a mismanaged demo­cracy, subject to sudden and unpre­dict­able crises, con­tinu­ity with the past is the most striking aspect of the polit­ical power-­struggles of the past 20 years. In the pages that follow, an attempt is made to understand the modalities of the expression of patrimonialism in the Philippines. After a pre­senta­tion of the his­tor­ical roots of the polit­ical sys­tem, we will attempt to understand the mech­ an­isms that have allowed the oligarchic elites to exert control over the elect­oral pro­cess and com­peti­tion in par­ticu­lar and con­tinue to consolidate their grip upon the Philippine state. Special attention will be paid to the double character of this state, patrimonial and oligarchic at the same time. Inspired by the works of Weber, Paul Hutchroft’s (1998) notion of ‘the patrimonial oligarchic state’ is most appropriate for our understanding of the polit­ical dy­namics of the coun­try. According to the author: In this polity, the dominant social force has an economic base largely inde­ pendent of the state apparatus, but the state nonetheless plays a central role in the process of wealth creation.

158   D. Caouette Thus, as is gen­erally the case in patrimonial states, there is a slim separation between the private and the pub­lic. More exactly, in the case of the Philippines, it is the landed elites, made up of large and power­ful fam­il­ies who are capable of imposing their views on the bur­eau­cratic ap­par­atus and even the elect­oral sys­ tem, that determine the oligarchic character of the state. Contrary to a classical patrimonial state where the control of the administrative ap­par­atus is central, the power centre lies outside the bur­eau­cracy and remains totally penetrated and loyal to the inter­ests of various factions of the landed oligarchy, most often in­cap­able of carrying out real reforms (Hutchroft 1998: 53).

The fundamentals of a patrimonial and oligarchical state To better grasp the im­port­ance of and the interpenetration between eco­nom­ics and pol­itics in the Philippines, it is im­port­ant to go back to the period of the US col­on­iza­tion of the coun­try at the dawn of the twentieth century. If we take Hawes’ (1987: 19) proposed periodization, three main periods succeeded one another: the emergence of a landed oligarchy at the time of the Amer­ican col­on­ iza­tion; the diversification of elite inter­ests after World War II; and finally the breakdown of elite cohesion in the 1960s. It is by examining the formation of the landed elite as a social class and its links with inter­na­tional markets through the export of agricultural commodities that we can better understand how the polit­ ical sys­tem became oligarchical. The short period of industrialization through import-­substitution that took place in the early 1960s created im­port­ant ten­sions among the landed elite, yet the overall control of the polit­ical and administrative ap­par­atus by the elite remained intact. The emergence and the im­port­ance of pop­ular mobil­iza­tions at the end of Ferdinand Marcos’ dic­tatorship did not really upset this legacy. The Spanish colonization It is with the Spanish col­on­iza­tion in the sixteenth century that we can see the gradual formation of large landed fam­il­ies that Aguilar (1998) calls ‘caciques’. These large fam­il­ies, mostly made up of old abori­ginal elites, con­ stituted the core of the landed oligarchy (Hawes 1987: 125). Not having found much gold or precious metals, the Spanish col­on­iza­tion was marked by very little investment in infrastructure. Moreover, a large part of the colony’s man­ agement fell under the respons­ib­ility of a variety of religious con­grega­tions that gradually learned to gain control of large parts of the territory of the archipelago (Anderson 1998: 5). That is why for a long time, Manila, the new capital, was hardly more than a big warehouse for goods coming from, or going to, China. The silk and China ware were bought with Mexican silver and resold with enorm­ous profits on the other side of the Pacific and in Europe. It was at the end of the eight­eenth century when the port of Manila was opened to inter­na­tional trade and foreign vessels that a verit­able incen­ tive for large‑scale commercialization of tropical farm products, such as

Oligarchy and caciquismo in the Philippines   159 sugar, indigo, and abaca, emerged for the first time. While in 1855, the exports of sugar stood at 53,000 tons and those of abaca at 12,000 tons, 40 years later, these exports were respectively 376,000 and 70,000 tons (Hawes 1987: 22). With a booming inter­na­tional market for tropical products, mestizos (mixed-­race people with a Chinese or Spanish father and a Filipino mother) realized the im­port­ance of land ownership. 2

The American colonization The struggles for inde­pend­ence at the end of the nine­teenth century and the sub­ sequent Amer­ican col­on­iza­tion in 1898 fol­low­ing the Spanish-­American war, hardly modified the concentration of the best farmlands, espe­cially those of export crops. In fact, the incorporation of the Philippine eco­nomy into the Amer­ ican eco­nomic sphere notably through a series of treat­ies had the effect of strengthening the value of export crops while intensifying the concentration of land in the hands of the few (Abinales and Amoroso 2005: 117–30). Through this pro­cess of land mono­pol­ization, the Amer­ican col­on­iza­tion con­trib­uted in a signi­fic­ant way to the consolidation of a solidly estab­lished and clearly vis­ible national oligarchy. Inspired by their own model, the Amer­ icans set up bicameral polit­ical institutions sim­ilar to those found in Washing­ ton. Yet, no effort was made to adjust or adapt them to the peculiar con­text of the Philippines. As Anderson (1988: 11) explains, ‘the new repres­enta­tional sys­tem proved perfectly adapted to the ambitions and social geo­graphy of the mestizo nouveaux riches. Their eco­nomic base lay in hacienda agri­cul­ture, not in the capital city.’ This landed oligarchy gradually based its control on both national and local institutions by controlling the elective offices and posts and weaving a whole network of patronage. The oligarchy did not directly control various bur­eau­cratic posts, but rather promoted the ascendance of sympathizers who then owed their positions to the favors and generosities of their ‘godfathers’ (Hutchcroft 1991: 421). Furthermore, the elite’s status and social prestige were strengthened by sending their chil­dren to the best Amer­ican universities. This eventually led to the estab­lishment of a new class of professionals in domains such as medicine, law, and other lib­eral occupations (Hawes 1987: 28). Through these networks, the landed oligarchy prevailed in estab­lishing control over the whole bur­eau­ cratic apparatus. It was during that period, which was also marked by the adoption of the Amer­ican elect­oral sys­tem, that the main charac­ter­istics of Philippine patrimoni­ alism were formed. Because of various restrictions – linguistic requirements, prop­erty ownership, and lit­er­acy – until World War II, only 14 percent of the popu­la­tion could vote, thus greatly re­du­cing the possib­il­ities of pop­ular parti­ cipa­tion (Anderson 1996: 24). Besides, the elect­oral sys­tem which mandated a single representative per district quickly took on oligarchical and patrimonial qual­it­ies. The large variety of local languages allowed politicians to use not only the power of money and patron–client networks, but also language bar­riers as

160   D. Caouette sources of legitimization and dominion. This elect­oral sys­tem insured some polit­ical stability because it distributed power horizontally through the archipel­ ago. Yet, it also led to the formation of ver­tical networks, guaranteeing the landed oligarchy repres­enta­tion in Manila. However, this did not lead to the cre­ ation of a professional centralized bur­eau­cracy (Anderson 1996: 22). After all, the Amer­ican co­lo­nial enterprise ended up in estab­lishing a state in which ‘the state elite is ident­ical with the eco­nomic elite’ (Hawes 1987: 19). This sys­tem remained rel­at­ively stable during the Amer­ican era thanks to the free eco­nomic access which it offered. That was par­ticu­larly true in the case of the sugar industry which enjoyed open access to Amer­ican markets at a time when the latter followed one of the most intensely protectionist market pol­icies in the world (Anderson 1996: 22). The sugar industry thus underwent huge de­velopment because access to the Amer­ican market meant selling sugar at prices that were immensely higher than those of the inter­na­tional markets, thus leading to the con­ solidation of a ‘sugar oligarchy’ in the Philippines. The Amer­ican co­lo­nial era was also quite favor­able to the emergence of new, large and power­ful fam­il­ies, through its sale of 400,000 acres of the most fertile agricultural lands that it had previously confiscated from religious con­grega­tions. The oligarchy’s control of the co­lo­nial legislature also led to the ‘plunder’ of treasuries through such gov­ern­ment institu­ tions as the central Bank of the Philippines. In spite of 35 years of or­gan­ized elec­ tions, these institutions did not pass a single legis­la­tion that would prove bene­fi­cial to ordinary Filipinos (Anderson 1996: 22). Towards an oligarchic democracy The Jap­an­ese occupation of 1941–5 opened the door for the inde­pend­ence of the coun­try, without modifying the pre­val­ent sys­tem of domination, characterized by the en­tanglement of polit­ical and eco­nomic power. Economic power was mainly concentrated in the hands of the landed oligarchy, or­gan­ized around large and power­ful fam­il­ies and often under the aegis of a pat­ri­arch (Hawes 1987: 28; Steinberg 1971; McCoy 1994; and Wurfel 1980). Though the Jap­an­ese occupa­ tion and the war severely affected the overall eco­nomy of the coun­try, they did not lead to the breakdown of the oligarchy’s grip despite increasing pressures from disgruntled peasants, who demanded a series of reforms, the most im­port­ ant of which being land reform. The U.S. aid, investments, and milit­ary sup­port in the anti-­insurrectionary struggle were instrumental in the restoration of the oligarchic order. Three bi­lat­eral agreements with the United States proved par­ ticu­larly decisive in returning polit­ical and eco­nomic power to the oligarchy: the Tydings Rehabilitation Act appropriated $620 million for the reconstruction of the coun­try, notably the re­hab­il­ita­tion of agricultural export sectors; a second treaty granted the U.S the control and use of their milit­ary bases (23 installations throughout the archipelago) for a period of 99 years (Anderson 1988: 14). Finally, the Bell Act restored free trade with the United States, and thus allowed improved access to the US markets for the Philippine agricultural commodities (Hawes 1987: 29).

Oligarchy and caciquismo in the Philippines   161 By the end of the 1950s, this eco­nomic sys­tem, essentially based on agrarian exports to the Amer­ican market, allowed the landed oligarchy to maintain its polit­ical control. Increasing negat­ive balance of payment due to the reduction of Amer­ican spending in the Philippines associated with a decline in the prices of export commodities, and the rising costs of imported goods all drove the Philip­ pine gov­ern­ment to put in place a series of eco­nomic pol­icies modeled on import-­substitution industrialization (ISI). The new industrial pol­icies, coupled with increasing student and labor militancy, led to frictions within the gov­ern­ ment co­ali­tion, but were not ser­ious enough to offset the oligarchical character of Filipino governance. The gradual modernization of the eco­nomic sector – without disturbing its mainly agrarian character – was coupled with the emer­ gence of the charac­ter­istics typ­ic­ally associated with the oligarchical neopatrimonial state. The elect­oral sys­tem also adapted itself to the post-­independence con­ditions, characterized by the lack of a coherent central bur­eau­cracy, with no professional army, and where control over the police and private armies was fragmented and dominated by provincial oligarchs (Anderson 1988: 23–4). Under such circum­ stances, money and viol­ence became two intrinsic constituents of the polit­ical struggles. This led to an even more extensive plunder of the coun­try’s treasures and the formation of complex networks in the polit­ical ma­chinery that were often or­gan­ized around an oligarch or a power­ful family (Anderson 1988: 24, see also Sidel 1999; Kingsbury 2005; Wurfel 1988). The elect­oral tactics deployed ranged from the purchase of votes (vote-­buying) all the way to the direct intimidation of voters by private militias (Conroy Franco 2001). While in the aftermath of the war these private militias had mainly been respons­ible for crushing the peasant movements, they were now deployed in the con­text of oli­ garchy infighting and com­peti­tion (Anderson 1988: 18).

Dictatorship and caciquismo: Ferdinand Marcos (1972–1968) With the rising demands for greater pop­ular parti­cipa­tion, ten­sions de­veloped within the oligarchical co­ali­tion with regards to the types of pol­icies that should be adopted. While ISI pol­icies were gradually losing ground, the IMF and the World Bank increasingly asserted themselves as im­port­ant actors, mainly through the granting of loans to the Philippine gov­ern­ment so that it could cover its balance of payment deficits (Wurfel 1988: 16; Lichauco 1988: 32–8). Under the newly emerging circumstances, the maintenance of the oligarchical model of governance became increasingly difficult. It was at this his­tor­ical juncture that the figure of Ferdinand Marcos emerged. Elected in 1965 and then reelected in 1969, he declared martial law in 1972. Oligarchical domination cronyism Marcos was confronted with the impos­sib­il­ity of running for a third straight pres­id­en­tial cam­paign and the slow pace at which a new consti­tu­tional agreement

162   D. Caouette was being pursued. He had planned to propose and adopt a consti­tu­tional amend­ ment that would transform the pres­id­en­tial sys­tem into a parlia­ment­ary one, thus ensuring the perpetuity of his regime. He chose to centralize polit­ical power in a wholly new way by breaking the oligarchical modus operandi, which had marked Filipino pol­itics since the Amer­ican co­lo­nial period. His declaration of martial law marked the beginning of an author­it­arian regime characterized by the dominion of Marcos and his family, his cronies, and the milit­ary. Hutchcroft defines cronies as those indi­viduals and fam­il­ies that enjoyed the greatest sup­ port from the regime and were most favored by it (1991: 435). Moreover, the Philippines were a kind of ‘booty capit­al­ism’ (capit­al­ism of plunder) marked by the massive and recurring extraction of privileges and state resources on behalf of ‘cronies’ and big oligarchical fam­il­ies, hence the im­port­ance of factional struggles within the oligarchy (Hutchcroft 1998: 20). Marcos was not the only author­it­arian leader in Southeast Asia during this period. There were also Suharto in Indonesia and the gen­erals in power in both Thailand and Burma. Nevertheless, Marcos and his cronies best illus­trate the pred­atory forms of patrimonial governance through the plunder of the state and the treasury, or­gan­ized in a dis­cre­tionary manner, and aimed at sup­porting a nationwide network of private patronage. Furthermore, there was, so to speak, no inde­pend­ent bur­eau­cratic tradition or a professional army. On the contrary, Marcos quickly learned to ally himself with a large sector of the armed forces and the police, links he ex­ploited in order to serve his inter­ests. The increasing size of the army ran parallel with their involvement and im­plica­tions in the main­ tenance of law and order, improving oppor­tun­ities to take part – directly or indi­ rectly – in business ventures, and pay raises for ordinary soldiers (Hawes 1987: 40). To ensure the loy­alty of the milit­ary, Marcos skillfully redistributed much valued resources, be they ‘the management of confiscated properties from the opposi­tion, pub­lic enterprises, real estate, etc.’ (Anderson 1988: 23) At the same time, Marcos appeared abroad as a stabilizing force and a loyal ally of the Amer­icans, who were bogged down in Vietnam and worried about maintaining their milit­ary installations in Southeast Asia. Marcos also took ad­vant­age of the stra­tegic im­port­ance of the milit­ary bases put at the disposal of the United States in order to fill his personal coffers (Hutchcroft 1991: 429). Having recourse to widespread use of force and viol­ence, the regime set up a mono­poly sys­tem which ruined the Philippine eco­nomy, while the regime of the Thai gen­erals proved less co­er­cive and more conducive to an eco­nomic boom (Anderson 1996: 25). Marcos and his allies’ parochial and personalized plunder did arouse opposi­ tion and resistance. By late 1970s, the guerrilla warfare led by the Philippine Communist Party (CPP) intensified. This was coupled with an opposi­tion move­ ment from within the large oligarchic fam­il­ies that had, under Marcos, been excluded from polit­ical power and in some cases even dispossessed. The polyc­ ephalic opposi­tion widened and strengthened with the assas­sina­tion of Benigno Aquino, a regime op­pon­ent, who was returning to Philippines from polit­ical exile (Rocamora 1994; Caouette 2002). Faced with the opposi­tion and Amer­ica’s

Oligarchy and caciquismo in the Philippines   163 growing skep­ti­cism, Marcos opted for the elect­oral path and announced hasty pres­id­en­tial elections for Novem­ber of 1985. However, his calculations did not stand the test of time. In 1985, the opposi­ tion movement widened to include a large part of the entrepreneurial class, a part of the Roman Cath­olic Church (including certain members of the hier­archy), a portion of the middle class3 several im­port­ant pop­ular sectors, the intelligentsia, several young milit­ary officers, as well as an im­port­ant number of oligarchs hith­ erto excluded from the exclusive circle of Marcos’ protégés. Later, when a first glance at the ballots of the Febru­ary 1986 elections seemed to indicate a win for Marcos rather than his op­pon­ent, the star candidate, Corazon Cojuangco Aquino, who was the widow of Benigno Aquino, two former accomplices of Marcos, his second-­in-command and deputy Commander in Chief, Fidel Ramos, and the Minister of Defense, Juan Ponce Enrile, launched a mutiny against Marcos. The mutiny was then joined by a pop­ular revolt called by the opposi­tion leaders, espe­cially the influ­en­tial figure, Cardinal Sin. Faced with an impasse at home and Amer­ica’s gradual withdrawal of sup­port, Marcos and his family agreed to leave the coun­try for a cozy exile in the Hawaiian Islands.

The return of the oligarchs During the first months of the Aquino presidency, polit­ical life showed signs of opening with the forming of a cab­inet that included several representatives from civil soci­ety as well as indi­viduals who did not neces­sar­ily have links with power­ful oligarchs (Anderson 1988; Kingsbury 2005: 306). This demo­cratic opening, how­ever, was short-­lived. The co­ali­tion that had formed around Aquino proved to be too diverse, while the army and several elements of the oligarchy remained suspicious of those personalities they deemed were threatening their inter­ests. The milit­ary proved too polarized to seize power, as they had six failed coup attempts. Nevertheless, these challenges and rebellions were (sufficient) enough to compel the gov­ern­ment of Aquino to turn back to the logic of oligarchy. By the end of Aquino’s mandate in 1992, a genu­ine restoration of oligarchic rule had taken place. This was done by restoring to Marcos’ cronies many of the privileges they had previously enjoyed and adopting a complacent approach with regards to judicial inquiries and proceedings (Kingsbury 2005: 308). The national elect­oral authorities, the Congress and the Senate, took up again their traditional functions of pacifying a popu­la­tion mobilized in favor of Marcos’ dis­ missal. At the same time, some of the legis­lat­ive initiatives which had im­port­ant social significance, such as the land reform program, were gradually emptied of their con­tents (Putzel 1992; Wurfel 1988: 321–3; Goodno 1991: 269–77). The most note­worthy element that stood out at the end of Aquino’s regime was its peaceful trans­fer of power fol­low­ing the election of Fidel Ramos, the former Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, and later, the Minister of Defense. Ramos restored the eco­nomic situ­ation and the pub­lic finances by appealing to inter­na­tional fin­an­cial institutions. As noted by Kingsbury, the under­lying

164   D. Caouette structures of power did not really change. At this juncture, the initial stages of the formation of a neopatrimonialism with a technocratic flavor can be observed, where Ramos appeared as an administrator surrounded with a team of techno­ crats, made up of an im­port­ant contingent of neolib­eral eco­nom­ists. Ramos’ mandate ended in 1998 with the election of Joseph Estrada, a former movie star, a populist and charismatic indi­vidual, who was once the mayor of one of Manila’s muni­cipal­ities, and who later became vice pres­id­ent under Ramos. The presidency of Estrada did not last very long. He quickly began to under­ mine much of the peace-­building efforts his predecessors had made with Muslim rebels and communists. Furthermore, his management of the eco­nomy proved dis­ astrous, or even ridiculous. As observed by Walden Bello et al.: ‘Joseph Estrada was a consummate, if clumsy, practitoner of  “crony capit­al­ism” ’ (2004: 243). Thus, Estrada did not question the patrimonial model of the Philippine oligarchical demo­cracy, which had con­tinued on the path of restoration ever since the EDSA revolts. Under Estrada, it became increasingly clear that the administration and opposing can­did­ates had no real polit­ical and eco­nomic programs. We also see that the elect­oral sys­tem set up after 1986 reproduced the very trends that were domi­ nant before 1972, maximizing com­peti­tion between various polit­ical factions while remaining united against any meaningful program for change. Some, like W. Bello et al. (2004), talk about the sys­tem of EDSA as one with two faces. On the one hand, it is a demo­cratic sys­tem in the formal sense of holding elections and the equality of votes. On the other hand, it is an exces­ sively costly sys­tem that maintains the socio­economic order and peri­od­ic­ally allows for elite circulation. Within the sys­tem, the Philippine masses are manip­ ulated for the bene­fit of intra‑elite com­peti­tions and struggles (Bello et al. 2004: 1–5). After the revolt of EDSA, the regimes which succeeded one another proved in­cap­able of bringing the promised prosperity, re­du­cing the disparities, and stopping Filipinos’ massive exodus through immigration (about 10 percent of the popu­la­tion, almost seven million, live outside the Philippines, and every day 3,000 Filipinos leave their coun­try to go and work abroad). Furthermore, as yet, there has not been a solid and impartial bur­eau­cracy capable of setting up real pol­icies and programs. In 2001, fol­low­ing the revelations of a fin­an­cial scandal through which Estrada attempted to buy Congress’ sup­port, a new wave of mobil­iza­tion got underway. Called EDSA II, this new uprising conjointly with a protest movement from the urban middle classes led to the pres­id­ent’s departure from office, and the ascend­ ance to the presidency of his vice pres­id­ent, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. Having come to power in Febru­ary 2001, Arroyo was quickly faced with a new pop­ular uprising in May 2001. This time around, the pop­ular classes were at the heart of the mobil­iza­tion, including certain fringe groups financed by the sup­porters of Estrada and other social groups in favor of his populist rhetoric. As the daughter of a former Philippine pres­id­ent, Arroyo was quite pop­ular and enjoyed a great deal of legitimacy as she ascended to the presidency. She was viewed by many as a sincere politician, despite the fact that her family and her husband had deep roots in the coun­try’s oligarchical hier­archy. She was

Oligarchy and caciquismo in the Philippines   165 quickly confronted with a resurgence of Muslim rebellion, and with small armed terrorist groups such as Abu Sayyaf on the island of Mindanao. In response, the pres­id­ent resorted to the solutions of the past by opening the coun­try’s doors to Amer­ican armed forces, thanks to an agreement of joint milit­ary exercises, matched by a substantial fin­an­cial and milit­ary assistance. This was a pragmatic short-­term solution to the coun­try’s ills, one that would give Arroyo the oppor­ tun­ity to consolidate her new regime. But she also had to respond to the pop­ular masses’ expectations, espe­cially those middle classes which had taken part in the uprising that brought Estrada down. Septem­ber 11, 2001 thus came at a very convenient moment, and Macapagal-­Arroyo was one of the first inter­na­tional leaders to sup­port the United States in their Afghan adventure. She also proved quite enthusiastic with regards to ex­plor­ing the ways in which the Philippine Constitution could allow for the deployment of Amer­ican troops in the coun­try and the holding of joint milit­ary exercises. Moreover, it was due to this consti­tu­ tional clause that Amer­ican milit­ary advisors arrived in the Philippines in Janu­ ary 2002, with Amer­ican promises of fin­an­cial aid for the revitalization of the coun­try’s eco­nomy. The Philippine army, a close ally of the Arroyo gov­ern­ment, also had much to gain from the arrival of Amer­ican milit­ary equipment, espe­ cially the satellite detection sys­tems that signi­fic­antly reduced the number of rebel ambushes. Nevertheless, the milit­ary solution to the Mindanao crisis did not resolve the under­lying sociopolit­ical causes of the conflict such as land tenure, redis­tribu­tion of wealth, the tight control of the polit­ical ap­par­atus by the eco­nomic elites, the eco­nomic mar­ginalization of abori­ginals, farmers without land, and the urban agricultural workers, be they Chris­tian, Muslim, or animist. In 2004, Macapagal-­Arroyo was reelected with a very narrow majority. This was viewed with sus­pi­cion with the release to the media of a telephone conver­ sation she had with the head of the coun­try’s Electoral Commission, demanding that she be given an advance of one million votes over her op­pon­ent. Since then, her prob­lems have snow-­balled: repeated coup attempts, the failure of peace nego­ti­ations with communist rebels, and a stra­tegic impasse in her dealings with the Muslim insurgency of Mindanao despite the substantial fin­an­cial and milit­ ary sup­port of the US. Plunged into a polit­ical storm since mid-­2005, Gloria Macapagal-­Arroyo managed to hang on to power. In June 2005, she had to pub­licly admit to having com­munic­ated with a high official of the Electoral Commission when the votes were being tallied in May 2004. In Septem­ber, she survived a congressional impeachment attempted by the opposi­tion par­ties. In Febru­ary 2006, she declared a state of emergency as people nationwide were getting ready to cel­eb­ rate the twentieth anniversary of the EDSA revolt and Marcos’ departure. Accus­ ing a number of officers in the coun­try’s milit­ary of planning a coup, she ordered the arrest of three high-­ranking milit­ary officials, pro­hibited demonstrations, and closed down a daily news­paper. The anniversary celeb­ra­tions turned into nation­ wide protests. Pressure on the gov­ern­ment was exerted from all fronts: tradi­ tional allies, ex-­presidents, influ­en­tial members of the Roman Cath­olic Church and civil soci­ety, and even a few members of the inter­na­tional com­mun­ity. A

166   D. Caouette week later, the state of emergency was removed, while the pres­id­ent declared that peace and order had been restored. Ever since, rumors of coup attempts have peri­od­ic­ally surfaced. Although often unsub­stanti­ated, they have nonetheless exposed the gov­ern­ment’s growing vulnerabil­it­ies. Though the Philippine civil soci­ety has remained mobilized and the press rel­at­ively free, eco­nomic disparities are most poignant today in a region with a Gini coef­fi­cient of 0.46. Furthermore, in 2005, the coun­try ranked 117th in the 159 country-­classification of Transparency International (2006: 46, note 2), and on its index relating to the perception of corruption, it fell more than 15 places compared with the previous year. So disturbing is the situ­ation in Philip­ pines today that Reporters without Borders con­siders the coun­try as one of the world’s most dangerous places for journ­al­ists (RSF 2005: 2). The current climate of impunity is most worrisome as indicated by the sharp increase in the number of indi­viduals murdered by the paramilit­ary groups in 2006.4 The ana­lysis of polit­ical regimes in the Philippines is rich in suggested con­ cepts and typologies in order to account for the coun­try’s complex his­tory (Quimpo 2005). For some, such as Landé (1965) and Novak and Snyder (1974), it is the complex links of patronage and clientelism that best de­scribe the exer­ cise of power. For others, such as Hawes (1987), it would be rather adequate to speak (in the Philippines) of a certain degree of state auto­nomy weakened by the in­ternal struggles of the bourgeoisie, although much less so than in the new industrial nations of East Asia (1987: 53). Other authors, such as Wurfel (1988), have seen the expression of a neopatrimonial state in its most repressive and cen­ tralized form in the dic­tatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. Wurfel suggests that in fact, under Marcos, the polit­ical sys­tem in gen­eral became much more complex and that the base of the dic­tator’s power extended well beyond the control of the bur­eau­cratic ap­par­atus. It is thus more suit­able to speak of patrimonial author­it­ arianism or neopatrimonialism as a sys­tem of highly personalized yet also insti­ tutionalized polit­ical power (1988: 153). Finally, there are those who propose a long term ana­lysis of the Filipino situ­ation. Anderson (1988) and Hutchcroft (1998) view the Marcos episode as the quasi-­caricatural expression of a logic of power that is inherent in a polit­ical sys­tem that was consolidated during Amer­ ican co­lo­nialism. The former prefers to concentrate on ‘cacique demo­cracy’ while the latter talks about an oligarchical patrimonial state, where the im­port­ ance of the control of the elect­oral sys­tem becomes itself one of the implicit rules of the patrimonial exercise of power. The Philippines has long been con­sidered a model of peaceful demo­cratic trans­ition and in Febru­ary of 2006, Filipinos cel­eb­rated the twentieth anniversary of the pop­ular uprising that brought Marcos down in 1986. This twentieth anni­ versary celeb­ra­tion has a rather bitter-­sweet taste to it, clearly exposing how the Filipino polit­ical imbroglio is rooted in con­tinu­ity: the consolidation of a patri­ monial polit­ical sys­tem in a con­text of oligarchic demo­cracy. Rather than looking for an im­port­ant event or a crisis, it is more compelling to look at the basic predispositions and the various constituents of polit­ical life that reproduce themselves in the Filipino polit­ical sys­tem. Seen this way, the regime of

Oligarchy and caciquismo in the Philippines   167 pres­id­ent Macapagal-­Arroyo points to a number of elements that favor con­tinu­ ity rather than change. A first element of con­tinu­ity is undoubtedly the persistence of the large landed oligarchical fam­il­ies’ hold on the elect­oral sys­tem. This structure of power is an old one, and as maintained by Benedict Anderson (1996) and Wurfel (1998), its roots go back to the coun­try’s ex­peri­ence under Amer­ican co­lo­nialism and the setting up of a highly fragmented elect­oral sys­tem. In fact, the Amer­ican sys­tem was so thoroughly copied that there exists an impressive number of elected posts (offices) today. In the mid-­80s, it was estim­ated that there was an elected office for every 1,400 voters in the coun­try. However, far from encouraging a better demo­crat­ization pro­cess, this led to the channeling of the elect­oral pro­cess toward a series of complex clientelist networks directly linked to the polit­ical ma­chinery (Hedman and Sidel 2000; Quimpo 2005). The peculiarity of this sys­tem, notwithstanding the enorm­ous costs associated with it, is that it allowed the consolidation of the oligarchs’ power base. In this con­ text, the era of Marcos deserves to be seen as that of a ‘big man’ or the ulti­ mate ‘cacique’ (Anderson 1988; Caouette 2002). Since EDSA and in spite of the introduction of certain elements of proportionality in the elect­oral pro­ cesses, the offices at the Congress and espe­cially at the Senate have remained the privilege of a resilient oligarchy, and like all neopatrimonial sys­tems, char­ acterized by intense power struggles. The second disturbing element which also clearly reflects con­tinu­ity is the increasing politicization of the armed forces and the impos­sib­il­ity of the insti­ tutionalization of power. With the 1017 Pres­id­en­tial Decree, and the arrest of several milit­ary leaders, including Brigadier General Danilo Lim and Colonel Ariel Querubin, the Philippine gov­ern­ment was faced with the twelfth coup attempt since its so-­called return to demo­cracy in Febru­ary 1986. Besides, this was not Lim and Querubin and their accomplices’ first coup attempt: they had already launched a mutiny against Arroyo in 2003 and Lim had parti­cip­ated in a coup attempt against pres­id­ent Aquino in Decem­ber of 1989 for which he was pardoned, apparently in order to bring back peace and harmony within the armed forces (Cabacungan and Dalangin-­Fernandez 2006). Today, the mutiny or the threat of mutiny, such as the occupation of a shopping center by the milit­ary in one of Manila’s beautiful districts in 2003, have become a way of putting pressure on the gov­ern­ment in order to force it to enter into nego­ti­ ations with the military. The last im­port­ant element is the role of the elections. Far from being an indic­ator of the demo­cratic character of the coun­try, the elections raise profound questions today. As indicated by the crisis involving pres­id­ent Arroyo’s tele­ phone conversation when she asked for favors from a high-­ranking official at the Electoral Commission, the role of the elections as channels of polit­ical expres­ sion have certainly taken a hard hit. Recent election cam­paigns have given rise to the emergence of a multitude of agreements, nego­ti­ations and tactical alli­ ances between the rad­ical left and the right, between pop­ular movements and the oligarchs, and between guerrillas and traditional politicians. In sum, although a

168   D. Caouette sys­tem of limited proportional repres­enta­tion allowed the emergence of sector-­ based par­ties, the elect­oral sys­tem has mainly remained profoundly ques­tion­able because it responds much better to the demands of the oligarchy than (it does) to the demands of the popu­la­tion for meaningful demo­cratic reforms and the estab­ lishment of demo­cratic governance. As Hutchcroft’s (1998) and Anderson’s (1988) oligarchic patrimonial state, and cacique demo­cracy respectively dem­on­strate, the ana­lysis of the various polit­ical sys­tems which succeeded one another since the Amer­ican col­on­iza­tion together reveal some of the main charac­ter­istics and attributes of neopatrimoni­ alism: a narrow link between private and pub­lic inter­ests, weak and easily manipulated polit­ical institutions, and favoritism and the domination of clien­ telist networks (Médard 1991b: 342). Furthermore, the study of these regimes reveals the weak capa­city of the Philippine state to set up attrib­ut­able and trans­ parent pol­icies (Transparency International and Quimson Gabriella 2006). The previous discussion also highlights the role of the elect­oral pro­cesses as venues for oligarchical infighting where charisma, money, and the use of viol­ ence become en­tangled, a reminder of Sahlins’ (1977) ‘strong men’ and Lacam’s (1998) ‘politician investor.’ The studies of Sidel (1999) and Lacaba (1995) on the regional ‘caïds’, McCoy’s (1994) work on large family-­based dynasties, as well as Franco’s (2001) work on the im­port­ance of clientelist networks, echo the work of Sahlins and Lacam while also giving a Filipino dimension to Erdmann and Engel’s (2007) recent discussion. If we want to understand the Philippine polit­ical dy­namics, recourse to neopatrimonialism represents a fertile conceptual ground, espe­cially so if we emphas­ize its oligarchic structure and how this con­ tinues to constitute a decisive factor in elect­oral struggles.

Notes 1 The uprising of Febru­ary 1986 is an in­teg­ral part of the national polit­ical mythology and is ritually cel­eb­rated every year. We refer to it as EDSA, an acronym for the Epifanio de los Santos Avenue which crosses the city of Manila and passes between two milit­ary camps, the Crame camp and the Aguinaldo camp. The milit­ary officers who had commanded the mutiny against Marcos had found refuge there, before their mutiny was joined by the populace, fol­low­ing Cardinal Sin’s and other opposi­tion leaders’ call for a pop­ular revolt, provoking a pop­ular uprising at the EDSA (Anderson 1988; Wurfel 1988). 2 Abaca, also called Manila hemp, is a fiber textile made from banana tree leaves which can be woven. It was used in the making of clothes and a variety of other products such as ropes, sandals, and even furniture. 3 It is neces­sary to underline the fact that a part of the middle classes has taken ad­vant­ age of the rel­at­ively favor­able migratory pol­icies of several Western coun­tries, includ­ ing the United States, to leave the coun­try since the 1960s. 4 In its 2006 Annual Report, Amnesty International denounced this estab­lished fact, further noting that in 2005, 66 leftist leaders and com­mun­ity workers had been killed (Amnesty International 2006).

12 Jeitinho and other related phenomena in contemporary Brazil 1

Yves-­André Fauré

The fol­low­ing commentaries and reflections aim to present the reader with a certain number of patrimonialist practices at play in the pub­lic sphere in Brazil, taking as an implicit benchmark the charac­ter­istics of patrimonialism as they were defined in a precedent art­icle written jointly with Jean-­François Médard to whom the present pub­lication pays a friendly posthumous tribute.2 Just like any approach that cau­tiously avails itself of ideal types or models, our purpose here does not lie in an attempt to elicit abso­lute confirmations of such types or models from the empirical real­it­ies under ana­lysis. Rather, it is to make use of those ideal types with a view to identi­fying and in­ter­preting the real­ it­ies being con­sidered without having to take into account the whole range of classificatory cri­teria, while keeping somewhat aloof from definitions whose rigidness would not make it pos­sible to find applica­tions fitting exactly the models. Indeed, it cannot be claimed that patrimonialism characterizes the whole or even the heart of the polit­ical and institutional sys­tem in Brazil, nor can it be asserted that it informs for the most part the exercise of pub­lic power and management in the coun­try. Brazil has his­tor­ically equipped itself with stand­ards, institutions, bodies of polit­ical repres­enta­tion and pub­lic management which testify to a modern state organ­iza­tion. In this respect and in keeping with the definition proposed by Max Weber, the State has claimed for itself the mono­poly of legitimate coercion over all its cit­izens, gov­ern­ment is formally based on law and not on personal subordination, administrative ser­vices rely on corps of skilled civil ser­ vants and it might be added – with respect to social and eco­nomic challenges that the German sociologist could not have con­sidered at the time – that the State as­sumes respons­ibil­ities in terms of de­velopment, often mustering both human and mater­ial resources to carry out its pub­lic pol­icies without relying on total arbitrariness or on traditional forms of management of gov­ern­ment prop­erty. In short, the elements of a sys­tem of power based on law and reason are emphatically present and several of the features that compose the lib­eral demo­cratic state can clearly be identified in the order of polit­ical forms prevailing in Brazil. Yet, reser­va­tions must be made for each of the aforementioned indic­ators. The high level and gen­eralization of viol­ence, the success of or­gan­ized crime and the multiplication of vigilante groups and other heavily armed private secur­ity ser­vices are clear signs that the State has failed in one of its essential functions; further,

170   Y.-A. Fauré that favor should often outweigh merit when it comes to appointing officials in the various cat­egor­ies of the administration ser­iously harms the prin­ciple that the opera­tion of pub­lic institutions should rest on technical competence alone. In prin­ciple, all cit­izens are bound by the law but concrete enforcement is clearly subject to nego­ti­ation, as this posited equality before the law coexists with an array of judicial regimes specific to such and such cat­egory of cit­izens. Finally, the conception and the implementation of pub­lic pol­icies are often swayed by cor­porat­ist inter­est. All this combines to form a pic­ture of the State as a mixed body with the charac­ter­istics of a modern polit­ical and administrative organ­iza­ tion as its funda­mental note, and, as a power­ful overtone, a set of features often inherited from his­tory yet con­tinu­ously updated through evolving practices and driven by renewed inter­ests, that clearly pertain to a patrimonialist sys­tem of gov­ern­ment and management of pub­lic life. Public organ­iza­tion in Brazil can thus be de­scribed as the fruit of a hybridizing pro­cess (Badie and Hermet 1990). It may have been tempting for some to think that this second dimension of the institutional regime in Brazil would shrink, if not al­to­gether vanish, with the coming into office of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and the access to power of his Partido dos trabalhadores (workers’ party). Their polit­ical agenda did include the promise of a modernization of pub­lic practices placing ethics at the center of polit­ical conduct and de­cision. However, the successive ‘scandals’ that have since surfaced have shown the real extent of the patrimonialist practices pervading the very routine of the nation’s pub­lic life and call for renewed inter­ est in their ana­lysis. So many officials in the polit­ical and administrative spheres, so much money, so many bodies pertaining to the State organ­iza­tion or its ramifications are involved, such a vast array of patrimonialist sources and uses are revealed in the pro­cess, that those persistently recurring affairs can only confirm the depth and ordinariness of the phenomenon (Hippolito 2005). Such conduct points concrete practices as much as the sys­tem of values that underlies them and indeed makes them pos­sible so that it is advisable to put words such as ‘scandals’ or ‘affairs’ or even ‘corruption’ in quota­tion marks when one uses them. The facts that are made known to pub­lic authorities, parlia­ment­ary commissions, courts of justice, the police, pub­lic pro­secu­tors and the media can only appear as ‘scandalous’ in the eyes of a minor­ity who look upon them as undesir­ able or reprehensible or of those who have some inter­est in their exposure. One touches here upon a paradoxical charac­ter­istic of patrimonialism. Departing as it does from models of behavior that are pub­licly or officially displayed and pro­claimed, patrimonialism undoubtedly infringes expli­cit stand­ards. At the same time, it must be granted that patrimonialism is but an ordinary feature of Brazilian pub­lic life as it translates into commonly found, widely toler­ated practices. ‘We need to strike a new social contract between Brazilian cit­izens in which corruption would be entirely outlawed and reduced to an isolated practice in the polit­ical life of the nation’ said the man who was to be appointed min­is­ter of finances in the new gov­ern­ment after the pres­id­en­tial elections on announcing that the resources of the Services of General Control of the Union (Controladoria-­geral da União) would be redeployed and substantially increased

Jeitinho in contemporary Brazil   171 – iron­ically enough, unsavory conduct later cost him his job in the gov­ern­ment.3 For Professor Kant de Lima, coordinator of the Centre for Studies and Research at the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro, the ‘affairs’ which over the past years have consistently tarnished the image of the gov­ern­ment, of the party in power as well as of its allies in the Parliament show how crime, par­ticu­larly that which is based on the use of slush funds (caixa dois) – and is implicitly legitimized by the routine practices of both private business and the pub­lic sphere – operates as much at the eco­nomic level as it does at the moral one. Ambiguity between what is legal and what is illegal is a feature of the Brazilian pub­lic sphere. [. . .]. Using such practices is tanta­mount to nat­uralizing illegality. (O Globo, 4 August 2005) Faced with the ambivalence of ‘corruption’, which is at once severely condemned and commonly practiced, the analyst can hardly set himself up as a judge. At the same time, such an ana­lysis as this one would be meaningless, should it not refer, in the background, to situ­ations where such patrimonialist practices are either ab­sent, or have been eradicated or restrained to a sufficient extent that they can provide a counterbalance en­ab­ling comparison, if only implicitly, and thereby con­ trib­ut­ing to the understanding of the phenomena under scrutiny. In addition to use­fulness when it comes to representing some of the real­it­ies of Brazilian pub­lic life, the gen­eral or funda­mental concept of patrimonialism offers several ad­vant­ages.4 It is a unifying concept en­com­passing a variety of practices which, though intricately interconnected, are often treated as separate objects of study through approaches that do not take the con­text in which they occur into fair con­sidera­tion. Furthermore, the notion of patrimonialism allows at once factual ex­plora­tion and a holistic repres­enta­tion of the climate that legitimizes a certain set of practices and the related conducts or attitudes. The present study, which for lack of space has to limit itself to a modest description, will first consist in a quick overview of the rel­ev­ant vocabulary meant to suggest a correlation between the abundance of words describing patrimonial practices and their pervasion of Brazilian social structures. An attempt will then be made to show that the State is a great provider of stipends, that pub­lic tenders are used to reward those who finance elect­oral cam­paigns, that legis­lat­ive arenas are the locus of intense bargaining largely giving rise to votes motiv­ated by self-­interest, that nepotism per­meates the various layers of the polit­ical ap­par­atus. Finally, it will be shown how the extremely high opera­tional costs of polit­ical life are a means for elected officials to get rich or richer.

Of words and behavior Brazilians are certainly not short for words or phrases when it comes to naming facts and practices that belong to the paraphernalia of patrimonialism. ‘Corruption’ in all its common forms and qualifications, whether administrative or penal,

172   Y.-A. Fauré (fraud, graft, peculation, influence peddling, etc.) has pervaded language as much as it has pervaded pub­lic affairs. However such words cover but a small part of the reality of patrimonialism and somehow fail to convey the exist­ence of a sys­tem of or­gan­ized and prestige-­endowed pro­cesses subsuming the concrete manifestations which it makes pos­sible and indeed perpetuates. Thus, in such commonly occurring ar­range­ments as are subsumed under the word jeitinho, the traditional and central figure of the despachante stands out, a sort of intermediary between ordinary cit­izens and pub­lic bur­eau­cracy, tasked with the mission of obtaining official docu­ments, licenses, permits, etc. He is a character typical of a soci­ety that is wary of anonymity, of waiting lines, of the humiliation that the status of an ordinary supplicant may entail. In the polit­ical sphere, patrimonialism rests, among other things, on a form of patronage or clientelism that cannot be reduced to a top-­down relationship between indi­viduals with unequal status, social power or fin­an­cial means. More funda­mentally, patrimonialism supplies the structure under­lying ‘the organ­iza­ tion of pub­lic power and its monopolizing by an elite’ (Badie and Hermet 1990: 257). The concept of paternalism used by some analysts instead of clientelism5 lays the emphasis on the good works of politicians and on the infinite gratitude owed them by ordinary cit­izens for asphalted roads, tap water, kindergartens, civic centers or sports facilities, although such pro­jects are funded with pub­lic money and their execu­tion carried out by pub­lic bodies. Paternalism stems from an attitude and col­lect­ive affect that are widespread in Brazil and are conspicuously not confined to states no­tori­ous for the persistence of the archaic practices that testify to the enduring strength of their ruling oligarchies, of coronelismo, of caciquism. The current pres­id­ent, though a former union leader, is given to using the family metaphor when explaining gov­ern­mental de­cisions: he claims he is acting as a ‘father’ and treating Brazilians as though they were his ‘chil­dren’. Such lexical borrowings are far more than mere rhet­orical figures. They betray the deep reality of how relationships are conceived of and conducted within the social and polit­ical sys­tem in Brazil. What Brazilians name fisiologismo defines the exercise of pub­lic office as exclusively guided by self-­interest and the quest for ad­vant­ages and favors of all types. It is more or less practiced by all polit­ical groups and politicians while more specifically characterizing the attitude or behavior of specific par­ties. There lies a partial explanation for the ‘scandals’ that have accu­mu­lated during the Lula administration as, instead of the so-­called ‘pop­ular front’ alli­ances that had been promised in the course of the party’s conquest for power, the gov­ern­ment has clinched deals with par­ties that had a better parlia­ment­ary repres­enta­tion and were more sensitive to the privileges and bene­fits tradi­tion­ally attached to pub­lic charges and offices. Those connected to a polit­ical leader who plays the role of a godfather dictating conducts and rewarding them with easier access to positions and ad­vant­ages are designated by the word apadrinhados. Political par­ties are all structured around national, regional or local personalities so that they are most of the time conglomerates of clans and factions which are founded on personal relationships

Jeitinho in contemporary Brazil   173 of subordination operating on the basis of reciprocated favors and very seldom carry a vision or even a gen­eral polit­ical per­spect­ive. In the world of Brazilian polit­ical par­ties one can hardly speak of clear-­cut, easy to distinguish ideo­lo­gies or of well-­defined polit­ical programs meant to transform the whole or even part of the social order. The function of the articulação política lies in the art of negotiating alli­ances and sup­port. No gov­ern­ment, at any level of opera­tion, whether national, estadual or local, can do without it partly because of the elect­oral regime which mech­ anically generates the scattering of polit­ical repres­enta­tion. The moeda (money) eleitoral serves to designate pub­lic resources (basic food baskets, school supplies, etc.) distributed with a view to capturing ballots. Half the council members of a large Brazilian city are thus also members of the board of social centers run with pub­lic sub­sidies that serve as vote tanks along with other civil bodies. In the imaginative language used to euphemize patrimonialist practices, a phrase that can be lit­er­ally translated as ‘hand over ministries and pub­lic com­panies with a closed door’ (entregar os ministérios e as estatais com a porteira fechada) means that de­cision over the appointments to senior or junior positions in ministries, pub­lic com­panies and official agencies ultimately falls to the party that claimed them. Multiplying cargas comissionadas amounts to attributing positions to friends and staunch sup­porters, with no need for the latter to pass pub­lic com­petit­ive examinations. The verb aparelhar or the phrase lotear a máquina refer to the practice of filling polit­ical or administrative pub­lic bodies with clients, members of the same party, or those beholden locally or regionally to their patrons. Fraudar as licitações consists in abusing pub­lic calls for tender addressing the supply of goods or ser­vices for pub­lic bodies so as to bene­fit com­ panies in which the elected official, or the chief executive he has appointed, has vested inter­ests, directly or indirectly through parents and allies. In this abundance of words and phrases which is only equaled by the frequency of the facts and acts to which they cor­res­pond, the baixo clero, i.e., ‘lower clergy’, cannot be said to be the least signi­fic­ant. The phrase refers to those members of the federal or estadual legislature who have most of the time no training to speak of and whose action in the Federal Congress or in the States’ legis­lat­ive assemblies is solely guided by the pro­spect of obtaining mater­ial ad­vant­ages for themselves or for their allies and clients. In a sys­tem where polit­ical par­ties, save for a very few, have no real polit­ical programme, the members of the baixo clero are no­tori­ous for having even less of a program than the others. As was noted earl­ier in this art­icle, diverse high-­profile ‘cases’ have left their mark on the gov­ern­ment and on the administration of the new ‘petiste’ power since 2003, bringing forth the fall of its successive leaders and the removal or the resignation of more than 50 polit­ical and administrative officials that the ruling party had appointed. This has entailed in turn the stepping down of several min­is­ters, a number of replacements in the leadership of the Workers’ Party, the removal of collaborators of the Palácio da Presidência as well as of members of the bur­eaus set for the co­ordination of the elect­oral cam­paign geared to the reelection of the current pres­id­ent. In total, more than 100 major personalities

174   Y.-A. Fauré have been indicted by the gen­eral pro­secu­tor of the Federal Ministry of Justice, while the Federal Supreme Court has also initiated legal action.6 True, several local or regional structures and elected officials of the PT had already been embroiled in the past in illicit ac­tiv­ities and had carried out rather unscrupulous opera­tions but the party that eventually came to power at the national level had been until then rather less implicated in suspicious opera­tions than other polit­ical groups. The latest ‘affairs’ have revealed an al­to­gether different, more massive and sys­tematic dimension of the party’s practices. This has con­sider­ably tarnished its image as ‘pub­lic morality’ was one of the two pillars on which the PT his­tor­ically asserted its dif­fer­ence in the polit­ical world, a dif­fer­ence it has always widely pro­claimed and that substantially con­trib­uted to its growing pop­ ularity with voters.7 No need here to draw up a detailed list of the ‘affairs’ that have punctuated the exercise of power by the highest State authorities and have left their marks on national polit­ical repres­enta­tion.8 Those affairs are echoed by those, even more numerous, that are played on the regional or local stage. Beyond the sys­tem of justifications used by the actors, it is pos­sible to put forward a gen­eral in­ter­pretation which speaks to the deep currents running in the polit­ical life of Brazil. It is not our purpose here to examine which of the affairs or of their revelation or denunciation has become more signi­fic­ant than in the past. One can, how­ever, wonder whether certain funda­mental traits, certain structural features of the polit­ical sys­tem in Brazil have not eventually prevailed over the most virtuous of intentions. The PT, whose ostens­ibly pro­claimed program was from the outset to enable the modernization of institutions and implement major changes in the structure of power relationships was for a long time confined to the opposi­tion and its function was accordingly reduced to that of a trib­une’s, at least at the federal level. It has eventually transformed into a powerhouse determined to conquer at all costs the levers of power on a national scale and in the highest spheres, a drive which has led some critics and ob­ser­vers to start speaking of the PT’s hege­monic pro­ject. An almost mech­anical corollary of this reversal may have been the loss of the party’s distinctive marks and its fusion into the wider-­encompassing polit­ical climate, which, in phase with rampant fisiologismo, may have somehow completed the party’s ‘Brazilianisation’. The preceding lines should not be construed as an attempt to suggest that the emergence and growth of patrimonialism may be looked upon as a ‘nat­ural’ pro­cess. Patrimonialist practices emerge, grow and con­tinu­ally transform as they adapt to evolving social or his­tor­ical con­ditions. This said, the evolution de­scribed above can also be in­ter­preted as the pro­gress of a polit­ical movement which the test of power has led to assimilate the dominating practices and the very workings of the ma­chinery operating the pub­lic sphere or which, in other words, has learned to master the polit­ical rules according to which it has changed, grown in strength and eventually prevailed. A pop­ular phrase en­cap­sul­ates this dimension of Brazilian ‘Realpolitik’ fueled as much by the frequency of patrimonialist behavior as by the gen­eral climate of tolerance that makes cit­izens condone, if not indulge it: rouba mas faz

Jeitinho in contemporary Brazil   175 – ‘He steals but he does something’ – a phrase used to absolve elected officials and leaders, who, although dishonest, make pro­jects advance and can be credited with a few realizations.

The state as the stepping stone for access to prebends In many respects, Brazil’s institutional sys­tem appears as a vast enterprise of appointments and alloca­tion of positions, where administrative and technical cri­ teria, competence and merit prove to be less rel­ev­ant than calculations based on partisan af­fili­ation, mutual trust between indi­viduals, the need for alli­ances or the exchange of favors dictated by polit­ical or mater­ial inter­ests. Appointments are mostly decided on the basis of their asso­ci­ation with stipends and mater­ial ad­vant­ages together with the part they play in the consolidation of power structures. These practices affect almost the whole range of polit­ical groups on the national polit­ical scene. What makes Brazil peculiar is not the exist­ence of a heavily politicized sys­tem of appointments in the pub­lic sphere – other nations including de­veloped ones use such a sys­tem – but the extent to which it has de­veloped there. In Brazil, the spoils sys­tem operates on a large scale. Horizontally, it affects all pub­lic bodies subservient to any power of appointing exercised by elected officials of the Executive – head of state, federal min­is­ters, state governors and secretaries, heads of pub­lic ser­vices and com­panies, city mayors and secretaries. Vertically, the spoils sys­tem deploys through the complex pyramid of administrative and technical levels in which ‘trusted partisans’ fill in the no­tori­ous cargas comissionadas. One major charac­ter­istic is that it is reactivated at regu­lar intervals owing to the short duration of voting cycles – four years on average, except for Federal Congress senators. The attractiveness of chief positions in ministries and state secretariats, of pub­lic offices and charges, of senior positions in the major pub­lic ser­vices and state-­owned com­panies is a function of the quantity of resources that such positions enable their holders to control. The pub­lic bodies most coveted by the politicians and polit­ical par­ties allied to the elected officials of the Executive at the three levels of gov­ern­ment are those boasting the largest budgets. Calculations do not only compute direct resources such as endowments but also include indirect resources, notably and no­tori­ously those manipulated through pub­lic calls for tender propitious, by means of commonly practiced irregu­larities, to give an unfair ad­vant­age to this client or that business which have sup­ported the party or the candidate. Thus emerges a hier­archy of positions that confers some order to this scram­bling for the spoils. Against such a yardstick as this ‘ranking’, it is known that the Ministry for Transports is 10 percent as attractive as the Ministry of Health and 400 percent as attractive as the Ministry of Tourism. It must be stressed that the ‘pecking order’ that defines the choice and attribution of positions also takes into account the numerous funds that are not directly consolidated in ministries’ budgets but are managed by certain de­part­ments whose management is ultimately the respons­ib­ility of the ministries. Thus, although its

176   Y.-A. Fauré budget only ranks 16th among the 30 or so ministries and federal secretariats, the Ministry of Urban Affairs (Ministério das Cidades) looks far more attractive when con­sidering that it supervises the substantial FGTS (Fundo de Garantia do Tempo de Serviço), which is the equi­val­ent of an unemployment bene­fit fund. The Ministry of Communications, that ranks poorly if con­sidering its budget alone, is, how­ever, the object of much inter­est in par­ticu­lar because of its parti­ cipa­tion in the management of the richly endowed FUST (Fundo de Universalização dos Serviços de Telecomunicações). A former senator sounded out by a party allied to the gov­ern­ment to become pres­id­ent of the National Institute for Social Security (INSS) was nat­urally presented in his state as the man ‘who will have control over R$127 billion’. Ministerial positions, pub­lic charges and offices endowed with de­cision power or management competence over signi­fic­ant resources are filled within the framework of nego­ti­ations between the heads of the Executive (at the national, estadual or local level) and the polit­ical par­ties, factions or leaders inclined to sup­port them. These same polit­ical patrons propose the names of the indi­viduals (pessoas indicadas) who are to fill the positions concerned in exchange for sup­port received or to be received in the legis­lat­ive arenas at their respective level in the three-­tier organ­iza­tion of pub­lic affairs. Such ‘proposals’ are pub­lic know­ledge. The appointment sys­tem concerns ministries and federal administrations including their respective decentralized ser­vices across the coun­ try as well as the governing and administrating bodies in the 26 states of the Union plus the Federal District. It is also applied in national institutions and state‑owned com­panies, and to assim­il­ated bodies which complete pub­lic governance in each state.9 In turn, and with the agreement of their polit­ical patrons at the national or regional level, the pres­id­ents, dir­ectors, superintendants, heads of major de­part­ments and administrative ser­vices and of those numerous pub­lic or semipub­lic bodies that constitute the pub­lic ma­chinery appoint allies, staunch sup­porters, clients to intermediary positions deemed to be eco­nomic­ally sensitive. It is estim­ated that the number of pub­lic positions that are directly filled according to cri­teria linked to polit­ical af­fili­ations or alli­ances might be as high as 20,000.10 The whole pub­lic ap­par­atus, at all three levels of the Union – federal, estadual, municípios, pub­lic com­panies and agencies, etc. – is headed by indi­viduals who have been designated on a mostly polit­ical basis modeled by tactical calculations or concerns linked to gov­ern­mental configurations (governabil­ity, nego­ti­ations between par­ties, interplay of influence). Competence is sometimes put forward as a cri­terion for appointment but such attempts at jus­ tifying appointments cannot deceive anyone. This pro­cess is called aparelhamento do estado by those who denounce both its extent and the damaging effects it has on pub­lic life. The milit­ary dic­tatorship (1964–85) whose mistrust of politicians had led it to break away from tradition had a tend­ency to appoint technicians to key-­positions of the pub­lic ap­par­atus. The return to demo­cracy was the occasion for a signi­fic­ ant increase in the number of appointments made on a strictly polit­ical basis. This is a well-­known and largely accepted fact as most in Brazil believe that

Jeitinho in contemporary Brazil   177 ‘trust’ should be the founda­tion for relationships in the conduct of pub­lic affairs. In a sys­tem of power where interpersonal and polit­ical connections prevail, technical competence cannot guarantee loy­alty. Pre- and post-­electoral alli­ances are forged and broken in direct connection with the advance or setback of nego­ti­ ations in this sys­tem designed to regulate the distribution of charges and pub­lic offices between par­ties and polit­ical leaders. The various threats that may jeopardize im­port­ant votes in the legis­lat­ive assemblies give rise at regu­lar intervals to the reopening of bargaining cycles. Thus certain ad­vant­ageous positions conquered in the course of nego­ti­ations can sometimes turn out to be quite precarious. Reconfigured alli­ances, circumstantial inter­ests may therefore preside over the fate of min­is­ters, state secretaries, heads of pub­lic com­panies – and, as a con­ sequence, the indi­viduals they have appointed to the various positions at the various levels on the hierarchical ladder of pub­lic bodies – who can be dismissed overnight to make room for the members or clients of a new coalition. Public tenders and the return on investments into electoral campaigns Public tenders (licitações) are one of the major paths to the accumulation of resources, whether it be to pay back fin­an­cial help obtained when in the conquest for an elective position, or to create personal ties clearly in­dis­pens­able in a polit­ ical regime with such strong tendencies to patronage. Public tenders are also an essential means for politicians, their staff and their allies to line their own pockets by attributing contracts for the supply of goods or ser­vices to businesses that are directly or indirectly connected with the elected officials, or with these officiers’ kith and kin. Civil engineering, school endowments, ad­vert­ising contracts are just as many oppor­tun­ities to do prof­it­able business. The practices and schemes involved may be easier to understand when seen in the light of the mater­ial con­ditions on which the organ­iza­tion of elect­oral cam­paigns is premised. Again, there is emphatically no attempt here to jus­tify such practices but to grasp better one of the causes under­lying the ‘manipulations’ to which many pub­lic contracts are subjected and somehow highlight why the odds are so few that such practices decline as long as one of the factors that origin­ate them persists. The amount of money invested in the long numerous elect­oral cam­paigns is quite impressive. The approximate indi­vidual cost for each elect­oral cam­paign is known through estim­ates released in the form of ‘set prices’ by the press. A fin­ an­cial stand­ard is set for elect­oral cam­paigns according to the elective position at stake, the size of the voting constituency, the number of voters to be mobilized. Costs may range from tens of thou­sands of euros for a town council member to tens of millions of euros for a Federal senator. Fees paid to the polit­ical par­ties added to pub­lic sub­sidies (Fundo partidário) are not enough to cover cam­paign expenses, a part of which must be financed through personal con­tri­bu­tions or com­panies’ dona­tions. Generous donors are usually wary to ‘cover their investments’ (to use a phrase borrowed from fin­an­cial markets) and may therefore be

178   Y.-A. Fauré led to sup­port several rival can­did­ates at the same time. When offering their sup­ port, they simul­tan­eously send a very clear signal about their expectations re­gard­ing ‘payback’ for their efforts. Private funding thus often looks like pre-­ emption on future pub­lic contracts and gov­ern­ment orders. A recent survey (Samuels 2006) has confirmed this in­ter­pretation of the function of fin­an­cial con­ tri­bu­tions to voting cam­paigns. Terms of office are rel­at­ively short and donors are pressed for time and pressing for results, which can explain certain indelicate or even shady conducts and the many irregu­larities or frauds that occur in the management of pub­lic resources by elected officials. In spite of the neolib­eral pol­icies that have been adopted since the late 1980s, the pub­lic ‘ma­chinery’ still plays a major role in businesses’ ac­tiv­ities and con­tinues to con­trib­ute substantially to the prosperity of the various sectors connected with gov­ern­ment orders. Institutionalized bargaining in the legislative assemblies Members of the par­lia­ments at all three levels of gov­ern­ment of the Union can obtain par­ticu­lar funding from their respective executive bodies that is earmarked in prin­ciple for such or such specific opera­tion. To such funding can be added expenditures as planned in pub­lic budgets (orçamentos) that are voted each year by the national Congress, or by state and city legis­lat­ive assemblies. These emendas parlamentares, negotiated one by one within a framework that is strongly based on interpersonal relationship, are resources aimed at financing pro­jects located in the elect­oral strongholds (redutos) of the applicants. They are decided in a con­text of patronage and reciprocated favors, return for these ‘extra’ funds often taking the shape of polit­ical sup­port. The pro­ced­ure is very pop­ular as payments are far from strictly complying with pub­lic tender regulations which they may even bypass completely. During the 2006 legislature of the National Congress, each of the 513 deputies of the Assembly and 81 senators were officially granted ‘drawing rights’ as high as R$5 million (a little less than €2 million). Many members of Parliament use this ploy, among others, to obtain contracts under pub­lic calls for tenders geared to the needs of schools or hos­ pitals, com­mun­ity groups or NGOs in which they have direct vested inter­ests as dir­ectors/members of the board or because they have rel­at­ives filling in such positions. The same pro­cess applies at the level of state and city authorities. The verbas are another form of fin­an­cial bargaining that relies heavily on interpersonal relationships yet does not neces­sar­ily involve members of Parliament or their respective counterparts in the Executive. Verbas take the form of pub­lic sub­sidies directly alloc­ated by gov­ern­ment authorities (Federal Government, state and city authorities) and paid to a multitude of social bodies (com­ mun­ity groups, NGOs or research consultants) acting in a variety of domains (civil rights, char­ity, education or training, health, etc.). These pub­lic monies are distributed through pro­ced­ures that are subjected to little or no control and the press is certainly not hard put to find and reveal how, for example, studies have been paid that were never carried out, or how social programs have been financed that were never implemented, as well as other no less fictitious

Jeitinho in contemporary Brazil   179 opera­tions. In all cases, con­sider­able amounts of money are at stake. The courts of auditors usually carry out but one perfunctory ex post control to check the regu­larity of the opera­tion and ask for explanations or express their disapproval only in the most ser­ious cases. Subsidies end up for the most part in the hands of politicians for whom they represent major sources of financing for upcoming elect­oral cam­paigns or, on a more trivial plane, of lining their own pockets. Nepotism as a comfortable avenue Public institutions provide their dir­ectors not only with the oppor­tun­ity of filling stra­tegic positions with allies and clients like so many pawns moved on a chessboard, but also of directly recruiting rel­at­ives in keeping with an old national tradition. A twofold ad­vant­age can be derived from such practices; relationships based on mutual trust are in prin­ciple strengthened in the pro­cess while oppor­ tun­ities for enrichment and accumulation are created for the bene­fit of the wider family circle. The no­tori­ous example of town councils (Câmaras dos Vereadores) is but one conspicuous occurrence of a situ­ation that prevails in many other pub­lic bodies. Council members can hire numerous assistants and collaborators whom they appoint at will, without having to present any guarantee of qualification or competence what­so­ever, the whole opera­tion being financed with the budget of the local Assembly. These positions, called cargas de natureza especial, are sim­ilar to the earl­ier mentioned cargas comissionadas; endowed with a substantial sal­ary, they do not depend on pub­lic com­petit­ive examinations. This use of ‘family labor’, which such con­ditions as obtain in Brazil’s pub­lic life foster at all different levels of Government, is proportionally more frequent at the regional or local levels. Bills introduced in the legis­lat­ive assemblies at all three levels of the Federal gov­ern­ment have been passed here and there to limit the influence of nepotism but their enforcement, hence their impact, have so far been very limited. The legal sphere has proved to be a privileged area for nepotism. So many staff in the courts, from the lowest to the highest, and who are kin to magistrates, fill trusted positions. This practice has been as widely spread as it has been long known, meas­ured and even exposed in countless press reports. The 9.421 Act of 1996 had in prin­ciple pro­hibited the appointment of spouses and rel­at­ives at a third remove, but it was not until Octo­ber 2005 that the National Council of Justice (CNJ), a body in charge of controlling courts, decided to pro­hibit nepotism and fixed a period of 90 days for magistrates to terminate employment contracts involving members of their fam­il­ies.11 There are at least two ways of getting around the obs­tacle: the first consists in what is called crossed nepotism – i.e., recruiting rel­at­ives between magistrates or between magistrates and pub­lic pro­secu­tors. A quid pro quo al­tern­ative consists in certain courts of justice pressuring goods suppliers or ser­vice providers into hiring the rel­at­ives of magistrates. An enquiry has shown that 82 percent of the so-­called trusted positions of the court of justice of the state of Pernambuco have been filled with direct rel­at­ ives of magistrates. A law dating from 1997 in the state of Goiás even

180   Y.-A. Fauré institutionalizes nepotism allowing as it does each official in the Executive, the Legislature and the Judiciary to hire two close rel­at­ives. In the state of Alagoas, the pres­id­ent of the Court of Justice is said to ‘prac­tically work at home’ in the words of journ­al­ists who have pub­licized this remark­able case: no fewer than 25 of his rel­at­ives hold positions in the Court. The Court of Justice of the state of Amazonas numbers 33 close rel­at­ives of judges. In the state of Piauí, scarcely populated, the Union of civil ser­vants reckons that 400 people will have to be dismissed should the law that pro­hibits nepotism be enforced. This situ­ation is far from being confined to the oligarchic states in the poor Nordeste region. The Union of pub­lic ser­vants of the Department of Justice in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, a part of the coun­try which is often presented as being closest to Euro­ pean practices and values, has listed 68 cases of nepotism. Interim applica­tions (liminares) have been introduced before the Federal Supreme Court by staff, rel­ at­ives of judges of the Labor Courts of the state of Maranhão and by magistrates of several states on the ground that the contracts which have bene­fited their rel­ at­ives are perfectly legal whereas the de­cision of the National Council for Justice is unconstitutional. Trading votes and offices Ballots and elected offices are resources that are commonly traded in Brazil. Considering ballots first, a survey carried out in 143 towns by the Brazilian Institute for Public Opinion (IBOPE) commissioned by the NGO Transparência Brasil and by the National Union of Financial Analysts and Control Technicians (UNACON) showed that nearly 10 percent of voters (i.e., 11 million) were the targets of active and direct approaches aimed at buying their votes in the latest round of elections – in return for money, goods, favors, etc.12 This comes in addition to the prodigality flaunted by most can­did­ates in the course of their elect­oral cam­paigns, lavishing school supplies, essential food items, facilitating enrolment in pub­lic schools or access to hos­pital beds, dis­trib­uting meals or even haircuts until voting time in order to ingratiate electors. Such practices which may look pic­turesque to readers used to stricter and differently motiv­ated voting pro­ced­ures cor­res­pond, how­ever, to deeply entrenched habits in Brazil. The purchase of ballots can also take the guise of ballooning budget expenditure in the run-­up to elections. Among many examples of the gov­ern­ment’s generosity, the substantial increase in the pensions paid by the National Institute of Social Security (INSS), Brazil’s state-­run pension for private sector workers, can be mentioned here as this par­ticu­lar ‘bonus’ happened to be decided by Federal authorities just a few weeks away from major national and regional elections in Octo­ber 2006;13 in the same vein and period: a signi­fic­ant increase in min­imum wages, the timely correction of income tax bases, fin­an­cial ‘packages’ offered to builders, farmers and employers of do­mestic staff. All these meas­ures have con­ trib­uted to sending pub­lic expenditure to record-­high levels while specialists and inter­na­tional agencies such as the CEPAL (Economic Commission of the United Nations for Latin Amer­ica) which is not par­ticu­larly or­tho­dox in mat­ters of

Jeitinho in contemporary Brazil   181 eco­nomy, had already deemed that Federal expenditure to cover personnel and operating costs was too high while pub­lic investments were too low.14 These de­cisions made by the gov­ern­ment in order to sway elect­oral choice, which in certain cases are nothing short of attempts at buying votes, are difficult to understand if isolated from their wider setting and from the ‘time-­honored’ and deeply entrenched practices which permit them.15 Another practice that partakes of the same prin­ciples and values is the renting of elected offices, called aluguel de mandatos or troca-­troca. These ar­range­ ments, which consist more specifically in one party recruiting elected officials from another party, feed the con­sider­able crossing over between par­ties and factions that can be observed in the legis­lat­ive assemblies at the three levels of gov­ ern­ment (Fauré 2005). One first factor of change in polit­ical af­fili­ation stems from the Executive’s endeavors nationally, regionally and locally to reach majority in the Legislature in a sys­tem where elect­oral rules disperse polit­ical repres­ enta­tion and have produced what some have called a regime of co­ali­tion presidency. This entails con­tinu­ous bargaining in the cor­ridors of the polit­ical arena, after electors have cast their ballots, with a view to obtaining sup­port for crucial votes in the assembly in exchange for positions and other fiercely disputed ad­vant­ages. In addition to this situ­ation of dispersal which makes it neces­ sary for the ruling party to seek con­ditions for governabil­ity, and if one is to con­sider the daily routine of Congress, the quest for fin­an­cial ad­vant­ages and favors regu­larly feeds interparty peregrination and is at the origin of numerous changes in af­fili­ation to such or such polit­ical group, with the distribution of seats in Congress being con­sider­ably modified in the sequence.16

A source of private enrichment: the high cost of politics It is a truism to say that the exercise of elective offices in a polit­ical sys­tem per­ meated with patrimonialism is a source of mater­ial enrichment for the happy few elected to office. To put things in a prosaic way, and on the basis of observations that have been repeatedly made by analysts, those offices which carry with them a com­mit­ment to serve the nation also enable those in office precisely to serve their own inter­ests. In Brazil, how­ever, such oppor­tun­ities for elected officials to increase their personal wealth cannot be dis­connected from the high cost of polit­ical life in gen­eral and from the way elective institutions work in par­ticu­lar. Possibilities of personal enrichment for those involved in the polit­ical game are a direct function of how substantial the resources managed or supervised by the Repub­lic’s Executive bodies and its Assemblies of elected officials are. Scarce controls and lenient pun­ishment also have an impact on the im­port­ance of the means put at the disposal of these very executive and legis­lat­ive bodies. It is pos­sible to form an idea of the cost of polit­ical life through a variety of quantitative data.17 For instance, it is known that each deputy of the Federal Assembly costs R$1.14 million per year (€422,000), apart from extra­ordinary sessions of Congress.18 In 2006 the deputies and senators of the National Congress had a budget of R$5.4 million. The Senate operates with the help of an

182   Y.-A. Fauré army of 12,000 staff. That same year, the staff of the lower Chamber numbered 20,579 people, among whom 3,579 so-­called career staff (hired through com­ petit­ive recruiting pro­ced­ures), 2,266 holding trusted offices, 9,821 fatly paid parlia­ment­ary secretaries also appointed at the dis­cre­tion of MPs, which makes a total of 15,666 so-­called active staff.19 This con­text makes it easy to understand the words of the anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro who wrote about the High Federal Chamber: ‘It is even better than Heaven for there is no need of dying in order to get admission. The Senate is like a big club, convivial, deferential and cordial’.20 As for mater­ial enrichment, while one does not have to be so attentive an ob­ser­ver to notice it, sources for a ser­ious identification of genu­ine cases and for ac­cur­ate meas­ure­ments to estim­ate their scope had been lacking up to now. Among several difficult investigations carried out recently by journ­al­ists – difficult for they are premised on the authorization by elect­oral courts to access the election can­did­ates’ declarations of estate – a series of papers published by O Globo in April 2006 can be mentioned here which show that half the MPs of the Legislative Assembly of the State of Rio de Janeiro managed to double their declared prop­erty within their four year term of office. Another enquiry released in the news­papers revealed that federal MPs spent dizzying amounts of money in fuel expenses. These gastos estratosféricos as the Brazilian phrase has it, amount to more than 4,100 journeys around the world or 215 to the moon.21 Among other elected officials, federal MPs bene­fit, in addition to their sal­ar­ies and those of their innumerous collaborators, from substantial funding that covers all types of expenses with no need to produce receipts, one con­sequence of which being the sys­tem’s con­tri­bu­tion to feeding an intricate circuit of false invoices.22 Payments often bene­fit businesses where politicians have vested inter­ests whether they be owners, shareholders or dir­ectors, inter­ests of which they take constant care through de­pend­ents and allies. A detailed survey examining the situ­ation of 1,800 federal and estaduais elected officials between two legis­lat­ive elections show the conspicuous mater­ial enrichment of MPs during their time of office, with those belonging to the governing party almost doub­ ling their estate in that interval (Rodrigues 2006). It should be added that the survey in question only took into con­sidera­tion the prop­erty duly declared by can­did­ates to the elect­oral justice. All these fin­an­cial oppor­tun­ities are both the fruit and one of the seeds of the patrimonial pro­cess at work in the management of pub­lic resources. Taking them into account enables the analyst to somehow draw a more complete and fairer pic­ture of the formal functions that should be fulfilled by representative and gov­ ern­ment bodies than that, far too naïve, which con­tinues to be presented to readers in pub­lic law treatises and textbooks. But the few devices de­scribed so far cannot give a precise comprehensive repres­enta­tion of the patrimonialist currents running through the pub­lic sphere in Brazil. The attributions of licenses and permits which are a staple of the very bur­eau­cratic pub­lic administration in Brazil frequently give rise to underground nego­ti­ations that can actu­ally involve criminal organ­iza­tions operating from within the official corps in charge of granting and/or controlling rights (taxes,

Jeitinho in contemporary Brazil   183 work, health, envir­on­ment, etc.) The pension funds of pub­lic com­panies pile up con­sider­able amounts of money and are often used in somewhat dubious opera­ tions that have little connection with the purpose for which they were set up in the first place. Construction law in Brazil, whose regime is defined at town scale, together with building permits granted sover­eignly by town halls, are an area where pub­lic and unscrupulous private inter­ests commonly mix. Writing false entries into pub­lic ledgers for pub­lic agents and em­ployees is quite common and makes it pos­sible for those concerned to embezzle pub­lic monies through the payment of fictitious sal­ar­ies. The purchase of legal acts in order to obtain an habeas corpus for example, or court rulings in favor of the mighty, are also part of a range of opera­tions that cannot but foster the con­ditions in which patrimonialism has endured and thrived. At this point it would behoove this pre­senta­tion to shed more light on the pervasion of the pub­lic sphere by those conducts and practices that partake of patrimonialism as well as to put forward some explanations re­gard­ing the factors that make them pos­sible, frequent, indeed endow them with legitimacy. The his­tor­ ical endurance of patronage on a local and regional scale (the so-­called coronelismo [Cf. Fauré 2004]), the anthropological duality of soci­ety, where the indi­vidual, as an ab­stract figure who is subject to the law of his coun­try, still has to yield before the person as an entity provided with social quality and capable of turning stand­ards to its bene­fit (Da Matta 1978), the influence of a sys­tem of beliefs and values which makes it pos­sible to accept the prescriptions that invalidate patrimonialist conducts while con­trib­ut­ing to their reduplication, are part and parcel of the structural factors to which the Brazilian jeitinho is subservient. If the jeitinho is still ‘alive and kicking’ it is also perhaps because of other currents and pro­cesses running deep through Brazilian soci­ety such as the conspicuous social in­equal­it­ies, the con­sider­able role played by the informal sector in the coun­try’s eco­nomy, the far too lenient penal and legal sys­tems, the liberties and immunities that the polit­ical class generously keeps granting to itself, the frequent collusion between pol­itics and or­gan­ized crime, the impunity that goes with power, whether it be of a polit­ical, eco­nomic or even criminal order, the un­cer­tainty and in­stability of rules, the disempowering wel­fare pol­icies, the facility with which one may transgress the bound­ar­ies between pub­lic and private sphere, including phys­ical space, the frequent submission of the state ap­par­atus and of its resources to the inter­ests of par­ticu­lar cat­egor­ies both social or corporative, etc. Such are some of the factors, diverse and recurring, which con­trib­ute to the ongoing self-­modernizing pro­cess of patrimonialism in Brazil and seem to guarantee its prosperity in the future.

Notes   1 The word jeitinho, a literal translation of which would be ‘the little art of finding a way out’, is used by Brazilians to designate the innumerable ar­range­ments in daily life that make it pos­sible for them to get around constraints and rules and often rest on the payment of tip money (propina) or on reciprocated favors.

184   Y.-A. Fauré   2 See Fauré and Médard (1995: 289). Our definition is close to the concepts and approaches of those who pioneered the reintroduction of the notion of patrimonialism – a word that is used here instead of ‘neopatrimonialism’ even to de­scribe con­tempor­ ary situ­ations – in social and polit­ical ana­lysis (e.g., Zolberg 1966; Roth 1968: 194–203; Willame 1972; Jackson and Rosberg 1982).   3 O Globo, 22 Decem­ber 2002.   4 Analysts have used various notions, words and phrases to de­scribe pro­cesses partaking of patrimonialism: ‘patronage sys­tem’ (Clapham 1982), ‘clientelist regime’ (Bayart 1979), ‘prebendal pol­itics’ (Joseph 1987), ‘pol­itics of the belly’ (Bayart 1989), etc.   5 Léna, Geffray and Araújo, 1996, various con­tri­bu­tions: 111–353.   6 Among the highest-­profile ‘affairs’, the fol­low­ing can be cited – the phrases or words in Portuguese being those commonly used in Brazil when referring to these affairs: Waldomiro, Correios, mensalão et Valérioduto, sanguessugas, vampiros, dossiêgate. Penal regulations and pro­ced­ure, regulations for the Legislative Assemblies, polit­ical immunity as or­gan­ized by the consti­tu­tion, etc. serve as sturdy shields for the indicted, very few of whom are actu­ally pun­ished in the end. It should be added that most of the elected officials implicated in those ‘affairs’ were returned to their offices in the 2006 Octo­ber ballot.   7 The second major trait which used to distinguish the PT from other polit­ical par­ties lay in its pro­claimed com­mit­ment to implement eco­nomic pol­icies running counter to the free-­market packages passed by the preceding gov­ern­ments. In this respect also, it can fairly be said that con­tinu­ity has largely prevailed.   8 The present chapter was written in 2006. Since then, new ‘affairs’ of peculation, and, more gen­erally, of ‘corruption’, some on a massive scale and implicating several polit­ical par­ties, have broken out and further tarnished the image of the Brazilian polit­ical class (navalha opera­tion, etc.).   9 The same spoils sys­tem obtains on a local scale in the 5,561 Brazilian towns. A more detailed description and above all, more in­forma­tion about its effects in terms of eco­ nomic management and local de­velopment can be found in Fauré (2004, 2005) and in Fauré and Hasenclever (2005). 10 Exactly 19,925 in 2005 (source: Ministério do Planejamento, Orçamento e Gestão), an increase of nearly 2,000 in the first three years of ‘Lula’s term of office. The figures do not include the cor­res­ponding so-­called trusted positions (cargas comissionadas) within the Federal Legislature and Judiciary, pub­lic and mixed-­status com­panies, the states’ and municípios’ executive, legis­lat­ive and judiciary bodies. On this, see the rather well-­documented papers published in the Folha de São Paulo, on 16 March 2003 and in O Globo, on 15 Octo­ber 2006. 11 It is not known to date whether the de­cision will be enforced as rebellion has flared up among magistrates, with several courts rallying against a meas­ure that they claim is a direct threat to the inde­pend­ence of their office. 12 This result confirms previous investigations (O Globo, 16 March 2005). 13 Earlier increases had been limited to adjustments aimed at keeping seniors’ purchasing power even with inflation. 14 The 2000 Act of fin­an­cial account­abil­ity (Lei de Responsabilidade Fiscal) while having a few mitigating effects on pub­lic finances (cf. Fauré 2005), has still not curbed the traditional practice consisting in ballooning pub­lic expenditure in the run-­up to elections. 15 A recent study by researchers of the Getúlio Vargas Foundation shows that since 1983 the income of Brazilians has increased 12.1 percent on average during pres­id­en­tial and gov­ern­mental election years and decreased 11.9 percent during the year fol­low­ing the election. Considering all pos­sible sources of income (sal­ar­ies, pensions, etc.) it must be noted that trans­ferred pub­lic money – notably sub­sidies for social programs – accounts for the highest increase during election years: +24 percent on average

Jeitinho in contemporary Brazil   185 (source: Centro de Políticas Sociais, Fundação Getúlio Vargas 2006). Isolated or specific ingratiating meas­ures are thus easier to understand when con­sidered within a gen­eral climate that is propitious to prodigality during election time. 16 Changes in polit­ical party af­fili­ation – cor­res­ponding among other configurations to cross‑overs between the opposi­tion and the governing co­ali­tion – during the seven terms of office since the end of the milit­ary dic­tatorship numbered: 168 (1983–7), 174 (1987–91), 261 (1991–5), 207 (1995–9), 225 (1999–2003) and more than 200 for the preceding 2003–6 legislature (source: Secretaria Geral das Mesas do Congresso). 17 The description here is limited to the Federal legis­lat­ive bodies. The same trends, with all proportions kept, can, how­ever, be observed in the legis­lat­ive bodies at the other levels of gov­ern­ment (i.e., the 27 states, including the Federal District, and the 5,561 Brazilian municípios). It must be added re­gard­ing the size of a given state’s Legislature’s expenditure that it is not proportional to that state’s popu­la­tion. Thus, for example, the Legislative Assembly of the state of Rio de Janeiro spends 25 percent more than the Assembly of the state of São Paulo whereas the popu­la­tion of the latter is double the popu­la­tion of the former (cf. O Globo, 22 Octo­ber 2006). 18 Jornal do Brasil, 18 Febru­ary 2006. 19 To these, 4,400 pensioners and de­pend­ents must be added (inativos e pensionistas) (source: Tesouro Nacional et Câmara dos Deputados). 20 Cited in Folha de São Paulo, 6 April 2006. Ribeiro 2006. 21 The comparison should not sound strange when seen in the national con­text: in 2006, the journey into space of the Brazilian astronaut aboard a Russian spacecraft was paid by the central gov­ern­ment at commercial rates and some ridi­culed an enterprise which they clearly deemed to be of a more touristic than sci­ent­ific order. 22 See, for example, O Globo, 25 April 2006.

13 Neopatrimonialism, factionalism and patronage in post-­Soviet Uzbekistan Alisher Ikhamov

Following the breakdown of entrenched author­it­arian regimes in Tu­nisia and Egypt some ob­ser­vers turned their attention to Central Asian coun­tries in anticipation of sim­ilar revolu­tions. Indeed, the ruling regimes in post-­Soviet Central Asia present a number of features deemed charac­ter­istic of the Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) states and soci­eties. These include inter alia a common religious background, widespread pov­erty, corruption and the brutal treatment of civil soci­ety and civic freedoms. Apart from these parallels one may also highlight the abil­ity of the Tunis­ian and Egyptian author­it­arian regimes to have lasted over a long period of time in spite of their lack of polit­ical legitimacy and failure to address the coun­tries’ social and eco­nomic prob­lems. In addition to this, the uprisings in Tu­nisia and Egypt have revealed their author­it­arian regimes’ vul­ner­abil­ity to massive street protests and pop­ular demands for the regime change. This dualism, i.e., durabil­ity combined with fragility due to a legitimacy largely based on resource distribution, may be viewed as a sys­temic feature shared by Central Asian states, and an invitation to apply to these the concept of neopatrimonial rule. The notions of patrimonial or neopatrimonial rule have been widely used to depict pol­itics in Africa, the Middle East and Asia (Sandbrook 1972; Willame 1972; Bill and Leiden 1974; Brynen 1995; and others). Yet, scholars studying the state and institutional trans­forma­tion in post-­Soviet Central Asia have rarely used this concept in spite of the unfulfilled expectations of post-­Soviet trans­ition to modern demo­cracy and free market eco­nomy. One of the few exceptions was been John Ishiyama (2002) who operates a distinction between neopatrimonial regime and cor­porat­ist author­it­arian regime. The fol­low­ing pages argue that the concept of neopatrimonial rule is par­ticu­larly suited to the discussion of the sys­tem of personal rule estab­lished by President Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan. Islam Karimov has been ruling his coun­try since 1990. Despite his obvious mismanagement of social and eco­nomic affairs, he still exerts firm control over the coun­try. Failed governance and a shrinking legitimacy have not resulted in mass uprisings, coup d’état or revolu­tions – the only exception remains the pop­ ular uprising in Andijan which was brutally suppressed in May 2005.1 Karimov’s rule invites for this reason a discussion of the pillars upon which his author­it­ arian rule rests, but also interrogations on the regime’s combination of resilience

Neopatrimonialism in post-Soviet Uzbekistan   187 and vul­ner­abil­ity vis-­à-vis in­ternal and external pressures. Indeed, it would be a mis­take to suggest that the perennation of author­it­arian regimes has to do exclusively with their use of force and viol­ence as means of polit­ical control. Besides the use of phys­ical force, other key ingredients account for their governing performance. The concept of neopatrimonialism (see Chapters 1 and 2 in this volume) helps to account for key aspects of Karimov’s rule, namely: • • • • •

personal rule embodied in the domination of executive gov­ern­ment over other branches of state authority; the exist­ence, within the executive branch of power, a nexus of informal checks and balances mostly associated with rivalries between factions within the government; the neutralization of potential power contesters through their co-­optation and accommodation; the use of state ideo­logy and propaganda complemented with strict censorship and control of information; the trans­forma­tion of institutional gaps, or ‘grey’ legis­lat­ive zones, into spheres of oportunity for personal rule and patronage networks.

The Uzbek ruling regime has dem­on­strated its skills at mobilizing these forms of power control and gov­ern­mentality. As sim­ilarly observed in other Central Asian coun­tries, personal rule involves the control of various factions tied to regional and patronage networks. In other words, neopatrimonialism refers here formal and informal practices that only partly coincide with the state as a formal organ­isa­tion. Indeed, family, kinship and patronage networks are actively mobilized as social resources to fight power struggles that offer a quintessential expression of neopatrimonialism. To monitor these inter­actions, this art­icle first focuses on the role of informal factions and patronage networks. We will then successively discuss neopatrimonialism during the Soviet period and the rise of Islam Karimov after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

‘Clan’ and patronage networks The parsimonious appeal to the concept of neopatrimonialism in Soviet and post-­Soviet studies contrasts with the abundant liter­at­ure on clan and patronage networks. During the Soviet period, the discussion of patron–client networks, con­sidered in connection with the issue of state corruption, featured both in the pub­lic arena and in private discussions. This was espe­cially the case during the decade that preceded the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the lex­icon of Soviet state ideo­logy this was known and articulated through the notions of clanoviost (nepotism), mestnichestvo (regionalism) (Critchlow 1991: 141) and kumovstvo (cronyism). These were con­sidered as diversions from governance based on purely national inter­ests. The term ‘clan’ referred to kinship-­based entities and relations based on lineage and descent (whether actual or fictive), but also to

188   A. Ikhamov networks based on a much broader range of af­fili­ations. These inter­est groups, whether they were based on kinship ties or on regional af­fili­ation, shared in common the as­pira­tion to control par­ticu­lar resources by taking over certain offices. Clanoviost and mestnichestvo were stigmatized as a source of state corruption alien to the values blessed by Communist ideo­logy. Over two decades after the demise of the Soviet regime and its state ideo­logy, these notions keep being criticized on pub­lic trib­unes where they are treated as threats to rule of law and state integrity. As in the past, none of the top and middle rank officials would dare pub­licly disclosing the ‘clan’ or patronage network to which they often belong. At the same time, the members of ‘clan’ and patronage networks are themselves often well informed about who is who in this respect.2 For the rest of soci­ety and external ob­ser­vers the evid­ence of ‘clan’ reality is rather scanty, with the result of a proliferation of rumours, stereo­types and myths on this subject. Not surprisingly, the phenomenon of ‘clans’ has attracted the attention of scholars. During Soviet times, ‘clan’ pol­itics was treated as an essential feature of Central Asian pol­itics by Donald Carlisle (1991, 1995) and Jim Critchlow (1988, 1991). In the post-­Soviet era, scholars like Kathleen Collins (2004, 2006), Sally Cummings (2005) or Ilkhamov (2004: 1, 2002) have kept discussing these issues. Barnett Rubin (1998) and Olivier Roy (1998) treat ‘parallel power networks’, ‘solid­arity groupings’ and regional factions as con­trib­ut­ing factors in the civil war that affected Tajikistan. More gen­erally, ‘clans’ and patronage networks are seen as sub-­ethnic and rather pre-­modern formations. Their influence is bound to be overcome if the agenda of modern nation-­state building succeeds. They may also be preserved and subjected to manipulation by the polit­ical leadership. The bulk of pub­lications on Central Asian ‘clan’ pol­itics refer to mater­ial drawn from mainly three coun­tries, Kaz­akh­stan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. However, there are signi­fic­ant dif­fer­ences in the role played by kinship and lineage networks in ‘clan’ formations between Kaz­akh­stan, on the one hand, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan on the other. In Kaz­akh­stan, clans are often closely associated with prim­or­dial tribal and lineage kinship asso­ci­ations that refer to a – real or ima­gined – common nomadic an­cestor. Edward Schatz, in his work on Kaz­akh­stan, underlines how kinship, a key feature of ‘clan’ formations, persists in post-­Soviet reality. As he puts it: ‘clan divisions are those that exist within an ethnic group and in which demonstrable common kinship is understood to underlie mem­ber­ship’ (Schatz 2005: 26). When studying informal, clan-­like networks in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan some authors have tried to aban­don the ‘cousinly’ in­ter­pretations of the ‘clan’ sys­tem. Indeed, tribal identity among Uzbeks and Tajiks, who have had a long his­tory of sedentary lifestyle, is much weaker (if it exists at all)3 than among the recently sedentarized Kazakhs and Kyrgyzs. At the same, time the sense of affinity to territory and the related mobil­iza­tion of regional networks are quite strong in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, as indeed in other parts of Central Asia. Extended fam­il­ies still play a key role in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, but lineage does not

Neopatrimonialism in post-Soviet Uzbekistan   189 play such an outstanding role as in Kaz­akh­stan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan in the formation of ‘clan’ identity.4 In Uzbekistan ‘clans’ are often very loose co­ali­ tions built upon various types of allegiance, including kinship, friendship, patron–client or part­ner­ships among clients. Muriel Atkin (1997: 292) makes a sim­ilar point when arguing that the term ‘clan’ is misleading when applied to informal networks in Tajikistan. In Tajikistan, at least, ‘clans’ are devoid of a prim­or­dial character and should be more adequately quali­fied as patron–client networks. Uzbekistan has also been moving from ‘clan’-based ver­tical af­fili­ations towards new forms, based on patron–client relations, although, both of them still coexist. The trans­itional form of patron–client relations, that characterize Uzbekistan and its post-­Soviet neigh­bours, can be called ‘neopatrimonial’, because of being coincided with the extensive legal-­rational forms of gov­ern­ ment and regulation. Uzbekistan enjoys a rel­at­ively all-­encompassing legis­la­tion that, besides the overarching consti­tu­tional prin­ciples, involves numerous laws or decrees, often inspired from Russia or Europe. However, their impartial and sys­tematic applica­tion is the prob­lem. Government bodies often act arbit­rar­ily by ignoring the law or applying it select­ively, in accordance with the private inter­ests of office holders or demands from clans and patronage networks that stand behind them or the top polit­ical leadership.

The Soviet period and its legacy The estab­lishment of Karimov’s neopatrimonial regime, as in other post-­Soviet coun­tries in the region, is the outcome of a complex set of circumstances. Foremost among them are the pre-­Soviet and Soviet legacies with respect to polit­ical culture, patterns of governance and relationships between state and soci­ety. The Soviet modernization pro­ject failed to uproot the patronage sys­tem because it was itself suffering from institutional underde­velopment. Stalin’s author­it­arian rule and its enforcement by the Politbur­eau,5 thwarted efforts to eradicate patrimonialism. It is difficult to monitor precisely how the period preceding the Octo­ber Revolution of 1917 con­trib­uted to shape the sys­tem of governance observed in today’s Uzbekistan. Some of the patterns of inter­actions between ruler and ruled during the Bukharan, Khivan and Kokand khanates were, how­ever, survived throughout the Soviet period and remain embedded into the con­tempor­ary administrative sys­tem. For instance, the Emir of Bukharan used the practice of tanho, namely a sort of licence granted to beks (local governors) to collect from local peasants taxes designed to fulfil both their private needs and the maintenance of local administration. This licence sys­tem was granted in exchange for allegiance, milit­ary sup­port and the trans­fer to Bukhara of parts of the rev­enue collected (Tolstov 1962: 175). As a sys­tem of tax collection imposed by a suzerain upon his vassals, tanho was strongly evocative of various aspects of con­ tempor­ary neopatrimonialism regimes. Indeed, the Emir of the Bukhara Khanate acted like a statesman, legitimately collecting taxes on behalf of the state, but

190   A. Ikhamov also behaved as a patron vis-­à-vis the beks. These were his clients and they also ran their own patronage networks which extended to the local aristocracy and communities. During the Soviet period, a sim­ilar sys­tem survived in conjunction with the expansion of patronage pol­itics. Sharaf Rashidov, as First Secretary of the Uzbekistan branch of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), skillfully combined the Soviet style of leadership with informal practices akin to tanho. Such a style of governance helped Rashidov to convince Moscow that he is in control of the situ­ation in the repub­lic. Thanks to that he managed to keep his position of the de facto repub­lican governor for 24 long years (1959–83). Such longevity stemmed from his capa­city to redistribute resources as in the pre-­ Soviet period: provincial bosses were allowed to bene­fit privately from a part of the local resources, both eco­nomic and polit­ical, which were under their supervision. Control over the local resources was only made pos­sible through unofficial and illegal channels of resource redis­tribu­tion that related to the sphere of the shadow eco­nomy secured by ‘clan’ networks. The creeping capture of the Soviet administrative sys­tem by patronage networks was not confined to ‘backward’ Central Asia. It also occurred at the very heart of the Soviet state, within the Central Committee of the CPSU and the central gov­ern­ment. Indeed, the spread of neopatrimonial practices was an intrinsic charac­ter­istic of the Soviet regime. As Ken Jowitt notes (1992: 127, 131), Bolshevic rule went along with the acquisition of an exclusive status by office holders and the routinization of corrupt governance practices. The shift of Stalin’s personal rule and charismatic authority towards neopatrimonial rule went along with the persistence of quite rational and predictable forms of de­cision making repres­ented by the executive gov­ern­ment which remained respons­ible for the definition of pol­icy orientations over social and eco­nomic issues. Although Stalin himself remained free of regulations that might constrain his authority, his rule did accommodate certain rational-­legal forms of administration (Gorlizki 2002: 701–2). Stalin’s personal preoccupation with exceptional control over the party and state administration also provided a decisive impulse to the spread of patronage and neopatrimonial practices across the Soviet Union. This translated afterwards into the widespread use of blat as a prin­ciple of social inter­action and a means of securing access to various bene­fits via ties of reciprocity. Stalin had thus paved the way for the combination of author­it­arian rule with an expansion of informal institutions and practices, a pattern most vividly illus­ trated by Leonid Brezhnev’s rule (1964–82). Although Nikita Khrushchev (1953–64) had restored some forms of col­lect­ive and collegial decision-­making, the restraints imposed on personal rule were sub­sequently compensated by the expansion of patronage networks. These were used as a channel to accommodate group inter­ests, but also, and ultimately, to strengthen inter­actions between state and soci­ety. To some extent, the leading slogan of those times ‘The People and the Party are United’ was not unjustified. John P. Willerton (1987: 176) recounts how neopatrimonial rule under Brezhnev deferred from Stalin’s. Stalin had built

Neopatrimonialism in post-Soviet Uzbekistan   191 a patrimonial hier­archy of loyal cadres and would not allow any factional grouping to influence him. He therefore peri­od­ic­ally organ­ised purges and sent the exiled to gulags. By contrast, Brezhnev was more inclined to craft solutions of compromise with both elites and soci­ety. As a result, the power seeking factions could exert some leverage upon Brezhnev and on pol­icy making. Unlike the Stalinist dic­tatorship, the era of Brezhnev was marked by the emergence and consolidation of a kind of polit­ical class comprised of party, administration bur­eau­crats and managers of the large industrial enterprises who interacted with each other through formal and informal channels. Since the consolidation of this bur­eau­cratic class occurred both at the centre and at local gov­ern­ment level, this widened the framework for inter­est groups’ lobbying. In Uzbekistan, Brezhnev’s style of neopatrimonial rule was skillfully emu­ lated by the local chief apparatchik, Sharaf Rashidov. Like Brezhnev, he successfully engineered a stable cadre management pol­icy due to his capa­city to build patronage networks and conclude ‘clan pacts’. The resulting sys­tem of governance left a strong imprint on local pol­itics and polit­ical culture since many party and state officials, who dominated the polit­ical arena after the post-­ Rashidov period remained indebted to him for their administrative career.6 Islam Karimov himself emu­lated, at least at the beginning of his rule, the consensual style so charac­ter­istic of his predecessor. With the rise of Karimov it pro­ gressively became clear that his rule differed from Rashivov’s tenure and was more akin to Stalin’s greater re­li­ance on coercion and gulags7 as a means of making popu­la­tion compliant with his rule through brainwashing.

The rise of Islam Karimov President Islam Karimov initially came to office as a leader of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan in 1989. These were the years of resurgent nationalisms across the Soviet Union. Karimov, during pub­lic meetings, presented himself as a leader of the whole nation who would stand above of any ‘clan’ or regional patronage network. Karimov also denounced clan pol­itics and swore to fight and eradicate these from Uzbekistani reality. In a book that he published in 1997, Karimov listed regionalism and clans among the seven most im­port­ant threats to the coun­try’s secur­ity. Karimov therefore ac­know­ledged that the phenomenon of ‘clans’ had not disappeared after years of anti-­corruption cam­paigns during the Soviet period (1997: 59). What Karimov did not add was that, as a politician and head of the state, he was himself the product of ‘clan’ politics. During his brief tenure as First Secretary of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan, Karimov estab­lished himself as a leader capable of meeting the expectations and hopes of various informal elite factions in the pursuit of key nego­ti­ations with Moscow. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Karimov’s election to the presidency, his gov­ern­ment gained control over the most im­port­ant eco­nomic resources, including cotton, precious and non-­ferrous metals and other minerals. Once inde­pend­ence was pro­claimed, Karimov also presided over the re­hab­il­ita­tion of Sharaf Rashidov and the amnesty of dozens of other

192   A. Ikhamov gov­ern­ment officials and regional elites who had been arrested and jailed in connection with Moscow’s anti-­corruption cam­paigns in the middle and late 1980s (Carlisle 1995). A number of local officials associated with Sharaf Rashiov and his patronage networks were also granted key positions in the gov­ern­ment. This was the case for Shukrullo Mirsaidov and Timur Alimov, two key members of the Tashkent ‘network’, who respectively became Prime Minister and Pres­id­en­ tial Adviser; Ismail Jurabekov who repres­ented the Samarkand-­Jizzak region was also appointed Deputy Prime Minister, a position that involved control over water management and agriculture. Karimov, how­ever, soon distanced himself from factional groups and even as­sumed the posture of a referee, as Moscow used to do. This enabled him to manipulate inter-­factional rivalries so as to promote a ‘divide-­and-rule’ strat­egy. As he strengthened his grip over power, Karimov’s dependency on previous allies and partners loosened. Karimov, how­ever, did not use this oppor­tun­ity to build and enforce demo­cratic and legal institutions that would have curbed the spread of neopatrimonialism. He strengthened instead his personal rule through neopatrimonial practices and by playing factions off one another. The outcome was a kind of check-­and-balance sys­tem that remained, how­ever, limited to the sphere of informal relationships within the executive government. The elimination of old ‘clan’ leaders was supplemented by lim­ita­tions installed on the capa­city of local elites to get access to the prof­it­able mining and cotton sectors (Ilkhamov 2004: 1). Step by step, major export resources became concentrated in the hands of the central gov­ern­ment and fell under the personal supervision of Karimov. The seizure of major national resources went along with the preser­va­tion of a command eco­nomy. The introduction of elements of free market in the eco­nomy remained limited and highly select­ive. As had been the case during the Soviet period, the planned eco­nomy and the mono­poly exercised over power by a single polit­ical grouping created a favour­able turf for the re-­ emergence of ‘clan’ formations and inter-­clan rivalries. So as to di­min­ish the sway of regional leaders, Karimov adopted a pol­icy of frequent rotations of the regional hokims (governors), ousted from their posts every three years on average as estim­ated for the period between 1993 and 2002 (Ilkhamov 2004: 170). The reason invoked for these dismissals was usually the corruption of the office holders. In a number of cases, dismissals were also followed by criminal charges brought against the ousted hokim. Despite the frequent occurrence of these corruption charges, nothing was done to reform the sys­tem and reduce the oppor­tun­ities for abuse of power among local governors. The regional hokims kept being appointed by the President himself and were employed to strengthen the repressive ap­par­atus and surveillance over local gov­ ern­ments, institutions and popu­la­tion. What such a pol­icy also achieved was a reduction of the likelihood of conspiracies plotted by local hokims against Karimov himself – who also happened to have been one of them in the past. Minimizing the risk of conspiracy by the local hokims coincided with the rise of influence of a new type of patronage networks within key ministries in the central gov­ern­ment. Structures respons­ible for secur­ity, law enforcement, tax

Neopatrimonialism in post-Soviet Uzbekistan   193 collection, custom, finances and export pro­curement became par­ticu­larly power­ ful. Thus, fierce com­peti­tion grew between the Interior Ministry and the National Security Services, a rivalry tacitly encouraged by the President, as part of the same check-­and-balance sys­tem. The power of these two administrations stemmed from wielding almost unchecked co­er­cive power, as much as from the acquisition of con­sider­able eco­nomic power. Much of this was achieved by gaining informal control over spheres of eco­nomic activity that range from export trade, retail and catering businesses to drug trafficking. This pattern still remains unchecked today, perhaps because President Karimov sees it as a retribution for loy­alty and an oppor­tun­ity to keep the respective patronage leaders on leash by threatening them to the use of compromising evid­ence collected while tracing their corrupt deeds. Law enforcement agencies have also actively con­trib­uted to the enrichment of the pres­id­en­tial family. Building familial wealth has become quite an extensive business, resulting in the emergence of what may be de­scribed as a kind of ‘mega-­clan’, centred on the Pres­id­en­tial family. Usage of this term to de­scribe a phenomenon observed in several other post-­Soviet author­it­arian regimes, enables to stress the exist­ence of a hier­archy that combines personal rule and patronage through access to administrative structures and sup­port from other resource affluent ‘clans’. Karimov’s daughter, Gulnara Karimova, until recent times was con­sidered as one of most probable can­did­ates to his succession. She also played a key role in the cre­ation and expansion of this ‘mega-­clan’. From the late 1990s onwards, the growth of Gulnara Karimova’s business empire was spectacular, both in terms of eco­nomic might and polit­ical clout. Thanks to the sup­port of her father, and backing up from the administrative ap­par­atus of law enforcement and the secur­ ity agencies as well as some ‘clan’ groupings, business structures reportedly associated with Gulnara Karimova acquired one asset after another. Early in 2011, she featured among the 300 richest people in Switzerland where her assets were estim­ated around US$600 million.8 This ‘mega-­clan’ phenomenon highlights a key distinction between Karimov style of neopatrimonial rule and Stalin’s. Unlike Stalin, Karimov has, like other post-­Soviet rulers, em­braced the market eco­nomy, albeit in a very select­ive and ‘kleptocratic’ manner. He clearly had little concern for the egal­it­arian ideals which were putting certain limits to the egoistic as­pira­tions of office holders in Soviet times. This also gives a clue to the specific slant of Karimov’s neopatrimonial rule, namely the combination of two mutually sup­portive factors, namely the hyper-­centralization of the administrative sys­tem due to exceptional control of power as­sumed by the President, and, secondly, the select­ive adoption of market eco­nomy and its institutions so as to allow the ruling elite to legalize its capture of resources and capital. This mix between mono­pol­istic patterns of polit­ical control and elements of market eco­nomy is the hallmark of Uzbekistan’s brand of neopatrimonialism. Such a pattern, needless to say, represents one of major obs­tacle to the eco­nomic, polit­ical and institutional de­velopment of the country.

194   A. Ikhamov

The exploitation of the ‘grey’ zones in the legislative norms Neopatrimonial regimes combine personal rule with modern forms of legal-­ rational gov­ern­ment. The outcome is a varying abil­ity to address the coun­try’s daily needs and pursue de­velop­mental agendas. The intrinsically dual nature of the dy­namics associated with neopatrimonial rule often turns into a conflict between logics of governance – personal vs legal-­rational, or patrimonial vs de­velop­mental, for instance. The conflict, when it takes place, usually results in the emergence of grey zones where a written law exists but means little or nothing as the conduct of pub­lic affairs is dictated by the inter­ests of a ruling clique or of influ­en­tial ‘clans’ and factions. Uzbekistan is a rel­at­ively de­veloped nation with an almost 100 percent lit­er­ acy rate, good social infrastructures and an army of legal professionals, not to mention an extensive legis­la­tion. Yet, in practice, some of legal norms are dorm­ ant and not applied in daily reality. Arbitrary de­cisions due to personal rule and the influence of patronage affect more specifically the business sector’s inter­ actions with the gov­ern­ment, for instance, abusive conduct of local hokims vis-­àvis the farmers, but also civil soci­ety’s relations with the state. Take, for example, the relationships between business and gov­ern­ment. It has become an estab­lished practice of the local gov­ern­ments to extort money from local businessmen for various char­ity purposes, for instance sup­port to local soccer clubs, or for the renovation of pub­lic buildings. Even more sys­tematic is the practice of paying bribes to secure favour­able administrative de­cisions. The bribes routinely range from petty amounts given to traffic police and rank-­and-file staff at local administrations, to big deals when businessmen grease the palm of officials and secure their protection for large scale cross-­border smug­gling activities. Among other notable examples features the cotton industry due to its large scale use of forced child labour,9 a practice orchestrated by the central and local gov­ern­ ments. Despite the adoption of legis­la­tion that un­equi­voc­ally bans child labour,10 these practices concern hundreds of thou­sands of school kids who are mobilized each harvest season. This suggests that the adoption of laws meant to prevent such practices should be better understood as an exercise in ‘window-­dressing’, the exercise designed to mask a well estab­lished sys­tem that maximizes profits to the bene­fit of ruling and local elites. More gen­erally, most of the spheres of social, eco­nomic and polit­ical life in Uzbekistan are, at least to some extent, per­meated by patrimonial practices. In many cases these practices, which involve, for instance, forced child labour or the abuse of farmers’ rights, have become routinized to the extent that they constitute the institutional envir­on­ment of its own. In Uzbekistan, as in many other states that emerged out of the former Soviet Union, a legacy of institutional underde­velopment has allowed patronage networks to flourish and penetrate pub­lic offices and state institutions. Post-­Soviet leaders have done little to mend this institutional gap. At the same time, among the post-­Soviet states, the Uzbek regime presents charac­ter­istics that are quite unique, due to a style of governance based, like Stalin’s on the combination of arbit­rary rule with legal-­rational forms of gov­ern­ment. Just as Stalin’s rule

Neopatrimonialism in post-Soviet Uzbekistan   195 coexisted with some de­velop­mental pro­jects run by the executive gov­ern­ment (take, for example, the genu­ine successes achieved in the fields of industrialization, sciences and education), Karimov’s personal rule sim­ilarly coexists with elements of modern statehood and market eco­nomy. Personal rule and its related incentive to patrimonial practices and relationships exists side-­by-side with legal-­rational norms of gov­ern­ment. The outcome is the production (and reproduction) of ‘grey’ zones, or institutional gaps: affairs are run and de­cisions are made in accordance with double stand­ards; written law and formal regulation, even when they exist, mean little or nothing, while oral instructions (the so called phone ‘law’) prevail over legis­lat­ive rules and norms. Given President Karimov’s age – he was 73 in 2011 – the question of regime change in Uzbekistan is bound to arise in a not too distant future. The question is not so much what form it will take – revolu­tion, state coup or a quiet succession by one of Karimov’s associates – but whether the trans­ition will depart from the sys­tem of personal rule which has been the main predicament to institutional de­velopment. Without such a trans­forma­tion neopatrimonial practices will retain their tight grip over state and society. Due to the combination of institutional inertia and author­it­arianism under the Karimov regime, Uzbekistan is unlikely to rapidly complete its protracted trans­ ition towards a modern nation state. Even in case of regime change, it may take quite a long time to entrench the rule of law, namely a sys­tem where polit­ical change is routinized and well regulated, and where gov­ern­ment is account­able and pub­lic policy-­minded. It is difficult to ima­gine that the successor to President Karimov, unless he or she comes on the wave of a demo­cratic revolu­tion, will have enough strength and determination to give up the temptation to cultivate patrimonialism. Neighbouring Turkmenistan is an example of such an unfortunate outcome. An offspring of the previous regime, the new Turkmen pres­id­ent, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov, was unable or unwilling to implement institutional reforms that would also have meant limiting his own power. What he has managed to achieve is a break away from the most ridiculous and eccentric forms of author­it­arianism repres­ented by his predecessor, Saparmurad Niyazov. As recent de­velopments in Russia, Ukraine and Armenia also illus­trate, the demo­cratic regimes that emerge in coun­tries with a long his­tory of neopatrimonial rule face the risk of sliding back into author­it­arianism that, in turn, reinforces and brings back neopatrimonial practices and relationships.

Notes   1 On May 13, 2005 a mass protest meeting in Andijan was violently suppressed by the army. See: Preliminary Findings on the Events in Andijan, Uzbekistan, May 13, 2005 (‘With Information as of ’ June 13, 2005), OSCE-­ODIHR, June 20, 2005; Bullets ‘Were Falling Like Rain, The Andijan Massacre’, May 13, 2005, Human Rights Watch 17(5-D), June 2005; ‘Uzbekistan: The Andijon Uprising’, Asia Briefing, International Crisis Group 38, May 25, 2005.   2 According to one informant who used to work in the gov­ern­ment, each top official has an adviser who accu­mu­lates know­ledge about the informal hier­archy and ranking

196   A. Ikhamov within the gov­ern­ment and makes re­com­mendations to his boss on how to act in some situ­ations in accordance with this ranking.   3 On the Uzbeks’ loss of social memory on their tribal origins, see Ilkhamov (2004: 23).   4 The exception may apply for Kyrgyz, Kazakh and Turkmen ethnic minor­it­ies in Uzbekistan.   5 The supreme de­cision making body of the CPSU.   6 This was the case for such famous politicians as Ismail Djurabekov, Timur Alimov and Abdulaziz Kamilov. In the Karimov administration they had respectively occupied the positions of First Deputy Prime Minister, Pres­id­en­tial Advisor and Minister of Foreign Affairs. Source: The database of personalities, Centrasia.Ru at: www.centrasia.ru/person.php4 (data accessed on April 25, 2011).   7 Political dissidents are held in the prison of Jaslyk, located in Karakalpakstan and frequently compared with the Gulag system.   8 RFE/RL at: www.rferl.org/con­tent/Does_PMs_Rise_Energy_Firms_Demise_Shed_ Light_On_Uzbek_Succession_Question/2048173.html (retrieved on March 20, 2011).   9 See more on the subject: Invis­ible to the World: The Dynamics of Forced Child Labour in the Cotton Sector of Uzbekistan, SOAS, 2008, www.soas.ac.uk/cccac/ events/cotton-­sector-in-­central-asia-­2005/file49842.pdf; What has changed? Progress in elim­in­ating the use of forced child labour in the cotton harvests of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, SOAS, 2010, www.soas.ac.uk/cccac/centres-­publications/file64329.pdf; www.cottoncam­paign.org. 10 The Uzbek Parliament has ratified the ILO Conventions 29 and 105 on forced labour, Convention 111 on discrimination in the sphere of labour, 138 on min­imum age for admission to work, and 182 on the worst forms of child labour. Article 37 of the Uzbek Constitution pro­hibits the use of any form of forced labour. The Law ‘On guarantees of the rights of a child’ adopted in 2007 recog­nizes the right to work from 16 years old onwards and the right to combine work and education provided this is not detrimental to compulsory schooling from 14 years old onwards (see section 7.2 for details). On top of this, in Septem­ber 2008, a Cabinet of Ministers res­olu­tion approved a National Action Plan for the implementation of ILO conventions 138 and 182.

14 Berlusconismo as a case of ‘hybrid neopatrimonialism’ Mauro Barisione

Italian demo­cracy in the past 20 years has often been presented as a kind of polit­ical laboratory in which many shared tendencies of con­tempor­ary demo­ cra­cies are translating into extreme forms. Dominated by the central figure of Silvio Berlusconi, who was in turn and several times either prime min­is­ter or opposi­tion leader, the Italian polit­ical stage can be effect­ively ana­lyzed through Berlusconismo, at least in so far as the purpose of the ana­lysis is to highlight the neopatrimonial com­pon­ents associated with the pub­lic sphere and the exercise of power. As a polit­ical phenomenon, Berlusconismo only makes sense if related to the his­tor­ical and social framework in which it emerged and thrived. The neopatri­ monial elements that may be detected in the widespread privatization of pub­lic mat­ters and, conversely, the pub­licization of private concerns are the ingredients of a more complex dy­namics, combining structural as well as contingent factors. Sources of polit­ical legitimization are indeed diversified in this case: they may be found in the charismatic dimension that emerged out of an extra­ordinary junc­ ture of national crisis, but also in ideo­logical elements of polit­ical repres­enta­tion that relate to deeper social structures. In order to ana­lyze the kind of hybrid neopatrimonialism that seems to define Berlusconismo, I will first examine the genesis of the phenomenon in its his­tor­ ical con­text and national specificity; secondly, I will then discuss the inter­actions between such patrimonial ingredients as the polit­ical use of mass media resources on the one hand, and the charismatic strand connected to the pub­lic re­cog­ni­tion of a leadership widely perceived as ‘extra­ordinary’, on the other hand. Finally, I will focus on the most typ­ic­ally neopatrimonial elements, while at the same time underscoring a prob­lem which I con­sider to be the crucial reason for S. Berlusconi’s success: the difficulty of clearly disentangling these com­pon­ents from the polit­ical discourses, the ideo­logical utterances and the sociological justifications which con­trib­ute, as a result of sustained stra­tegic efforts and communication performances, to ensure the pub­lic legitimization of Berlusconian domination.

198   M. Barisione

The genesis of Berlusconismo: the systemic and cultural contexts Berlusconismo relies both on the sys­temic and cultural specificities of the Italian con­text. At the sys­temic level, we must emphas­ize the role of polit­ical par­ties as key institutional an­chors for the consolidation and maintenance of demo­cracy which, during the repub­lican era that came after World War ii, only enjoyed limited legitimacy within civil soci­ety (Morlino 2001). The party sys­tem was also marked by ‘imperfect bipartism’ (Galli 1966), owing to the pres­ence of the biggest communist party in the West, which resulted in incomplete polarization because, under the existing inter­na­tional order, the party was barred from con­ quering polit­ical power and demo­cratic alternation was thus im­pos­sible. As for polit­ical culture, it must be noted that Italian demo­cracy has functioned under the influence of two phenomena which nine­teenth century his­tor­ians had already highlighted: a tend­ency toward ‘transformism’ – or the capa­city for polit­ical metamorphosis – within the polit­ical class, and the wide diffusion of clientelist practices at the various échelons of power (Tullio-­Altan 2000). Grasping Berlusconismo also necessitates that, beyond this pri­mary in­forma­ tion, we look at the genesis of Berlusconi’s polit­ical itinerary as tied to the con­ tingent polit­ical events of the early 1990s. The entry of Silvio Berlusconi into the polit­ical arena must be connected to the un­pre­ced­en­ted deficit in pub­lic repres­enta­tion that the sudden disap­pear­ance of the main polit­ical par­ties of the first Repub­lic had created in the polit­ical sys­tem and in Italian soci­ety. The famed anti-­corruption investigations that started in 1992 had tainted major repre­ sentatives of his­tor­ically ruling par­ties, such as Chris­tian Democracy, the Social­ ist Party, the Repub­lican Party, the Liberal Party and the Social-­Democratic Party. After losing their capital in cred­ib­il­ity and their pub­lic legitimization in just a few months, the par­ties had lit­er­ally imploded. None of these, which repres­ented a moderate electorate, rather hetero­geneous ideo­logically but sharing a clear anticommunist attitude, were to survive the judicial scandals. As a result, there was a signi­fic­ant deficit in polit­ical supply on the eve of the early gen­eral election of 1994. The main post-­communist party – the Democratic Party of the Left – which was tradi­tion­ally in the opposi­tion and had been rel­at­ively spared by the investigations, looked then destined to an easy win. In the early 1990s, S. Berlusconi was a well-­known businessman who had initially made his mark in the area of real estate before diversifying his ac­tiv­ities into sectors as varied as television, fin­an­cial ser­vices, advertisement, mass market retailing and soccer. While he was not directly involved in pol­itics, per­ sonal connections brought him closer to the Socialist Party’s intensely modern­ izing leader, Bettino Craxi, who was con­sidered his polit­ical ‘godfather’ within the gov­ern­ment. On the other hand, every­thing seemed to move him away from the post-­communist world: value sys­tems, cultural styles, fin­an­cial horizons and business strat­egies.1 Two issues, both of them related to the ac­tiv­ities of Fininvest, the key corpo­ ration owned by Berlusconi, seem to have led to his de­cision to enter the polit­ical

Berlusconismo as ‘hybrid neopatrimonialism’   199 arena: the incipient exten­sion to the Fininvest group of some of the judicial investigations that were going on at the time, and the heavy indebtedness of the group. These as­sump­tions would also tend to strengthen the notion that the polit­ ical and eco­nomic resources of patrimonial leaders are in­ter­change­able (Médard 1991b). Accordingly, a change in the polit­ical setup in favor of the post-­ communist demo­cratic left might have had nefarious con­sequences for the stability of Fininvest, which was de­pend­ent on banks still mostly under pub­lic ownership. Direct access to the centers of polit­ical de­cision could also help miti­ gate the damage that was expected from expanding judicial procedures. After the collapse of the main Italian polit­ical forces, Berlusconi’s consecra­ tion as a polit­ical actor came about through a statement sup­porting Gianfranco Fini during Rome’s muni­cipal elections in Novem­ber 2003. Fini was the leader of the Italian Social Movement, a small right-­wing outfit that grew on memories of the fas­cist experiment of the Repub­lic of Salò (1943–5). This new pub­lic posture was the prelude to the launching, a few weeks later, of a polit­ical party, Forza Italia, followed up by the conquest of the leadership of a wider polit­ical co­ali­tion. Besides Fini’s party, which had to give up its post-­fascist aura and was renamed the ‘National Alliance’, that co­ali­tion included the Northern League, a fed­eral­ist outfit with xenophobic tendencies, and the more con­ser­vat­ive sections of old Chris­tian Democracy. If we go by the hypo­thesis that a ‘rich man cannot achieve the full status of a big man unless he moves into pol­itics’ (Médard 1991b: 343), then Berlusconismo fits the ideal-­type. However, the more or less latent goals of self-­defense and of promoting personal and private inter­ests appear hard to dissociate from the pub­licly stated quest for a polit­ical al­tern­ative to a leftist gov­ern­ment. The rhet­oric of anti-­communism offers a para­digmatic example for this, as it expressed itself in its most elementary forms, mixing old techniques of ideo­ logical propaganda with the mobil­iza­tion of newer media channels of polit­ical communication. Anti-­communism would also provide the guiding rod for all sub­sequent elect­oral cam­paigns. This helped to (re)mobilize an electorate that was predominantly hostile to com­mun­ism or not identified with the communist tradition. To that ideo­logical dimension should be added a more complex socio­ logical factor: the kind of social repres­enta­tion that Berlusconi’s polit­ical engagement managed to foster – albeit in all prob­abil­ity in a much more ‘sym­ bolic’ than ‘substantial’ vision of repres­enta­tion (Pitkin 1967) – within im­port­ant sections of the popu­la­tion, in par­ticu­lar the socio-­professional cat­egor­ies con­ nected to inde­pend­ent labor. It is in effect neces­sary to bear in mind that, in Italy, both soci­ety and the eco­ nomy rely upon a high proportion of mostly family-­based small and medium-­ sized enterprises. A sizeable portion of the working popu­la­tion is also self-­employed (small business, professionals, traders, craftsmen). Furthermore, the number of laws which regulate productive ac­tiv­ities is signi­fic­antly higher than in other major Euro­pean coun­tries (Ginsborg 2003). These im­port­ant seg­ ments of the Italian popu­la­tion are caught between the need for the daily inven­ tion of forms of adaptiveness and evasion towards regu­latory constraints and

200   M. Barisione adherence to a type of indi­vidualistic and par­ticu­laristic civic culture inspired by ‘amoral familism’ (Banfield 1958). The outcome is a deep-­seated sus­pi­cion towards the state – perceived as an inspector that must be circumvented in mat­ ters of taxation and labor regulation, but also towards the pub­lic sector, seen as an eco­nomic burden and an obs­tacle to competition. Members of these social categories which are so em­blem­atic of Italian soci­ ety, proved par­ticu­larly receptive to Berlusconi’s polit­ical discourse which heavily dwelt on the ‘robbery’ perpetrated by the state in requesting half the gains made by entre­pren­eurs, but also openly condoned the exceptionally wide­ spread practice of tax evasion. These segments of the popu­la­tion were also receptive to his anti-­state and neolib­eral ideo­logical stance that combined with populist inflections and elements from pop­ular Cath­olic tradition. It was not a coincidence if the center-­right co­ali­tion led by S. Berlusconi obtained, at the gen­eral elections of 2006, 67 percent of votes among inde­pend­ent workers, a pattern underlining one of the most signi­fic­ant explan­at­ory factors for voting de­cision in con­tempor­ary Italy.2 One last element – charisma – must be underscored before getting to the most typical neopatrimonial com­pon­ents of Berlusconian domination on a day to day basis, namely the propagation of informal pol­itics, the personalization of power, the pub­licization of private mat­ters and the rise of conflicts of inter­ests. The next pages are devoted to the ‘extra­ordinary’ dimension of a pro­cess of polit­ical lead­ ership legitimization that, during its crit­ical initial stages, often led ob­ser­vers to refer to the Weberian notion of charisma. However, the charismatic com­pon­ent itself cannot be dissociated from the use of the media tool and control over tele­ vision. These shaped de­cisively the peculiar post or pseudo-­charismatic relation­ ship between the given leader and his supporters. And yet such a relationship cannot either be dissociated from the patrimonial element that is present under the guise of the ‘contextual-­persuasive resources’ (Lacam 1988) since the leader, in our case, owned these very communication means that con­trib­uted to the con­ struction of his ‘charismatic’ domination. As a whole, these elements – patrimo­ nial, media‑charismatic, ideo­logical and social repres­enta­tional – set the founda­tions for Berlusconi’s ‘hybrid neopatrimonialism’.3

Between charismatic leadership and television ownership Among the neces­sary con­ditions for the advent of charismatic leadership (Weber 1972) features an exceptional con­text of crisis, namely, in the case of Italy’s 1992–4 period, an institutional crisis and a state of polit­ical ‘anomy’ accompa­ nied by the disap­pear­ance of the landmarks of traditional party af­fili­ations. It is in effect in extra­ordinary his­tor­ical circumstances that a man endowed with qual­ it­ies that are held to be exceptional will be recog­nized by the masses as a charis­ matic leader vested with the mission to save the coun­try. The nar­rat­ive strat­egy used by Berlusconi to introduce his candidacy to national leadership in early 1994 abides very much to this outline. His mission is presented as that of a suc­ cessful outsider – the famous phrase ‘as far as business skills go, you cannot

Berlusconismo as ‘hybrid neopatrimonialism’   201 argue with Berlusconi’ is the most per­vas­ive stereo­type for this. Haloed with an exemplary life of indi­vidual achievements, Berlusconi offers himself up as the savior of the coun­try, confronted with the communists, and the bearer of a brave new era of prosperity and national success (Cavalli 1994). The crisis con­text, a personal trajectory meant to be exemplary and the mes­ sianic overtone of his message are elements that coincide with the ideal-­type of charismatic legitimization of power. The same applies for the pop­ular en­dorsement factor, which stemmed from the surprising elect­oral victory secured, in March 1994, at the helm of a polit­ical co­ali­tion based upon a ‘per­ sonal’ party (Calise 2000), the recently founded Forza Italia. Even then, Berlusconian leadership does not squarely fall under the charismatic heading for several reasons. First, if charismatic leadership is by definition tied to the exceptional character of the con­text, such characterization no longer applies when it comes to the ordinary and enduring exercise of power. Berlusconi would thus have been a charismatic leader only partially and in the course of the statu nascendi of his polit­ical ex­peri­ence. This ceased to be true with the un­avoid­able pro­cess of the institutionalization of his leadership, completed with his successive appointments as Prime Minister (April 1994, May 2001 and May 2008). Second, it has also been noted (Poli 1998) that his message, because it targeted too expli­citly the conquest of a majority consensus and the maximization of eco­nomic results (personal as well as national) contrasted with the heightened selflessness and the visionary and revolu­tionary stamina that are the proper traits of charismatic leader­ ship. Finally, the use of television as the key instrument for building charismatic leadership may well harbor an inherent contra­dic­tion, notably owing to the effects of ‘space restructuring’ gen­er­ated by the electronic media in so far as the relations between leader and voters are concerned (Thompson 1995). More precisely, televi­ sion tends to reduce the distance between the actor (the leader) and the spec­tator (the cit­izen). It therefore con­trib­utes to trivialize the leader, to demystify him, by taking him down to the level of his audience (Meyrowitz 1985). In this way, tele­ vision negates the pos­sib­il­ity of genu­inely charismatic leadership, based on an aura of greatness and the perception of a superi­or­ity which requires the preser­va­tion of a certain amount of phys­ical and symbolic distance (Katz and Kahn 1978). In this respect, Berlusconi, like other leaders in con­tempor­ary media-­democracies, might be at best a pseudo-­charismatic leader, endowed with ‘phony’ (Bensman and Givant 1975) or media-­driven charisma – much in the same way as journ­al­istic and daily parlance use the adjective ‘charismatic’ as a metaphor for ‘communica­ tive’ or ‘telegenic’. The term ‘post-­charismatic’ has also been used to refer to a communicative, television-­driven and utterly digitalized era where charisma in the Weberian sense has become structurally unworkable (Barisione 2006). The charisma that may be applic­able to Berlusconi’s leadership should there­ fore be con­sidered as a hybrid phenomenon, far removed from the pure type. It is also worthwhile connecting such hybridization with the strong contamination of the media-­charismatic com­pon­ent by patrimonial elements, related to owner­ ship and the control of the means used to define charismatic leadership when it is pub­licly staged.

202   M. Barisione The debate around the con­tri­bu­tion of Berlusconi’s television channels to his elect­oral successes has long been central in Italy. Outside ob­ser­vers, when adopt­ ing the journ­al­ist’s (Jones 2003) vantage point, cannot but ponder on the strange reluctance of Italian analysts to see television as the barely hidden secret of Ber­ lusconi’s polit­ical appeal. Indeed, the statement, ‘Berlusconi won the election because he owns TV channels’ has been discarded, as happens to worn out tools. Uttered far too often in the early years of the Berlusconi era, it has been sub­ jected to such intense criticism that it became con­sidered as the un­bear­able mark of simplistic con­sidera­tions and trivial judgments. It would be of course quite unrealistic, from both a methodo­logical and an epistemological view point, to secure empirical data providing conclusive evid­ ence as to the elect­oral effects of Berlusconi’s Mediaset TV channels. To be sure, an econo­metric model elaborated on the basis of field data (Ricolfi 1994) seems to confirm that these channels have had a decisive effect in terms of vote displacement towards the center-­right. Other voting ana­lyses conducted at an ag­greg­ate level have, how­ever, highlighted a signi­fic­ant stability of elect­oral behavior at the territorial level (D’Alimonte and Bartolini 1995). More gen­ erally, experts in polit­ical communication have denounced the risk of a return to naïve beha­vi­oralism in in­ter­preting the effects of the media on voting choices (Mazzoleni 1998). What they did observe during the Italian elect­oral cam­paigns of the 1990s and 2000s was a net effect of the media on the mobil­iza­tion and reactivation of existing polit­ical identities (anti-­Communism versus anti-­ Berlusconism), but a less signi­fic­ant pattern of vote conversion and shift from one camp to the other (Schadee and Segatti 2002; ITANES 2006). These cam­ paigns, largely conducted through television, resulted in a very small amount of vote conversion from one co­ali­tion to the other, notably due to the dual mech­an­ ism of select­ive exposure and perception: voters who watch the news on the Mediaset channels were already closer to Berlusconi.4 Voters from the center left essentially preferred pub­lic channels of the RAI for polit­ical in­forma­tion, and in­ter­preted in negat­ive terms any in­forma­tion related to the center-­right leader.5 The imprints of a patrimonial contamination on Berlusconi’s mediatic cha­ risma may have taken other forms than an instant and straight­forward elect­oral impact. First, we must con­sider the hypo­thesis of a long term ‘cultivation effect’, a kind of cultural harmon­iza­tion between a specific genre of television supply and a given polit­ical and symbolic demand. Accordingly, the Mediaset channels would assert and foster the social dominance of cultural styles and modes of consumption par­ticu­larly suited to the leadership proposal embodied by Berlus­ coni. This might also have entailed the implicit validation of the neolib­eral and indi­vidualistic ethos that was coherent with his ideo­logical and polit­ical mix.6 Second, the very fact of entering the polit­ical arena at a time of crisis and upheaval favored the de­velopment of new polit­ical identifications for voters deprived of their traditional polit­ical landmarks. As newer and still fuzzy polit­ ical identities emerged, Berlusconi’s private television channels proved most effect­ive in broadcasting the image of their owner as a media-­charismatic leader strongly rooted in a new center-­right polit­ical space.7 Finally, even though it is

Berlusconismo as ‘hybrid neopatrimonialism’   203 im­pos­sible to determine the direct impact of the Mediaset channels on voting, and therefore on access to power, the way their news programs covered the elect­oral cam­paigns was, predictably and perhaps inev­it­ably, marked by the framing of in­forma­tion in a manner that was qualit­at­ively favor­able to the candidate-­owner, and quantitatively lopsided in his favor.8 The gen­eral effect of the qualit­at­ive and quantitative imbalance in the communication flows originat­ ing from the Mediaset channels was crucial, if not for the conversion of new voters, at least for the maintenance of a capital of consensus acquired during the early crit­ical stage – the one related to the definition of newer polit­ical identities.

Neopatrimonialism and political discourse A signi­fic­ant neopatrimonial dimension in Berlusconismo can be earmarked both over the years during which he gov­erned the coun­try and as the new party was being launched, not to mention the preliminary con­ditions of that experience. The most obvious preliminary element is related to the already mentioned theme of the media and polit­ical in­forma­tion resources avail­able to one of the running can­did­ates. The circumstance led ab origine to a paradoxical situ­ation of com­petit­ive imbalance, by opening the door to a personal and partisan use of private resources secured through state concessions granted to fulfil a pub­lic ser­ vice. On that score, Berlusconi’s strat­egy appears to have been ever inspired by the logics of patrimonialism: for instance, through the trans­fer – whenever this proved neces­sary – of formal ownership to rel­at­ives or very close collaborators, while retaining substantial control even after the sale of prop­erty shares to exter­ nal partners.9 The founda­tion of Forza Italia – a private law entity drawn out of civil soci­ ety – provides a palpable instance of the unfolding of neopatrimonial practices, given ‘the imme­diate corres­pond­ence between party structures and corporate cadres’ and a complete ‘identification between leadership and ownership’ (Pros­ pero 2003: 54). From the onset, Forza Italia drew its strength, for all its consti­ tutive ac­tiv­ities – managers, local officials, can­did­ates, but also lo­gist­ics, communication, marketing, surveys, territorial organ­iza­tion – from the main group owned by Berlusconi (origin­ally named Fininvest, it included the channels of the yet to be created Mediaset group) and from its ad­vert­ising branch (Publi­ talia). The entire party organ­iza­tion chart looked like a kind of ‘personal ap­par­ atus’ (Maraffi 1995) and was reflective of a sys­tem of relationships based on loy­alty and proximity to the person of the leader. These features helped in creat­ ing a kind of clannish dimension that dissolved every distinction between party and business (Raniolo 2006). The Forza Italia model was also unique in terms of funding, since it prefigured a sys­tem in which a party would depend on a single corporation and its boss. In that sense, the ‘symbiotic relations between Forza Italia and Fininvest bring about conflicts of inter­ests on an un­pre­ced­en­ted scale’ (Hopkin 2005: 55). Despite a partial institutionalization pro­cess of the organ­iza­tional model and the growth of the party’s roots within the national territory over the years (Poli

204   M. Barisione 2001), the labels of ‘corporate party’ and ‘personal party’ still stick to characteri­ zations of the ori­ginal party model of Forza Italia. This has led to re-­emphasize the hybrid nature of Berlusconi’s polit­ical supply due to the combination of neo­ patrimonial and post charismatic features. The central issue with neopatrimonialism remains, how­ever, the intertwining of private and pub­lic inter­ests, of business and gov­ern­ment, of ‘patrimony’ and state. What is at play here is the abil­ity to generate business profit from regula­ tions and constraints that are adopted as part of the management of pub­lic affairs. In one word, the prob­lem of ‘conflicts of inter­ests’ looms at large if we retain the hypo­thesis of a shift from a kind of corporate party towards a ‘corporate gov­ern­ ment’ that penetrates core state institutions. The issue was extensively discussed during Berlusconi’s first candidacy and went along with a debate on the oppor­tun­ity of a law that would have restricted access to pub­lic office for people holding large eco­nomic inter­ests. Already then, a potential paradox was exposed: the pos­sib­il­ity that a cab­inet meeting would have to discuss or approve bills on mat­ters such as insurance, publishing, the alloca­tion of television wave lengths, etc., in which the Prime Minister had per­ sonal inter­ests. On such occasions, the stra­tegic will to promote a specific eco­ nomic inter­est may be deemed secondary, for an ob­ject­ively favor­able outcome may well be inde­pend­ent from any expli­cit intent. In effect, the successive center-­left gov­ern­ments which ruled between 1996 and 2001 were never able to frame a law on conflicts of inter­ests – they were too keen on keeping a dialogue going with the Berlusconi-­led opposi­tion so as to achieve a larger consti­tu­tional reform. The Berlusconi gov­ern­ment itself (2001–6) rejected the adoption of meas­ures that would have been more constraining than the ‘Frattini Bill’, which did not see any prob­lem in ownership inter­ests for pub­lic office seekers. Even then, the prob­lems gen­er­ated by the interpenetration of polit­ical and eco­ nomic resources occurred in various ways and on several occasions. The bill that decriminalized balance sheet fraud and the ‘Gasparri reform’ on telecommunica­ tions are two par­ticu­larly expli­cit examples. In the first instance, the imme­diate effect was the direct annulment of whole chapters related to lawsuits against Ber­ lusconi’s com­panies.10 In the case of the telecommunication sector’s reform, how­ ever, the bene­fits were more diversified. Let us mention here the waiver to the de­cision of the Constitutional Court which had imposed broadcasting only via sat­ ellite to one of the Mediaset channels. There was also a de facto rise of the regu­ latory ceiling that previously restricted ownership concentration in the media, or the confirmation of a near-­monopoly situ­ation on the advertisement market by private channels. In this way, the group belonging to the then Prime Minister was able to consolidate, through legis­lat­ive means, its dominant position on the national stage, in the sectors of television and advertisement (Hibberd 2007). Beyond the weak differ­enti­ation between the spheres of pol­itics and eco­nom­ ics, the pursuit of private inter­ests from within the state also became apparent through a confusion between the polit­ical and the judicial domains which truly marked Berlusconismo. So-­called ‘lib­eral’ meas­ures aimed at re­du­cing the judges’ range of action were on the pri­or­ity list of the successive gov­ern­ments

Berlusconismo as ‘hybrid neopatrimonialism’   205 that S. Berlusconi headed: a bill, passed in the summer of 1994 (while the ‘Clean Hands’ investigations were in full swing) helped to restrict the preventive imprisonment of people under investigation; the ‘Cirami Law’ of 2002 also granted to attorneys the right to request that the location where the trial was to be held be moved, whenever there was ‘legitimate sus­pi­cion’ on the fairness of judges; in 2003, the ‘Lodo Schifani’ Law guaranteed the immunity of the Prime Minister and of the holders of the higher state offices. At any rate, the repercus­ sions of these legis­lat­ive pro­vi­sions were bene­fi­cial to Berlusconi or to those representatives of his com­panies and personal collaborators who were personally implicated in various lawsuits. All of these actions corroborated the image of a polit­ical leader intent on ‘using to his own ad­vant­age, subverting or dodging’ the rules and constraints of pub­lic and institutional life (Lazar 2006: 19). Out of the complex neopatrimonial interplay between party organ­iza­tion, gov­ern­mental action and eco­nomic and judicial inter­ests, also emerges the enun­ ciation of a structured polit­ical discourse. This discourse asserts goals that are both ideo­logical (the invocation of a lib­eral state confronting an alleged ‘judges’ repub­lic’) and pragmatic (the claim that there is need to consolidate national cor­ porations so as to face global com­peti­tion). As a result, it is not easy to disen­ tangle ideals from a posteriori rationalizations and mere propaganda in the pub­lic decoding of the Berlusconian discourse. Measures such as tax cuts on high incomes or the ab­roga­tion of inheritance taxes on great fortunes were coherent with a neolib­eral scheme tending toward the reduction of state inter­ven­tions. In effect, they also meant ob­ject­ively that Berlusconi himself saved every year sub­ stantial amounts of money, both as a private citizen and as a businessman. It might therefore be argued that the profits earned as a result of such extreme intermingling between pub­lic discourse and private position were the pri­mary goal of Berlusconi’s de­cision to step into the polit­ical arena. While announcing this move, Berlusconi had also begun to de­velop the arguments which would sys­tematically guide his pub­lic defence. Then as in the numerous lawsuits in which he was implicated in the fol­low­ing 15 years, he would denounce the funda­mentally polit­ical and partisan nature of the ‘judicial attacks’ against him. In addition to the issue of potential conflicts of inter­ests, another manifesta­ tion of neopatrimonialism has been associated with the ex­peri­ence of Berlusco­ ni’s gov­ern­ments. It can be detected in the pro­cess of diffusion of informal pol­itics toward the sphere of formal institutions, in parallel with the personaliza­ tion of his power. Among the more telling instances of this pro­cess, we may point out: the appointment of some of Berlusconi’s judicial counsels as min­is­ters or pres­id­ents of parlia­ment­ary commissions; the use of his Roman home as a place for gov­ern­ment meetings, or of his villa in Sardinia as an informal recep­ tion venue for foreign heads of state with whom he claimed relationships of per­ sonal friendship (Vladimir Putin and Tony Blair). In addition, one may also refer here to the weekly dinners, sys­tematic after 2001, with Umberto Bossi, the leader of the Northern League, the party which brought about the fall of the first Berlusconi gov­ern­ment in 1995, and more gen­erally, the interplay of personal relationships and loy­alty networks based on the distribution of substantial

206   M. Barisione ‘personal and retributive resources’ (Lacam 1988). Moreover, as soon as he secured, in his capa­city as head of the gov­ern­ment, a power of formal supervi­ sion over the appointment of the managers of the pub­lic television (RAI), Ber­ lusconi appeared to focus on the expansion of his loy­alty network within formal institutions, through the appointment of some of his trusted collaborators to key positions in the pub­lic television administration. After wire tapping records were made pub­lic in the press in 2007, these appointments emerged as launching pads toward the homogenization of polit­ical in­forma­tion on the channels of the RAI and Mediaset, leading to the capture of state news channels. Finally, Berlusconismo reveals a gen­eral and paradoxical reversal of the terms of the debate on the privatisation of pol­itics due to its combination with a pattern of pub­licization of private mat­ters linked to the media exposure of personal issues. This phenomenon may be related to a more gen­eral pro­cess of personali­ zation and mediatization of modern pol­itics, but also to the correl­at­ive expansion of media attention paid to the private lives of pub­lic personalities. Berlusconi’s communication strat­egy has been sys­tematically drawn from personalistic and private elements, such as family life anecdotes, the pub­lic exhibition of family quarrels, the distribution of dozens of millions of copies of a self-­glorifying biography or of posters flaunting his image at the expense of local can­did­ates of his party. Since 2009, this pattern has also been fuelled by the disclosure in the media of various scandals with a sexual connotation. To be sure, these outbursts and their judiciary im­plica­tions were clearly not the outcome of a Berlusconian strat­egy of pub­licization of private mat­ters. They, how­ever, confirm the broaden­ ing of the reach of the media so as to en­com­pass the most intimate aspects of the life of pub­lic personalities. The hybrid nature of Berlusconismo stems from a tend­ency to condense the various com­pon­ents – neopatrimonial, charismatic and communication-­driven, ideo­logical and socio-­political – in a unicum. Here is the core and essence of what has been designated and variously defined as Berlusconismo. This phenom­ enon, which might well be a mere vari­ation on pro­cesses of a greater magnitude that are emerging in other con­tempor­ary demo­cra­cies, can be ac­cur­ately de­scribed as the claim – translated in ideo­logical and sociological terms and propagated through mediatic and personalized channels – to both the privatiza­ tion of pub­lic mat­ters and the pub­licization of private ones.

Notes   1 For instance, in 1989, the PCI (the Italian Communist Party) fought in Parliament to reduce the amount of commercial breaks, deemed culturally debilitating, on Berlusco­ ni’s three channels (Canale 5, Rete 4, Italia 1). The same year, Berlusconi started a fin­ an­cial battle with many judicial twists and turns (Lodo-­Mondadori lawsuit on judicial bribery) in order to secure the control of a series of weeklies and dailies, including L’Espresso and La Repubblica, two reputedly left-­leaning maga­zines and newspapers.   2 A sim­ilar phenomenon was also noted at the 2001 elections, won by a center-­right co­ali­tion (Diamanti and Mannheimer 2002; Italian National Election Studies [ITANES] 2006).

Berlusconismo as ‘hybrid neopatrimonialism’   207   3 Neopatrimonialism as an ana­lyt­ical cat­egory always appears, at least in con­tempor­ary demo­cra­cies, under a ‘hybrid’ form, grafted on a basis of legal-­rational domination. The hybridization phenomenon alluded to here must be located at a more specific level, marked by the in­ex­tric­able intertwining of the patrimonial, charismatic, political-­ideological, and social repres­enta­tional dimensions of Berlusconismo.   4 Research shows strong correlations between the TV news shows habitually watched (RAI vs Mediaset) and voting choice (center-­left vs center-­right). These relationships are how­ever in­ter­preted as the expression of ‘incorporation’ models (of polit­ical pref­ er­ences into news exposure) rather than as an in­dica­tion manifesting ‘influence’ models (from the news to polit­ical pref­er­ences) (Legnante 2002).   5 Such a personal feature as honesty provides an obvious case of perception shaped by the ideo­logical and affective orientations of the perceiver: 77 percent of center‑right respondents believed Berlusconi to be funda­mentally honest, against only 16 percent of center-­left respondents (Barisione 2006).   6 The signi­fic­ant correlation between the length of daily exposure to television and the Forza Italia vote seems to corroborate that hypo­thesis (ITANES 2001).   7 It is precisely in polit­ical junctures of crisis, conflict or upheaval that people become more receptive to media influence, as well as more de­pend­ent on them (DeFleur and Ball-­Rokeach 1989).   8 During the two months long official cam­paign for the legis­lat­ive elections of 2006, the law compelled news channels to grant equal airtime to the two main leaders of the co­ali­tion. Despite the eco­nomic sanc­tions to which they could be subjected, the Medi­ aset channels alloc­ated, on the whole, 74 percent of airtime to Berlusconi, with the 26 percent remaining slots going to Prodi (data from Pavia’s Observatory).   9 Berlusconi’s brother officially owns the daily Il Giornale. The vice pres­id­ent is none other but his son, Pier Silvio Berlusconi. His daughter Marina presides over Fininvest. Mediaset’s pres­id­ent is Berlusconi’s lifelong friend Fedele Confalonieri. 10 Lawsuit Fininvest All-­Iberian, Sme-­Ariosto, Mediaset TV broadcasting rights.

15 Clientelism and patrimonialism in international relations The case of France’s African policy Daniel Bourmaud

France’s relations with Africa are frequently described as ‘special’. The specific features of such relations have always been puzzling to specialists and account for conclusions that mix analysis with forceful condemnations. Indeed, France’s African policy clearly does not invite benevolent neutrality due to its frequent association with corruption, patrimonialism, and ‘dirty tricks’. Although firm evidence is not always available, probabilities are strong enough for political scientists to accept the materiality of such practices. This raises the question of the conclusions to be drawn. For Jean‑François Médard, who devoted a significant part of his work to the study of this ‘special relationship’, the underlying question was to determine how the former colonial power managed to keep playing such a pre-eminent role within and beyond its former sphere of influence. Asking such a question implied focusing on the instruments used rather than on the causes. Accordingly, Médard insisted on the imprint of networks, the key role played by emblematic personalities such as Jacques Foccart, and the prevalence of family-type relationships. In short, emphasis was laid on a set of players and practices that contributed to an apparently exceptional and hardly refutable overview of France’s African policy. Yet, focusing on policy instruments sidetracked the issue of the foundations upon which such policies were built. The following pages discuss France’s African policy from a contextual perspective, an angle of approach to which J.‑F. Médard (1999b) himself was not entirely impervious. Indeed, an analysis confined to the study of clientelism and patrimonialism would neglect that there was always an international dimension to the relationship between France and Africa. In that respect the relations should not be merely analysed through the actors’ practices but also through the structures within which these practices occur. More specifically, clientelism in Franco-African relations has been part and parcel of a more global policy with its own determinants. Whenever these have happened to evolve, the practices were necessarily altered, and may have become unsuitable. The policy orientations adopted by France in the aftermath of the independence of its African colonies were shaped by ideological and systemic considerations. Ideology refers here to the French authorities’ conception of foreign policy, but also to the role they believed France should play in international relations. The second variable refers to the type of international relations at a given time. It is in the broad

France’s African policy   209 framework shaped by these two interacting variables that clientelism and patrimonialism manifested themselves whenever they did. During three decades – roughly between 1960 and 1990 – France’s African policy was embedded into a process of empowerment fostered by the bipolar international system. Since then, France’s policy has followed the erratic course of a foreign policy which is still to be redefined in the new globalized world. Whereas patrimonialism prospered in the first period, the era ushered in by the fall of the Berlin wall has significantly reduced its relevance and usefulness.

Patrimonialism as a source of international power Rarely has a policy been so deeply shaped by its conceptors. Decolonisation initiated a peculiar type of relations between France and Africa. This exceptional policy, if we compare it with those implemented by other former colonial powers, was intimately linked with General de Gaulle. How is it then that it endured, with hardly any change, with his successors? The reason is that, beyond the ideology professed by the first President of the Fifth Republic, Gaullism was, in Africa, embedded into a vision of the world shared by all French political elites. Such a consensus gave rise to a system of Franco-African relations within which the instrumentalization of clientelism and patrimonialism were of central significance. It would be impossible to make sense of the relations between France and Africa without referring to General de Gaulle’s political project. Although history cannot be rewritten, it seems unlikely that France’s African policy would have taken the course that it followed had the Fourth Republic not come to a brutal end due to the war in Algeria. The political leaders of the time were not left unconcerned by the situation in Africa. In spite of its limitations,1 the En­abling Act (Loi‑cadre), voted in 1956 upon the initiative of the French Minister of Overseas Affairs Gaston Deferre, had paved the way towards international sovereignty. General de Gaulle’s return to power also gave specific overtones to the policy that France would adopt towards its former colonies in Sub-Saharan Africa. The first reason was the special linkages between de Gaulle and Africa, a continent that he had learnt to appreciate during the Second World War – the pages devoted to Africa in his Mémoires de guerre and Mémoires d’espoir confirm this. Another reason was that the ‘Man of 18 June’ had a vision of France’s role in the world that led him to regard Africa as one of the pillars of French influence. French interests, in his view, were attuned to the ‘generosity’ and ‘genius’ of France (Quantin 1982). France had been able to recover from its defeat in 1940 thanks to Africa which had remained loyal, despite the influence of Petainist ideas that permeated some colonial lobbies. France had also been able to meet the challenges of the new post-1945 world thanks to the strong and institutionalized links that it had managed to preserve in Africa. The aborted Community project of 1958–1959 was also part of a political vision that, thanks to Africa, should make it possible for France to remain a great power. General de Gaulle was obsessed by what he saw as a quasi-physical law that, through the

210   D. Bourmaud combination of geography with demography, led to the marginalisation of France. Decolonisation, with which de Gaulle finally came to terms, ought not to abolish relations between France and Africa that combined reciprocal affection with necessity. The cooperation policy, carefully mapped out from 1962 onwards, was to be the instrument of de Gaulle’s vision. Even though the African states were formally independent, the foundations upon which the new alliances between France and its former colonies were built were best described as co-sovereignty. Indeed, key areas of sovereignty remained under the direct control of metropolitan France. The CFA franc, created in 1948 and maintained after the decolonisation process, gave African states access to foreign exchange thanks to the free convertibility of CFA francs into French francs. Accordingly, African states were controlled by the French Treasury which monitored current payments. In addition, the modus operandi of the Treasury prevented African states from exercising total freedom in matters of money creation (Vallée 1989). While this system carried some advantages, it strictly constrained a competence widely considered as emblematic of the sovereign powers of a state. The security of the African states was also placed under the benevolent supervision of France. Defence agreements, signed with eight African states, guaranteed their protection from any external aggression. In addition, so-called ‘special’ agreements also meant that France could be called upon to intervene in internal security.2 In five out of the eight countries mentioned above, France maintained military bases which hosted what was officially known as ‘pre-positioned troops’. We should also mention the agreements on technical military assistance concluded with 23 states over a period of 30 years. These concerned former French colonies, but also Belgian colonies and even the former Spanish colony of Equatorial Guinea. In short, money and defence policies were directly supervised by France. France’s cooperation policy also included cultural and technical programmes relayed by numerous aid workers known as coopérants – teachers, doctors, engineers, experts, advisors – who filled positions in administration, universities, and secondary schools, thus working towards the preservation of French influence in Africa. Through this unique system, France was able to fend off the risk of marginalisation. Thanks to Africa, it was able to rebuild a sphere of influence, its socalled pré-carré (home turf), attuned to its ambitions. Substance was instilled into the notion of grandeur through the French language and the institutionalisation of Francophonie, the CFA franc currency zone and the French armed forces. These could, at least in Africa, ‘change the course of History with 500 men’, as former French Foreign Minister Louis de Guiringaud once bragged. The implementation of this Africa-focused approach to power enhancement survived after the resignation of de Gaulle from the presidency in 1969. Each of his successors endorsed the Gaullist legacy and tried to enrich it with some personal added value. George Pompidou innovated through the organisation of the first Franco-African summit in Paris on 13 November 1973.3 The summit, conceived as a direct continuation of de Gaulle’s policy, was expected to strengthen

France’s African policy   211 existing links with French-speaking Africa. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing would institutionalise these summits on a yearly basis. Simultaneously, he also broadened the scope of France’s Africa policy which opened up to English-speaking Africa, notably Nigeria (Bach 1984). But the real test came as François Mitterrand became President. The French Socialist party was traditionally sensitive to the rhetoric of Third Worldism (Biondi and Allende Gossens 1976), and called for a departure from capitalism while denouncing imperialism and neo-colonialism. The party, thus, seemed ill-equipped to follow de Gaulle’s footprints. In the event, ‘Mitterrand the African’ (Marchesin 1995; Bayart 1984), broke away from the generous utopian ideals of Socialist intellectuals and activists and adopted a policy of continuity that required little adaption since he had, after all, been familiar with it for a long time. As a former Minister of Overseas Affairs (colonies) under the Fourth Republic, Mitterrand had expressed his own views in a book published under the title: Aux frontières de l’Union française: Indo‑ chine, Tunisie. His description of France’s African empire as ‘a colossal bloc that was over seven thousand kilometres long and three thousand kilometres wide, [and ranged] from Lille to Brazzaville and from Abéché to Dakar’, concluded the future emergence of a single entity ‘from the Congo river to the Rhine’ (Mitterrand 1953). Mitterrand’s views also sounded like a premonitory expression of de Gaulle’s conception of Franco-African relations as he referred to their merger into a ‘nation-continent’ (Mitterrand 1953: 34–35) united by the consciousness of and the desire for a common destiny. This heralded what Felix Houphouët-Boigny, the President of Côte d’Ivoire, would immortalise under the appellation ‘France–Afrique’. Three decades later, the conversion of the socialist president to the Gaullist doxa was therefore not entirely surprising. The convert was already a believer! He would also be able to win over to his own vision the left wing of his party that was, a priori, reluctant to adhere to a course of action that smacked of neo-colonialism. Just as de Gaulle had done before, Mitterrand’s policy fitted into a wider global vision where France played a central role, as defender of the oppressed masses under the banner of international solidarity against exploiters – Mitterrand’s Cancun speech in 19814 would echo de Gaulle’s 1967 speech in Phnom Penh. The Franco-African pill was made all the easier to swallow since it was sugar-coated with Third World rhetoric. Realism can take the appearance of idealism in order to ensure easier acceptance of the brutal rules of the game. Upholding France’s position in the international pecking order did not go smoothly. The France–Afrique nexus was born and grew during the Cold War. Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union were prepared to accept initiatives that would enable other states to challenge them and emerge as autonomous powers. In such a context, de Gaulle’s main achievement was his capacity to impose France as a power to be reckoned with. This continued with his successors. There has been much rambling on the bombastic dimension of what was interpreted as typically Gallic pretensions based on words rather than acts. There may have been some truth in these criticisms since de Gaulle’s vision mobilised symbols as an alternative to a deficit in the material elements of power.

212   D. Bourmaud However, we should not forget that Gaullist France also secured during these years instruments that conferred international power: permanent membership of the UN Security Council and the development of France’s own arsenal of nuclear weapons were the most tangible expression of this movement. Africa was party to this trend as it enabled France to secure the necessary votes at the UN General Assembly, notably through its self-portrayal as the ultimate guarantor of Western interests in a continent which, initially at least, was not deemed favourable to them. Conversely, France managed to free itself from the constraints of bipolarity through its acknowledgement as a major power without which nothing could be done, at least within its own pré-carré. While France gained the status of a ‘great’ power, its former colonies were insulated from direct competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. Admittedly, this distinctive pattern would not have been possible without the consent of the US which, after being initially puzzled by and reluctant towards French ‘claims’, finally endorsed a division of labour that suited Washington. Accordingly, France gave up its neutral position and performed as the warden of Western interests in ‘its’ African turf, thus sparing the US the need to get directly involved in a continent which was not one of its priorities. France isolated Sékou Touré’s Guinea, supported the end of the socialist regime of Modibo Keita in Mali, systematically contained Libya’s ambitions in Chad, or came to terms – probably better than Benin’s citizens themselves – with the Marxist pranks of Mathieu Kérékou, thus contributing to maintain an order which was not its own. France also drew from this period a source of international power that was out of proportion with what it could have claimed on its own. Through its assertion as guardian of Western interests, Paris was also able to take advantage of opportunities to expand its influence into the Sub-Saharan region. Although supporting Biafra (Bach 1980: 259–72) failed to secure the enlargement of France’s sphere of influence against the often fantasized Anglo-Saxon ‘enemy’, its growing weight in the former Belgian colonies, notably the Democratic Republic of Congo (then Zaire), or the former Spanish colony of Equatorial Guinea, gave substance to the idea of France as a power without any real competitor in Africa. What France only needed was the necessary means to legitimise its ambitions in the eyes of those who were directly concerned: the Africans themselves. Exceptional policies call for exceptional instruments. These ranged from currency to military bases, from the constant flows of coopérants to the institutionalisation of Francophonie, with the result of the establishment of a network of relations between France and Africa that was unparalleled if one excludes the relations imposed by the Soviet Union on its satellite states. Exceptionalism, however, was not merely due to the importance of the means and resources deployed. The strength and uniqueness of the Franco-African relationship also stemmed from its intensity. Beyond France’s power politics and the asymmetric domination exerted over its former colonies, lay a truly exceptional ingredient: a commonly shared register of interactions between the dominant and the dominated countries. The classical understanding of foreign policy as a mix between negotiations, power struggle, self-interested motives, and intimidation cannot

France’s African policy   213 give a full account of the substance of Franco-African relations. These ingredients were clearly present, but they were dressed and sweetened according to a recipe concocted not so much by France as by the Africans themselves. The main interest of studying Franco-African relations through the lenses of patrimonialism, as suggested by J.‑F. Médard, resides in seeking to adapt to the sphere of the international relations of African practices previously confined to the sphere of domestic politics. Just about everything has been said or written on the confusion between the public and private domains in Franco-African relations, on the spread of rampant corruption, on the central role of networks related to the Gaullists or to other French political parties. Much has also been written on the ambivalent role of French state-owned companies, such as Elf, or on the African outgrowths of official or semi-official institutions that cast Gaullists, free masons, intelligence agents, adventurers, advisers of all sorts, and spooks (bar‑ bouzes) into a giant melting pot. History as a science is still in its infancy when it comes to studying properly the undercover agents and underground organisations who crafted France–Afrique. Even then converging facts and clues are too many for the reality of the matter to be questioned. The most common mistake made in this domain resides in the interpretations suggested for this nexus of interactions. Ethical grounds – the most commonly adopted viewpoint – are not particularly relevant, unless one seeks to imply that successive French governments and elites were all, from de Gaulle to Mitterrand, fundamentally immoral and intrinsically corrupt (Vershave 1998). What emerges as an alternative explanation is how the successive Presidents of the Fifth Republic (Wauthier 1995) did reproduce a patrimonial model because it was viewed as a pre-condition to the consolidation of France’s international power. Each president committed himself to extending and perpetuating existing institutions and their unwritten rules. France’s foreign policy – the preserve (domaine réservé) of the President of the Republic according to a tradition which has nothing to do with the Constitution – was pursued with remarkable consistency, including when the specific patterns of interactions with Africa were involved. It is the famous and secretive ‘Africa cell’ that oversaw the country’s specific policy orientations. There was no reason why such an institution should have lasted after de Gaulle’s presidency but for the necessity to supervise, organise, and articulate France’s quest for power with the personalisation of relations that African leaders imposed. The classical conduct of diplomacy, with its rituals and codes, was not apt to respond to the exigencies of a relationship that carried its own rules. The functions performed by J. Foccart (Médard 2002), the shadowy figure in charge of de Gaulle’s African policy, were subsequently undertaken by René Journiac under Giscard d’Estaing’s presidency, then by Guy Penne and even François Mitterrand’s own son.5 They all followed the lessons of their master by turning ‘Foccartism’ into the fundamental doctrine of Françafrique. Thanks to these men, the successive Presidents of the Republic maintained direct relations with the African leaders, with the result of a mix between state affairs and family concerns for the sake of efficiency! Reading J. Foccart’s memoirs is highly instructive in this respect (1995; 1997). The author may not say much about the darkest episodes of

214   D. Bourmaud Franco-African relations, be they political assassinations or coups, but describes at length the intimate relations maintained between French presidents and African leaders. Special favours, endless conversations and meetings, support to improbable godsons, etc. A related outcome was the much publicised display of affection between heads of state. Such close personal links guaranteed the climate of trust necessary to strengthen political ties. French institutions had to adapt to this iron law. The Ministry of Cooperation was informally known as the Ministry of the Africans, a state of affairs that reflected on the special status of Africa in the French governmental bureaucracy. This context makes it easier to understand the depth of the crisis triggered by Jean‑Pierre Cot, the Minister for Cooperation and Development in the first Socialist government of 1981. His intention to dilute the specificity of relations with African states through their incorporation into the somewhat blurred and unspecific group of developing countries was part of an attempt to moralise Franco-African relations. By doing so, the newly appointed minister broke the code of courtesy painstakingly established with France’s former colonies since their independence. Through his rejection of the language of the Françafrique family, J.‑P. Cot undermined symbols of trust and confidence without which France’s quest for power was bound to fail (Cot 1984). In the end, his dismissal was seen as an inevitable and necessary precondition to the pursuit of such objectives.

Erratic power and the trivial pursuit of patrimonialism Today, Françafrique has been pronounced dead by hard facts if not by its longstanding opponents who fear they might become activists without an enemy to fight. The structural requirements for its preservation have subsided within just a few years and no substitution model has yet emerged. The rhetoric of grandeur upheld by French elites has imperceptibly been replaced by the rhetoric of powerlessness, while the institutional pillars of France’s African policy progressively crumbled. Clientelist practices have lost in the process the foundations that accounted for their reproduction and intensity. If we are to endorse perceptions conveyed by the media, activist groups and even at times academic circles, France’s African policy has remained unchanged. Such a vision, occasionally buttressed by unquestionable facts, tends to assimilate the tails of the Françafrique comet with the resilience of a system capable of reproducing itself. They tend to forget that the political foundations of the system have collapsed one after the other due to unanticipated changes in international politics. The end of the Cold War was a major event in this respect: France’s African policy should not be apprehended in isolation from a redistribution of international power that affected both France and Africa. Africa, which had been largely spared by bipolar rivalries, found itself caught in a maelstrom of contradictions, notably due to macro-economic adjustment policies that challenged pre-existing patterns of regulation. France was also compelled to relinquish the Gaullist vision of the international system and reconsider its insertion into the new globalised world. Neither Africa nor France were prepared to face

France’s African policy   215 such a challenge and all the parties involved had to improvise. France’s foreign policy was brutally bereft of the overarching consensus that prevailed since de Gaulle. Two viewpoints, transcending the left–right party divide, progressively emerged (Bourmaud 2000: 27–36; 1996: 431–442). By contrast with the traditional conception upheld by the heirs to the Gaullian world view, a new, radical, and heterogeneous vision emerged, supported by a fraction of the French politicaladministrative elite that was at odds with the classical political culture. Less statist and openly committed to the regulating laws of the market, this modernist group also had little affinity with Africa. It regarded the African continent as devoid of any interest in the post-bipolar world shaping up. In its view, Françaf‑ rique was a relic of the past. Dysfunctional in its effects, it hampered the development of Africa and exhausted the resources of France through arrangements which had become of little value. Emphasis on Francophonie no longer meant much as English had grown to be the international language for communication. In short, the notion of grandeur was outdated or even dangerous. This trend of thought, which could be dubbed liberal, has been reinforced by a second ideological mutation that originated from activist and intellectual circles. While the Gaullist matrix exercised an hegemonic imprint, the NGOs engaged in Africa remained ideologically close to the prevailing paradigm. Their role was seen as contributing to France’s support to the development of the young nations. The key words were then ‘cooperation’ and ‘development’. The most active NGOs in the 1960s and 1970s were known as the Volontaires du progrès or the Comité catholique contre la faim et pour le développement – the humanitarian discourse had not yet emerged. Then came the 1980s, which represented a turning point for the NGOs. Emphasis on development and cooperation was progressively superseded by values of compassion for situations of intense suffering and extreme poverty. What may be termed the Biafra syndrome, in reference to the Biafra war which saw the creation of Médecins sans frontières (Doctors Without Borders), strongly influenced the agenda and vision of NGOs. Africa had become the epitome of universal poverty. Emotion prevailed over reason and short-term action became the norm. Indeed long-term aid was no longer seen as apt to respond to critical situations, and highly bureaucratic state-backed programmes were all of a sudden regarded as incapable of meeting these new challenges. In the process, the Françafrique institutions became stigmatised as redundant, competing, and inefficient bureaucracies, thus generating additional feelings of culpability. France was also put in the dock for having created, organised, and benefited from corrupt practices in conjunction with its support for rogue governments. The 1994 tragedy in Rwanda crystallised a moral perception that went along with allegations of French complicity in the genocide. Here again, what matters is less the evidence – it has been hotly debated – than the ideological interpretations and their historical context.6 Indeed, during at least the first two decades after decolonisation, there was hardly any criticism of Françafrique secretive practices. The written press, including the respected daily newspaper Le Monde, fully adhered to the official discourse. Was it collusion? Such an explanation would be too simple unless we adopt the conspiracy theory

216   D. Bourmaud approach to history. We should rather speak of a communion of ideas between the elites and their adhesion to the vision of France as a power. The ideological watershed of the 1980s brought together – rather paradoxically – the proponents of a new, modernised African policy in the name of their essentially economic liberal ethos and the supporters of cleaner and purer Françafrique for the sake of idealism. The direct consequence of this liberal and moralistic approach was that it clashed with the rhetoric of power politics by suggesting converging visions of a powerless France: if the new world would not condemn France to anonymity, moral grounds would do so by prevailing over all the other analytical models meant to make sense of the real world. In both cases, this created a fertile ground for the loss of specificity in the relationship between France and Africa. The speech delivered by F. Mitterrand at the 16th Franco-African summit of La Baule, in 1990, was an emblematic moment and a turning point for Françaf‑ rique.7 It would be, however, a mistake to believe that the French president was the architect of the new African policy of France. A faithful heir to the Gaullist model, he also acknowledged the strength of diverging constraints that were at work. The socialist president lucidly drew the conclusions from the emergence of a new post-bipolar world which made France’s power politics obsolete, while an ideological mutation made change compulsory. Subsequent governments, left and right alike, namely from Edouard Balladur and Alain Juppé to Lionel Jospin, have contributed, each in their own way, to undo the Françafrique institutions. The two main pillars of co-sovereignty accordingly underwent a drastic overhaul: the devaluation of the CFA franc by 50 per cent, unilaterally decided by France on 11 January 1994, was groundbreaking. Until then it had been assumed, at least implicitly, by the various actors concerned, that the exchange rate between the French franc and the CFA franc was at fixed rate. The very idea of challenging the exchange parity was felt to be an infringement on the post-colonial pact concluded between France and its former colonies. As previously mentioned, all the parties concerned drew economic and political benefits from the CFA area (OPCF 1995). Calling into question this monetary regime meant that France could no longer unilaterally maintain a monetary zone without taking into account its internal dysfunctions and their external consequences. The international power of France was no longer what the country claimed it was. The decision-making process had excluded de facto the African heads of state, thus ending the family atmosphere that presided until then over the adoption of common decisions. Everybody, including the former colonial ruler, was subjected to economic constraints. The E. Balladur government had announced the adoption of the so-called Abidjan doctrine a few months earlier, in September 1993. As part of its official decision to rally to the policies of external agencies, the IMF and the World Bank, France now compelled African states to conclude an agreement with them before they  would be entitled to French budgetary aid. Monetary and financial co-­ sovereignty conjointly exercised by France and the member countries of the CFA area was replaced by a system governed by rules that were above all the actors concerned.

France’s African policy   217 There was a similar shift in the domain of security as France decided to reduce both the number of its military bases and that of the French soldiers deployed in Africa. This was a measure of considerable significance since it meant that France renounced its claims to act as the gendarme of Africa. The ReCAMP doctrine, adopted in 1997, further confirmed this policy shift.8 France’s pledge to train African armies and the restriction of its role to logistical support made it explicit that Paris no longer wanted to be directly involved in African conflicts. As war and peace were now considered the preserve of African actors, the defence agreements signed just after independence became largely devoid of significance. Finally, the reform of the cooperation system symbolised above all the end of an era. Initially envisaged by A. Juppé’s government, the reform was eventually implemented by L. Jospin’s. The incorporation of the Ministry of Cooperation into the DgCiD,9 located within the Foreign Affairs Ministry, deprived the Africans of ‘their’ ministry. The pré-carré was dissolved into a continental entity that gathered practically all the African states plus the countries of former Indochina and a certain number of Caribbean islands. The resulting so-called Priority Solidarity Zone (Zone de solidarité prioritaire) contributed to bring to an end the special and privileged treatment previously granted to francophone African states. What is the space left for clientelist relations? All the institutions in charge of Françafrique have been dismantled or drastically transformed. With what kind of resources is it possible today to sustain personal bonds of allegiance? And, above all, with what men? In the French state apparatus, the ‘clan of the Africans’ does not carry much weight any longer. The civil servants who were at the heart of France’s relations with Africa for three decades have been progressively side-tracked. A question linked to the rise of a new generation, of course, but also the outcome of the desire to put aside the most dubious agents, those who represented what was left of ‘Foccartism’, as was the case with Michel Dupuch, in charge of the Africa cell until August 2002. Where are the likes of Charles Pasqua, Michel Roussin, or Charles Debbasch, to name but a few? Today, the refined codes of diplomacy are supposed to have been reinstated in the conduct of Franco-African relations. The intrusion of judges into the Elf case from 1995 onwards has also ruined one of the founding principles of Françafrique, widely associated with cronyism and trafficking of all kinds. The condemnation of Loïc Le Floch‑Prigent, among others, strengthened the general feeling that the rule of law was no longer compatible with patrimonial rules. In June 2007, the condemnation of Bob Denard, one of the most emblematic ‘spooks’ of Françafrique, offered additional evidence of the deep changes that have taken place in France’s African policy. Change has not only affected France. The special relationship between France and Africa was based on shared bonds of affection, the feeling of belonging to the same family, with a common destiny. Personalities as different as F. ­Houphouët-Boigny, Jean Bedel Bokassa, Denis Sassou Nguesso, Mobutu Sese Seko, or Omar Bongo were, each in their own way, outstanding symbols of these relations. Beyond its elites, France had also established peculiar linkages with

218   D. Bourmaud Africa through successive waves of coopérants over a period of some 25 years. There was indeed an attraction to France and an attraction to Africa that conferred on Franco-African relations a social and cultural base. This sociological dimension has disappeared or is progressively disappearing. It has not been replaced by any systematic feeling of hostility, even though we may find some traces of it. The case of Côte d’Ivoire offers one of the best examples of this dilution of the close links between France and Africa. On the whole, some form of attraction may remain in a few African countries. The expression of feelings that are often somewhat contradictory signals the end of 30 years of unanimously felt fascination for the former colonial ruler. The outcome is the emphasis on rational calculation, as when Jean‑Paul Ngoupandé, a former Centrafrique minister, argues that the CFA franc ‘prevents further difficulties’ and ‘guarantees minimum stability’.10 At the other end of the spectrum, strong disapproval was voiced by many African intellectuals after President Sarkozy’s speech in Dakar on 26 July 2007, in which he declared that ‘the African man has never really entered into History’.11 The words, deemed arrogant by some, represent, symbolically, a breaking point in Franco-African relations. Indeed, it is unconceivable that any of his predecessors could have pronounced such a speech. Who could have predicted that France’s political elites would be conspicuously absent from Dakar on the occasion of the funerals of former President Senghor in 2001? The first President of Senegal was clearly not the archetype of Françafrique – he actually symbolised the ‘acceptable’ side of Franco‑African relations. Precisely for this reason, the conspicuous absence of French officials at the ceremony confirmed that a page has been turned and that Africa has lost its exceptional status in the eyes of the French elites. The structural variables which contributed to the patrimonialisation of Franco-African relations have almost completely disappeared. Does it imply that all clientelist practices have also vanished? Sceptics will rightly mention the persistence of patrimonial tendencies within institutions that are supposed to have been ‘sanitized’. The truth is that there have been many lapses in the great transformation process observed over the last 15 years. Congo, Chad, and Centrafrique exemplify the fact that France still retains interests in Africa and that the means used today to preserve these are not necessarily very different from those employed in the past. Networks, even though they may be residual, can be reactivated efficiently, as confirmed when France opposed the US intervention in Iraq in 2003. For a short period, France renewed its status as a great power. The pure Gaullist style that was being adopted gave rise to spontaneous support from almost all African states, with a few exceptions, notably Rwanda. France’s readiness to fall back on an active neo-Gaullist stance could equally mean renewing exceptionalism in Africa (Chafer 2002: 343–63). Indeed, the African policy conceived by Dominique de Villepin, as Foreign Affairs Minister and later as Prime Minister, drew much of its inspiration from the Gaullist legacy (Bourmaud 2005: 17–27). A new and voluntarist France could open a new chapter – modernised and therefore unblemished – in the long history of Franco-African relations. The Marcoussis agreement and France’s commitment in the crisis in Côte d’Ivoire

France’s African policy   219 might be interpreted as a renewal of its role as the policeman of Africa, this time for more laudable motives since the objective was to contain the possible extension of a civil war and, by capillary action, of a regional war. But, in doing so, wouldn’t France be mechanically induced to turn back to patrimonial practices due to a new fascination for its past power? Others have argued that some secret forces are still at work in the background and that the imprint of ‘white sorcerers’ (Hugueux 2007) remains of key relevance. They will add that the case of Mr Borel, a French magistrate killed in Djibouti in 1995, exemplifies the continuation of the shady practices of France’s highest authorities when Africa is involved. Even then, the ‘depatrimonialisation’ process seems unlikely to be stopped and replaced by the practices of the past since the structural conditions that we have analysed above have disappeared. There is no longer, in France, any paradigm capable of shaping a new, proactive, and consensus-based African policy. Although D. de Villepin made an attempt, there is a dominant trend of thought in the French elite in favour of the streamlining of the Franco-African relationship. L. Jospin’s policy (1997–2002) offered the best illustration of this point. The French elites’ lack of ideological framework is echoed by a very weak, if not totally absent, desire for France on the part of the African elites. Finally the structure of the post-Cold War international system no longer enables France to act as or keep the appearance of a great power. This does not mean that the country is condemned to marginalisation, nor does it signal that corruption is a thing of the past. There would be a significant dose of innocence and a total absence of comparative perspective in such an idyllic vision. If we turn towards other horizons, we have to admit that corruption is rampant in international relations. A good illustration was offered in 1997 by the adoption of the Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions (Montigny 2007: 41–48). Each state, whenever its interests are at stake, is prone to build clientelist relations and to establish privileged linkages with politicians or civil servants. In that respect, France cannot claim to have had any monopoly of such practices in Africa or elsewhere. The United Kingdom was caught not so long ago in a major scandal that shook British institutions. The BAE Systems affair – with the payment of a £2bn ‘commission’ to Prince Bandar bin-Sultan of Saudi Arabia for the renewal of arms deals since 1985 – condenses all the elements associated with clientelist practices. Although the sums involved were enormous, the British Labour government actively tried to block the inquiry on the grounds that it would threaten national interest.12 Germany has similarly been recently confronted with the Siemens scandal due to the firm’s use of secret accounts to pay bribes for contracts.13 Similar examples may be found in almost all countries. The difficulty from an IR perspective is to provide an interpretation. The notion of ‘collective clientelism’ put forward by John Ravenhill (1985) highlights the asymmetry in the relations between actors and their reciprocal advantages, the weaker actor being in a position to reverse a negative situation a priori, by using blackmail for example. It would be tempting to use this concept in the case of Franco-African relations. But the difficulty is that we are insidiously led to confuse the interests of private actors with those of

220   D. Bourmaud state actors. There may be some similarities but the respective motives and constraints are not the same. Private actors are motivated by specific interests, such as getting richer. State actors behave according to the environment in which relations of domination prevail and in accordance with their perception of these. Clientelist relations and personal ties are convenient means to implement a specific policy. They do not shape it but are part and parcel of it. It goes without saying that it may open up opportunities for private interests. The Gaullist project for Africa, in the name of France’s grandeur, enabled many interests to converge and thrive. As this project faded away, both the institutions which gave it substance and the whole ‘structure of opportunities’ have collapsed. They have dragged in their fall a Franco-African relationship that was not so exceptional after all.

Notes   1 The Enabling Act made provision for the creation of Councils of government (Conseils de gouvernement) in the overseas territories, but the voting system was biased against the indigenous population.   2 The defence agreements signed just after the independence contained secret clauses or agreement.   3 The summit, which was organised at the request of some African leaders, gathered ten French-speaking heads of state.   4 The so-called Cancun speech was actually delivered by F. Mitterrand in Mexico City.   5 René Journiac was Jacques Foccart’s collaborator between 1967 and 1974 before taking over from him as head of the ‘Africa cell’ in the Élysée after the election of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. Following Journiac’s accidental death in 1980, Martin Kirsch took up his position. He was soon replaced after the victory of François Mitterrand in 1981.   6 Facts have not been fully established and have thus given rise to controversies. Seeing things from a distance in the respect of the historical analytical model is the only way to potentially determine the respective responsibilities.   7 In his speech, F. Mitterrand praised political liberty and announced that French aid would henceforth give priority to the countries respecting democratic principles.   8 ReCAMP stands for Renforcement des capacités africaines de maintien de la paix (Reinforcing African peace-keeping capacities).   9 Direction générale de la Coopération et du Développement (Directorate General for Cooperation and Development). 10 Libération, 15 September 2004. 11 Libération, 2 August 2007. 12 Guardian, 21 September 2007, ‘Labour tries to block new BAE inquiry’; also ­Guardian, 6 February 2010 ‘BAE admits guilt over corrupt arms’. 13 The Economist, 18 December 2008, ‘Bavarian baksheesh: The stench of bribery at Siemens signals a wider rot in Europe’. www.economist.com/node/12814642.



Conclusion Neopatrimonial and developmental – the emerging states’ syndrome Daniel C. Bach

The dissemination of the concept of neopatrimonial rule in Africa cannot be dissociated from its more parsimonious mobil­isa­tion outside the continent. When this neologism was carved out of the Weberian sub-­type of patrimonial domination in 1973, there was little in­dica­tion that such a pattern would emerge. Pre-­ existing discussions of patrimonial rule within con­tempor­ary polit­ical sys­tems were more prone to focus on Latin Amer­ica and Asia. Following its initial applica­tion to Cameroonian pol­itics in the late 1970s, the concept of neopatrimonial rule gathered stamina in Africa as an al­tern­ative to the notion of charismatic rule, against a backstage of rampant unsatis­fac­tion with de­velop­mental and dependency theories. Neopatrimonialism provided the ‘common denominator for a range of practices that are highly charac­ter­istic of pol­itics in Africa, namely nepotism, clannish beha­vi­our, so-­called “tri­bal­ism”, regionalism, patronage, “cronyism”, “prebendalism”, corruption, predation, factionalism, etc.’ (Médard, 1991b: 330). All of these practices had, until then, been frequently treated as a dis­par­ate collection of phenomena in the schol­arly literature. As the con­tri­bu­tions to this book have shown in detail, the concept of neopatrimonial rule has stimulated research on a widening range of issues and areas pertaining to African pol­itics since the 1980s. The concept has con­trib­uted to promote intermediary grids of in­ter­pretation that invite to caution, without calling for the straight­forward rejection of ‘grand’ theories or exclusive agency-­ focused per­spect­ives. The concept has also encouraged explanations that are both more complex and more modest due to their location at the cross-­roads of a plurality of oppor­tun­ities and rationales. The tra­ject­ories of the African states are treated as the outcome of dy­namics that combine en­do­genous with exogenous com­pon­ents, just as, depending on circumstances, the strat­egies pursued by elites reproduce or challenge imported models. It is therefore not surprising that, today, a large number of scholars and analysts, whether expli­citly or in metaphorical ways, refer to the concept or what it stands for. The dissemination of the concept does not mean a dearth of interrogations or challenges with respect to its relev­ance and heur­istic value. A number of authors have preferred notions that, albeit related, did not formally en­dorse the post‑Weberian concept – Jackson and Rosberg’s emphasis on ‘personal rule’, Jackson’s notion of ‘quasi states’ or Bayart’s discussion of ‘belly pol­itics’ offer

222   D.C. Bach good examples of this trend. Other scholars have firmly rejected a concept that they con­sidered prone to reductionism due to its tend­ency to tie corruption or clientelism to some sort of African exceptionalism (Tshiyembé, 1998). More recently, the rise of metaphoric ref­er­ences to the concept has also prompted its stigmatization as a catch-­all notion and a para­digm ‘for all African “seasons” ’ (Therkildsen, 2005: 36). This is not al­to­gether surprising: since the 1990s, demo­ crat­isation, governance, de­velopment pol­icies and state reforms or state reconstruction have been central concerns of de­velopment practitioners (World Bank, IMF, UNDP, NGOs . . .) and aca­demics alike. The confusion between the pub­lic and private spheres, clientelism and personal rule – distinctive ingredients of neopatrimonialism – featured prominently in theories of the state and demo­crat­ isation, or in the norm­ative debates on governance. One of the outcomes is that neopatrimonialism is no longer insulated from the criticisms that were addressed to patrimonialism by authors like Theobald in the 1970s – namely metaphorical, allusive and laxist usage. Such a strand calls for closer monitoring of the genesis, intellectual ramifications and complexity of concepts that are often employed without due con­sidera­ tion for their epistemological im­plica­tions. References to Max Weber and his conceptualisation of patrimonial domination give all too often the impression of being purely decorative elements notes Hinnerk Bruhns. Similarly, discussions of neopatrimonialism in Africa often overlook what constitutes its essence: dualism and hybrid patterns of inter­action between patrimonial and legal-­ bureaucratic decision-­making. Unlike what is often as­sumed, the concept, does not automatically infer the domination of the former over the latter. Depending on the dy­namics of inter­actions between its constitutive elements, neopatrimonialism is associated with con­sider­able empirical vari­ations. Neopatrimonialism may combine with a pattern of stable production of pub­lic pol­icies in some sectors, just as it may, conversely, be embedded into a pro­cess of dilution of the state into informal and even criminal networks. The sys­tematic reduction of institutions and bur­eau­cratic pro­ced­ures to mere ‘facades’ proceeds from a flawed metaphor (De Haan, 2010: 108). The concept of neopatrimonialism does not postulate the state or ruler’s incapa­city to implement pub­lic pol­icies. Nor does neopatrimonialism preclude the coexist­ence of demo­cratic practices within neopatrimonial systems. The pro­gressive trans­forma­tion of the African neopatrimonial state into a quasi-­ideal type of the anti-­developmental state also deserves to be reviewed. A string of implicit as­sump­tions accounts for the emergence of a neopatrimonial doxa based on a peculiar reading of African pol­itics and polities. Depictions of African states as empty shells or quasi-­states rely upon the lack of any opera­ tional distinction between regulated or capped and in­teg­ral or pred­atory forms of neopatrimonialism. This contrasts with what can be observed outside Africa, where patrimonial practices within the state have kept being dissociated from cases where patrimonialisation perverts the entire state, with the result of a thorough dissolution of the pub­lic sphere into private inter­ests and networks. Reasserting the relev­ance of such a dichotomy in Africa is long overdue. It is also a

Conclusion   223 federating concern of the rising number of studies on pockets, sectors or en­claves that reveal the efficiency and/or the de­velop­mental slant of pol­icies conducted within African neopatrimonial states.1 Monitoring neopatrimonialism within the state also lifts impediments to broader cross-­regional approaches, as illus­trated by the con­tri­bu­tion of Mauro Barisione on Sylvio Berlusconi, the chapter of Daniel Bourmaud on Franco-­ African relations and the study of Dominique Caouette on the Philippines. Yves-­André Fauré’s reassessment of neopatrimonialism in Brazil provides another instance of the heur­istic value of shifting away from entrenched models and frameworks. The value of such comparisons resides in the detailed case studies provided as much as in the discourse on the method that they aspire to promote. Debates on the neopatrimonial state in Africa have for all too long crystallised on the issue of institutionalisation and inter­actions between the pub­lic and private sphere within the state. This has not been the case in Latin Amer­ ica, where ongoing ref­er­ences to caciquismo and to the ‘bureaucratic-­ patrimonial’ state mirror the resilience of in­ter­pretations stressing the legacy of co­lo­nial rule. Following the rise of milit­ary regimes in the 1970s, such ref­ er­ences were supplemented by a cor­porat­ist com­pon­ent so as to account for the pro­mo­tion of private oligarchic inter­ests within the state. Even then, patrimonialism or neopatrimonialism were never con­sidered as structural impediments to the production of pub­lic pol­icies. In contrast with the Africanist and Latin-­American emphasis on institutionalisation and bur­eau­cratisation, the South East Asian liter­at­ure has gen­erally focused on the nexus of state-­ business relations and inter­actions. Underlying concern at the emergence of com­petit­ive and de­velop­mental capitalist states has also prompted the adoption of a specific lexicography, illus­trated by ref­er­ences to oligarchic patrimonialism, crony capit­al­ism and even ‘ersatz’ capit­al­ism. In Russia and Central Europe, it is the related idea of state ‘capture’ by oligarchic and/or criminalised networks that sim­ilarly gained widespread currency after the collapse of communism. Regional vari­ations in in­ter­preting the interplay between private inter­ests and pub­lic pol­icies point to a key as­sump­tion, largely overlooked in the Africa debates until recently: a state can be both de­velop­mental and neopatrimonial, just as bad pol­itics can produce good pol­icies (Moene, 2011). The relev­ance of such a para­digmatic shift is also at the core of the emerging states’syndrome, namely their abil­ity to combine rapid eco­nomic trans­forma­tion with pov­erty reduction despite the persistence of high levels of corruption and, at times, author­it­arian/totalitarian rule. In many respects, the emerging coun­tries’ syndrome reasserts the key significance of empirically based and do­mestically driven pro­cesses that combine the implementation of structural adjustment pol­ icies on a sus­tain­able basis with the preser­va­tion of a state capa­city to craft and implement pub­lic pol­icies. This postulates in fine that neopatrimonial practices should not be so per­vas­ive as to prevent any capa­city to craft pub­lic pol­icies, or disen­tangle national inter­est from the rulers’ private concerns.

224   D.C. Bach

Note 1 Cf., inter alia, the Tracking Development Programme of the Afrika-­Studiecentrum of Leiden; the Nigerian research pro­ject co­ordinated by Michael Roll on Pockets of Effectiveness: The Politics of Public Sector Performance in Nigeria; also ‘The Persistance and Change of Neopatrimonialism in Various Non-­OECD Regions’ programme co­ordinated by Chris­tian von Soest at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA) of Hamburg.

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Index

Page numbers in italics denote tables. Abinales, P.N. 159 accumulation, power and money 54 Acemoglu, D. 101–2, 104 Adedibu, Chief Lamidi 134–7 administrative staff 17 Africa: clientelism 26; corruption 52; French policy 6; neopatrimonial state as model and prototype 26–34, 43–4; see also France’s African policy Africanization 54 Ahidjo, Ahmadou 27, 30 aid 32, 104–5, 215 Akinsola, Latif (Tokyo) 135 Alao-Akala, Christopher 135, 136 aluguel de mandatos 181 Amoroso, D.J. 159 Anderson, B. 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 166, 167, 168 anti-developmental state 33–4 apadrinhados 172–3 aparelhamento do estado 176 aparelhar 173 Aquino, Corazon 163 Arafat, Yasser 37 Arroyo, Gloria 157, 164–6 articulação política 173 Atkin, M 189 authoritarian-bureaucratic regimes 36 authoritarianism 4, 162, 186, 187, 190 authority, patrimonial 18 autonomy, customs officers 143 Badie, B. 46 Bailey, F.G. 49–50 baixo clero 173 Balladur, Edouard 216 Banfield, E.C. 47 Bayart, J.-F. 32, 33, 58 Beetham, D. 79 Bell Act 160 Bello, W. 164 Below, G. von 13

Berdimuhamedov, Gurbanguly 195 Berlusconi, Silvio 5–6; early political career 198–200 Berlusconismo: charisma and media 200–3; communication 206; context and overview 197; genesis of 198–200; hybridism 206; neopatrimonialism and political discourse 203–6; personalization of power 205–6; scandals 206; use of legislation 204–5 big men 5–6, 28, 30, 46, 53–4, 86, 132–3; see also Njonjo, Charles Bigo, D. 30 Bill, J.A. 37 Blondel, J. 2 Blundo, G. 11 Bøås, M. 124, 125, 128, 129 Bockarie, Sam 129 Bokassa, Jean-Bédel 30–1 Bolshevik revolution 41 booty capitalism 39, 162 bosses 47 Botelho, J.E. 36 Botswana 52 Bourmaud, D. 28, 29 Bratton, M. 28, 31, 33, 54, 80, 82–3, 85, 100, 111, 120 Brazil 5, 34, 35–6; ‘affairs’ 173–4; bargaining in legislative assemblies 178–9; context and overview 169–71; corruption 171–2, 173–4, 180–1; electoral campaigns 177–8; enrichment through public office 181–3; godfatherism 172–3; military dictatorship 176–7; nepotism 179–80; patrimonialism 170–1; political alliances 177; political costs 181–3; prebendalism 175–81; public tenders 177–8; renting elected offices 181; summary and conclusions 183; trading of votes and offices 180–1; use of terms 171–5 Breuer, S. 21 Brezhnev, Leonid 190–1 Bukhara 189–90 bureaucracy 15–16, 18, 21

Index   255 bureaucratic-authoritative communism 41 bureaucratization, patrimonial 36 cacique democracy 168 caciques 158, 172 Callaghy, T. 27, 33 Cameroon 27, 30, 32 capital flight 96 capitalism 19 capitalist states 34 captive civil society 46 capture 97–8 cargas comissionadas 173, 175 Carothers, T. 85–6 caudillos 35 Central African Republic (CAR) 30–1 CFA francs 210, 216 Chabal, P. 33 Chad 148 charismatic authority 25, 47, 200–3 Chehabi, H.E. 31 child labour 194 chopping 55 civil society: captive 46; Uzbekistan 194 civil wars: overview 124–5; summary and conclusions 131 clanoviost 187–8 clans 187–9 clientelism 4, 97, 103–4, 112; Africa 26; and democracy 116; rationalized 29; see also political clientelism cliques 53 cohesive capitalist states 34 collective clientelism 219 Collier, P. 86 colonial state, deconstruction of 32 colonialism 36–7; Philippines 158–60; Sierra Leone 127–8 communist regimes 41 condotierre 47–8 Confucianism and Taoism 12, 16 constitutional reform 54 coronelismo 172, 183 corruption 3, 5, 47, 97–8, 100–1, 103; Africa 52; Brazil 171–2, 173–4, 180–1; Charles Njonjo 65–8, 76; curbing 105–6; extent of 55–6; godfatherism 141; increased awareness of 122–3; Niger 146–8; Philippines 166; scandals 219; Sierra Leone 128; Southeast Asia 39; state as powerless 152–3; Zaïre 31 Cot, Jean-Pierre 214 Côte d’Ivoire 27, 29–30 Craxi, Bettino 198 credibility, of public institutions 104 credit, political entrepreneurs 50 crime and impunity 136, 141 Critchlow, J. 187 cronyism 38–40, 98; oligarchal domination 161–3; Soviet Union 187; Zimbabwe 54–5 Crook, R. 30, 32

Crouch, H. 38 cultural ideals 19 culture of democracy 121 customs, evasion 146 customs officers 143; bypassing the state 144–5, 146; impunity 151 customs services: failure to combat corruption 152–3; Niger 142; rules 148–9 Dahl, R.A. 51 Daloz, J.-P. 33, 54 De Boeck, F. 129 de Gaulle, Charles 209–10 de Lima, K. 171 decentralized despotism 27 decentralized patrimonialism 27 decolonization 209–10 deconstruction, of colonial state 32 democracies, typologies 86–7 democracy: and authoritarianism 4; and clientelism 116; contradictory norms 85–9; defining 79; institutions 121–2; Italy 198; legal and informal norms 83–5; and neopatrimonialism 95–6; oligarchic 160–1; overview 79; survival of 121; tension with neopatrimonialism 80–3 democratization 33; and political clientelisms 117–20, 122; political parties 120; as slow process 121; third wave 82–3 despachante 172 development economics 4; context and overview 90–1; neopatrimonialism as multidimensional 92–3; neopatrimonialism as political process 94–5; reconciling with neopatrimonialism 106; regimes and neopatrimonialism 95–6; shared conceptualizations 99–106; states and development 92–6; summary and conclusions 107; trajectories of post-independence states 93–4 developmental states 34; East Asia 95 Diamond, L.J. 85, 86–7, 88, 120 diamonds, Sierra Leone 127–9 diversity, political entrepreneurship 51–6 dominant-power systems 86 domination: distinction between forms 84; hybridism 20; legitimate and non-legitimate 21; patrimonial 19–20; sociology of 14–16; Weber’s typology 16–23 Drazen, A. 100 Dunn, K.C. 124 East Asia, developmental states 95 Easterly, W. 100 economic characteristics, consolidation of 102 economic crisis 32 economic growth, and democracy 121 economic institutions, and rulers 103 economic liberalization, Niger 142 economic redistribution 119–20

256   Index economic reforms: attitudes to 104; Niger 142 economics: of development 4; theoretical approaches 90 economy, effects of traditional domination 19 Egypt 186 Eisenstadt, S. 1, 9–10, 25, 92 electoral autocracies 120, 122, 133 electoral campaigns 177–8 electoral politics 117; impact of 119–20 Elias, N. 81 elite clientelism 113–14, 116–19 elites, self-interest 34 emergent countries 34 emerging states’ syndrome 221–3 Engel, U. 10–11, 79, 85, 86–7, 89, 111 Englebert, P. 30, 93, 96 enrichment, personal 54 equilibria 103, 104 Erdmann, G. 10–11, 79, 85, 86–7, 89, 111 Estrada, Joseph 164 Ethiopia 26 ethnicity 46, 101 Evan, P. 34 external influences 82 extractive industries, Sierra Leone 127–9 factions 50 Faoro, R. 35–6 Fauré, Y.-A. 28, 55 federalism, Nigeria 133 feudalism 15, 20 Fininvest 198–9 fisiologismo 5, 172 Fithen, C. 126, 131 Florescano, H. 35 Foccart, J. 213 followers, of political entrepreneurs 49–50 Forrest, J. 33 Forza Italia 199, 201, 203–4 Fox, J. 121 France: as a major power 211–12, 215; policy towards Africa 6 France-Afrique 211, 214–16, 217–18 France’s African policy: collapse 214–17; context and overview 208–9; depatrimonialization 218–19; Gaullism 209–10; instruments of 212–14; military involvement 210, 216; patrimonialism as source of power 209–14; perspective 208–9; reform of cooperation system 216–17; special relationship 208, 217; zone of influence 210 fraud, Niger 146–7 Gaxie, D. 48 gerontocracy 18 Gil Sánchez, I. 35 Giscard D’Estaing, Valéry 211 godfatherism 5; Adedibu, Chief Lamidi 134–7; Brazil 172–3; corruption 141; crime and

impunity 136, 141; defining 132–3; expectations and demands 133–4; influence on government 137, 138; kidnapping 138; sponsorship 135, 137–8; spread and prevalence 139–41; Uba, Andy 139; Uba, Chris 137–9; use of violence 134, 135–6, 138–9, 141; see also Nigeria Gorlizki, Y. 40, 41, 43 Grégoire, E. 145 guerrilla entrepreneurs 54 guided democracy 38 Haller, K.L. von 13 Hanke, Edith 14 Hatløy, A. 128 Hawes, G. 158, 159, 160, 162 Hellman, J.S. 42 Helmke, G. 121–2 Herrschaftssoziologie 14–16 hokims 192 Honwana, A. 129 hostage taking 130 Houphouët Boigny, Felix 27, 29–30, 211 Hughes, J. 41 humanitarianism 215 Hunter, J.E. 39 Hutchcroft, P. 38–9, 157–8, 159, 162, 166, 168 hybridism 25, 85, 86–7, 88, 120–1; Berlusconismo 206; Brazil 170; of domination 20 Hyden, G. 34 ideal types 22–3, 84 Ilchman, W.F. 50 Iliffe, J. 54 Ilkhamov, A. 43, 192 illiberal democracies 120–1 import-substitution industrialization (ISI) 161 imported state 46 impunity 141; godfatherism 136 incomes 103 Indonesia 38, 39 inequality 119 influence peddling 120 informal free zones 146 informal institutions 121–2 informalization, of politics 200 institutional intermediation 150 institutionalization: of neopatrimonialism 31; weakness of 54 institutions: of democracy 121–2; nature of 106–7; underdevelopment 194–5 interface bureaucracies, Niger 142–3 intermediate state 34 intermediation practices 150–2 international financial institutions (IFIs) 93–4 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 93, 115, 128, 142 international relations 122 Ishiyama, J. 186

Index   257 Italy 5–6; attitudes to state 200; democracy 198; patterns of employment 199–200; taxation 205; see also Berlusconismo Jackson, R. 26, 32, 33, 94 James, R. 96 jeitinho 5, 172, 183 Joseph, R. 32, 120 Jospin, Lionel 219 Jowitt, K. 190 judicial systems 105 Kang, D. 40 Karimov, Islam 43, 186–7; rise of 191–3; see also Uzbekistan Karimova, Gulnara 193 Kaufmann, D. 42 Kazakhstan 188 Keen, D. 124, 128 Kenya 29–30 Kenyatta, Jomo 29, 68–9 Kibaki, M. 69 kidnapping 129–30, 138 Kingsbury, D. 163–4 kinship 46, 53, 188 Kitschelt, H.B. 41 Kittel, B. 100 kleptocracy 31 Kohli, A. 34 Krushchev, Nikita 190–1 Kuchma, Leonid 43 La Baule speech 216 Lacam, J.-P. 50, 51, 200, 206 Ladoja, Rashidi 135–6 Lamprecht, Karl 13 Landesherrschaft 13 Latin America 35–7; mass clientelism 119 law, attitudes to 105–6 Le Vine, V. 26–7 leadership see political entrepreneurship legal-rational bureaucracy 11 Legal-rational domination 17; 80 legitimacy 10, 100, 104; Weber’s view of 16–17, 19 legitimate coercion (domination) 169 legitimate domination, Weber’s typology 16–23 Leiden, C. 37 Lemarchand, R. 31 lending, international financial institutions (IFIs) 93–4 Levitsky, S. 86, 121–2 Lewis, P. 38 Liddle, W. 38 Lindberg, S.I. 120 Linden, R. 41 Linz, J.J. 31 Lula da Silva, Luiz Inácio 170 Malaysia 39 Marchal, R. 54

Marcos, Ferdinand 40, 161–3, 166 Marcoussis agreement 218 Maslovski, M. 42 mass clientelism 114, 117; Médard, J.-F. 1, 3, 10, 11, 20–1, 22, 23, 27–9, 30, 32, 46, 52, 55–6, 79, 92, 96, 97, 132, 169, 221; neopatrimonialism and democracy 82 media 200–3 Mediaset 200–4 mega-clans 193 merchants 143; Niger 145; rules and practices 148–52 Merkel, W. 88 Messiant, C. 54 mestnichestvo 187, 188 Mexico 35 middle classes 96 Middle East 37 military dictatorship, Brazil 176–7 military regimes 100 militia groups, and elites 130 mining, Sierra Leone 127–9 Mitterand, François 211, 216 Mkandawire, T. 33 Mobutu, Sese Seko 27, 29, 31, 126 modelling 91, 99–102 Moi, Daniel 64, 68–9, 75–7 Momoh, Joseph 128 money, accumulation 54 monopolization 81 moral economy 29 Morse, D. 35 Movement for Emancipation in the Niger Delta (MEND) 129–30, 131 multi-party polyarchies 33 multidimensionality 92–3 Muthemba affair 73–4, 75 national accommodative communism 41 national sovereignty 81 Nda-Isaiah, Sam 137 neopatrimonial state, as model and prototype 26–34 neopatrimonialism: application to Africa 43–4; Eisenstadt’s conception of 25; increasing theoretical role 221; key aspects 187; overview of research 1–2; predatory forms 30–1; predominant view of 111; regulated forms 29–30; scope of research 221; summary and conclusions 221–3; use of term 1, 9–11, 27–9 nepotism 179–80, 187–8 new democracies, contradictory norms 85–9 Ng’ang’a, Amos 70 Ngige, Chris 138–9 Niger: bypassing the state 144–5, 146; corruption 146–8; customs administration 144–5; customs officers 143; economic reforms 142; exploiting rules 149–50; fraud 146–7; informal free zones 146;

258   Index Niger continued interface bureaucracies 142–3; intermediation practices 150–2; lump sum clearance 147; merchants 143, 145; privatization 145; rules and practices 148–52; state as powerless 152–3; transit convoys 147–8 Niger Delta 129–31 Nigeria 34; impeachment 135–6; overview 132–3; see also godfatherism Niyazov, Saparmurad 195 Njonjo, Charles 5, 28, 46, 53; attempt to seize power 68–76; basis of power 62–3; biography 60–1; as candidate and MP 69–73; Commission of Inquiry 66, 68, 71, 76; defeat and disgrace 74–6; domestic perceptions of 61–2; economic resources 65; influence on President 64; institutional strategy 68–9; latitude of action 65–8; leadership style 61–2; networking 64–5; overview of career and importance 58–9; positions held 63–4; reasons for downfall 77; summary and evaluation 77; system of power 63–5; violence 73–4 norms 2–3; contradictory 85–9; legal and informal 83–5; social 105–6 North Africa 37 Obi, Peter 139 Offerlé, M. 48 offices, trading 180–1 Oginga, Raila 73–4 oikos 13, 15, 19 oligarchal domination 161–3 oligarchic democracy 160–1 oligarchic patrimonialism 38–9 Olivier de Sardan, J.-P.. 29, 143 Olson, M. 103 one-party state 52 Oszlak, O. 36 Ottaway, M. 33 Palestine 37 paradigms, development of 31–3 paramount chiefs 60, 127 Park Chung-hee 40 parliamentary rule 121 Partido dos trabalhadores 170, 174 paternalism 172 path-dependency 125 patriarchalism: and patrimonialism 13; primary 18 patrimonial authority 18 patrimonial bureaucracy 15–16 patrimonial bureaucratization 36 patrimonial communism 41–2 patrimonial domination: relevance to Africa 26; Roth’s forms of 25; Weber’s concept of 12–23 patrimonial oligarchic state: defining 157–8; see also Philippines

patrimonialism: application of concept 25, 41; Brazil 170–1; and bureaucracy 18; bureaucratic 21; and capitalism 19; continuity and change in 26–7; decentralized 27; state bureaucracies 143–4; use of term 9–11; Weber’s concept of 12–23 patronage 114, 116 patronage networks 187–9, 190 peripheral countries 34 personal rule 30–1, 32, 35–6, 58; Karimov, Islam 192; limits to 33 personality, influence of 29–31 personalized patrimonialism 41 Philippines 5, 38–9, 40; American colonization 159–60; context and overview 157–8; corruption 166; elections 167–8; Japanese occupation 160; oligarchal domination cronyism 161–3; oligarchic democracy 160–1; oligarchies 167; as patrimonial oligarchic state 158–61; patronage and clientelism 166; politicization of military 167; post-independence 161; rebellion 165; return to oligarchy 163–8; Spanish colonization 158–9; state of emergency 157; US military 165; see also patrimonial oligarchic state political alliances 177 political careers, as enterprise 51 political clientelisms: adapting to democracy 120–2; causal relationships 116; characteristics and correlates 118; defining 113; and democracy 122; economic risks 119; elite clientelism 113–14, 116–19; impact on state capacity 116; mass clientelism 114, 117; patronage 114, 116; prebendalism 114, 116; prevalence 113; summary and conclusions 122–3; theoretical approaches 117–20; tribute 113; and wealth 115; see also clientelism; Sub-Saharan Africa political discourse, Berlusconismo 203–6 political economy, of neopatrimonialism 34 political elites, and militia groups 130 political entrepreneurship 4, 46; concept of 47–51; diversity 51–5; summary and conclusions 55; and tradition 92–3 political intermediation 151 political parties: and democratization 120; effect of presidentialism 121 political process, neopatrimonialism as 94–5 political resources 51 politicians, professional 47–8 politics: informalization of 200; professionalization of 51 politics from below 32 politics of the belly 32 Politique africaine 32 Pompidou, Georges 210–11 popular sovereignty 81 post-colonialism 3–4 post-Communist states 40–3

Index   259 post-independence states, development trajectories 93–4 post-patrimonialism 9 poverty 103; Sierra Leone 128 power: accumulation 54; neo-patrimonial conception 10; personalization 205–6; from war 48 pragmatism 50 prebendalism 20, 32, 35, 114, 116; Brazil 175–81 predatory neopatrimonialism 30–1 predatory state 34 presidentialism 31, 112, 121 press freedom 122–3 prestige 53 primary patriarchalism 18 privatization, Niger 145 professional politicians 47–8 professionalization, of politics 51 Przeworski, A. 79, 100, 121 public institutions, credibility of 104 public office, as means of gain 181–3 public tenders 177–8 Putin, Vladimir 42 quasi-states 32, 33, 94 Ramos, Fidel 163–4 Rashidov, Sharif 190, 191–2 rationalized clientelism 29 Ravenhill, J. 219 rebel groups: images of 125; motivation 124; Niger Delta 129–31; social banditry 129–31; summary and conclusions 131; and warlordism 126–9; worldview 124–5 recruitment, patrimonial and extra-patrimonial 18 redistribution, scope for 119–20 reform programmes 32 regimes: authoritarian, democratic and hybrid 87; Carothers’ binary classification 86; and economic performance 100; effects of transitions 122; links to neopatrimonialism 95–6; traditional and neo-traditional 25 regionalism 187, 188 regulated neopatrimonialism 29–30 regulatory capture 98 religion, and political entrepreneurship 54 Remmer, K. 36 Reno, W. 33, 43, 127, 128 rent capture 39 resources: accumulation 175–81; extraction and redistribution 125–6; liquidity 53; neopatrimonial systems 112; of political entrepreneurs 50–1; privatization of 92, 93; for redistribution 119–20 Revolutionary United Front (RUF) 125, 126, 131 Ribeiro, D. 182

Richards, P. 124, 126, 131 Robinson, J.A. 101–2, 104 Roett, R. 35–6 Romania 41 Rosberg, C. 26, 32, 94 Roth, G. 10, 21, 25 rouba mas faz 174–5 ruling cliques 53 Rwanda, 215 Sandbrook, R. 30, 32, 33, 34 Sankoh, Foday 129 Schattsneider, E.E. 121 Schatz, E. 188 Schedler, A.P. 120, 133 Schemeil, Y. 37 Schumpeter, J.A. 48–9 Searle, P. 39 shadow state 33, 43, 127 Sierra Leone 33; as colony 127–8; context of civil war 126–7; diamonds 127–9; independence 128; smuggling 128 Sindzingre, A. 100, 105 small open economies 93 smuggling, diamonds 128 social banditry 129–31 social intermediation 152 social norms 105–6 social practice, neopatrimonialism as 125–6 socialization 55 sociology of domination 14–16 Soekarno 38 South Africa 53 South Korea 34, 40 Southeast Asia 38–40, 98–9 sovereignty 81 Soviet Union 40–1, 187–8; legacy of 189–91 spoils system, Brazil 175 sponsorship, godfatherism 135, 137–8 stability 88, 96, 100 Stalin, Joseph 40–1, 190–1, 194–5 state: bypassing 144–5; as opportunity monopolization process 81 state-building 82 state bureaucracies, patrimonialism 143–4 state capacity, impact of clientelism 116 state capture 42–3 state formation, neopatrimonialism as outcome 102 state structures, size of 115 states: and development 92–6; differentiation criteria 84–5 Stevens, Siaka 128 stratification 119 strong men 132–3 structural adjustment programmes 145 Sub-Saharan Africa: capital flight 96; context and overview 111–12; democratization 95–6; post-independence states 93; see also political clientelisms

260   Index Suharto 38 sultanism 18, 31, 32, 54, 80 Syngman Rhee 40 Tajikistan 188–9 tanho 189–90 taxation, Italy 205 television, Berlusconismo 200–4 Thailand 39 The City 15–16 Theobald, R. 116 theoretical approaches 221–2 theory of institutional transformation 91 third wave democratization 82–3 Tidjani Alou, M. 143, 145, 147, 149 Tocqueville, A. de 83 Tolstov, S.P. 189 totalitarianism 36 trading, of votes and offices 180–1 tradition: loss of force of 10; move away from 92 traditional domination 16, 18–19, 80 traditionalism, in patrimonialism 19 transit convoys 147–8 traps 93–4 tribute 113 troca-troca 181 Tunisia 186 Turkmenistan 195 Turner, T. 26, 31 Tydings Rehabilitation Act 160 Uba, Andy 139 Uba, Chris 137–9 Ukraine 42–3 United States: bosses 47; patronage 116 Uphoff, N.T. 50 Uzbekistan 5, 43; civil society 194; clans and patronage 187–9; context and overview 186–7; grey zones in legislative norms 194; hokims (governors) 192; institutional underdevelopment 194–5; regime change 195; Soviet legacy 189–91; see also Karimov, Islam

van Zon, H. 42–3 Vidal, N. 31 Villepin, Dominique de 218, 219 violence: Charles Njonjo 73–4; godfatherism 134, 135–6, 138–9, 141; and political entrepreneurship 54 votes, trading 180–1 vulnerability: of neopatrimonialism 126; young people 129 Wallenstein, Albert von 48 Wantchekon, L. 100 war, and power 48 warlordism 4–5, 33, 94; and rebel groups 126–9 wealth 101 Weber, Max 3, 4, 26; forms of domination 80; ideal types 84; interpretations of 10–12; legitimate domination 169; meaning of patrimonialism 12; neopatrimonialism and democracy 83–4; patrimonial domination 12–23; patrimonialism, concept of 12–23, 28; political entrepreneurship 47, 48–9; references to patrimonialism 13–14; sociology of domination 14–16; types of domination 16–23 Whimster, S. 84 Willame, J.-C. 27 Willerton, J.P. 190–1 Wilson, J.Q. 47 Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Economy and Society) 12, 13–14 World Bank 93, 128, 142 Wurfel, D. 166, 167 Yacouba, D.M. 151 Yeltsin, Boris 42 Young, C. 26, 31, 32, 83 Zabludovsky, G. 36 Zaïre 27, 29, 31, 126 Zakaria, F. 86, 88, 120 Zimbabwe 54–5 Zolberg, Aristide 25