The Changing Governance Landscape In Africa - An Overview
Governance has in recent years become one of the most frequently used concepts in the social sciences and it’s a strong contender for the most commonly used term in public debates.
It is often used indiscriminately to describe almost all modern developments — good and bad — and thus usually generates more heat than light.
The global spread of the term is evidence of the very developments to which it refers. Every business guru talks about it. And no political speech is complete without reference to it.
Yet, as little as a few decades ago, the term was hardly used, either in the academic literature or in everyday language. It has come from nowhere to be almost everywhere.
As Ghana has in recent years been described as a leading African country in the area of governance, particularly following the country’s effective implementation of the African Peer Review Mechanism process, which has commendably put Ghana on the most envious and highly covetous governance map of Africa, it has become increasingly necessary to draw attention of the general public to this intriguing subject of governance.
The last Sunday’s (November 29) TV3 highly informative Kwaku “One–on-One” with MO Ibrahim, Founder of the Ibrahim Prize for Achievements in African Leadership, as the guest on governance in Africa, is indeed sufficient evidence of Ghanaian interest in the concept of governance.
Ghanaians would wish to know what governance is all about, its significance to development, its impact on African international negotiations and the challenges to governance in Africa.
This first paper in the series analyses the concept of governance and the type of governance landscape in Africa during the early years of independence.
As a management concept, governance has progressively become a major concern for the success of any development initiative. In Africa, governance has been debated since the 1960s, following the independence of some African countries.
Recently, the concept of governance has been captured from different perspectives by political leaders, institutions, and national and international communities.
Already, it represents a key item in the major international agendas. Many publications are issued on governance and several initiatives are taken both in the international arena and at national level.
It must be pointed out that governance is linked to country-specific contexts, but it also evolves within the framework of international commitments, visions of development and continental plans of actions such as the Millennium Development Goals, the Poverty Development Strategy, the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, the Brussels Programme of Action, and many other initiatives currently underway in Africa.
In addition, intense negotiations have taken place with the G8 countries and with various international organisations.
These negotiations have a profound impact on the welfare of the African people. In this perspective, governments and their development partners have executed governance programmes, projects and other specific initiatives at nationals level, guided by appropriate policies that need to be in line with the development vision adopted by each African country.
What is the concept of governance?
The concept of governance presents by itself a definitional challenge. First, the term is broad and subject to varying interpretations, and there is not up till now a common definition applied to governance terminology in Africa, although there is a commonality in the applications of key terms through regional and continental plans of action, programmes, management systems and mechanisms.
There is also a proliferation of governance approaches which are reflected in different titles highlighting specific principles such as engaged, inclusive or shared governance focusing on the participation principle, and democratic governance focusing on legitimacy and voice, direction and leadership, accountability, human rights and fairness. Governance is also labelled as urban, local, national, international, economic, institutional and corporate.
Because the debate on governance has over time intensified, some challenges are now constantly openly debated and the ways to address them are shared regularly through statements, conferences, political events, international workshops, and even through institutional surveys.
This has produced a growing degree of convergence about the understanding of governance, even though the term “good governance” remains to some extent, controversial for some African countries.
Recent reports by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) and the World Bank have affirmed that without good governance, sustainable development is not possible.
For UNDP, governance makes reference to ‘the exercise of political, economic and administrative authority to manage nation’s affairs (in the best interests of the people). It is the complex mechanisms, processes and institutions, through which citizens and groups articulate their interests, exercise their legal rights and obligations and mediate their differences’.
For the African Development Bank (AfDB), governance is the ‘manner in which power is exercised in the management of a country’s social and economic resources for development. Governance means the way those with power use that power’. On the other hand, the World Bank refers to governance as ‘the traditions and institutions by which authority in a country is exercised for the common good.
This includes (i) the process by which those in authority are selected, monitored and replaced, (ii) the capacity of the Government to effectively manage its resources and implement sound policies, and (iii) the respect of citizens and the state for the institutions that govern economic and social interactions among them’.
In political science literature, governance is approached as the fundamental rules that regulate the relationships between rulers and the ruled. These fundamental rules refer to the constitutional rules as “ground-norms”.
This definition could be referred to democratic governance. However, it must be underlined that equating good governance to democratisation might be misleading.
The role of key institutions is crucial in terms of whether they perform their functions in an efficient and effective manner and adopt policies that respond to the needs of the population.
As a working definition, governance refers to the process whereby elements in society wield power and authority, and influence and enact policies and decisions concerning public life, and economic and social development.
Governance is a broader notion than government, whose principal elements include the constitution, legislature, executive and judiciary. Much emphasis may be put on the following:
• The process by which governments are chosen, monitored and changed.
• The systems of interaction between the administration, the legislature and the judiciary.
• The ability of government to create and to implement public policy.
• The mechanisms by which citizens and groups define their interests and interact with institutions of authority and with each other.
Governance in post-independence era
While for most of the 20th century, the African independence movement was embedded in an emancipatory projects to rid the continent and its people of racism, colonialism and foreign domination, the post-independence era proved to be a liability to the vision of economic emancipation and democracy that was presumed to follow political independence.
Kwame Nkrumah, our first President, had declared in 1957 that Africa should “seek ye first the political kingdom, and all things shall be added unto you.” When he said that, he was convinced that political independence was the key to all other improvements in the African condition.
By the 1980s, in most African countries, including Nkrumah’s own Ghana, the conditions seemed to testify to an opposite conclusion from what Nkrumah had in mind. Nkrumah’s declaration now turned to read: “Seek ye first the political kingdom, and all else will be subtracted from it”.
Despite the promises of the early years of independence, there had been no substantial development in post-colonial Africa. There emerged many post-independence leaders who typically believed that they could rule over societies on their own terms without having to consult and include their citizens in political governance.
Some of them even turned the presidency into a lifetime position, while one-party political systems and military rule flourished on the continent. They turned a blind eye to human rights abuses, corruption and coups d’ etat in obedience to a cardinal rule:
Sovereignty above all. Agreeing that a state’s internal affairs were no one else’s concern, many leaders destroyed constitutional checks and balances and trampled on the rights of citizens. This type of governance was ’abundantly’ typical of Nkrumah’s Ghana, but which was surprisingly put in a cold storage during the recent Nkrumah’s centenary celebration.
Without sound governance to fight corruption, interrogate new laws and effectively manage public services, much of Africa was effectively bankrupt within 20 years of independence. Abuse of power sparked incessant conflicts, state collapse and genocide.
Thus, by the late 1980s and early 1990s, most African states found themselves caught up in the grips of crisis of political legitimacy and governance.
It was within this context of crisis in governance that one can explain the failure of development strategies, such as the celebrated Lagos Plan of Action, adopted at the time.
There was a widespread recognition that the African development crisis was political rather than economic; or, to put it another way, that the lack of development was primarily due to political, rather than economic factors.
This in itself was a huge shift, since it had always been assumed in development circles that what was missing were the financial and technical means to enable Africa to reach the critical ‘lift-off’ stage of economic growth. Indeed, for decades, the focus had been on the delivery of aid to support the investment that would encourage development.