Resolving Africa's Crises

By George B.N. Ayittey

[Reprinted from Issues & Views Winter 1998]

George B.N. Ayittey is a first hand observer of Africa. Born and raised in Ghana, he has taught at the University of Ghana and is now Associate Professor of Economics at The American University in Washington, DC. Following is an excerpt from his newest book, Africa in Chaos:

A serious study of Africa s interminable and innumerable crises reveals that they all share a similar evolution. Each crisis begins when an "educated" buffoon, civilian or military, assumes power through an election or a coup d'état. He then proceeds to entrench himself in office by amassing power and surreptitiously debauching all key government institutions: the military, the civil service, the judiciary, and the banking system. With all powers in his hands, he transforms the state into his personal property--to benefit himself, his cronies, and tribesmen, who all then proceed to plunder the treasury. All others who do not belong to this privileged class are excluded, as the politics of exclusion is practiced.

The tyrant employs a variety of tactics to decimate opposition to his rule: co-optation, bribery, infiltration, intimidation, and "divide and conquer." Opposition leaders compound their weakness by their constant bickering. Out of frustration, a rebel group emerges from the excluded class and mounts a guerrilla campaign to oust the despot and his cohorts from power, or to secede, as in the Biafran secession in 1967. In the course of the insurgency, the guerrilla movement splits into several factions, often along tribal lines. If the campaign to overthrow the regime is unsuccessful, the war drags on for years, even decades, as in Angola, Mozambique, and Sudan. If the head of state is ousted or killed, a power vacuum emerges and factional leaders battle ferociously to fill the void, as in Somalia and Liberia.

Chaos and carnage ensue. Infrastructure is destroyed. Food production and delivery are disrupted. Thousands are dislocated and flee, becoming internal refugees and placing severe strains on the social systems of the resident population. Food supplies run out. Starvation looms. The Western media bombards the international community with horrific pictures of rail-thin famine victims. Unable to bear the horror, the international community is stirred to mount eleventh-hour humanitarian rescue missions. Food, tents, blankets, portable toilets, high-protein biscuits, and other relief supplies are airlifted to the refugees.

Factional leaders, who initially welcomed the humanitarian mission to feed refugees, turn against the mission and refuse to cooperate with it, because its presence accords some legitimacy and recognition to the hated regime. Factional leaders thus demand that relief organizations deal with them and not the regime. The demands soon turn into extortion. At some point, relief supplies are attacked and aid workers are taken hostage or killed.

The mission loses public support and is terminated; relief workers are pulled out and the starving refugees are left to fend for themselves. That is, until another African country blows up and the whole macabre ritual is repeated. Nothing--absolutely nothing, it seems--has been learned.

More maddening is that the solution to all these crises lies internally--in each African country. It entails the modernization of an indigenous African political tradition--the village assembly. When a crisis erupted in an African village, the chief and his council of elders would summon a village meeting--similar to New England s town hall meetings. There, the issue would be debated by the people until a consensus was reached. Once a decision was made, everyone in the village, including the chief, would be required to abide by it.

This indigenous tradition was revived, modernized as a "sovereign national conference," and used to resolve political crises and make peaceful transition to democratic rule in Benin, Cape Verde Islands, Malawi, Mali, Zambia and South Africa. By contrast, the national conference convened by Mobutu in 1992 was not sovereign. The conference was packed with delegates from the more than 200 political parties that Mobutu created himself, leading Zaireans to scorn multi-partyism as "multi-Mobutuism." Nor were the decisions of the conference binding upon Mobutu. In fact, he repeatedly sabotaged the conference. . . .

Successful resolution of disputes must have three key features. First, the forum must be recognized by all as the place to take disputes to. Second, the adjudication process must be transparent; that is, judges must be impartial and the process open, with no backroom deals struck. Third, the rulings must be accepted by all. If not, an appeal must be allowed, but a limit should be placed by establishing a final court of appeal.

In much of Africa, these structures are woefully lacking. Thus, a trivial political dispute can easily escalate into a full-blown civil war that sends refugees streaming in all directions. A typical example was the February 1994 deadly ethnic conflict in northern Ghana between the Konkombam, the Nanumba, the Dagomba, and the Gonja, which claimed over 2,000 lives. the conflict was started by a simple dispute over the price of a fowl. This dispute flared up into a general conflict because there was no local institution for resolving disputes. . . .

Home-grown solutions can be found in Africa s own indigenous systems, almost everywhere castigated as backward and primitive. A hierarchical system of jurisprudence existed in more traditional African societies. . . . Kwame Arhin of the University of Ghana studied the hierarchy of Akan courts. The first was the extended family court known as badwa, with its members known as badwafo, which consisted of heads of the households of the family groups, heads of other family groups with certain relationships from intermarriage or occupying the same brono (ward), and respected heads of other family groups. The badwa, an arbitration gathering, settled internal disputes between members of the family groups. . . .

The badwafo relied on the respect due to the family elders and other elders and the force of public opinion for compliance of any judgment reached. Those who refused to comply with decisions would be disowned by their close relatives. Disputes between members of different family groups that could not be settled by a joint badwa of the family groups concerned were referred to the Odikro's nhyiamu (village chief's court). This court also settled cases that involved rules made by the council. . . .

"The settlement of disputes at the odikro's court differed from that at the family group level in that the former was supported by the physical force at the disposal of the village as a whole. Offenders found at fault could be compelled to comply with the decisions of the court. In cases of refusal to comply, or if a party was dissatisfied with the court's decision, the oath of the ohene (king) was sworn, and the case transferred to the divisional court. The case then ceased to be an afisem of the village and became a matter for the division." . . .

Public offenses, some of which carried the death penalty, were tried at any level of jurisdiction and decisions could be appealed. Such offenses, called akyiwadee (taboos) by the Akan, included murder (awudie), homicide, and suicide; certain sexual offenses; and treason, which included breaking the oath of allegiance to a ruler or the cowardice of a warlord in battle. . . .

After independence, African nationalists and elites abjured their own native institutions and rushed to blindly copy foreign systems they did not understand. Had they looked in their own backyard, they would have found the solutions to many of Africa's recurrent crises.

-- George Ayittey has won the H.L. Mencken Award for Africa Betrayed, his first book about despotic African leaders and black neo-colonialism. Africa in Chaos and Africa Betrayed are in bookstores and available from Laissez Faire Books: (800) 326-0996; online at http://www.laissezfaire.org.

Copyright © 1998 Issues & Views

Ignoring the heinous tyranny in black Africa passively condones black African tyranny as long as the tyrants are black. This insidious form of racism suggests that white rulers in Africa must be held accountable to a higher moral standard than black leaders face. Africans vehemently object to this treacherous double standard. To their dead compatriots, the color of the hand that killed them made little difference. Vehement denunciation of apartheid without a parallel condemnation of tyranny in black Africa serves only to perpetuate the myth of black inferiority and to accentuate the suffering of all black Africans.

What many black African leaders do to their people has for years aided and abetted apartheid. Although apartheid is an institutionalized form of racism, when the issue is stripped of its emotional rhetoric there is really little difference between that system and black tyranny in independent Africa. The instruments of oppression are identical virtually everywhere on the African continent. Tyranny is tyranny, regardless of the race of the tyrant. Black-on- black tyranny is as ethically abhorrent as white-on-black oppression.

-- George B.N. Ayittey, in Africa Betrayed (St. Martin's Press).

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