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Lancing the Swollen African State: Will it Alleviate the Problem of Corruption?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Robin Theobald
Robin Theobald
Affiliation:
Principal Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Westminster, London
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Extract

International concern over the pathology of political corruption increases apace. The last five years have witnessed a proliferation of organisations, conferences, and meetings dedicated to analysing the phenomenon as well as proposing workable policies of containment and control.This rising concern is a consequence partly of accelerating globalisation which not only increases awareness of the incidence and appalling scale of corruption but, more seriously, allows the contagion to infect the international system of trade and finance as a result of the activities of organised crime syndicates, money launderers, arms dealers, and the like. Furthermore, the ending of the cold war has meant that the ‘great’ powers are now having to confront the consequences of their longstanding indulgence, in the interests of political expediency, of sundry seedy dictators and their cronies; kleptocrats who seemed to devote much of their incumbency to transferring millions of dollars, sometimes billions, from the public treasury into Swiss bank accounts.

Type
Africana
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 32 , Issue 4 , December 1994 , pp. 701 - 706
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

1 For example, the series of International Anti-Corruption Conferences (IACC), the sixth of which was held in Cancun, Mexico, in November 1993; the ‘Ethics in Public Service’ series, the fourth of which was held in Stockholm in June 1994; the work of the G-7 Financial Action Task Force; and the activities of such agencies as Transparency International, Berlin, and Worldaware: the Centre for World Development Education, London.Google Scholar

2 Moody-Stewart, George, Grand Corruption in Third World Development (Berlin, 1994), p. 1.Google Scholar

3 See, for example, Weber, Max, Economy and Society (New York, 1968), Vol. 2, pp. 963–4,Google Scholar and Kamenka, Eugene, Bureaucracy (Oxford, 1989), ch. 3.Google Scholar

4 See Kaldor, Nicholas, ‘Taxation for Economic Development’, in The Journal of Modern African Studies (Cambridge), I, 1, 03 1963, pp. 7–23,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Todaro, Michael P., Economic Development in Third World: an introduction to problems and policies in a global perspective (London, 1989 edn.), ch. 17.Google Scholar

5 See Fischer, Wolfram and Lundgren, Peter, ‘The Recruitment and Training of Administrative and Technical Personnel’, in Tilly, Charles (ed.), The Formation of Nation States in Europe (Princeton, 1974), pp. 456–561,Google Scholar and Moore, Barrington, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Harmondsworth, 1973), ch. 4.Google Scholar

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7 Zolberg, Aristide R., Creating Political Order: the party-states of West Africa (Chicago, 1966).Google Scholar

8 See, for example, Médard, Jean-François, ‘The Underdeveloped State in Tropical Africa: political clientelism or neo-patrimonialism?’, in Clapham, Christopher (ed.), Private Patronage and Public Power (London, 1982), pp. 162–92.Google Scholar There is something a little uneasy about a concept that is seen as the core characteristic of régimes as diverse as those in Mobutu Sese Seko's Zaïre, Shehu Shagari's Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea under Macias Nguema, and Félix Houphouët-Boigny's Côte d'Ivoire, to mention only a few. On this problem, see Crook, Richard C., ‘Patrimonialism, Administrative Effectiveness and Economic Development in Côte d'Ivoire’, in African Affairs (London), 88, 351, 04 1989, pp. 205–28.Google Scholar

9 See Roth, Guenther, ‘Personal Rulership, Patrimonialism and Empire-Building in the New States’, in World Politics, 20, 1968, pp. 194–206;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, ‘Authority and Power in Bureaucratic and Patrimonial Administration: a revisionist interpretation of Weber on bureaucracy’, in ibid. 31, 2, January 1979, pp. 195–227; and Theobald, Robin, ‘On the Survival of Patronage in Developed Societies’, in Archives europeéennes de sociologie (Paris), 33, 1992, pp. 183–91.Google Scholar

10 See, for example, Lemarchand, René and Lagg, Keith, ‘Political Clientelism and Development’, in Comparative Politics (New York), 4, 2, 1972, pp. 149–78.Google Scholar Also, Toinet, Marie-France and Glenn, Ian, ‘Clientelism and Corruption in the “Open” Society: the case of the United States’, in Clapham, (ed.), op. cit. pp. 193–213.Google Scholar

11 See Theobald, Robin, Corruption, Development and Underdevelopment (London, 1990), pp. 158–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Far from my having taken a ‘simplistic view’ which ‘fails to take into account either the negative “side-effects” for the population at large…or the many difficulties of actually implementing privatisation’, as suggested by Harsch, Ernest, ‘Accumulators and Democrats: challenging state corruption in Africa’, in The Journal of Modern African Studies, 31, 1, 03 1993, p. 42, the paragraphs immediately succeeding the half-sentence that he quotes (out of context) move on to discuss precisely these negative side-effects and difficulties.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 World Development Report, 1983 (London, 1983), p. 117.Google Scholar

13 See Dobel, J. Patrick, ‘The Corruption of a State’, in The American Political Science Review (Menasha, WI), 72, 3, 09 1978, pp. 958–73.Google Scholar This is in no way to underestimate the difficulties of promoting a viable civil society in Africa which, to say the least, are daunting. See, for example, ‘The Challenge of Trade Union Rights in Africa’, ICFTU, Brussels, 1994, which describes the violation of such rights as ‘widespread and acute’. Particular problems are being created by the pressure to cut public spending which frequently expresses itself in unilateral reductions in salaries as well as their non-payment for several months. Reported in the Financial Times (London), 28 09 1994.Google Scholar