A Faustian Pact with Neo-patrimonial Regimes
The Ordeal African Political Challengers endure in a Constricted Political Space
Respublica Litereria Public Lecture - RL Vol XIII No 279 MMXIX
Costantinos Berhutesfa
Costantinos, PhD
Professor of Public
Policy & Sustainable Institutional Reforms
Abstract
This think piece
raises the tangential issues of the trajectories on the stewardship of African
democratisation marked by uniquely austere organisational-strategic issues of
neo-patrimonialism. Under patrimonialism there is no differentiation between
the private and the public realm. Neo-patrimonialism is an amalgam of
moderately coupled forms of state supremacy resulting from a coevolution of
patrimonial and legal-rational bureaucratic state supremacy. Hence, the purpose
of this paper is to study the key characteristics of neo-patrimonial regimes
and derive methodological pathways for successful political transition into a
pluralist society and polity. The research enquiry augurs on the knowledge gaps
on African political transitions in nations under neo-patrimonial rule. While
many African nations are bent on installing public administration and undertake
regular elections the coordinates of the state are controlled to perpetuate the
single party rule. Hence, the research questions augur on the following. What
is the level of political culture development in Africa to ensure democratic
development? What are the indicators that justify electoral quantity, quality
and meaning in Africa? What can states; civil societies and the international
community do to promote democracy in Africa?
The paper further discusses democratic political culture development in Africa,
under whose rubrics are discussed are developmental states, market failures and
neo-patrimonial rent seeking, neo-patrimonial states and citizenship in Africa,
electoral trajectories in Africa political parties & elections in Africa: elections
and their outcomes. The discussion focuses on quo vadis democracy in Africa, state
building and nation building. All endeavours to characterise African
neo-patrimonialism hinge on a fusion of the patrimonial single parties that
dominate African elections (legal-rationalism) and absolute dictatorships that
seeks to make sense of the (more real than imaginary) contradictions to be
found in the state in Africa. When African states gained their independence
from European colonial disruption, the African state had to inherit both the
public and private sphere, including national development and colonial
businesses. The developmentalist state that ensued has become bewildering to
many, as influential strands of radical scholarship continued to question
whether the ‘peripheral’ parts of an increasingly inter-connected global
economy could ever hope to escape the predations of the established industrial
heartlands. The failure of central planning in socialist countries pointed to
government failure as more insidious than the market failure that state
policies had purportedly been designed to correct. States are
heretically formed through wars to extend influence of certain powerful
individuals but nation building is the action undertaken by
national actors to forge a sense of common nationhood, usually in order to
overcome ethnic, sectarian or communal differences, counter alternate sources
of identity and loyalty and to mobilise a population behind a parallel
state-building project.
Key words: Neo-patrimonialism, electoral quantity, electoral
quality and electoral meaning, democratic political culture, developmental
states, market failures, rent seeking, state building and nation building
See paper here or http://www.academia.edu/38175569/A_Faustian_Pact_with_Neo-patrimonial_Regimes_RL_Vol_XIII_No_279_MMXIX.pdf
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