Beyond Prebendalist Systems

Beyond Prebendalist Systems State, Democracy and Development in Africa Richard Joseph

Post-colonial African Prebendal System • Mix of authority systems: personalistic, legal-rational, military, traditional rulers • State offices as prebends acquired through appointment or election • Exploitation of economic advantages of state offices while pretending to uphold stipulated public duties • Clientelistic responsibilities used to justify extra-legal use of offices • Fissiparous state order, often unstable and conflictual

Theory of Prebendal Politics Originally an ecclesiastical term “… prebend refers to offices of feudal states which could be obtained through services rendered to a lord or monarch, or through outright purchase by supplicants, and then administered to generate income for their possessors. Max Weber discussed both prebends and a prebendal organization of office.” As adapted to Nigeria and other African countries: “A qualitatively unique form of statist and clientelist political behavior [that is] …ultimately self-destructive.” R. Joseph, “Class, State and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria” (1983)

Theory of Prebendal Politics “In my adaptation of this concept to Nigerian politics as well as many peripheral capitalist nations, the term prebendal refers to patterns of political behavior which reflect as their justifying principle that the offices of the existing state may be competed for and then utilized for the benefit of office-holders as well as that of their reference or support group. To a significant extent, the ‘state’ in such a context is perceived as a congeries of offices susceptible to individual cum communal appropriation. The statutory purposes of such offices become a matter of secondary concern however much that purpose might have been codified in law or other regulations or even periodically cited during competitions to fill them.” (“Prebendal Politics”, 1983)

NeoPatrimonial Rule “In patrimonial political systems, an individual rules by dint of personal prestige and power; ordinary folk are treated as extensions of the ‘big man’s’ household, with no rights or privileges other than those bestowed by the ruler. Authority is entirely personalized, shaped by the ruler’s preferences rather than any codified system of laws. The ruler ensures the political stability of the regime and personal political survival by providing a zone of security in an uncertain environment and by selectively distributing favors and material benefits to loyal followers who are not citizens of the polity so much as the ruler’s clients” M. Bratton and N. van de Walle, Democratic Experiments in Africa (1997)

The Fight of Our Time In August 2006, Barack Obama described the struggle to reduce corruption as "the fight of our time". Transforming prebendalist systems must be at the center of strategies to strengthen democracy and achieve poverty-reducing economic growth in Africa. “Ways must be found to protect the state-power…from being prebendalized and then squeezed of its resources to satisfy the unceasing struggle among massed communities and their (self-serving) patrons for access to the public till.” (“Prebendal Politics”, 1983)

Dysfunction and Sub-Optimalism The Nigerian State may be withering away in terms of its sensational incapacity to provide minimal services to its hard pressed citizens. Witness, for example, the protracted ongoing national black-out coinciding with a terrifying heat wave. The vacuity of a political leadership which has turned the state arena into one of unprecedented predatory extraction as several scams burst open almost daily…the weak stature of the country in the global knowledge economy. A direct linkage between the criminalization of the state populated increasingly by what one may describe … as looting gangs and the activities of militias in the Niger-Delta and in the North of the country. Professor Ayo Olokotun, April 13, 2012

Primacy of Institutions “We take institutions for granted but have no idea where they come from.” “Three important categories of political institutions: the state, rule of law, and accountable government”. “Institutions were the products of historical circumstances and accidents that are unlikely to replicated by other differently situated societies.” “New institutions are typically layered on top of existing ones, which survive for extraordinarily long periods of time.” Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (2010)

The Weberian State and Ancient China The hallmarks of the modern office are a separation between the office and the officeholder; the office is not private property; the office-holder is a salaried official subject to the discipline of the hierarchy within which he is embedded; offices are defined functionally; and officeholding is based on technical competence. All of these were…characteristic of the Chinese bureaucracy from the time of the state of Qin – repatrimonialized during later dynasties. [Ancient China]… alone created a modern state in the terms defined by Max Weber… China…invented a system of merit-based bureaucratic recruitment…

China: The Patrimonial Tug “One of the most important causes of the decline of the Han Dynasty was the recapture of the state by different patrimonial elites and the consequent weakening of the central government. The Qin effort to eliminate feudalism and create an impersonal modern state was undone; kinship returned as the primary avenue to power and status in China, a situation that lasted until the later years of the Tang Dynasty in the ninth century.” “Kinship and patrimonialism reinserted themselves as the organizing principles of Chinese politics. There is an inverse correlation between the strength of the centralized state and the strength of patrimonial groups.”

Confronting Patrimonialism “Impersonal modern states are difficult institutions to both establish and maintain, since patrimonialism – recruitment based on kinship or personal reciprocity – is the natural form of social relationship to which human beings will revert in the absence of other norms and incentives.” “The most universal form of human political interaction is a patron-client relationship in which a leader exchanges favors in return for support from a group of followers.” “…there is constant pressure to repatrimonialize the system.”

Fukuyama and Africa “Most people…would prefer to live in a society in which their government was accountable and effective…few governments are actually able to do both, because institutions are weak, corrupt, lacking capacity, or in some cases absent altogether.” “Tribalism in its various forms remains a default form of political organization, even after a modern state has been created.” Abner Cohen: Ethnicity - “one type of political grouping within the framework of the modern state.” “Getting to Denmark …stable, democratic, peaceful, prosperous, inclusive and…extremely low levels of political corruption.”

France’s ancien régime “…the actual purchase of small pieces of the state, which could then be handed down to descendants.” Government offices …sold to the highest bidder…Government …was privatized down to its core functions and public offices turned into heritable private property. Patrimonial officeholding; venal officeholders; prebendal The rente: selling of public offices to private individuals, entitling office holder to a revenue stream that the officeholder controlled. The paulette: a rente holder could convert his office into heritable property by bequeathing it to his descendants in return for a fee.

France’s ancien régime The system created by the French government was an absolute nightmare. It virtually legitimized and institutionalized rent seeking and corruption by allowing agents to run their public offices for private benefit... If modern public administration is about the observance of a bright line between public and private, then the ancien régime represented a thoroughly premodern system. The French state was thus a curious and unstable combination of modern and patrimonial elements. A market in state offices: bought, exploited, and transferred to heirs: “property rights in public offices”. “Governments felt they had to respect the property rights of traditional elites”.

French Prebendalism “The state sold the right to collect indirect taxes to tax farmers who, in return for guaranteeing the state a certain fixed return, could keep any excess tax revenues for themselves. In addition, the state could simply increase the number of offices for sale, which had the effect of depressing the price of existing offices and thus diluting the property rights of their holders.” “The authority of the state had been built by empowering a broad coalition of rent-seeking elites and entrenching them in tradition and law…A modern France could not arise until venal officeholding was replaced by impersonal, merit-based bureaucracy.”

The Prebendalist Trap “The French fiscal system deliberately encouraged rent seeking. Wealthy individuals, instead of investing their money in productive assets in the private economy, spent their fortunes on heritable offices that could not create but only redistribute wealth…they innovated with regard to new ways of outwitting the state and its tax system.” “The government of the town in France came to be controlled by a small oligarchy who increasingly came to hold their offices through purchase.” “The state resorted to what amounted to a protection racket…since virtually all of the creditors were corrupt in one way or another…”

Beyond Prebendalism: The Bright Line “The French Revolution was able to reestablish a bright line between public and private interest by simply expropriating all of the old venal officeholders’ patrimonies and lopping off the heads of the recalcitrant ones. A new political system in which recruitment into political office was to be based on merit and impersonality – something the Chinese had discovered nearly two millennia earlier – was then brought to the rest of Europe by the man on horseback…The nineteenth-century German bureaucracy that became Max Weber’s model for modern, rational public administration did not evolve out of patrimonial officeholding, but rather styled itself as a conscious break with that tradition.”

Nigeria: State, Society and Economy “..a deeper crisis in the political and economic order…the distinct pattern of competition for access public resources in all sectors of Nigerian society.” “…the self-destructive tendencies of this system must be thoroughly understood if ways can ever be described to escape its debilitating cycle of political renewal and decay.” (“Prebendal Politics”, 1983) FF: “The critical political institution in a Malthusian world was the state because it was the primary route to achieving extensive economic growth.” “…the thorough prebendalizing of the public realm created a state that was incapable of effective macroeconomic management.” Crawford Young (1998)

Nigeria: State, Society and Economy “The vulnerability and fragility of the Nigerian state increased pari passu with the expansion of its economic activities.” “The degree to which individuals and private concerns were able to block, alter, or circumvent state policies to suit their own interests.” By 1978, “a new class of Nigerian entrepreneurs – drone capitalists – had consolidated itself in both the public and the (nominally) private sectors.” “When the state itself becomes the key distributor of financial resources…all governmental projects become the object of intense pressures to convert them into means of individual and group accumulation.” (“Prebendal Politics”, 1983)

The Patrimonial Challenge “Access to the Nigerian state, from the colonial period to the present, has become increasingly central to the social struggle for control of scarce (and occasionally abundant) resources…The emergence of the state as the central focus or vortex of the struggle for advancement at all levels and from all sections of Nigerian society.” “Procedural rules governing the conduct of state business become fig leaves…the avoidance or evasion of formal governmental procedures…the priority, or even decisiveness, of such approaches and their detrimental effect on the functioning of the swollen state apparatus.” (“Prebendal Politics”, 1983)

The Bourgeoisie and the State “a class whose formation, and sustenance, has become closely tied to the privatizing of public resources…” “able to fatten themselves on oil-generate wealth…[blockage]…shifting to really productive activities as long as sufficient wealth can be siphoned off.” “[The bourgeoisie]…has an economic orientation and a set of priorities that render it fundamentally incapable of ruling without squeezing dry the arteries of the state itself.” (“Prebendal Politics”, 1983) “The centrality of the Nigerian state in the distribution of desired goods and services renders it a kind of ‘market’” (Terisa Turner) The need for a vigorous market economy to supplant the state-as-a-market (Goran Hyden)

Conglomerate Society “Ethnic communities complement the former regions and now federal states of Nigeria as informal constituencies of the nation.” “The ways in which the disproportionate access to goods and services are legitimized in Nigerian society. [The]…subtle commingling of individual procurement with communal advancement…” “The pervasive normative expectations…that the struggle for a share of public goods will be conducted and assessed along ethnic and other sectional lines…Such expectations…do not preclude egoistic appropriations by individuals or mutual exchanges among members of the dominant class.” (“Prebendal Politics”, 1983)

Prebendalism and Democracy-Building “The intensity of political conflict in Nigeria…can now be fully understood in terms of prebendal attitudes to governmental office.” “…normative principles of prebendal politics…an individual’s sectional support group should obtain tangible benefits from the latter’s exploitation of his or her public office and…pride will be taken by these sectional clients in the magnificence of the patron’s life-style.” (“Prebendal Politics”, 1983) “It is my concern to analyze these…dynamics, and to see what paths can conceivable lead from them to a more stable, efficient and democratic polity”. Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria(1987)

Prebendalism and Economic Growth “A military-bureaucratic elite during the 1970s was able to act in an authoritative and often unilateral manner to execute policy and institute reforms.” “With the return to competitive party politics after 1978…constraints to the full flowering of prebendal politics were removed.” “…the dominant class elements will not temper their greed to make possible a sufficient downward flow of resources.”(“Prebendal Politics”, 1983) Nigeria 2011 61% of Nigerians (97.6 million) earn less that $1 a day. 10% increase in poverty, 2004-2010. Nigerian National Bureau of Statistics

Prebendalism as a Global Phenomenon? United States Albert J. Stanley, CEO of engineering firm, KBR, pleaded guilty to conspiring to bribe officials in Nigeria in return for $6 billion in business contracts. Siemens, Halliburton, etc. Negotiated fines included in cost of doing business. “As business has gone global, so has graft…The World Bank estimates that $1trillion in bribes is paid annually to government officials. In Africa alone, $148 billion is siphoned off annually…” Leslie Wayne, NY Times, March 11, 2012 “The worldwide proliferation of gray zones – part of the “great success narrative.” Pankaj Mishra, NY Times, February 2, 2012 Gray zones rather than bright lines

Prebendalism as a Global Phenomenon? The United States “The extent to which the legislative process has become hostage to the lobbyists, while politicians increasingly depend for campaign finance on big business. The land of opportunity is thus turning into a land of rent seekers in which business has acquired excessive power and regulators have been captured by those they regulate.” John Plender, FT, 4.16.12 Jack Abramoff: Systematic enticing [suborning] of congressional chiefs of staff. Subsequently, “every move that staffer made, he made with his future in my firm in mind.” Ezra Klein, NYRB, 3.22.12 “A Congress that’s become a forum for legalized bribery.” TomFriedman, NY Times, 4.22.12

Prebendalism as a Global Phenomenon? India“Democratic India finds it extremely difficult to fix its crumbling public infrastructure – roads, airports, water and sewage systems, and the like…” F. Fukuyama Truck drivers pay bribes instead of license fees to use the national highway. Uttar Pradesh and Bihar “lose millions of rupees that could be used for road repairs”. Railway clerks systematically divert rupees collected for railway tickets. Bala Sugavanam, FT, March 13, 2012. Government increases passenger and freight fares to improve decayed railway stock. James Lamont, FT, March 15, 2012 Railway Minister Dinesh Trivedi forced to resign for raising fares. March 18, 2012 Katherine Boo, Beyond the Beautiful Tomorrows (2012): dysfunctional and corrupt governments – “citizens locked into a fantasy.” Pankaj Mishra, NYTimes, 12.2.12

Prebendalism as a Global Phenomenon? RussiaTax rebate scam allegedly cost the Russian Treasury more than $800 million from 2006-2010 Refunds worth $370 million granted by the same tax officials to a string of front companies Rebates shepherded by senior officials in government; FSB, successor to KGB, accused of involvement Death of informant lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in jail Resignation of Sergei Vasilenko, Head of Anti-Corruption Department of the Federal Tax Service, after his investigations blocked. FT, April 13, 2012 Criminalized State and Prebendal Tax Farming

Prebendalism as a Global Phenomenon? China…now confronts rampant corruption, rent-seeking, cronyism, nepotism, injustice, inequalities and social instability.” Lifen Chang, FT, March 16, 2012 The Bo Xilai/Gu Kailai affair: “Corrupt party officials have been secretly using wives, friends, and even mistresses to transfer and conceal ill-gotten wealth overseas.” Ms. Gu’s law firm and consultancy: “serving as a gatekeeper to her husband and his powerful government associates”. Andrew Jacobs, NY Times, April 13, 2012

Prebendalism as a Global Phenomenon? South Africa Limpopo Province: “Dry pipes and powerless plugs…the heavy toll of graft and cronyism…” “graft and wasteful spending have sapped the government’s ability to tackle inequality.” Government contracts to companies run by close associates of politicians. “It is all over the country.”Moeletski Mbeki “Only 3 of 39 governments departments were pronounced clean in audits …Only 7 of 237 cities passed muster…” “…regional politicians use their offices to enrich their friends, forming a coterie of wealthy clients.” “politicians by day, businessmen by night.” Lydia Polgreen, NY Times, February 19, 2012

All Africa Ghana and Nigeria Police officers and custom officials “whose income depends on extracting petty bribes and a politician whose primary concern is channeling state funds to his patronage network”. Lionel Barber, FT , April 14-15, 2012 Uganda: Six government ministers forced to resign after investigations of graft. NY Times, February 17, 2012 Angola: “An Angolan elite, centered on the presidency, has amassed private fortunes.” FT, April 7-8, 2012 “Three of the most powerful officials…have held concealed interests in an oil venture with Cobalt International Energy, the Goldman Sachs backed explorer.” FT, April 15, 2012

The Bright Bottom Line “In the mid-2000s,Wal-Mart de Mexico was the company’s brightest success story.” • Systematic bribery campaign to win market dominance • Bribes paid to obtain permits throughout Mexico • Wal-Mart investigators unearth evidence of widespread bribery • Wal-Mart de Mexico concealed payment documents • Likely violations of Mexican and US laws • Wal-Mart shuts down investigation Special Report, NY Times, April 22, 2012

The Nigerian Predicament Feckless Democracy -> Effective Democracy [T. Carothers; R. Inglehart & C. Welzel] • Soaring Population Growth • Deeply Deficient Infrastructure • Woeful Education, Health, Nutrition • Economic Expansion + Poverty Increase • Crime, Insecurity, Terrorism • Mega-Corruption + Tollgate Corruption • Plutocracy + Mass Deprivation • Dynamic + Venal Leaders • Conglomerate Electoral Politics

A Prebendal Republic “A democracy that works”, Ch 2, Democracy and Prebendal Politics “We need to know the conditions under which democratic institutions work and endure. By ‘work,’ I mean that they achieve such widely desired effects as economic growth, material security, freedom from arbitrary violence, and so on.” Adam Przeworski (1993) “The Nigerian federal system operates almost exclusively as a mechanism for the intergovernmental distribution and ethno-political appropriation of centrally collected oil-revenues.” Rotimi Suberu (2012) Oil Bunkering/Political Bunkering: Tap into an artery of the state and sunction revenues. When it dries up, find another artery

Closer to Denmark? “Getting to Denmark …stable, democratic, peaceful, prosperous, inclusive and…extremely low levels of political corruption.” “Most people…would prefer to live in a society in which their government was accountable and effective…few governments are actually able to do both, because institutions are weak, corrupt, lacking capacity, or in some cases absent altogether.” F. Fukuyama Nigeria 2025 Project Nigerian Model: designing accountable and effective government: Lagos State after 1999 Central Challenge: From Prebendal to Inclusive and Effective Democratic Governance

Nigeria 2025 Project I. Civic and Communal Associations, Corporations, NGOs, Faith Groups II. Local Governments, States, Sub-National Zones, Confederation III. Qualitative Education IV. Strategic Partnerships and Out-Sourcing V. Engaging the Diaspora VI. Ethical Leadership & Followership

Nigeria 2025 ProjectCollaborative Learning and Action • Nigeria after Military Rule: 1999-2025 • Midway: 26-year Marathon • Amalgamation,1914-2014 • April 2015 Elections and Beyond • The Northern Schism and Terrorism • South-South Learning: Brazil-India-Nigeria-Indonesia • What tried? What worked? What failed? What next? • Innovations and Communications Technologies

Beyond Prebendalist Systems