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One of the reasons that democracy is valued is that, by empowering all citizens to have a say in the running of the country, it is expected to ensure that economic and political opportunities are more broadly shared.
Democracy and Why it Matters
For Alexis de Tocqueville, one of the most influential students of what during his time
was a relatively young political phenomena, the multiple problems of democracy were justified on the
basis that it would improve the condition of the worst off.
Yet in reality democratic political systems have not always delivered on this central promise. In some established democracies with developed economies, such as the United Kingdom and the United States, “one-person-one-vote” has gone hand in hand with rising economic inequality.
One of the important consequences of this trend is that the ideal of political equality has effectively been compromised, as poorer citizens struggle to secure the resources needed to compete for political office.
In the younger democratic systems of sub-Saharan Africa, democracy has been shown to generate
developmental gains as compared to authoritarianism, but these have tended to be far less
impressive than many hoped when the vast majority of the continent’s one-party states and military
regimes were replaced with multiparty politics in the 1990s.
In the decade following 1989, almost every country on the continent with the notable exceptions of Eritrea and Swaziland, moved to hold elections of some kind to select the government.
Yet although poverty has fallen in a number of states, this has been a slow process and for the most part has gone hand-in-hand with the expansion of a super elite that has gotten richer at a far quicker rate than the worst off have become less poor.
Partly as a result, countries such as Benin, Chad, and Malawi are still located in the “low human
development” category of the United Nations Human Development Index, almost thirty years after
multiparty elections were reintroduced.
A number of reasons have been put forward for this disappointing performance. First, many countries
have yet to overcome problematic colonial inheritances, which bequeathed economies and infrastructures set up to expropriate natural resources rather than to do the kind of manufacturing work that adds value and hence creates more highly skilled and better paid jobs.
Second, for a long time the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank promoted economic adjustment policies that sought to make African economies more sustainable by cutting government spending, which had
a negative impact on government investment on the healthcare and education systems that the poor
rely upon.
Relatedly, the economic models adopted by many governments approximate, whether intentionally or otherwise, the kind of neo-liberal policies that are typically justified on the basis that wealth “trickles” down to the worst off, when in reality this typically fails to happen.
Finally, the international economic system continues to be governed in ways that advantage already wealthy and
industrialised countries, compounding the other challenges faced by African countries.
In other words, the political systems introduced in the early 1990s have not been run according to democratic principles – for example, they often lack fully independent judiciaries and electoral commissions, and feature a civil service that is run on the basis of clientelism and favouritism rather than meritocracy.
This has often been described in terms of the problem that corruption poses to effective government,10 and it is clear that grand corruption and graft takes vital resources away from the state while undermining the provision of essential public services. In reality, however, corruption is a symptom, rather than the cause, of the problems facing many African democracies today.
The authors represented in this report argue that the real challenge is both broader and more
worrying than corruption – as damaging as it is – namely the capture of democracy itself by a small
number of political actors who use their influence over key democratic institutions to further their
own interests at the expense of those of the public.
As Professor E. Gyimah-Boadi puts it in his theoretical overview (Chapter 2 of this volume), “Democracy Capture occurs when a few individuals or section of a supposedly democratic polity are able to systematically appropriate to themselves the institutions and processes as well as dividends of democratic governance”.
This report is comprised of a conceptual framing of the nature and importance of “Democracy
Capture” and a series of case studies that investigate the extent and impact of Democracy Capture in
five very different states: Benin, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique and Nigeria.
Each chapter was written by a country expert on the basis of cross-referencing available documentation including media reports, grey literature, academic analysis and their own past studies on related topics. In some cases, authors supplemented this with selected interviews in order to ensure that findings were robust.
One important theme that comes out from many of the chapters is that Democracy Capture is particularly
difficult to study, both because its activities often take place in the shadows and are hidden from
public view, and also because the key players – the “captors”, we might say – are often able to censor
the media and so it can be difficult to prove accusations of corruption, criminality and clientelism.
Despite these challenges, all five reports also identify disturbing and anti-democratic practices that risk hollowing out democracy so that it serves as a political mirage that legitimises the monopolization of economic opportunities by a small elite (defined in greater detail below) at the expense of the public.
Although the extent and nature of Democracy Capture varies from case to case, in none of the five cases does the author conclude that it is not a significant concern.
The reports therefore call for far greater attention to the challenge of Democracy Capture, including a greater investment of resources into mapping and researching how it occurs, and propose a range of political and legal steps that can be implemented in order to resist it.
The common theme running through all of the analysis contained in these pages is that every month that goes by without concrete and concerted resistance facilitates greater Democracy Capture, which in turn makes it even more difficult to ensure that the political system, broadly understood, works in the interests of all citizens.
In order to put the chapters that follow into context, and to draw out some comparative lessons, this introduction briefly sets out how the authors understand and conceptualise Democracy Capture, what the five cases have in common and how they differ, and concludes by highlighting some of the key findings and recommendations.
Why “Democracy Capture”
A number of different terms have been used to characterise the struggles that African countries have had in establishing effective democracies that work for ordinary citizens.
Academics have long written about the challenge of neo-patrimonialism, which is often argued to have been the dominant form of politics on the continent since independence.
In most formulations, ‘the term “neopatrimonialism” is intended to signify that, following the imposition of the colonial state, African political systems can no longer be treated as purely traditional.
The reason for this is that patrimonial modes of conducting politics were grafted on to the trappings of the modern state, including political parties, legislatures, and judiciaries. In the process, both patrimonial and formal institutional structures were transformed.
The consequences of this are said to be profound: “On the one hand, institutions such as legislatures did not perform as expected because they conformed to a patrimonial, rather than a rational-legal, logic.
On the other hand, the fusion of traditional forms of authority with the centralised political structures of colonial rule often served to empower the position of traditional leaders, or chiefs, over their communities.’12 Variations on this theme include Richard Joseph’s discussion of ‘prebendalism’ in Nigeria,13 Jean-François Bayart’s analysis of the ‘politics of the belly’,14 and analysis of the ‘it’s our turn to eat’ phenomena in Kenya.
Other approaches to the poor performance of political institutions in Africa have focussed more on the takeover and subversion of political systems. In the late 1990s, there was a spate of interest in the ‘criminalization’ of the state,16 and the way in which political elites can manipulate disorder as a political instrument to entrench their authority.
More recently, a number of studies of the way in which the South African government was subverted to private interests under the presidency of Jacob Zuma have described a process that has become popularly known as “State Capture”.
In particular, this body of research has focussed on how a ‘power elite’ – a ‘well-structured network of people
located in government, state institutions, state-owned enterprises (SOEs), private businesses, security
agencies, traditional leaders, family networks and the governing party’ – has gained control of the
formal apparatus of the state and used it for its own ends.
According to Ivor Chipkin and Mark Swilling, these actors are distinguished by their privileged ‘access (either consistently or intermittently) to the inner sanctum of power in order to make decisions’.
The members of such networks are able to subvert the state for their own ends because they enjoy ‘high-level protection’, including ‘from law enforcement agencies; intense loyalty to one another; a climate of fear; and the elimination of competitors’.
The use of the term Democracy Capture is not intended to suggest that these existing approaches are
necessarily incorrect or unhelpful, but rather to draw them together under a common framework
through which to understand their impact on democracy in particular.
In other words, Democracy Capture refers to the way in which interconnected processes of clientelism, neo-patrimonialism, the personalization of politics and state capture impact on the democratic process – and highlights how the image of democracy is used to legitimate this process.
On this understanding, a country can be said to have experienced Democracy Capture when: The political context may be formally democratic, but public policies are still largely developed to favour elite interests – by manipulating democratic institutions and processes, and through practices such as payment of illicit contributions by private interests to political parties and for election campaigns, parliamentary vote-buying,
buying of presidential decrees or court decisions, as well as through illegitimate lobbying and
revolving-door public appointments (Gyimah-Boadi, Chapter 2 of this volume).
Click here for full report: file:///C:/Users/HP/Downloads/Democracy%20Capture%20Report.pdf
