The Case For Building African Nation States On Village Self-Governments

Dr Michael Njume Ebong*

There is enough evidence to suggest that the nation state model inherited at independence is in crisis in much of the continent. With very few exceptions African governments since independence have been unable to deliver the benefits of sovereign statehood to their populations. Poverty rates have hardly improved over the past half century. Corruption remains endemic, impeding use of the region’s vast natural resources to achieve the economic development promises that accompanied the struggle for independence. As a result, African youth and talent are emigrating in desperate waves to seek better pastures out of Africa. The performance scorecard remains dismal overall.

It is of course true that crisis states are to be found also on other continents. It is also a fact that African states, while sharing some common characteristics, also differ on several dimensions. For example, they can be placed on a spectrum of successful democratic governance and effective economic stewardship ranging from South Africa at one extreme to Somalia at the other. 

Nonetheless, even while allowing for such polar extremes, there is little doubt that a good many African states, even those not currently and visibly wracked by armed conflicts, are at pains to achieve national cohesion and build effective state institutions for the delivery of basic public goods and services normally expected of a sovereign state, such as peace and security, law and order, incorruptible justice system, and economic prosperity – comparable  to some successful state building achievements elsewhere, such as China or South Korea.

Given the region’s complex history and relatively short time span for nation building – it took  centuries of bloody struggle for many European states to attain maturity - it is not surprising that Africans are yet to succeeded in creating vigorous states that do not need to be sustained by life-support drips of foreign aid and United Nations peace missions.

While the international community has offered a cocktail of remedies for the region’s complex crises, from the institution of multi-party democracies to respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, the pivotal question that has not yet been asked and answered by Africans themselves is why and how in the past Africa developed viable indigenous self-governing polities, but find it exceedingly difficult today to manage the modern state system in ways that respond to the development aspirations of the African populace.

To underscore the relevance of that question, it should be recalled that Africa’s pre-colonial political map consisted of numerous state systems, such as empires, kingdoms and chiefdoms, which developed indigenously and in some cases prospered for centuries without foreign political and economic assistance. Some of these supra-village state systems continue to exist to this day in parts of the continent. The Ashanti, Bamoun, Swazi, or Zulu kingdoms are notable but not the only examples. Itt is important to note, however,  that whatever the over-arching polity, whether empire or kingdom, effective day-to-day governance in pre-colonial Africa was at the grassroots, village-clan level, so much so that the region’s endogenous political map was that of a horizontal configuration of loosely inter-connected village-clan self-governments. And while most of the empires and kingdoms have either crumbled or lost their institutional relevance within the modern states, the village-clan grassroots self-governments have continued to thrive in one form or another, even in circumstances of government neglect such as in Cameroon.

Because Africa’s indigenous state-formation process was broken by the European carve-up of the continent in the 19^th century, and since European occupation had relatively limited destructive impact on the region’s resilient traditional society, the village community or clan unit retained most of the original hallmarks of an autonomous African governance system - a self-contained, coherent, and enduring societal and political unit, glued internally by the bonds of kinship and organic economic solidarity, a common cultural and communicative system of languages, a collective sense of purpose, justice, and public ethics. These fundamentally distinctive African societal values – which ought to have formed the social foundation cells and cultural life-blood of our modern nation states, are today slipping into oblivion precisely because the continuum has not been rebuilt (or is still to be rebuilt) between pre-colonial and post-colonial Africa.

The question then is how to rebuild what colonial history destroyed; how to recover Africa’s ancestral spirit and worldview without forsaking the obvious benefits to mankind of scientific and technological progress; how to deepen Africa’s footprint in the march of human history. Moreover, a uniquely African modern state model rooted in the region’s pre-existing traditional political institutions would best serve Africa by giving to all ethnic communities, as in the distant past, the same level playing field in the political and economic development process or equitable participation in nation building.

For all practical intents and purposes, therefore, the village kinship polity remains Africa’s core “nation state” since its basic attributes are the same usually identified with sovereign states, albeit on a different scale. As such, the search for solutions to Africa’s current development predicament should start from the centuries-old village polities, which continue to embody Africa’s true original essence despite the traumatic shocks of history, as opposed to present-day aping of European institutions and mores and seeming loss of strategic direction. The fact that many elements of Africa’s original governance system are still operative today in numerous village communities across the continent is testimony to their enduring vigour and relevance to Africa’s current challenges. We should therefore be interrogating our history and villages to find the clue as to how to build and operate effective states with a distinctive African identity. This grassroots village foundation, which thankfully survived the colonial depredation of Africa’s traditional identity, should accordingly form the fulcrum for the modern state.

For various unknown reasons, the leaders of Africa’s decolonization struggle, unlike the architects of America’s independence from Britain for example, failed to draw inspiration from Africa’s pre-existing history and institutions in developing post-independence constitutional and modernization models. The leaders were consumed by continental macro issues, such as the Pan-Africanist movement, which basically sought to decolonize the continent and erect a United States of Africa. These were laudable goals that ultimately resulted in the creation of the Organization of African Unity, subsequently renamed the African Union we know today. But surprising as it may sound, this institutional growth of the Pan-Africanist movement must, by hindsight, be considered a failure from the standpoint of the development expectations of the African population.

Firstly, the colonial legacies of the region were deemed sacrosanct from reform of whatever type, a typical example being the colonial boundaries that artificially chopped up the continent into numerous unviable “independent nation states”, some of which are now collapsing helplessly before our eyes.

Secondly, and with the exception of Swahili in East Africa, the failure to develop a transnational African language to underpin the Pan-Africanist goal of a re-unified Africa, and replace the colonial languages which now foil at every turn the socio-economic integration of the region, must be considered an intellectual defeat for Africa’s political élite.

Thirdly, while the regional and sub-regional political organizations have been a positive development in building intra-African cooperation in various realms, they are yet to become intellectual powerhouses where politicians, business captains, scientists, opinion makers, and civil society groups debate Africa’s future and chart farsighted development pathways.

Fourthly, these supranational political organizations, like the national governments they comprise, have by and large collectively marginalized the region’s village knowledge systems, including traditional political institutions and processes, economic and social safety nets, conflict resolution mechanisms, or justice administration, which ruled in much of pre-colonial Africa. More fundamentally, Africa’s post-independence states have failed to deliver on the powerful promise of economic prosperity for Africans that justified and accompanied the region’s independence movements at the onset.

These failures originate for the most part from the fact that hardly any modernization project founded on Africa’s history, cultural and ethnic realities was conceived as part of the post-independence development strategies. Since the African village was the complete embodiment of the “primitive” culture that colonial powers sought to replace with European values and outlook in order to maintain Africa economically chained, Africans committed the original sin of believing that their only route to modernity had to bypass the village or that the village could be modernized from above using the left-over colonial apparatus that had operated precisely as a sword against the village. Not surprisingly, our modern states exhibit little institutional or economic innovation informed by our traditional heritage, which however continues to co-exist with the “modern state” as uncomfortable bedfellows. Both seem to be engaged in a form of subterranean competition for visibility, legitimacy, and supremacy: indigenous languages versus European languages; traditional healers versus modern physicians; village chiefs versus district officers; customary law versus modern justice system; traditional thrift societies versus modern banking sector; African open markets versus supermarkets; etc.   

As practised thus far in Africa, nation-building has simply meant sidelining and muzzling Africa’s traditional heritage outlined above while concentrating on operating and expanding the anti-village and urban-centred colonial state apparatus and value system. Independence and modernization were wrongly construed to mean Africa’s leap from “the village of primitive darkness” to join the civilized world. That probably explains why this elite set about to build “nation states” that remain to this day, exactly as in colonial times, abnormally city-biased and unhinged from  the village heartland where the majority of the population still resides but where the benefits of sovereign statehood are still awaited after over 50 years of independence.

This anomalous disconnect between contemporary African governments and the majority village population in political, cultural, social and economic terms, is the root cause of Africa’s institutional identity crisis at the root of current development failures, as visible in the region’s long record of political fragility or poor management of national weal and sovereignty. Africans would therefore be best advised to go back to the drawing board, and  start all over again to design a bottom-up charter for nation building that resembles a cobweb arrangement of village self-governments glued together at upper levels by a solid democratic  pact and trans-village institutions of the highest probity.

Can we do it? Ask the Swiss who for six centuries (13^th to 19^th) patiently built their constitutional arrangements on the model described herein. Also ask the United States of America, built for almost two centuries (from 16^th to 18^th) in a bottom-up political  development process before its 1776 Declaration of Independence from Britain. Another approach to the same ends would be a thorough political, administrative and fiscal system of decentralization, not ordained autocratically from above but democratically willed and pulled from below by the citizenry. The village-centric system proposed should, among other benefits, considerably diffuse political, administrative and financial authority and resources and consequently facilitate the delivery of goods and services nation-wide. It is not yet too late to create a uniquely African civilization of colourful villages that are culturally vibrant, economically prosperous, and environmentally friendly.

One last question: if we cannot rebuild and modernize our small and simple villages sacredly bequeathed to us by our forbears, how could we successfully build the comparatively more complex state models of European hardware and software? The answer is we cannot. That is why these foreign state models are failing us in almost all development realms.  So let’s  return to our roots and start building and modernizing from our village traditional base.

*Dr Michael Njume Ebong, Board Chairman of Chede Cooperative Union. Email: michael@chede.org