Baba Galleh Jallow 
 

Beyond Neocolonialism: Alternative Approaches to Understanding Africa's Underdevelopment 

Claude Ake, a prominent African scholar, makes the interesting proposition that Africa's problem is not so much that development has failed on the continent as that it was never really on the agenda. In other words, Ake is arguing that neither the colonial powers nor the post-colonial African governments have ever really been concerned with developing the continent but rather with the accumulation of power and material benefits. At first glance, Ake's claim would sound rather odd, considering the fact that development is literally the catch phrase of all African governments as well as virtually all major actors in the international community such as the United Nations system, the World Bank and the IMF. But however odd it sounds, Ake makes a valid and profound point that should serve as a wake-up call for those of us who are struggling to make sense of the mess that is today's Africa. 

Baba Galleh Jallow far left with conference
participants

But first, let us reflect on the two key words in our topic tonight: neocolonialism and underdevelopment. The concept of the neocolony derives from the argument by some Africanist scholars, mostly of Marxist persuasion, that the post-colonial state in Africa is really not independent because its economy remains organically tied to the economies of its former colonizers and its political institutions are not indigenous to the continent but modeled on those of its former colonizers. That Africa is economically dependent for its survival on European states and institutions is common knowledge. African products are sold on the world market, its crude oil and other raw materials are exported to the West and western finished products are imported into the continent in vast quantities. Trade aside, all African countries are now heavily indebted to western financial institutions such as the IMF and World Bank. Basically, what neocolonialism means is that Africa is only partially independent because it remains economically dependent and there cannot be any political independence without economic independence. Also, neocolonialism presupposes that vestiges of the colonial state still remain ingrained in post-colonial state structures and social institutions such as education.  

The concept of underdevelopment also has a lot to do with the West. Underdevelopment is a comparative term that automatically suggests the existence of a yardstick of measurement. If Africa is underdeveloped, its underdevelopment must be measured against someone else's level of development. That someone else is Western Europe. The underlying assumption here is that Africa should strive to become as developed as Western Europe. It is interesting to note that what constitutes being developed is determined not by Africa, but by Western Europe. For Western Europe, being developed means being industrialized, having stable political institutions, strong economies, effective health and other public services, good road networks and utility services, and being a well managed consumer society, among other things. According to development or modernization theory, in order to be considered developed, Gambia for instance, must become like America. Indeed, so improbable is such an eventuality that it was considered logical to stop talking in terms of first, second and third worlds and talk instead of developing countries, or the south, when referring to Africa and other underdeveloped countries of the world.  

There are other aspects of neocolonialism that have been impediments to the development of Africa. One of them is the colonial boundary. These were drawn up with absolutely no regard for the indigenous populations or other demographic factors. In the process of haphazardly slicing up the continent among themselves, the European powers not only created mini entities like The Gambia or sprawling wastelands like the Sudan, but also lumped disparate populations within or on different sides of the border. A cursory glance at countries like The Gambia and Senegal, Mali and Burkina Faso, Rwanda and Burundi among other places, reveals the effects of the social mutilation that Africa suffered from colonialism. The logical thing to do after independence would have been for the new rulers to wield the continent together to create viable political entities. But of course, our new rulers wanted to be kings in their own fragments and so while they purported to have created the Organization of African Unity to help unite the continent, they laid the organization's foundation on the principle of sovereignty and territorial integrity, thus effectively ruling out the possibility for unity.  

Having briefly examined the concepts of neocolonialism and underdevelopment, let us now backtrack a little and examine colonialism itself. At this point, we need to keep in mind that we are dealing with two distinct entities here: The state, meaning the government, and the people, who constitute the nation.  

Europeans scrambled for and partitioned Africa after the Berlin conference of 1884 not because they loved Africa, or wanted to civilize Africans as they claimed, or to develop Africa, but because they wanted to exploit the labor and resources of the continent to feed their industries and develop their economies. Having colonized Africa, the Europeans needed to provide a framework of stable political control in order to guarantee the conditions necessary for the extraction and accumulation of African resources. It was with this aim in mind that the colonial state was created. The roads and infrastructure they built were designed to facilitate the exploitation, storage and transportation of extracted resources. The schools they built were designed to provide clerks for the colonial bureaucracy. Thus, as far as the colonial state was concerned – to revisit Ake's proposition – development was never on the agenda. The colonial state was totally based on the calculus of power and profit. So, we can argue, is the post-colonial state.  

After colonialism came independence. The exponents of the theory of neocolonialism argue that what we now refer to as independence was nothing more than a tactical withdrawal by the colonial powers. Apart from the wars of liberation fought in Algeria and the Portuguese countries, self-rule in Africa was negotiated around the table. The colonial powers, according to this school of thought, realized that after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the aftermath of the Second World War, and after the example set by Indian and Pakistani independence in 1947, there was no way they could hold directly on to their colonies in Africa. So the British policy of Indirect Rule was sort of extended. Originally, the colonial state ruled the protectorate through the local chiefs. Now, Britain was going to rule both colony and protectorate through the new local, western educated chiefs – the nationalist agitators, whom the British scornfully called apes in trousers. The tactical withdrawal was more organized in the French territories. In 1958, France organized a referendum offering its colonies two options: One, internal self-rule with close ties with France – A Franco-African community in which France would continue to support the CFA Franc and the economies of its former colonies and two, a clean break with France. All but one African colony voted yes to the French proposals. Sekou Toure's Guinea voted no. Guinea was stripped of all French support. The others were granted independence en masse in 1960. While no such arrangement was offered by the British, they made sure that close ties remained between London and the former colonies through the Commonwealth of Nations whose head is the British Queen.  

Another school of thought describes independence as "deradicalization through accommodation." In other words, those African nationalists who sought independence were sufficiently softened up and turned into great sons of the British Empire or La Francophonie, as the case might be before they were sworn in as leaders of their countries. This process of deradicalization by accommodation is graphically demonstrated in the knighting of some of the new African heads of state. We can think of Sir Dawda Jawara, Sir Milton Margai and other Sirs across the former British Empire. Modibo Keita of Mali and Houphouet Boigny of the Ivory Coast held French ministerial positions before becoming rulers of their own countries.  

Our so-called independence aside, African countries had to deal with the ugly realities of superpower rivalry during the cold war into which they were born. After defeating the Axis powers - Germany, Japan and Italy in the Second World War, two of the former allies – the United States and the Soviet Union - emerged as superpowers, each espousing an ideology that proclaimed its intention to dominate the world by any means necessary. Moscow and Washington did everything in their power, regardless of the consequences, to keep each other outside their spheres of influence through their policies of global containment. In Africa, this superpower rivalry translated into unconditional support for all manner of rulers from Mobutu to Samuel Doe to Mengistu Haile Mariam of Ethiopia. So long as the ruler declared his support for Capitalism or Communism, they were given everything they needed to stay in power and muzzle dissent in their countries. Monsters like Mobutu and Samuel Doe, who professed support for America, were given millions of dollars as well as arms and ammunition with which they oppressed and killed their own people. By the time Mobutu was removed from power, he was one of the five richest men in the world while his country was one of the five poorest countries in the world. Both Mobutu and Doe were invited to the White House to meet with the leader of the world's greatest democracy. So in effect, the cold war did irreparable damage to Africans by turning a blind eye to the despotic activities of such criminal rulers as Mobutu and Samuel Doe. On the other hand, the Soviet Union turned a blind eye to Mengistu's red terror in Ethiopia. The cold war also claimed the lives of Africa's most enlightened leaders – Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana and Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso, among others.  

Then there was the pumping of debts into Africa – the so-called debt trap – and the eventual imposition of structural adjustment programs on African countries. While African rulers took hundreds of millions of dollars in debt money in the name of development, they stashed these millions away in Swiss bank and other foreign accounts for their own personal use. When donor fatigue set in, the IMF and World Bank stepped in with structural adjustment programs that further squeezed the life out of Africa's ordinary people. To qualify for external aid under the SAPs, African governments had to do several things such as devalue their currencies, remove government subsidies from public services such as health and education, which were already in short supply, and cut the size of their civil services, which meant retrenching thousands of poor hapless workers whose sole means of survival with their families was their job. The net result of SAPs was increased poverty and hardship for Africans and a further marginalization of the continent from the center of world development activities. Meanwhile, our rulers grew wealthier by the minute to the extent that one of them could publicly declare on national radio and television that he would never be poor, his children would never be poor and his children's children would never be poor. His country, meanwhile, lies at the bottom of the world's poverty ladder.  

Transposed over these impediments to our development are the realities of the "overdeveloped" state and the shadow state. 

As we have seen, the colonial powers were only interested in the exploitation of Africa's resources. In order to do this, they needed to put in place an institutional framework that would ensure law and order. Thus, they set up a colonial police force, a colonial court system and a bureaucracy designed to help achieve the aims of the colonial power. In short, they created a colonial state based entirely on power. They did nothing to develop the people of the colonies. Thus after independence, there was a state but no nation.

So nation-building was not part of the colonial lexicon. 

A cursory glance at Western Europe and the United States shows us that it is the people who built the states. A state should not build a nation. It is a nation that must build a state. Americans migrated to the New World from other parts of the world. They settled here and built states based on certain liberal traditions. They made sure that their elected representatives would be accountable to them and will not be able to abuse or overstep their powers. They realized that human beings are by nature selfish and power hungry. That if checks and balances are not put in place to check people's propensity to abuse their powers, they will abuse their powers. Africans had the peculiar misfortune of having a state system imposed upon them. They had no say in the design of the colonial structures and institutions that ruled their lives. At the time of independence, the institutional mechanisms – ideological and otherwise - necessary to subject state power to constitutional constraints and accountability did not exist. The responsibility to create such mechanisms unfortunately fell to the new rulers who had little interest in being accountable or responsible to their peoples. Even where such institutions were put in place, they were eventually removed. A typical example is the now common practice of changing constitutions to allow incumbents to seek indefinite re-election.  

Having received their powers from the West, the new rulers also derived their legitimacy from the west. They saw little need to be accountable to their own people because these were powerless to do anything about it. When the ideology of nationalism became redundant following independence, the new rulers adopted the ideology of development as espoused by the former colonial powers. They sang every tune the West sang and danced every dance the west danced. They proclaimed their resolve to "catch up with the west." Development in Africa became synonymous with development according to European standards. But while they parroted and continue to parrot the ideology of development and the need for development, African rulers continue to miserably fail to transform the idea of development into a program for societal transformation. After building a few miles of road, some hospitals without trained doctors or medicines, schools without furniture, books or teachers, and some other white elephant projects, African rulers loudly proclaim that their countries have seen great development during their misrule. In The Gambia, Mr. Jammeh is so excited and tickled with the sweetness of power that he recently declared that The Gambia is now a superpower. Of course, Mr. Jammeh has not the faintest idea of what development means, that development is not synonymous to building infrastructure. That development should, first and foremost, be concerned with developing the people of the nation, creating a national mastermind by harnessing the brain power of the nation and channeling it toward the charting of novel forms of social advancement, day in and day out. It is only the combined mental and physical powers of the people that can build a nation. But in Africa, the mental powers of the people are crippled, their creativity is denied expression, and everyone is forced to live a big white lie, to testify that the Emperor's new clothes are the best in the world while the emperor has no clothes and is strutting naked in the streets. Whoever dares to proclaim what they see with their naked eyes is immediately silenced in the name of national security.  

Tragically, African rulers have no idea what national security is either. As far as they are concerned, national security simply means regime security; and to ensure this militaristic brand of security, they spend huge amounts of national resources in building up military, paramilitary, regular and secret police forces to terrorize their own populations. National security means that people should enjoy a certain level of food security, job security, income security, health security, judicial security, political security, particularly the right to freely participate in the national discourse and politics of your country, to criticize and offer your opinions on issues of national significance. National security cannot be confined to militaristic concerns. It has to be security with a human face.  

The "overdeveloped" and all-powerful state aside, another reality we need to deal with is that of the shadow state, also called the criminal state, which is the most common variety in Africa today. The concept of the shadow state derives from the observation that people in power in Africa normally by-pass formal state structures and build parallel channels of power through a network of loyalists and psychopants that would cater entirely to the security of the regime, or the ruler. Where we have a shadow state, the cabinet, the legislature, the judiciary and other formal state structures and institutions become redundant. The shadow state does not care about the rule of law. Such concepts as the separation of powers or the independence of the judiciary are thrown to the dogs. The ruler creates a secret police unit like the NIA directly controlled by him and whose loyalty lies entirely with him. He bypasses legal and legislative processes and runs the country through his informal network of cronies and informal channels of power and coercion. The shadow state informalizes the government and turns it into the private property of the ruler. The chief concern of the shadow state is not national service, but the enhancement of material flows into the greedy pockets of the ruler and his criminal network of cronies, and the preservation of that malignant system of exploitation for as long as possible. Once it emerges, the shadow state insitutites the politics of violence and the economy of violence. Like the colonial state, it seeks to deradicalize its critics through accommodation, and when it fails to deradicalize anyone, it simply seeks to eliminate or silence that person. Recent African history is replete with examples of such deradicalization and elimination.  

Certainly, no discussion of the causes of Africa's underdevelopment will be complete without at least a passing mention of the military. More than any other group, the military has been responsible for the worst atrocities against the African people and have been among the most corrupt on the continent. Think of the most corrupt and most brutal rulers in Africa over the past forty years and you will come up with the names of soldiers: Mobutu, Samuel Doe, Bokassa, Sani Abacha, Musa Traore, Eyadema, Yahya Jammeh. With very few exceptions like Sankara, Tumani Ture and Mohammed Vall of Mauritania, all those self-proclaimed messiahs of peace and deliverance who seized power through the barrel of the gun turned out to be monsters and virtual criminals in power. It is interesting to note that in many cases, military coups have just formalized civilian banditry and looting of the state coffers. The military in power proved more vicious because unlike the civilians they removed, they actually had direct control of the guns and tanks and could easily and directly employ them in inflicting terror on the civilian population.  

What we have in The Gambia today is a combination of all of the above. An overdeveloped power-crazed neocolonial state in the grips of a pseudo-military regime that functions through informal channels as a malignant shadow state. There is absolutely no respect for the separation of powers, the independence of the judiciary or the rule of law in The Gambia today. The professionalism of the civil service and the most basic rights of the ordinary people of The Gambia are treated with utmost contempt b y the shadow state. Such contempt for the Gambian nation is manifest in the countless unexplained sackings of government ministers, the killings of government critics like Deyda Hydara in December 2004 and innocent school children in April 2001, the arson attacks on independent media houses, the forcible and unexplained closure of The Independent newspaper, the arbitrary arrests and long incarceration of Gambians without charges and the many other unlawful activities of Yahya Jammeh and his thugs and cronies.  

Well, we cannot hope for any changes if Yahya Jammeh is re-elected because he has neither the political will nor the know-how to effect the desired changes. A victory for Mr. Jammeh will be a vote for the continuation of the shadow state and its nefarious activities. Mr. Jammeh has long declared that he will stay in power for the next thirty years. Making such a pronouncement indicates that as far as Mr. Jammeh is concerned, the elections of 2006 are merely an exercise in formal futility.  

Finally, I wish to argue that contrary to the contention of neocolonial theorists, the national question in Africa today is less subject to imperialist interests, but to the personal interests of the shadow ruler and his shadowy interests pursued through the agency of the shadow state. Europe and America have virtually no interests in most parts of Africa today, with the exception of oil and other resources. True, Africa is still tied to the economy of the west. But that is a reality we have to live with and learn to deal with as intelligently as possible. Of more urgent concern today is the problem of the shadow state, which is irresponsible, malignant, unaccountable, and supremely contemptuous of the people, who are the real custodians of power in any country.  

If Africa must develop, the task of nation-building must start from below. Trying to build a nation from above is like trying to build a house from above. To develop Africa, we must either develop our people or allow them to develop themselves and take their destinies into their own hands. Africans must retrieve their powers from the clutches of the criminals hiding behind the shadow state, and build a state that is accountable to them and that will cater to their most basic needs. If this happens, the world will be forced to revisit the concept of underdevelopment because alternative models of development will emerge and claim their rightful place in the development lexicon.