Understanding Why so Many, Many False Starts in Sub-Saharan Africa...
An unsuccessful piece, in which I largely fail in my attempt to meditate on what might possibly be done to create a better future for Cameroon…
Is there a path to some future process that could change Cameroon’s government to one like Denmark’s—or even just Singapore’s? And so produce not only the blessings of liberty but the accompanying prosperity of modern economic growth?
The ninety year-old President Paul Barthélemy Biya’a bi Mvondo has been in power since 1975, and was back in 2006 named—along with three other sub-Saharan African rulers—one of the world’s twenty worst living dictators by David Wallechinsky:
Timothy Burke: The News: Starting From Scratch: ‘Two Swarthmore students organized… “Africa Is Rising”…. [One of] the… speakers… really got my attention: Kah Walla, a Cameroonian… insisted that Cameroonians needed to imagine, plan for and even count on a political transition from the malfunctioning political order that was imposed on Cameroon during decolonization to a responsive and consultative state and a political system that serves its people rather than victimizes them…. Preparation, as Walla saw it, should include some form of ground-level conversation between Cameroonians in their home communities about what exactly they want from government, about what they think politics ought to be like….
Political visionaries… are driven nearly mad by the dysfunctionality of the states they endure. They can see designs which plainly should be better, and which in many cases, actually exist…. You do not have to pine for a millennarian vision…. You can just wish for social democratic administrative and institutional norms on the model of the Scandinavian states… or, to be honest, you could just wish for an authoritarianism that actually works on the model of Singapore…. [But] even… that more modest imagination of a re-imagined state… may have little to do with what most people in a given territory think about politics, authority, or government. That might be why those states work fairly well in Scandinavian nations: because they align with how the population by and large thinks about government and politics.
I think Kah Walla is right that the only way to build states that not only function but endure in sub-Saharan Africa is to start from scratch… with… a foundational conversation that rises up from all the people in all their communities…. [But] as long as the process is expected to culminate in something like a recognizable government in command of an internationally-agreed-upon territory that performs all the expected functions and behaves in all the expected ways, the conversation is never going to be more than a short speed bump in a circular road that leads back to the usual suspects…
In some ways, it is an old dream: to replace government as political domination over persons with government as the simple ancillary administration of things and the win-win coördination of processes of production: <https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=8859-1&oe=8859-1&as_occt=body&num=25&sitesearch=www.marxists.org%2F&as_epq=%22government+of+men%22&as_oq=&as_q=&as_eq=&as_occt=all&btnG=Google+Search%21#ip=1>:
We see this in Friedrich Engels:
Friedrich Engels: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science: ‘When at last [the state] becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary…. Tthere is no longer any social class to be held in subjection… and a special repressive force, a state, is no longer necessary…. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the coördination of processes of production. The state is not “abolished”. It withers away… <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch24.htm>
Or, alternatively:
Friedrich Engels: The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State: ‘The society which organizes production anew on the basis of free and equal association of the producers will put the whole state machinery where it will then belong—into the museum of antiquities, next to the spinning wheel and the bronze axe…
But it is older. Engels attributed its origin to St. Simon in his Letters from Geneva:
Friedrich Engels: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science: ‘What is here already [in 1802] very plainly expressed is the idea of the future conversion of political rule over men into an administration of things and a direction of processes of production…
Engels’s and St.-Simon’s dream has by-and-large been accomplished in Denmark, and, in a different way, perhaps it has been accomplished in Singapore, perhaps.
But clearly not in Cameroon.
Why not? And is there any way that things could possibly be changed? And is Kah Walla right in how to start changing them?