AFRICA POLITICS: Chapt.Five

THE CONTEXT OF POLITICAL CHANGE

Irrespective of the interpretative weight which may be placed on the changes which have occurred on the African political landscape, in the period since the onset of the 1980s, these changes have taken place in a context defined and characterized by a prolonged economic crisis which African governments were encouraged or outrightly pressured to redress through an equally prolonged programme of orthodox International Monetary Fund (IMF)/World Bank structural adjustment that has already over lasted two decades and which has failed to overcome the difficulties it was introduced to help overcome at the same time as it has created new complications of its own (Mkandawire & Olukoshi, 1995; Mkandawire & Soludo,1999). Economic crisis anddecline, the state of maladjustment ofAfrican economies, the expansion of the informal sector, and the erosion of domestic policy autonomy and capacities represent a critical component of the context within which politics is being restructured in Africa.

The end of the old East-West Cold War as it was once played out, a development symbolized by the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany, the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, and the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). While it lasted, the Cold War had a major impact on the domestic politics of many African countries as the rival ideological blocs immersed themselves in the internal political dynamics of different countries in their quest to contain each other and retain/expand their spheres of influence. The end of the Cold War may not have meant the end of history or ideology as was hastily suggested by some commentators; however, it altered an important geo-political factor around which a welter of strategies and interests had mushroomed in the domestic politics of African countries. Post-Cold War African politics involved a complex set of re-alignment of forces and interests in ways which affected the pre-existing patterns of politics.

The significant weakening of the African state by a combination of factors, not least among them the distinctly anti-state market reform agenda promoted by the IMF, the World Bank and other donors. That agenda had the consequence not only of delegitimizing the state as an actor in the political economy but also eroding its capacities through a series of retrenchment measures that also served to fuel the brain drain, facilitate the erosion of the domestic policy system, and reduce Africa to the most under-governed region of the world.

Given the central role which the African state assumed in every facet of the post-colonial political economy, the institutional decline and decay to which it was exposed represented a major development which reverberated in all spheres of life - the economic, the socio-cultural and the political (Mkandawire & Olukoshi, 1995; Mkandawire & Soludo, 1999). The politics of filling the voids created by state retrenchment, delegitimation and decay has been at the heart of some of the changes that have occurred over the last decade and half or more, including the emergence of new actors/actresses of various kinds with competing/conflicting projects.

The widespread resort to violence and arms in managing domestic political conflicts or demonstrating disaffection. Connected to the end of the East-West Cold War and the retrenchment of the state in a manner which hobbled it, Africa witnessed the emergence/resurgence of conflicts, mostly of an intra-state type kind and with varying degrees of intensity. Some of the conflicts were carried over from the Cold War period while others derived from grievances deriving from other sources.

The most spectacular and tragic of the conflicts had genocidal dimensions to them while in many cases, there was also the collapse of central governmental authority. Furthermore, in what some commentators presented as evidence of a new genre of wars, the conflicts departed from the traditional patterns in which professional armies were pitched against each other. Instead, armed civilian groups took on others and/or heavily factionalized professional armies. Also, the widespread recruitment and deployment of child soldiers represented another unique aspect of the conflicts, as did the terror and mayhem which was visited on unarmed civilian populations especially in the rural areas. Lacking in ideological clarity or an alternative social project, these wars were easily dismissed by many as amounting to banditry at the interface of greed and grievance; in fact, they spoke to a much more profound of change associated with the emergence into political significance of a disaffected urban youth (Abdullah & Bangura, 1997; Abdullah, 2003; Mkandawire, 2002; Mamdani, 2001; Sesay, 2003).

The Emergence of a Diaspora of recent migrants from Africa also constitutes an important contextual factor which is growing in significance as the new Diaspora grows in influence as a constituency whose influence is refracted back into the domestic political processes unfolding in different countries. The process of the constitution of this new Diaspora is recent and still on-going as a wave of professionals, many of them still in their prime, migrate for a variety of reasons to Europe and North America at the same time as many who left temporarily to study abroad also choose to stay back. Their weight in lobbying around issues of political reform and human rights in their host countries is growing and their voice in the affairs of their home countries reverberates among some important constituencies. It is a mark of their growing influence that a formal recognition has been conferred on them by the African Union.