1. DEFINING GOVERNANCE IN RELATION TO NEPAD’S APRM
Kayode Fayemi
The task of creating and maintaining a viable and legitimate State that is
accessible (political representation & access to information), efficient,
accountable, transparent (budget transparency & anti-corruption) and
equitable (rule of law, judicial independence) is simply the task of
governance. It has been one of the most critical and complicated challenges of
the transformation process that African countries are currently undergoing.
Fundamental to the notion of governance is the ability of the state to provide
efficient and well functioning institutions and infrastructures of government –
legally backed and socially coherent – that together establishes and maintains an
enabling environment in which human security and human development takes
place.
The notion of good governance has gained greater prominence in the
democratisation discourse since the collapse of the cold war in the early 1990s.
Equally, its meaning has been the subject of contestation between promoters of
the shrinking State and the champions of the inclusive State in which the
establishment of a wide range of governmental and non-governmental
institutions enable people to participate in society. Despite the debate that
raged on the nature of the state, there has been a great deal of unanimity on
the need to arrest the ‘desertion’ by citizens that characterised the ‘old’ cold war
State, in Africa in the quest for a transparent, trusted and accountable State.
Although governance has always featured in the management of public sector in
Africa, it was rarely defined as a partnership between the rulers and the ruled
aimed at the efficiency of State structures. While the clamour for this type of
partnership has featured in the struggles for the transformation of authoritarian
structures and one-party states, the idea of a people driven governance was
largely ignored by the command economies that dominated the world in the cold
war era. The idea that the people ought to have a say in deciding governance
strategies was seen as an anathema and generally discouraged. In the search for
strong states, strong rulers were seen as the sine-qua-non. The more
unaccountable these rulers were, the more legitimate they became in the hands
of the metropolitan powers and their supporters. Even when the command,
interventionist economies of the 1970s and early 80s gave way to structural
adjustment programmes in the mid-1980s, governance defined as partnership
aimed at achieving ownership, social equity, equality and development was still
missing from the equation.
Indeed, the end of the cold war brought economic globalisation – the
homogenisation of the world economy which tended to separate the State from
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2. the market in the belief that a strong state cannot produce a strong market.
Given the above, it was not surprising that many elected governments in Africa
collapsed in the wake of the structural adjustment programmes and the
succeeding authoritarian regimes sharpened the state instruments of coercion in
coping with the resistance that developed against economic reform programmes
of the period.
It was only later that the notion of ‘good’ governance became a compliant tool in
the hands of the promoters of structural adjustment programmes and policies.
This coincided incidentally with the collapse of the Berlin wall and the various
‘people power’ revolutions in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Indeed,
before the World Bank’s 1989 report “Sub-Saharan Africa: From Crisis to
Sustainable Growth”, governance was a rarely used term. Even when it was
introduced into the IFIs lexicon, its operational use was limited. In its use of the
term, the World Bank identified three distinct aspects of governance:
1) the form of the political regime;
2) the process by which authority is exercised in the management of a
country’s economic and social resources for development; and,
3) the capacity of governments to design, formulate and implement policies
and discharge functions.(World Bank, 1994b)
Although they recognise the holistic nature of governance, the World Bank and
other multi-lateral agencies have concentrated mainly on the third aspect in their
governance related work – the capacity of governments to design, formulate and
implement policies and discharge functions. Public sector reform and
management has been the most visible area of activity in this regard. This
ranged from capacity building and institutional strengthening in civil service
reform; government budget, public investment programme, modernisation of
public sector accounting and auditing; government financial management
information systems, development assistance and aid coordination, economic
management agencies and all other sections of government that are pivotal to a
well functioning public sector. Governance in the public sector has also been
concerned with the levels and quality of relationship between different layers of
government – central government and its subordinate tiers as well as the public
and private sectors.
The basic thrust of this reform process has been state retrenchment in all its
ramifications and this has been manifested in the shift from a highly
interventionist paradigm in many African states to one in which the role of
government is primarily that of an enabler for the private sector, a regulatory
framework and a provider of public infrastructure for the efficient running of the
market. Tied to the structural adjustment reforms whose objective was to
establish market friendly set of incentives that can encourage accumulation of
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3. capital and more efficient allocation of resources, this shift often necessitated
conflict between capital and labour and it resulted in huge labour cuts arising out
of privatisation of inefficient state institutions with serious social consequences –
leading often to a disconnect between the shrinking State and the deprived
Society.
The challenge with institutional reform in many of the sectors highlighted above
has always been one of building convergence between the demands of the new
corporate governance environment and the legitimacy for enforcement provided
by the local context – between ‘good’ governance and ‘democratic’ governance.
It is because of the problems associated with reconciling the State and Civil
Society in the public sector reform process that sustainable institutional capacity
building has been difficult to achieve in many African states.
Although NEPAD’s framework document also exhibits state retrenchment
tendencies, by locating the development agenda within a governance framework,
it goes a step further in bridging this gap between the search for the efficient
and accountable state and the legitimate society, emphasizing not just the
capacity of governments to design, formulate and implement policies, but also
the form of political regime and the process by which authority is exercised. The
missing link which the APRM seeks to address is to define how best to monitor
the governance and development agenda with a view to ensuring the necessary
‘buy-in’ from all stakeholders. The added value in the civil society monitoring
initiative is the degree to which it seeks the views of other players outside the
official state system in order to address the gaps in governance. The process of
defining and agreeing benchmarks and indicators of performance requires rigour
and ownership by all stakeholders involved, both in their design and
administration.
One final caveat that one must add is that even with the most rigorous and well
intentioned assessment, any evaluation is complicated by the fact that, while
governance in Africa (as in many newly democratising regions) are in a state of
flux, these changes are occurring in varied political contexts, with their own local
dynamics and challenges, and incorporating rather different prospects for the
development of democratic norms and controls. Divergent trajectories of
transition have produced a wide assortment of post-transition political
configurations on the continent – some complementary and progressive, others
contradictory and worrisome. This necessarily inhibits generalisation and requires
our assessments to be placed in historical and political contexts if monitoring is
to have any meaningful results to all concerned.
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