Of leaders and state collapse

THE TWISTER

By Brian Ligomeka & Geoffrey Gomani

The issue of state collapse aroused a lot of interest in the 1990s so much that many political scientists have written on this subject. The literature grew most rapidly because some states were on the brink of collapsing.

Zartman, Boulder & Lynne-Rienner (1995), in Collapsed States—The Disintegration and Restoration of Legitimate Authority, define collapse of a state as a time when “the basic functions of the state are no longer performed as analysed in various theories of the state. While Badie and Birnbaum (1983) has defined state collapse as “...when the decision making centre of government is paralysed and inoperative: good laws are not made, order is not preserved, and societal cohesion is not enhanced”.

Commenting on the subject of state collapse, Gramsci (1967); Hegel (1952); Kean (1988) made a few observations. “Does this pervasive incapacity occur because the state itself collapses as the authoritative political institution? Or because society beneath it has become incapable of providing the support and demands it needs?

Others look at state collapse as the breakdown of good governance, law and order. The state, as a decision making, executing and enforcing institution can no longer take and implement decisions. Societal collapse, on the other hand, is extended breakdown of social coherence: society, as the generator of institutions of cohesion and maintenance, can no longer create, aggregate, and articulate the supports and demands that are foundations of the state. When the state fails to provide the basic resources or overtaxes its citizens, then state collapse is imminent.

There are many countries in Africa where presidents assume more dominant and autocratic disposition and running their countries as their private estates. Their support structures are only out to advise the president on exactly what he would like them to articulate and both the president and his advisors have lost touch with political reality on the ground. The government machinery is in complete denial hence the citizens are paying a heavy price in form of taxes on basic essential goods and cost of life that is moving away.

By deduction, it can also be said there is a form of state collapse, which is associated with a leadership that has turned into an evil or tyrannical institution, in which the necessary balance between coercive and rewarding functions is disrupted in favour of coercion.

Zartman says, “As the long debate over the state as a social contract has brought out individuals in society in creating a state trade in their freedom in exchange for security and constraints. When the state overplays its functions, it loses the willing allegiance and legitimising support of its population.

The events of the early 1990s—the collapse of the ideologised tyranny in the Soviet Union and of constitutional racism in South Africa - support the hypothesis that authoritarianism is the cause of state collapse and that tyranny in the end will destroy its own state. The cloud on this silver-lined conclusion is that society, too, pays the price of tyranny; it is the tyrant’s destruction of the institutions of civil society and any form of opposition that makes the state’s destruction a matter of collapse rather than one of simple replacement.

The state collapse is not a short term phenomenon nor is it a crisis with a few early warning signs but rather a long term degeneration disease whose outcome is inevitable. It is a process that may be likened to the movie version of a car falling slowly, in stages down a cliff—or to the progress of an object tumbling down a staircase, landing and tittering on each step it hits, then either regaining its balance and coming to rest or losing its balance again and bouncing down to the next step, where the exercise is repeated.

Leaders in government going through the process of state collapse have a tendency to view slippery slopes as merely grades on the normally bumpy terrain of politics, making it difficult to focus their attention on the gravity of the problem until it is too late and difficult to prescribe preventive measures or it is far too late to engage in any meaningful dialogue and reconciliation.

Nonetheless, the slippery slope has some notable characters near the bottom and these do serve as ultimate warnings. Five ultimate sign posts that have been identified by various authorities including Yoffee and Cowgill (1988) are:

1.      Power devolves to the peripheries when (because) the centre fights among itself. Those in central power are too busy defending themselves against attacks from their political competitors, the media, civil society and the clergy to hold on to reign of power over the country. Local authority and popular support is up for grabs.

2.       Power withers at the centre by default because central government loses its power base. It no longer pays attention to the needs of its social bases and does not heed advice. The centre instead relies on its inner most trusted circle: this may be an ethnic or regional group, or a functional group or a legal group or such groups operating in cliques unknown to leadership. Attention to the needs and demands of the smaller group diverts allocations from the broader social sources of support (the electorate).

The smaller groupings galvanise their cohesion to the leadership by systematic rumour mongering, malicious gossip against political adversaries, creating fear of the unknown on the leadership, in fighting for greater leadership attention, and get-rich-quick syndrome creeps in sharing limited resources in government.

3.      Government malfunctions by avoiding necessary but difficult choices. As a result, such measures mount in urgency and difficulty, facing the state with a governing crisis. Decisional avoidance can take place either because of institutional incoherence, in which the mechanisms of government are inadequate to their challenges, or because of political flabbiness and inexperience, in which the politicians themselves are incapable of biting the bullet. The effect is the same.

4.       The incumbents practice only defensive and scapegoat politics, fending off challenges, making threats, intimidating, manipulating and arresting political competitors, concentrating on procedural rather than substantive measures and issues. Such measures include both repression and coercion using state machinery, taken to get the opposition and the Civil Society off their back. What is seemingly absent is a political agenda for participation by all and development programmes. The leadership behaviour closes off to alternative views and limits evaluation of alternative ways of resolving problems.

Elections are postponed; platforms for public speech are absent, the media is muzzled and persecuted, civil society is destroyed, the state enters into propaganda phase, and attempts are made to interfere with the judiciary through appointment of Judges on the basis of being cronies or from the same homestead. Further attempts are made to force compliance by the Judiciary through holding back benefits as bargaining strategy.

5.      Probably the ultimate danger sign is when the centre loses control over its own state agents, who begin to operate on their own account. Officials extract payments for their own pockets, and law and order is consistently broken by the agents of law and order, the police become political gangs and brigades serving the interest of just the ruling party.

The antidote to these ultimate signs of state collapse is simply to reverse them. But it is obvious that because of their very nature, reversal is extremely difficult and hard to attain. It might almost be said that, at this point, the process needs to run its full course before a new structure of law and order or legitimate authority can be constructed. This is through a democratic legitimisation process: the ballot box.

Based on the preceding discourse and the various factors that cause a state to collapse, whither Malawi? Is Malawi in a state of collapse? One would answer yes or no depending on whether or not an in-depth analysis has been made. One would, however, encourage objectivity and hindsight knowledge to determine whether Malawi is in a state of collapse or not.  

The crux of the matter starts from a willing acceptance that Malawi is in a crisis. Like all crisis situations, the leadership and the citizenry should embark on a problem-solving approach that is both collaborative and collective. The problem-solving approach should identify the root-causes of the problems rather than addressing symptoms and simply finger-pointing.

Obviously, a leader in a state of collapse must be multi-skilled, flexible; a people-centred person with adequate charisma, with capacity to balance short-term interests with long-term ones and must be an accomplished politician endowed with a sense of resolve and determination. Certainly, a state of collapse has no room for autocrats, bloodthirsty leaders, and scholars of Tit-for-Tat Academy.