World Development, Vol. 14, No. 3, pp. 31Y-332, lY86. 0305750)(/X6 $3.00 + 0.00 Printed in Great Britain. Pergamon Press Ltd. The State and Economic Stagnation in Tropical Africa zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWV RICHARD SANDBROOK* University of Toronto, Canada Summary - Politics, while only one strand in the explanation of Africa’s massive economic problems, is nonetheless a significant factor. A central conundrum facing postcolonial political leaders is how to govern and hold together unintegrated peasant societies in the absence of legitimacy. “Personal rule,” a particular mode of patrimonial governance, provides an answer. permitting regime survival and the advancement of political insiders. But personal rule has an economically destructive tendency that only shrewd political leadership and propitious world economic conditions can check. If uncontrolled, certain political practices corrode bureaucratic and legal rationality and promote the misallocation of scarce public resources. The result can be a downward spiral of interrelated political and economic decline that is increasingly difficult to reverse. While the state has been a crucial element in the success of Japan and the Newly Industrializ- ing Countries (NICs), it is part of the problem of economic stagnation in much of Sub-Saharan Africa. How and why is this so? Today, economic development places an even more onerous burden on political institutions than in the past. The challenge involves not only a government’s selection of the most efficacious bundle of economic policies. It is a difficult enough task to decide upon effective pricing policies, the appropriate degree of export orientation, the pros and cons of concentration on small-scale peasant agriculture, the proper extent of reliance on direct foreign investment, and so on; but there is also a more fundamental question: how conducive is the political and administrative framework to economic develop- ment irrespective of particular policies? Although one could explore this question in relation to countries of both capitalist and socialist orientation, I focus upon the former. There is some convergence in the politics of stagnation in both cases, in that both strategies rely heavily on the state. To the extent that the governmental apparatus is an unreliable instru- ment, political weaknesses bedevil both approaches. Beyond this, however, lie a number of divergent possibilities and problems that I have not the space to examine. The political constraints to socialism are even more exigent in Sub-Saharan Africa than those that face capitalist experiments. ’ Market-oriented approaches are certainly resurgent in Sub-Saharan Africa. A few regimes among the 47 countries proclaim a commitment to Marxism-Leninism: Angola, Benin, Congo, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Mozambique, and Soma- lia. Ideological pronouncements notwithstand- ing, such regimes as Benin and Congo practice capitalism, albeit with a large public sector. And even formerly stalwart Marxist-Leninist Angola, Mozambique, and Somalia grew increasingly disillusioned with a collectivist strategy and/or Soviet tutelage in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Seeking a rapprochement with Western govern- ments and investors, they all to a greater or lesser degree opened their economies to market forces. Certain other regimes characterize themselves as socialist, though with a greater or lesser degree of militance and unanimity. The Cape Verde Islands, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and Mauritius inject a collectivist element into development plans while allowing considerable latitude for free enterprise. Whatever the merits of capitalism versus socialism, world recession and African economic crisis clearly exert a firm pressure on govern- ments to free market forces and rely on private investment. All of them desperately need to obtain loans, aid, and investment from inter- *Thanks are due to my friends Professors Albert Berry (Economics), Cranford Pratt (Political Science). and Fraser Taylor (Geography) for their useful com- ments. 31’)