Tueesday, December 31, 2013 47
THE GUARDIAN www.ngrguardiannews.com
experience and way forward (1) Stock swings will widen in 2014 as the Fed continues to cut its bondbuying program, according to Soh. The central bank will probably reduce its purchases by $10 billion in each of its next seven meetings before ending the program in December 2014, according to the median forecast in a Bloomberg survey of 41 economists conducted on December 19 tions in which the centre makes laws in which the subnational units participate) but subnational units execute or implement federal laws, such as in Switzerland and Germany. d. Cooperative Federalism – emphasizes interdependence among orders of government as they cooperate and collaborate on a number of issues. e. Competitive Federalism is also seen by some experts as useful for a federation. Here, it is assumed that competition among component units is functional to a working federation. A healthy competition does not pose a problem, but unhealthy competition beyond a threshold can be divisive and pose a danger to the federation. In essence, federations “are not static structure, rather they are dynamic and evolving systems.”14 Federations have evolved tremendously since the 1940s, and candidly, there is no true federalism anywhere in the world. Since this is not an academic audience, we have briefly discussed the controversial issues of federalism operating and its dynamic and evolving nature. Let us briefly look at federalism in Africa. Federalism in Africa As we suggested earlier, the forms of government adopted by many African countries after independence were partly the product of their colonial experiences. French and British colonial experiences differed in goals and strategies. French colonialism was culturally arrogant but racially tolerant.15 French culture was the culture or civilization into which the average African was to be assimilated. It was the culture of African ‘ancestors’ – the Gauls. Once you were assimilated into the supreme French culture, you became ‘French’. Thus Africans could sit as Deputies in the French parliament in Paris. It was unthinkable for any Anglophone African to sit in the British parliament in London. Did the French policy of assimilation actually lead to integration? The inner-city violence in France by the so-called assimilated people demonstrated that there was ‘assimilation’ without integration. While the French used Federalism as a technique of colonial administration, it was unitary at home and bequeathed unitary forms of government to her new States. Although France had operated a colonial Federation of West and Equatorial Africa, its administration was centralized and unitary. African inheritance elites at independence had less problems of challenges or threats from sub-national units in Francophone countries than their counterparts in Anglophone States. In fact, DeGaulle did not like federal solutions to problems of authority and unity arising from cultural pluralism. As he once observed:It is not certain that the concept of a Federation.... is always very good and very practical... For in fact, that consists of automatically putting together very different peoples, sometimes very different indeed, and who, in consequence, do not like it at all. One sees this in Canada, one sees this in Rhodesia, in Malaysia, in Cyprus, and one sees it in Nigeria. The only exception to this unitary government in Francophone States was Cameroon which experimented briefly with federalism after it absorbed Western Cameroon from Nigeria. The federal experiment was terminated in 1972. Similarly, the Senegal-Sudan (Mali) federation effort failed. On the other hand, British Colonial rule was
racially arrogant but culturally tolerant. The concept of Dual Mandate and Indirect Rule had embedded in them racial bigotry. The Africans were unable to attain superior British culture, so let them be on their own and do their own thing as long as they served the general purposes of colonial administration. Indirect rule not only strengthened subnational self-determination of groups, but established effective loci of opposition to the central authority after independence. In a way, British cultural tolerance created problems of centralization of authority for the inheritance elites and probably heightened cultural diversities in various states. On the other hand, it may be suggested that Anglophonic states are today more ‘autonomous’ in terms of their political and economic sovereignty or independence than their Francophone counterparts. Britain, a culturally plural country is unitary at home. However, it bequeathed to many of its ex-colonies one federal form of government or the other. This was the case in Nigeria. Nigeria is still federal and has adhered to the federal compromise even under military rule. The only brief period when the military administration of General Ironsi introduced unitary government in May 1966, there were violent reaction.17 Until recently Nigeria was the only country in Africa which was strongly attached to federalism as a compromise solution to its problems of state- and nation-building in the context of her cultural diversity, except for Tanzania. Ethiopia has now embraced the federal option, while South Africa (for historical reasons) has a unitary state with federal features. There are debates about federalism in Uganda, championed by Buganda. Kenya inherited a quasi-federal structure under the Majimbo Constitution which gave some powers to regional legislatures. However, Kenyatta and his colleagues believed that federalism had the capability for escalating interethnic tensions and eroding the power of the centre. They lobbied against federal or quasifederal institutions which were eventually reversed to unitarism in 1964. As Kenyatta observed of the 1963 Constitution: “Constitution was too rigid, expensive and unworkable”18 President Kenyatta’s party then moved on to erode the regions of “any executive and legislative duties”. It centralized regional administrations and only devolved certain functions and power to them. Ghana also inherited, in the terminal colonial period, a quasi-federal system similar to Kenya’s. Ghana became independent earlier. Nkrumah and the Convention Peoples Party (CPP) had opted for a unitary system in opposition to the proposed quasi-federal system which gave the regions some autonomy under colonial rule. He succeeded in getting a unitary constitution at independence. In Uganda, the constitution was neither federal nor unitary- it was both. In an amorphous and contradictory fashion, the British handed over to Uganda a constitution in which certain Kingdoms (such as Buganda) had federal relations with the central Government while other groups had unitary relations with the federal government. President Obote gave the system the first shock in 1965-1966. Idi Amin centralized political power under a unitary government in his 1974 administrative re-organization. While the Museveni administration has restored traditional rulership, they have no political powers. The regions have no constitutionally guaranteed powers of their own. As part of a unitary state structure, the region or province may have powers devolved to them which could be retrieved at the behest of the central government. The federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland fell apart as Nyasaland became an independent Malawi. In the same vein, Nkrumah’s panAfrican attempt to create a federation of Ghana, Mali and Guinea did not really take off. Today, two other cases of federal-type solutions to the problem of cultural diversity exist. On the East coast of Africa, the Federation of Zanzibar and Tanganyika had given birth to
Tanzania. The Tanzania case illustrates a relatively successful case of two countries merging into one under a federal grid. Is this trend likely to continue in Africa? It is doubtful. However, perhaps another variant of the federal-type solution may appeal to some states. The Senegambia confederal arrangement between the Gambia and Senegal is more economic and security-related than it is political. Its success has been a moot-point. Why did African rulers prefer unitary solutions to problems arising from their cultural pluralism? It seems to logically follow that given the cultural diversity in African States, the compromise offered by the federal system of government would have been embraced by their leaders. Why is there an overwhelming preference for a unitary system of government? As suggested above, the new leaders of independent African states had found that while the colonial governors seemed “omnipotent”, they had inherited very fragile bases of power. The fragility of central authority and the necessity to consolidate power and authority meant that structures which were mobilizational became more advantageous than structures which exhorted inter-group reconciliation. A unitary system emphasizes centralization. Sub- national units must look up to the center for their resources and power. The crises of authority which the inheritance elites experienced made them to opt for unitary solutions. The leaders were too preoccupied with the consolidation of the power of the center that they were not ready to share powers and functions with sub-national units. Secondly, it was often feared that federalism crystallized sub-national identities and often sharply defined the parameters of operation and loyalty of component units. In doing so, federalism is seen as a crisis escalator rather than a crisis dampener. Inter- ethnic, religious, geopolitical and racial dichotomies become supposedly more pronounced under a federal system. In a way the fears of the inheritance elites in Africa were genuine. After all, federalism is a paradoxical elixir to be purchased from any political market. If it provides for the security and survival of a nation (because of the very compromises it is capable of effecting), it also safeguards self-determination of parochial and/or subnational groups. As Shridath Ramphal once correctly observed: ... the foundations of feder-
Mark
alism must be laid in nationalism; but it cannot be ignored that at the heart of the nationalism lies the concept of selfdetermination. It is however a concept of double application. Secession is the claim concomitant of self-determination, which can therefore help to destroy federalism just as serves to build it.19 Thus as we have earlier suggested, federalism while serving as a mechanism for effecting compromises in a multinational state, is embedded with its own seeds of discord. Essentially, federalism is a compromise between centripetal and centrifugal forces in the political system. All federal systems experience adjustments, at different points in time, between these two extreme pulls. But the extent to which a federal system survives very much depends on the ability of the political elites in a country to maintain a delicate balance between centrifugalism and centripetalism. Excessive pulls in favour of centrifugal forces may grossly weaken the center and herald disintegration, as Nigeria found out. Yet excessive pulls toward the centre may challenge the very existence of federalism and the cocoon of relative security it provides for the members of the society. The bloody riots in Northern Nigeria in 1966 illustrate this. Perhaps the Ethiopian and Sudanese civil wars illustrate this point more dramatically. Given an already fragile central authority, African leaders did not want to add on the strains of effecting a federal delicate balance between centrifugal and centripetal pulls. While the issues of consolidation of authority related to the state-building, the fear of exacerbating conflicts on the inter-group or horizontal level, related directly to the issue of unity or nation- building. Many African leaders felt that a unitary system provided a more conducive framework for effective building of nations out of the state. They argued, for example, that the Shona-Ndebele ethnic problems would have been more sharply defined under a federal framework. Currently Zimbabwe runs a unitary system. Thirdly, while the federal solution is attractive, the political economy of federalism has made it expensive and administratively cumbersome. The cost of maintaining federal and state legislatures, the executive and in some cases, local government councils and staff, is prohibitive. In
TO BE CONTINUED