Earning Sovereign Status
by Uchenna Okeja
A respected scholar of African politics, Jeffrey Herbst, argued almost three decades ago that “the current state system in Africa has institutionalized weakness and decline.” Due to the “complete dissociation between a country’s economic and political performance and its sovereign status” in Africa, Herbst believes we cannot hope for progress if the current state model is retained. Leaving aside concerns regarding the feasibility of doing away with the state model for now, the question to ask is whether states ought to earn their sovereign status. Should superior performance in spheres of the economy and governance be considered prerequisites for sovereignty? In other words, is it justified to make economic and political performance conditions of sovereign status?
I aim to show why it is cogent to ask this question. This means that I will not discuss the ways we conceive the meaning of sovereignty in the different disciplines in order to show that the best approach is to insist that sovereignty is only meaningful when it is earned. My focus is simply to explain why it is cogent to ask in the first place whether states ought to earn their sovereignty. Focusing on the reasons this question is cogent is necessary because some people may at first blush fail to see why it is reasonable to think about sovereignty from this angle, due to their detachment from problems that lend salience to the concern. Although people familiar with the goings-on in post-colonial spaces will consider the question to be not only cogent but also timely at first blush, they may lack systematic imagination of why their intuition is correct. Thus, in thinking about why it makes sense to ask whether the conditions for sovereignty should be superior performance in the areas of the economy and governance, the relevant issue is not so much whether it is true that states have underperformed but rather what failure means for the sovereign status vested in states.
Chinua Achebe must have had this issue in mind when, in 1983, he pointed out that a failure of leadership is a major source of troubling political conditions. Focusing on his native Nigeria, he observed that “the trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership.” Achebe was convinced that “there is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian character.” Indeed, he says, “there is nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example.” I agree with Achebe that a failure of leadership is at the core of what ails Nigeria and other countries in Africa. However, his proposition is not self-evident, hence the need for explanation. For instance, it is not self-evident how the failure of leadership invoked by Achebe manifests and why leaders are unwilling or unable to rise to the challenge of responsibility and personal example. It is definitely contestable the extent taking responsibility and showing personal example, as Achebe proposed, are sufficient, on their own, to resolve current political problems in Africa. Although Achebe’s proposition points us in the right direction, it must be emphasized that decades of bad leadership have produced intractable problems we cannot hope to correct squarely through virtuous leadership and personal example.
It is against this background that we should consider the validity of the question regarding whether states ought to earn sovereign status through economic and political performance. To see why performance in the spheres of the economy and governance are invoked as possible conditions for continued enjoyment of sovereignty status, it is perhaps necessary to paint a picture of what sustained failure in these two spheres means for concrete individuals. I say ‘concrete individuals’ because issues that matter to this group are different from worries attributed to so-called statistical persons—for instance, in claims like ‘the average person in Africa wants X’.
It cannot be denied that there is a crisis of habitation in Africa. Of course, saying this is not an endorsement of a ‘single story’ about Africa. This caveat should forfend any distracting knock-down argument, such as the charge that one who is unimpressed by the state of affairs in Africa is peddling a single story or suffering from a terrible affliction of Afro-pessimism. Indeed, it is true that Africa is many things. Africa is many stories, if you like. Yet, one can only know the range of things the continent is if one knows its different aspects in detail. This is to say that a central aspect of what it takes to know Africa is to pay attention to the details of its different aspects, including reflection on the daily experiences of Africans. For, the sort of knowledge invoked when one says one knows Africa is not just knowledge of things experienced through travel, literature and other forms of engagement. This knowledge refers as well to a perception of reality through critique and reflection. Although this view may not tell the sort of complex story those who abhor single stories demand, it surely tells an important story.
To return to the attempt to paint a picture of what a sustained failure in the economy and governance means and the reason it grounds the cogency of asking whether states ought to earn their sovereignty, let us consider how the crisis of habitation manifests by reflecting on what a phenomenon that best expresses this state of affairs means—the desperate out-migration of young people from the continent.
Eager to remove themselves from the continent by every means and at any cost, a large number of young Africans often embark on dehumanizing journeys across the Sahara Desert armed only with a hope of re-humanizing themselves through immigration into more habitable countries in Europe. The images of people drowning in the Mediterranean Sea and the massive graveyards in Lampedusa and other places, of young African immigrants who became victims of hope, tell a grim story of a continent suffering due to a terrible crisis of habitability. A recurrent lament of the subjects of this story of migration is the failure of their countries in the spheres of politics and the economy. The stories of these young people reflect an excruciating pain induced by wars and the scars inflicted by terrorism, police brutality, persecution, hunger, religious or sexual bigotry and related dangers.
For the subjects of this experience, powerlessness and humiliation are certainties that must be endured on a daily basis. Given that every rational human being has an interest in living a life truly free from oppressive social conditions, it is reasonable for people to flee countries where the failures just described are permanent afflictions. Indeed, the stories of many countries in Africa revolve around confounding failures in politics and the economy. Indeed, most of the problems encountered by first-generation leaders in the continent remain unresolved even today. With regard to infrastructure, for instance, projects identified as critical for national development after political independence was attained, have barely taken off in most countries. Conventional democratic practices, such as periodical elections are hardly guaranteed.
In most countries, elections take the form of mini-civil wars and serve the main purpose of instilling despair among the old and young who belong to the ‘wrong’ political party. The damage caused by this despair is expressed in the widespread belief in Africa that it is deceitful to parrot the aphorism that “the young shall grow.” How can the young grow in places where the state system continues to underperform and struggle to accomplish even basic tasks, such as providing sanitation? How can the young grow to become bearers of responsibility in their society when their daily experiences reveal to them that the state is their worst enemy working actively to kill their lofty dreams? To the often-parroted claim that the problem of governance in Africa is the failure of colonialists to train Africans in leadership prior to political independence, the disillusioned young people will retort: what we see is that the leaders in our society have failed dismally in every way possible.
To save whatever is left of their dignity, many young Africans flee to other parts of the world, especially to the so-called developed countries. The problem, alas, is that once they arrive in these countries, they discover that more humiliating conditions await them. They find out, for instance, that they must put up with daily experiences of racially induced social distancing in public spaces, trains, trams and buses. They discover that encounters with the police are unpredictable for no other reason than the color of their skin and other prejudices that have crystallized over the years into a moderating principle of social life in so-called developed countries. Having left their support systems and social circle at home, loneliness and depression creep in.
But then, life is not completely a tale of disappointments because once in a while the grim realities of living in a foreign land ease off. This happens most of the time due to the imagination that nothing can be worse than the state of affairs at home. Comforted by the imagination of a home that has made a permanent reality out of economic and political failures, these sojourners in foreign lands descend into a never-ending circle of new beginnings with the hope of creating a new sense of home. The thinking that life may be hard in a foreign land, but it cannot be worse than what obtains in their native countries, effectively transforms into a motivation to stay away from their countries of birth, no matter the humiliations this may bring.
Our children, they imagine, will grow up in our chosen community and do better than us. They will become what we could not dream to achieve because they will be unencumbered by limitations our countries of birth impose upon us, they imagine. In expressing this belief, what is affirmed is that it is justified to live one’s entire adult life as a prisoner of freedom. In this context, it is imagined that being free entails that one must completely and without reservations embrace the unknown by staying permanently away from the known, from one’s home. Those who refuse to accept this dire option are also not free as they must continuously battle to find a meaning for a life that must be lived in awareness of the devastating certainty that one will never experience good governance and economic prosperity in one’s lifetime. Indeed, in every country in Africa, an acute concern is how to make life worth living through the creation of a tolerable environment that will enable people to realize their life-plans.
As human beings, our distinctive characteristic is that we reflect on our experiences. We pause to think about how far we have come and how much we want to invest of ourselves in the affairs of the community in which we live. We think about life as a whole, not as unconnected or disparate events. One of the reasons we do this is because we want our lives to have meaning. Every human person is interested in ensuring that they live meaningful lives. The idea of meaning here is conveyed through various idioms and concepts. For instance, a meaningful life could be described as a life defined by a sense of freedom. It could also be described as a life of service, example, charisma and religious piety. Although this is true, our judgment that our lives have meaning is only as good as the concepts we deploy to articulate this meaning. This is to say that the concepts we deploy to describe what it means to live a meaningful life can only make sense if indeed we have reasons to trust them as formidable ways to make sense of the world. If the link between a people and the concepts they employ to make sense of the world is broken due to a trauma caused by negative social, cultural, political or economic experiences, the group will be unable to use the concepts adequately to frame the sense of life’s meaning.
Like people, cultures can experience trauma. The humiliating circumstances in contexts where the consequences of economic and political failures are rife in the present century culminate in a psycho-social trauma. Thus, it is not trivial to ask whether states in such contexts ought to earn sovereignty through superior performance in governance and economic advancement. This is the case because of the far-reaching damage to society and people caused by failures in these spheres.
Academic theories of state sovereignty offer different, sometimes contradictory, views on its meaning and implications for social and political life. These academic theories range from the idea that sovereignty refers to the supreme public power to govern, the exercise of authority over a given territory to the view that it is an embodiment of legitimate authority to rule over a given territory. The Westphalian sovereignty model, which dominates the international order currently, is particularly loved by African leaders. They find it attractive because it proclaims sovereignty as an exclusive right of a state to exercise authority over a territory. Leaning on the Westphalia notion of sovereignty, political leaders in Africa established, through the African Union, a principle of non-interference in the domestic political affairs of member states. Over the years, however, the experience of people in different countries in Africa has shown that this political doctrine provides a cover for the deployment of brutal mechanisms aimed at consolidation of political power.
The mindless insistence on sovereignty on the basis of reasons traceable to experiences of non-Africans is the reason leadership in the African context seems like the supervision of a poverty-plagued and disillusioned people. Claiming sovereignty because of an assumed idea of sovereign integrity explains why states in Africa have become mere vessels needed to keep the global poor in their place and ensure they do not have the means to interfere with the lives of people in more affluent countries. With the current ahistorical idea of sovereignty that informs how political actors imagine, represent and run the state in Africa, a dangerous possibility for them to simply metamorphose into the police of the poor and disempowered is guaranteed. In the long run, this role might become too difficult to resist, due to the reward that comes in the form of external legitimation and financial sustenance.
Asking whether sovereignty should be earned through superior performance in the spheres of the economy and governance is a way to change the narrative. It is cogent to raise this question because it presents a way to frame accountability in understandable terms. Giving prominence to this question in the public sphere of African societies lends potency to the agency of the people in the sense that it forces the state to justify itself in concrete terms to the citizens.
Uchenna Okeja is a professor of philosophy at Rhodes University and a research associate at Nelson Mandela University. He is the director of Emengini Institute for Comparative Global Studies and Executive Editor (Humanities and Social Sciences) of ILORA.