Strengthening Africa: A Conversation With Professor Ken Opalo
Ken Opalo released his new book Legislative Development in Africa at Georgetown’s Mortara Center. (Mortara Center)
Georgetown University Professor Ken Opalo gave a talk at the Mortara Center for International Studies on October 31 to launch his new book, Legislative Development in Africa: Politics and Postcolonial Legacies, which attempts to explain variation in the strengths of contemporary African legislative institutions. I sat down with Opalo to discuss the book and its implications on current conditions throughout Africa. The following is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.
AG: Can you give me a brief synopsis of the book, what your argument is, and what your ultimate conclusions are?
KO: The book essentially asks two questions: why do we see variation in the strength of institutions under autocracy and what conditions of democratic transitions produce strong democratic institutions? These questions are interesting because not all autocracies are created equal. There are some that have very strong, robust institutions with rule of law and stable, predictable systems of governance.
For example, China, Chile under Pinochet, Rwanda under Kagame, Ethiopia under Meles Zenawi. You also have autocracies that are fairly weak and de-institutionalized, such as the current D.R.C. under Mobutu or Haiti under Duvalier. And so, as an answer to that first question, it truly matters whether the autocrats think that they’re strong enough to balance competing institutions. You need institutions for a variety of reasons, the most important of which is to incorporate fellow elites. But if you’re threatened by fellow elites because you’re not strong enough, you’re not going to allow them to congregate within an institution.
The incentive, then, is to have very weak institutions and to have several of them so that they can keep competing against each other and not against the autocrat. But if you’re strong enough, you can delegate power to these institutions, because you know you can take that power back. So stronger autocrats who are not threatened by fellow elites will tend to have strong institutions.
On the second question, because institutional development takes time, it's also the case that places that typically had strong and stable autocracies have strong and stable democratic institutions once they transition, whereas places that had chaotic autocracies will tend to have very weak institutions even after they transition. Institutional development takes time and merely moving from autocracy to democracy doesn't strengthen institutions on its own.
AG: What drove you to write this book? Are there any personal experiences in your life that inspired your topic and thesis?
KO: One of my old advisors used to tell us that everyone writes something as an expression of the times. So, I was mostly driven to think about intra-elite politics in Africa out of frustration with the excessive focus placed on presidential elections. If you read a lot of news reports or books or papers on Africa or politics, it’s often very president-centric at the neglect of everything else.
However, no one can run a whole country on their own; even the most crazy autocrats typically have elites around them. Thus, I was interested in elite politics, how African elites share power, what mechanisms they use, and what are the consequences of that. I tried looking at political parties but I didn’t see enough variation on that front in the region, and so legislatures were the next natural institutional expression of intra-elite politics. Within legislatures, you have elites who win elections and share power and make policy. And so I came at this not from the legislative studies side of things, but more from the intra-elite politics side of things.
AG: One of the things you said in your talk is that we place too much emphasis on executive and nationwide elections when oftentimes smaller elections can give a more accurate picture of the political situation in a country. The Caravel aims to cover under-reported international news. How do you think we can begin to shift emphasis, both within Georgetown but also within the broader international community, from large-scale executive elections to more local legislative ones?
KO: The first thing is if you’re reporting on country X, it matters that you know how power is actually distributed in the country. Consider the United States. It would be absurd to report on U.S. elections and only mention the presidential elections. It would be totally absurd because Congress has so much power and influence.
Now in other countries, legislatures may not be as powerful as the U.S. Congress, but they still matter in politics. If you're talking about Nigerian elections, it's important to also know who won the Senate, who won the lower House, and what that means for political outcomes. Knowing how power is distributed , the strengths of these different institutions, and how they interact with each other, is a good place to start. We need to try to understand that other countries have domestic politics just like the U.S. does. We often miss that in our takes on other countries.
AG: To bring this to a modern perspective, I know that in the book you focus on two case studies: Kenya and Zambia. However, governments all across Africa today are facing large governmental shifts, including Algeria, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique, and Egypt. They are all facing different types of governmental turmoil, whether that be popular uprisings against a current regime, insecure elections, or executive mismanagement. While these might not all particularly deal with the countries’ legislatures, they all certainly have implications for the power and capacity of nationwide legislatures. In these transitory periods, what do you see as the eventual outcome of these laws, and what can legislators do to fight back?
KO: In the book, one of the mechanisms through which legislatures can get power is when chief executives or presidents are threatened. When a president is facing an uprising in the streets, that's often the weakest time for them, and so a smart intervention would force the president to cede some policy-making powers to legislatures. For example, in Egypt, they would say, “Look, President el-Sisi, your people are in the streets, you need to give more power to Parliament so people can feel like their institutions are working.”
A lot of these protests are motivated by the fact that people feel like the government, the presidency, is not delivering on what they want, and that the presidency is sidelining other institutions. If you distribute power to those other institutions, you could not only dissuade people from being in the streets but also force a structural shift in power from just being in the president’s hands to being shared by a legislature.
In most countries, if people feel like they can call their representative and have their representatives make a difference, they wouldn’t be going out in the streets. These protests tend to be motivated by the belief that institutions don’t matter, so people then lose patience to wait for the next election. Instead, they want change now.
AG: Another side of this question is something like what’s happening in Mozambique, where you have a ruling power, but you also have a very strong opposition party, so you have two competing heads against one another. You said earlier that a legislature can sometimes be muted to prevent the opposition from taking over. What role, then, could a legislature play in building its own capacity in a country where there are two very distinct sides?
KO: The problem in Mozambique is, since 1994, it has had a very strong opposition. During the last election, the opposition was completely wiped out, they claim unfairly. This gets to the heart of democracy. Democracy only works if losers feel like they have a chance to win tomorrow. If the process is fair and the losers know they have a chance to win tomorrow, they’re better able to accept the outcome and move on.
But if you have a situation like you have in Mozambique where the losing party feels like the playing field is rigged, then they have no interest in participating again in the system. The way out for Mozambique would be going back to the previous balance of power where the government in Maputo allowed the opposition to win in the provinces, thereby giving them access to power and resources to maintain themselves.
Democracy only works if everyone has a stake in the game, so if the opposition is able to win some provincial legislatures and some seats in the national legislature, and if the national legislature is sufficiently empowered, then the opposition can express itself. You can imagine that, if the Republican Party’s control of the U.S. Congress following the 2016 election lasted through all four years of this current administration, America would be a very different place without the safety valve that the midterms in 2018 provided.
AG: The title of your book includes the phrase “postcolonial legacies.” What role have the autocracies of different European colonizers played in African nations following their liberation?
KO: If you think of colonial administrations, they are autocratic by structure. However, even under autocracy, there are variations. British autocracy in its colonies tried to build institutions within the territories. So India gets a legislature, which does a lot in enabling the evolution of a political culture that is stable and survives its brief flirtation with autocracy in the ‘70s. Similarly in Africa, former British colonies tend to have more stable politics because the territories’ institutions evolved for longer. France, on the other hand, tried to integrate everything back to Paris, which disallowed the local development of institutions.
In the book, I make the strong case that institutions are only as good as the people in them, so it matters that people get used to a certain way of doing things. I think, now more than ever, we’re seeing evidence of why norms matter. So even when you think about institutional development, it matters that the people in the institution have a specific understanding of what they're supposed to do within those institutions.
AG: You're speaking about creating norms in politics, but especially in developing countries, corruption and bribery have become norms for local politicians. How can we ensure that in establishing legislative norms for representatives, we don’t allow corruption or bribery to become one of those norms?
KO: Corruption and bribery is one of those big questions when talking about politicians. I think one way to answer this is to be honest about what it is that people are doing. Let’s compare the proportion of the economy that goes into inducing politicians to behave in a certain way between the U.S. and India. A big chunk of the difference is that in the U.S., a large part of that has been sanitized and put above board.
Lobbying is legal, campaign contributions are legal through direct contributions or Super PACS, and there’s a fair amount of reporting so we know who spends what on whom. However, in places like India, because of this weird imposition of the idea of corruption, space has not been allowed for the sanitization of certain unavoidable practices during the normal conduct of politics. And because of that, there is this dark economy that then attracts all sorts of crimes and criminals.
I think a first step should just be an honest appraisal of the system saying these are things we know are inevitable in the conduct of politics, and so we’ll bring them above board. Of course, make illegal anything that’s egregiously illegal. But this notion that just a blanket ban on what we would consider corruption is counterproductive. It’s kind of like how making certain drugs illegal fuels more crime.
AG: Let’s switch gears a little bit. Let’s say we could snap our fingers and every government official in Africa has read your book. What would you want to be the biggest takeaway in improving legislative capacity?
KO: I think the biggest takeaway would be that the only way to get strong legislatures is by having strong and politically empowered members of legislatures. Ensuring that bureaucracies are strong enough to enable members to fulfill their campaign promises, and then empowering members to build the organizations they need to both provide public goods and services to their members and to win re-election is critical. The action has to be in strengthening that bond between public officials and their constituents.
AG: That’s an interesting point because I know in the United States, a lot of politicians running for president will start in Congress. But, in countries without a strong legislature, you see those high-calibre politicians going through alternative routes such as the military or jumping in from the private sector. Do you think that without a strong legislature, those strong politicians will seek alternative routes to that presidency, weakening legislatures even more?
KO: Absolutely, or it becomes an end in itself. You can think of someone like Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) or Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). These are strong, well-accomplished politicians in their own right who will never run for president because they lead their powerful institutions. Having strong legislatures takes a lot of the heat off of the hyper-focus on the executive.
So when you disperse power to the legislatures and the courts, people have different avenues. People gravitate toward power. There are people in the U.S. whose big dream is to be either Supreme Court justice or to argue cases in front of the Supreme Court because the Court is a powerful institution in itself. That’s a channel that takes away any fights they may have had in them about becoming president.
AG: What would you say is the biggest threat to the stability of national governments and legislatures across Africa and how can it be overcome?
KO: I would say that the biggest threat now is the inability of democracies to deliver. Across the continent, for almost 30 years now, people have been sold this idea that all you need is clean and fair elections and life will be different, but that's not empirically true. So people are becoming frustrated and beginning to think of alternative ways to get to a higher quality of living and improved life outcomes. That gap between the promise of electoral democracy and what is actually achieved is the biggest threat. And like in the case of Algeria, it threatens the executive but also the system, in the sense that people want to overhaul the entire system.
AG: That’s a fascinating point because of how much emphasis we place on electoral strength. Whenever there’s a nationwide election, just from my personal experience, the thing that people seem to focus on the most is how strong and how fair those elections were, whereas that might not necessarily be the only qualifying factor.
KO: Exactly, so in my classes I try to emphasize that elections are a means to an end. Think of it as though the state is a tool that enables us to do a lot of things. Elections allow us to elect good operators of the tool, but for elections to work, that tool must be functional. If you keep electing the best operators of a tool that’s broken, then you have a broken system.
In most of the world, we focus so much on making elections free, fair, and transparent but haven’t given enough attention to also ensuring that this system of delivering public goods and services to citizens is also working. Elections elect people who run bureaucracies; those bureaucracies ought to deliver, and then citizens evaluate their elected officials on the basis of that cycle. When that system doesn’t work as it should, I think that’s a big threat.
Globally, there are people who look at China and make the wrong inference that the reason they’re doing well is because of autocracy, while in my view, the reason they’re doing well is because they have an effective tool. They’ve tweaked the tool, and the tool works well. Because for every China, there are lots of other autocracies with mediocre bureaucracies that do nothing. The lesson from China is that the tool works, but most people become persuaded that the autocracy is working.
Opalo’s book is out and available for purchase (Hardcover, $99.99).