Coups and Conflict in West Africa, 1955 2004 Part I, Theoretical Perspectives Patrick J McGowan

10.1177/0095327X05277885

ARTICLE

Armed Forces & Society

McGowan / Coups and Conflict in W est Africa

Coups and Conflict in

West Africa, 1955-2004

Part I, Theoretical Perspectives

Patrick J. McGowan

Stellenbosch University and Arizona State University

From independence through 2004, the sixteen West African states have experienced

forty-four successful military-led coups, forty-three often-bloody failed coups, at least

eighty-two coup plots, seven civil wars, and many other forms of political conflict. This

two-part article seeks answers to the question, what has gone wrong in West Africa? Part I

uses world-systems and rational-choice analyses to provide theoretical answers involv-

ing macro structures and micro leadership behavior. Structural peripherality and poor

leadership result in underdevelopment and state weakness, the major structural causes of

West African instability. Empirical evidence demonstrates West Africa’s peripheral role

in the world-economy, the high risks associated with political leadership in the region,

and West Africa’s critical socioeconomic situation. Part II, appearing in the January 2006

issue, will examine new data on coups and conflict in West Africa and speculate on what

can be done to improve the situation.

Keywords: coups; West Africa; world-system; rational choice

Because political office is a quick route to wealth in Africa, people fight for it.

—Robert Guest

If we define West Africa as the sixteen member states of the Economic Community

of West African States from Mauritania in the west to Niger in the east and all states

south of them including offshore Cape Verde, we must then conclude that this region is

Africa’s zone par excellence of coups and conflict, only perhaps rivaled in conflict, but

not in coup activity, by the Great Lakes region in Central and Eastern Africa.

A recent

study of all failed and successful coup attempts in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) between

1956 and the end of 2001 found that fully 45 percent of all 188 attempts occurred in

West Africa, although the states of this region represent only 33 percent of SSA’s forty-

Armed Forces & Society

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Author’s Note: An early version of this article was presented at a U.S. State Department Conference on

“Military Coups in West Africa and Regional Instability,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,

Washington, D.C., March 5, 2004. The author has benefited from comments at this conference and seminars

at Stellenbosch University and the University of Cape Town as well as from the comments of three anony-

mous referees.

eight states.

This alone justifies a closer look at military coups and conflict in West

Africa.

Our new data set has been expanded to include 1955 and three more recent years,

2002 to 2004.

By our count, beginning in January 1955 (in the case of Liberia) or with

the date of independence of the other fifteen states, by the end of 2004, these West

African states had experienced forty-four successful military-led coups d’etat, forty-

three often-bloody failed coup attempts, eighty-two reported coup plots by elements

of the military, and as many as seven terrible civil wars.

Indeed, being overthrown or

killed in a coup or civil war has been by far the most frequent way West African leaders

have lost power, which is another reason to examine coups and violent conflict in the

region.

In West Africa, only the tiny island Republic of Cape Verde has been totally free of

military interventions and serious violent conflict since its independence in 1975.

Surely, its insular location and ethnic homogeneity have helped in this, but such geog-

raphy and ethnic patterns have not helped Sao Tome and Principe off the coast of Cen-

tral Africa or the Union of the Comoros in the Indian Ocean. Fourteen out of sixteen

states have seen from one to six successful military coups (only Cape Verde and Sene-

gal are exceptions), and beginning with the Biafran War from 1967 to 1970, Liberia

(1989-1997, 2000-2003), Sierra Leone (1992-2002), and Côte d’Ivoire (2002-

present) have also suffered devastating civil wars. With the exception of Cape Verde,

other types of serious intrastate and interstate violence and conflict have also affected

the rest of postcolonial West Africa.

These coups and conflicts have been a massive humanitarian and developmental

disaster for West Africa and its 238 million people: at least 2 million dead during and

after the Biafran War, at least 200,000 in the first Liberian civil war, and more than

100,000 in the Sierra Leonean civil wars, with millions more international refugees

and internally displaced persons resulting from these conflicts.

With the exception of

Cape Verde—which has benefited from its large diaspora in North America and

Europe—no other West African state has experienced significant economic and

human development since independence (see Tables 1 and 3).

Moreover, it is not just West Africans who are endangered by the region’s disasters.

They could present a national security threat for the United States: if the Sudan and

Somalia were bases of international terrorism yesterday, why not some failed West

African state today or tomorrow? In this vein, the U.S. Ambassador to Senegal Rich-

ard Roth asserted in January 2004 that al-Qaida had tried to infiltrate the illegal West

African diamond trade centered on conflict-ridden Sierra Leone and Liberia in order

to launder money.

This allegation was subsequently confirmed in a confidential

United Nations report that was leaked to the Associated Press in August 2004. Work-

ing with Liberia’s former warlord Charles Taylor, senior al-Qaida operatives pur-

chased “blood diamonds” in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone between September

1998 and the end of 2002 to acquire “easily convertible, untraceable resources after

the first US-led moves in 1999 froze al-Qaida bank accounts and other conventional

assets worldwide.”

6 Armed Forces & Society

Because many analysts “see al-Qaida as finding an ideal new staging ground in

Africa, where governments are weak, poorly paid authorities are easily bribed, and

communications are slow and in some places don’t exist,”

in mid-2004, approxi-

mately 1,000 U.S. special operations troops were engaged in antiterrorism training

efforts with the armies of Mali, Mauritania, and Niger in West Africa and with neigh-

boring Chad in Central Africa under the U.S. military’s European Command’s “Pan-

Sahel Initiative.”

The enemy is the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, an

alleged Islamic militant organization with ties to al-Qaida, one of whose leaders is the

Algerian Amari Saifi, also known as “Al Para” because of his earlier training as a para-

trooper.

As Keenan has written, “The biggest problem for the Americans is their

unfamiliarity with and lack of good intelligence on this environment . . . the vast

expanse of Sahara and Sahel that runs from Mauritania in the west, through northern

Mali and Niger, southern Algeria, eastwards through Chad and into Darfur.”

The members of the European Union are also vulnerable as tens of thousands of

West African conflict and economic refugees cross the Sahara each year to seek secu-

rity and employment in Europe.

In 2003 alone, more than 17,000 illegal migrants

mainly from West Africa were intercepted while attempting to enter Spain by sea.

Instability in West Africa also challenges the international community as a whole with

large and expensive UN peacekeeping forces presently in Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, and

Sierra Leone and with Liberia needing $520 million in stabilization aid just for 2004

and 2005.

These international implications of West Africa’s poverty and political

instability provide a further justification for our analysis of coups and conflict in the

region.

It is not a simple task to answer the question, what has gone wrong in West Africa?

In this article, only tentative suggestions can be made. In doing this, one must immedi-

ately point out that since the early 1990s, Senegal, Cape Verde, Ghana, Mali, and per-

haps Benin, while all terribly poor and suffering from widespread unemployment,

have bucked the regional trend and are today (at least for West Africa) relatively sta-

ble, multiparty democracies. Indeed, in the last presidential election in Cape Verde in

February 2001, Pedro Pires won by only twelve votes, a narrow margin that was

respected by all involved.

These states are the politically stable black swans that

refute any simplistic generalization that all West African states are unstable, corrupt,

conflict-ridden white swans.

A Political-Economy Perspective

It is the leader with the least certainty about his fate who has the strongest incentives

to take his rewards now—and to take as much as possible.

—Arthur A. Goldsmith

This article argues that a political-economy perspective can provide a parsimonious

and relatively complete explanation of West Africa’s coups and conflicts since inde-

pendence. The modern world-system perspective as developed by Immanuel

McGowan / Coups and Conflict in West Africa 7

Wallerstein, Christopher Chase-Dunn, and others explains why the peripheral states of

West Africa are so weak and poor.

State weakness is the primary structural cause of

the varied forms of political instability that have afflicted this region over the past forty

years.

At the level of individuals, Mancur Olson and Arthur Goldsmith have persua-

sively argued that institutional weakness and violent politics create an environment in

which autocratic political leaders rationally choose short-term gain rather than longer-

term development.

In this sense, they are “poor” leaders who are likely to behave in a

corrupt, nepotistic, and rent-seeking fashion that further weakens the political econo-

mies of the states they autocratically rule: “This in a nutshell is why Africans are poor:

their leaders keep them that way.”

Structure and agency thus combine to produce a vicious downward spiral that has

so far been well-nigh impossible to reverse in most of West Africa. This is reflected in

the region’s miserable performance on the United Nations Development Program’s

Human Development Index (HDI), its very low per capita incomes, and its pervasive

poverty (see Table 3). It is also the case that the “micro” rational-choice, political-

economy theory of Olson has seldom been used in tandem with the “macro” capitalist

world-economy perspective of Wallerstein, but in the instance of coups and conflict in

West Africa, they complement each other nicely.

The World-System Perspective

The modern world-system comprises a single capitalist world-economy and an

interstate political system that today numbers more than 190 members. A key feature

of the world-economy is a global division of labor in which different zones and states

specialize in the production and exchange of different commodities. World-system

theorists posit that there are three distinct zones within this division of labor: core,

semiperiphery, and periphery. Core zones produce, consume, and export varied prod-

ucts in a capital-intensive, high-tech, and high-wage fashion, whereas peripheral areas

produce and export agricultural and mineral commodities as well as simple manufac-

tures like textiles and clothing in a labor-intensive, low-tech, and low-wage fashion.

These exports make possible imports of foodstuffs and more-sophisticated manufac-

tures from the core and semiperiphery, like South Africa. The role that states or

regions play in the world-economy’s division of labor affects their class structure and,

therefore, their politics and state strength.

The internal structure of peripheral areas is typically “dualistic” with a “modern”

sector of mines, plantations, estates, and ports oriented to the world-economy and a

“traditional” sector of peasants and herdsmen that serves as a “labor reserve” for the

former.

In West Africa, unlike Latin America, no indigenous class of large landown-

ers and businesspeople developed during the colonial era.

At independence, the vast

majority were subsistence or cash-crop peasant farmers and pastoralists. In urban

areas, there was a small working class mainly in ports and railroads, petit bourgeois

traders, and a more-educated cadre of government employees. Along the coast, a tiny

professional class of lawyers, doctors, educators, and ministers of religion existed.

Large businesses in the export-import trade, plantation agriculture, and mining were

8 Armed Forces & Society

almost always foreign owned as were many smaller retail shops (by so-called Leba-

nese). Property-owning middle classes were small and weak and found almost exclu-

sively in government employment and the liberal professions.

These “new states” of

West Africa comprised weak, urban-based regimes led by western-educated national-

ists unanchored in the social classes historically associated with strong states—wage

workers, capitalist bourgeoisie, and large landowners.

The incorporation of coastal West Africa as a peripheral zone in the world-economy

began in the mid-eighteenth century when the slave trade experienced a major expan-

sion, reaching a peak in the decade before 1793.

Thomas Packenham has vividly

described this process in the Guinea Highlands:

The eighteenth century saw a kind of Dyula revolution. The slave gangs now plodded

south through the forests to the slave ports of Guinea and Sierra Leone. From there they

were packed off to the plantations of the New World. Back through the forest tramped

porters with luxuries from the Old World on their heads: Spanish knives, British kettles,

French cloth and, above all, obsolete firearms of every kind. Guns and gunpowder were

soon to be as essential as a staple food. Starved of guns, a chief and his people would soon

find themselves snapped up by the Dyula to become a line of merchandise plodding down

to the slave ports.

This shift, which happened throughout coastal West Africa during the mid-1700s, rep-

resented a basic change in the region’s relationship with the world-economy. Instead

of an “external area” exchanging “luxury goods,” such as the brass and copper brace-

lets, head ware, uncut cloth, and gin of earlier centuries, for slaves gathered from other

African peoples, some West African entrepreneurs and rulers became “hooked” into

the “business” of trading slaves (as well as gold and ivory) for increasingly “essential”

guns and gunpowder.

The process of precolonial peripheralization began in this

manner.

Once Britain had consolidated its global hegemony in the world-system by indus-

trializing and defeating revolutionary and Napoleonic France in the early nineteenth

century, it began to suppress the Atlantic slave trade and gradually replaced it with so-

called legitimate trade in which increasingly peripheral coastal West Africa exported

peasant-grown cash crops like palm oil and peanuts (used in making lubricants, soap,

and candles) in exchange for British textiles and other manufactured goods.

Britain’s “informal empire” along the West African coast during the mid-

nineteenth century came under challenge by other European core powers when its

hegemony began to decline in the 1870s and 1880s along with the global Great

Depression from 1873 to 1895.

This led to the famous “Scramble for Africa” of the

1880s and formal empire by means of the preemptive colonial partition of all of West

Africa, including the interior Sahel and Saharan regions, by Britain, France, Germany,

and Portugal.

Only tiny Liberia remained independent, largely thanks to Anglo-

French rivalry. The ensuing colonial era from the 1880s to around 1960 further deep-

ened West Africa’s peripheral role in the world-economy by emphasizing the produc-

tion and export of agricultural and mineral commodities to metropolitan markets in

exchange for their manufactures.

McGowan / Coups and Conflict in West Africa 9

Table 1 demonstrates the peripheral role West Africa still plays in the world-

economy, even after more than forty years of independence. The export of primary

commodities in exchange for core manufactures established in the colonial era

remains in place. The only significant change since independence is unrefined Nige-

rian petroleum exports. Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau are mainly

agricultural exporters. Guinea and Nigeria export minerals and petroleum almost

exclusively, whereas Benin, Ghana, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Sierra Leone,

and Togo mix mineral and agricultural commodities among their major exports.

Because it has refineries, Senegal exports some petroleum products to neighboring

states but mainly depends on peanuts and fish as foreign exchange earners. Only Cape

Verde exports some labor-intensive manufactures—shoes and garments—but its total

exports are a tiny $30 million a year. All these states import foodstuffs and capital-

intensive manufactures from the core of the world-system. The region’s peripheral

role in the global division of labor is reinforced by the extremely modest value of each

state’s total foreign trade, Nigeria’s oil riches making it the sole exception. The pro-

ducers of these exports are mainly peasant farmers in the case of agricultural commod-

ities and giant multinational or state-owned corporations for minerals and petroleum.

The classically peripheral role played by all sixteen West African states within

today’s global political economy has resulted in class structures dominated by subsis-

tence farmers; by small-scale peasant commercial farmers; by wage workers on some

plantations and in mining, transportation, and government employment; and by a

small, trading-oriented bourgeoisie. With the possible exception of Nigeria, an indige-

nous capitalist class (as opposed to multinational and parastatial capital) active in

manufacturing and services is weak or absent. With such class structures, it is next to

impossible to construct a multiethnic “hegemonic bloc” comprising business and

political elites along with other key sectors such as the civil service that provides the

foundation for a strong state. In such weak states, accumulating wealth via entrepre-

neurship is more difficult and riskier than stealing it through the corrupt use of politi-

cal office. This is why “for bright, energetic Africans, it is often easier to get rich by

joining the government than by creating honest wealth”

and why civilian politicians,

military men, and warlords have so often fought for control of the state during West

Africa’s independent history and are likely to continue to do so for as long as their

states remain so peripheral, poor, and weak.

The Rational-Choice Perspective

These macro structural features are not the only reason the region is so poor and

unstable. At the micro level of individual political leaders, it often becomes a “ratio-

nal” political strategy to seek short-term gain rather than longer-term national devel-

opment and economic reform because of the high risk of losing office in a coup or civil

war before the benefits of reforms and development materialize. This political-

economy theory of leadership motivations in such high-risk political environments as

West Africa explains why so many heads of government have been corrupt and reluc-

10 Armed Forces & Society

McGowan / Coups and Conflict in West Africa 11

Table 1

West Africa’s Major Commodity Exports and Imports by Value, 2002

Country

Top Three Exports

Top Three Imports

Benin

$207 m.

$479 m.

Cotton

Foodstuffs

Crude oil

Capital goods

Palm products

Petroleum products

Burkina Faso

$250 m.

$525 m.

Cotton

Capital goods

Livestock

Foodstuffs

Gold

Petroleum

Cape Verde

$30 m.

$220 m.

Fuel

Foodstuffs

Shoes

Industrial equipment

Garments

Transport equipment

Côte d’Ivoire

$4,400 m.

$2,500 m.

Cocoa

Fuel

Coffee

Capital equipment

Timber

Foodstuffs

Gambia

$138 m.

$225 m.

Peanut products

Foodstuffs

Fish

Manufactures

Cotton lint

Fuel

Ghana

$2,200 m.

$2,800 m.

Gold

Capital equipment

Cocoa

Petroleum

Timber

Foodstuffs

Guinea

$835 m.

$670 m.

Bauxite ore

Petroleum products

Alumina

Metals

Gold

Machinery

Guinea-Bissau

$71 m.

$59 m.

Cashew nuts

Foodstuffs

Shrimp

Machinery and transport equipment

Peanuts

Petroleum products

Liberia

$110 m.

$165 m.

Rubber

Fuels

Timber

Chemicals

Iron ore

Machinery

Mali

$680 m.

$630 m.

Cotton

Petroleum

Gold

Machinery and equipment

Livestock

Construction materials

Mauritania

$335 m.

$360 m.

Iron ore

Machinery and equipment

Fish and fish products

Petroleum products

Gold

Capital goods

Niger

$293 m.

$368 m.

Uranium ore

Foodstuffs

Livestock

Machinery

Cowpeas

Vehicles and parts

(continued)

tant to “stay the course” of market-oriented economic policies, so-called good eco-

nomics, as well as the democratization of their political systems.

The theory as proposed by Olson and Goldsmith is quite simple but intuitively

appealing. As Goldsmith writes, “We can begin with the assumption that African lead-

ers are usually trying to do what they think is best for themselves. We can posit that

they choose actions that appear to them to produce the greatest benefit at least cost,

after making allowance for the degree of risk involved.”

No political leader fully

exemplifies this rational-actor model, but the model leads to interesting predictions on

how such a leader will behave in the political circumstances found in independent

West Africa.

For rational leaders, the problem is to make accurate estimates of the costs, bene-

fits, and risks of any present or future course of action. If one assumes that leaders

employ a “political discount rate” to estimate the present value to themselves of some

future event, then it follows that the rate of discount rises with risk and uncertainty. So,

“when an outcome is doubtful over time, it makes sense to mark down its present

value. The more doubtful the outcome, the more valuable are alternative activities that

yield immediate dividends, even if the expected return of these activities is low.”

Olson writes, “Many autocrats . . . have had short time horizons: the examples of con-

fiscations, repudiated loans, debased coinages, and inflated currencies perpetrated by

monarchs and dictators over the course of history are almost beyond counting.”

The political environment in West Africa since independence has been highly

uncertain and risky for its political leaders. Three consequences follow from this sim-

ple model: (1) under conditions of political uncertainty, the rational leader will choose

current political consumption over longer-term political and economic investments

12 Armed Forces & Society

Nigeria

$17,300 m.

$13,600 m.

Petroleum and petroleum

Machinery

products (95%)

Cocoa

Transport equipment

Rubber

Manufactured goods

Senegal

$1,150 m.

$1,460 m.

Fish

Foodstuffs

Peanuts

Capital goods

Petroleum products

Fuels

Sierra Leone

$35 m.

$190 m.

Diamonds (1999)

Foodstuffs (1995)

Rutile

Machinery and equipment

Cocoa

Fuels and lubricants

Togo

$449 m.

$561 m.

Reexports

Machinery and equipment

Cotton

Foodstuffs

Phosphates

Petroleum products

Source: CIA Factbook 2003.

Table 1 (continued)

Country

Top Three Exports

Top Three Imports

from which he may never benefit; (2) rational leaders with uncertain tenures have

strong motives to be corrupt and feather their nests while they can; and (3) in multieth-

nic states, insecure, autocratic leaders have strong incentives to favor their own kin and

larger ethnic-kin networks. If they lose power at the center, they may still be able to

reconstitute themselves as miniautocrats in an ethnic homeland.

That holding high political office is a very risky affair in West Africa is demon-

strated in Table 2 where all eighty-nine leadership transitions in the region beginning

with 1960 are reported (Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Guinea’s Ahmed Sékou Touré,

and Liberia’s William Tubman were still in power at the beginning of that year). The

most common way to lose power in the region is to be overthrown or killed in a coup

attempt or civil war (52.8 percent of all transitions), and this pattern has persisted since

1990. Moreover, several of the ten resignations and retirements were not voluntary but

forced by a faction of the military.

It is true that some West African leaders have been able to stay in office for

extended periods. In the cases of Félix Houphout-Boigny who ruled Côte d’Ivoire for

McGowan / Coups and Conflict in West Africa 13

Table 2

How Leaders Have Lost Office in West Africa, 1960-2004

Number of Incidents

1960-1969 1970-1979 1980-1989 1990-1999 2000-2004 Total

Overthrown/killed in a

failed coup, successful

coup, or civil war

Died of natural causes

Retired/resigned

Lost an election

Other (interim or

caretaker regime)

All transitions

Leadership Turnover in West Africa, 1960-2004

Number of Transitions

Country

The Gambia

Cape Verde, Guinea, Senegal

Côte d’Ivoire, Togo

Mali, Mauritania

Burkina Faso, Guinea-Bissau

Niger

Ghana, Liberia

Nigeria, Sierra Leone

Benin

Source: Pieter Esterhuysen, Africa at a Glance: Facts and Figures 2001/2002 (Pretoria: Africa Institute of

South Africa, 2002); Arthur A. Goldsmith, “African Leadership Data” (kindly provided to the author);

Patrick J. McGowan, Intervention Events; and World Political Leaders 1945-2005, http://www.terra.es/

personal2/monolith/00index.htm (accessed January 24, 2005).

just over thirty-three years until his death in 1993 and of Senegal’s Léopold Senghor

who was president for twenty years until his retirement in 1980, this was made possi-

ble because a major core power, France, guaranteed their continued rule and because

of their own shrewd political skills.

Other long-time civilian rulers were eventually

overthrown in coups: Dawda Jawara in 1994 after ruling Gambia for twenty-nine

years, Moktar Ould Dadda of Mauritania in 1978 after eighteen years in power, and

the unfortunate Hamani Diori, who thought France also guaranteed his rule in Niger

but who was overthrown in a 1974 coup with apparent French approval, after fourteen

years in power.

West Africa’s other long-term rulers either died in office—Gnassingbe Eyadéma,

who was Togo’s president for a remarkable thirty-eight years, Guinea’s Sékou Touré

after ruling for twenty-six years, and Niger’s Seyni Kountché after thirteen years—or

have kept power via a shrewd mix of repression and electoral authoritarianism:

Benin’s Mathieu Kérékou for a total of twenty-six years, Burkina Faso’s Blaise

Compaore since 1987, Guinea’s Lansana Conté since 1984,

and Mauritania’s

Maaouya Ould Taya also since 1984. Only in the cases of Cape Verde’s Aristides

Pereira (sixteen years), Ghana’s Jerry Rawlings (nineteen years), and Senegal’s

Abdou Diouf (twenty years) did a longtime leader leave office because he lost an elec-

tion or was forbidden to seek another term by the constitution.

Because some leaders held office on two different occasions, such as Nigeria’s

Olusegun Obasanjo between 1976 and 1979 and since 1999, only seventy-three differ-

ent persons have been chief executives in West Africa during the period 1960 to 2004.

That politics in West Africa is a zero-sum game is shown by what happened to many of

these leaders when they lost power or thereafter: fourteen (19.2 percent) were killed,

seventeen (23.3 percent) were exiled, and twenty-one (28.8 percent) were arrested,

including Obasanjo himself.

Political leadership in West Africa is indeed an uncer-

tain, high-risk endeavor, which explains why so many leaders have been so corrupt

and uninterested in long-term development policies, thereby deepening the peripherality

and weakness of their states.

World-system theory predicts that peripheral states will tend to be poor, weak,

authoritarian, and rarely democratic. The frailty of institutionalized democracy in

West Africa is confirmed by the facts that only one leader, Sir Albert Margai of Sierra

Leone, left office between 1960 and 1991 because he lost an election in 1967 and that

only six transitions out of eighty-nine (7 percent) were the consequence of losing a

democratic election. The countries with the most leadership turnover—Benin, Nige-

ria, Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Liberia—have been the locus of repeated coups d’etat

and, in the cases of Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, of serious civil wars.

The Socioeconomic Setting

Victims of . . . wars and other large-scale collective violence concentrate dispropor-

tionately in countries where most people live miserably in other respects as well.

—Charles Tilly

14 Armed Forces & Society

Examination of Table 3 confirms what we would expect to see if West Africa is

peripheral and has suffered from poor political leadership since independence. With

the exception of Cape Verde, which in the 2002 HDI tables ranked higher than South

Africa (119th), the other fifteen West African states have per capita incomes and levels

of human development among the lowest in the world. Indeed, according to the 2002

HDI rankings, the five states of Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Sierra

Leone are the least developed in the world.

Fourteen of these sixteen states are far

down in the United Nations Development Program’s “low human development” cate-

gory, and Ghana barely makes it into the “medium human development” class. Short

life expectancies, inadequate school enrollments, low literacy rates, and low Purchasing-

Power-Parity (PPP) per capita incomes are the basis of this dismal record. Not a single

McGowan / Coups and Conflict in West Africa 15

Table 3

Human Development, Per Capita Income, and

Poverty among Sixteen West African States, 2002

Population %

with Incomes

GDP per

Less than

Capita

$2 per Day,

Rank among 177 States

Country

HDI

(PPP US$)

1994-1999

105

Cape Verde

0.717

$5,000

—

131

Ghana

0.568

2,130

78.5

143

Togo

0.495

1,480

—

151

Nigeria

0.466

850

90.8

152

Mauritania

0.465

2,220

63.1

155

The Gambia

0.452

1,690

82.9

157

Senegal

0.437

1,580

67.8

160

Guinea

0.425

2,100

—

161

Benin

0.421

1,070

—

163

Côte d’Ivoire

0.399

1,520

50.4

172

Guinea-Bissau

0.350

710

—

174

Mali

0.326

930

90.6

175

Burkina Faso

0.302

1,110

81.0

176

Niger

0.292

800

85.3

177

Sierra Leone

0.273

520

74.5

Liberia

—

Sub-Saharan Africa

0.465

1,790

—

World

0.729

7,804

—

Source: United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 2004 (New York: Oxford

University Press, 2004), 139-42, 250; and World Bank, World Development Report 2004 (New York: Oxford

University Press, 2004), 258-59.

Note: HDI = Human Development Index; GDP = Gross Domestic Product; PPP = Purchasing-Power-Parity.

a. Medium human development.

b. Along with Afghanistan, Iraq, North Korea, Serbia and Montenegro, Somalia, and ten microstates like

Nauru; there were insufficient reliable data to calculate the HDI for Liberia.

West African state has an HDI score above the world average, and eleven states are at

or below the average HDI for all of SSA.

Regarding per capita income, the extent of West African poverty is dramatic. In the

world at large, calculating income in PPP terms usually results in marked increases in

estimated personal income for less-developed countries with relatively undervalued

currencies and low costs of living. For example, in 2001, South Africa’s PPP per capita

income was estimated to have been $11,290, about one-third the average U.S. PPP

income. For fourteen of the states of West Africa, 2002 PPP incomes range from

Ghana’s $2,130 to Sierra Leone’s pitiful $520. The extent of West African poverty can

be judged by a relative comparison to the United States, whose PPP per capita income

in 2002 was $35,750. Ghana’s per capita income was one-seventeenth the average

American income. Seven of the countries in Table 2 have per capita incomes less than

one-thirtieth the U.S. average.

Nigeria’s 121 million citizens comprise 43 percent of West Africa’s total popula-

tion, and they have PPP incomes of only $850 a year. Because of this, the estimated

average per capita income for the entire West African region of some 238 million peo-

ple is a meager $1,141—well below the average for all of SSA, about one-seventh the

global per capita income, and just one-thirty-first the U.S. income.

The proportion of the national populations estimated to be living below the interna-

tional poverty line with incomes less than $2 per day ranges from Nigeria’s 90.8 per-

cent to Côte d’Ivoire’s 50.4 percent (surely an underestimate today). For the ten states

for which poverty estimates were available, nine have about two-thirds to over nine-

tenths of their populations living in poverty, and the situation is surely as bad in Libe-

ria, for which we have no data. In 2002, the two most populous states in West Africa

were Ghana (20.5 million) and Nigeria (121 million). If the estimated percentage of

each country’s population living in poverty is at all close to the mark, then some 16

million Ghanaians and 110 million Nigerians are “living” below the global poverty

line!

These bleak economic figures reflect the fact that no West African economy

has experienced a structural transformation from its colonially based, peripheral,

commodity-export orientation to one in which manufacturing and services comple-

ment primary sector activities such as agriculture and minerals, including petroleum.

Peripheral and poor at independence, West Africa is poorer today due to mal-

governance, harsh global economic conditions for commodity exporters, and coups

and conflict. The region remains very underdeveloped, arguably the least developed

region in the world; it is the periphery of the periphery with a per capita income less

than 15 percent of the world’s average.

Under such dismal economic conditions, democratization and political stability

must remain problematic and open to renewed military interventions and conflicts. As

Jackson has argued, “The most serious problem for Africa’s weak states is underde-

velopment and ongoing economic crisis. These can lead directly to political instabil-

ity. At the very least, they create the conditions whereby politics is transformed into a

vicious competition for scarce resources” in which elite corruption, nepotism, rent

seeking, and coups become the norm.

16 Armed Forces & Society

For these reasons, during the past five years between January 2000 and December

2004, West Africa has seen five failed coup attempts (three in Côte d’Ivoire and one

each in Mauritania and Sierra Leone); a successful coup in Guinea-Bissau in 2003;

reported coup plots in Burkina Faso, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau (two), Guinea, Côte

d’Ivoire (two), Mauritania (two), and Nigeria; rumors of plots across the region, par-

ticularly in Ghana;

serious civil wars in Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, and Sierra Leone; and

a twenty-two-year-long insurgency in the Casamance region of Senegal that only

ended in late December 2004.

West Africa’s present socioeconomic malaise is to a great extent a consequence of

the political instability and conflict that has wracked the region since its first success-

ful coup in Togo in January 1963. Politics matters greatly for economic growth.

Eco-

nomic growth results from investment, and the expected profitability of investment is

determined, in part, by two political factors: the extent to which the economy favors

production instead of diversion and the stability of the economic environment.

Poor

political leadership encourages resource diversion by means of corruption, theft, and

rent seeking by special interests. These act like taxes on businesses, reducing their

profitability and investment attractiveness.

Coups and violent conflict are extreme

forms of political instability and destabilize the economic environment as well. “Insta-

bility of the economic environment increases uncertainty and discourages investment,

thereby affecting growth.”

It is also clear that economic instability can lead to political instability, as Jackson

has noted. Starting out peripheral and poor and then practicing “bad economics” after

independence are surely among the structural causes of postcolonial coups and con-

flicts. Rather than a virtuous cycle of development and democracy, with the exceptions

already noted, too many West African states have experienced vicious cycles of

impoverishment, tyranny, and instability.

With around 121 million citizens and great oil wealth, Nigeria typifies these West

African dilemmas. No one would dispute the talent and energy of Nigerians, and one

cannot deny the country’s abundant mineral and agricultural resources (which are

totally neglected today). Yet its 2002 PPP per capita income was only $850 and an esti-

mated 91 percent of its population are living in poverty (about 110 million people),

while the wealth, ostentation, and corruption of its millionaires (both civilian and mili-

tary) are proverbial. After a bloody civil war, eight coups (six of them successful),

repeated bouts of serious communal violence, levels of corruption perceived to be

about the worst in the world,

and criminal mafias with global reach, the enormity of

the tasks confronting President Olusegun Obasanjo’s administration are staggering.

Conclusion

The correlations of misery and conflict do not result from a general propensity of

poor people to lash out in violence. They arise from the tyrannies large and small that

flourish in undemocratic regimes in which the state has limited capacity to act for the

common good.

—Charles Tilly

McGowan / Coups and Conflict in West Africa 17

At the end of the day, conflict and coups in West Africa have their primary political

cause in the character of the region’s weak states.

We have argued that West African

states are so weak because of their peripheral political economies, poor political lead-

ership, and socioeconomic underdevelopment. Analysts have used a variety of terms

to characterize these weak African states: collapsed, failed, fictive, fragmented, quasi,

shadow, soft, swollen, and underdeveloped are among the terms used. In “highly

factionalized, patronage-based political systems,” this has led to the development of

“war economies,” “warlord politics,” and “armed commercial networks,”

in which

the control and use of violence have become a strategy for the accumulation of wealth

and power as they were in early modern Europe.

The result is sometimes a cruel and

deeply ironic choice between chaos and colonialism: witness today’s Liberia that

according to the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, is “a collapsed state that

has become in effect a UN protectorate.”

Weak states share a number of characteristics: (1) unconsolidated or nonexistent

democracy, (2) lack of legitimacy, (3) no cohesive national identities, (4) institutional

incapacity and inability to implement policies, (5) economic crisis, and (6) vulnerabil-

ity to external intervention.

Leaders in West African states that are weak and poor

cannot use redistribution to maintain power. In the face of opposition, such political

leaders are likely to turn to repression to stay in office. This has two negative conse-

quences: first, repression makes it more likely that political opposition will also turn

violent, and second, the forces of repression, the army and police, become central

domestic political players likely to acquire their own political agendas.

In Azam’s

words, “In a precise sense . . . a weak government implies a repression bias, while a

strong government will use less repressive actions, or even will give them up, and will

rely more on redistribution.”

Building strong states is no easy matter. Looking at early modern Europe, Imman-

uel Wallerstein has identified five characteristics of the Dutch and English strong

states of that time (1600-1750): (1) the extent to which their state policies promoted

the competitiveness of indigenous business enterprise in national and global markets

(mercantilism); (2) the extent to which the Dutch and English were able to affect the

competitiveness of other states and enterprises (mercantilist policies and naval

power); (3) the ability of the English and Dutch states to mobilize resources to perform

these competitive and military tasks at costs that did not eat into profits of their capital-

ist classes (sound public finance and the generation of what Frederic Lane has called

protection rents); (4) the Dutch and English capacities to create administrations

enabling the swift carrying out of tactical decisions (effective bureaucracy); and (5)

the development of a “hegemonic bloc” in which political arrangements reflected a

balance of interests among capitalists and political rulers for their mutual benefit (the

politics of class relations), which, according to Wallerstein, “is the key to all others.”

Put briefly, most of the time, or at least enough of the time, Dutch and English leaders

sought long-term success rather than short-term personal gain.

We are now in the twenty-first century in which neoliberal globalization and struc-

tural adjustments are the dominant international political-economic realities for weak

states and their leaders. Yet Wallerstein’s criteria remain highly relevant. While the

18 Armed Forces & Society

Dutch and English were often corrupt, fought wars of national liberation against the

Hapsburgs, and experienced regicide and a vicious civil war as well as numerous inter-

state wars, they nevertheless developed. Translated into today’s terms, for their time

and place, the United Provinces and Tudor and Restoration England were what we call

developmental states. In most of West Africa, we see incompetent predatory regimes

in which class relations are relations of power, not relations of production.

Ending coups and conflicts in West Africa will require a political-economy

approach to development in which market-oriented economies with a vibrant capital-

ist class free from state predation and from multinational corporation and international

financial institution domination (this does not exclude participation, however) can get

on with the job of capital accumulation and poverty reduction and in which political

leaders seek legitimate profits as well as power by establishing and maintaining strong

property-rights regimes, the rule of law, and if possible, democracy. The realities on

the ground in most of West Africa today show how far we are from this scenario.

These realities are further examined in part II, which analyzes the record of military

coups d’etat in West Africa since 1955, trends in coup behavior, and the pattern of

major intrastate and interstate violence since independence. It will conclude with a

theoretical and practical discussion of what can be done locally, regionally, and glob-

ally to address West Africa’s many problems.

Notes

1. Robert Guest, “A Survey of Sub-Saharan Africa,” Economist, January 17, 2004, 1-16.

2. Interestingly, in spite of the continuing prevalence of military incursions into West African politics,

Armed Forces & Society has not published a comparative study of military coups d’etat anywhere in sub-

Saharan Africa since Yekutiel Gershoni, “The Changing Pattern of Military Takeovers in Sub-Saharan

Africa,” Armed Forces & Society 23, no. 2 (Winter 1996): 235-48, and nothing on West Africa since the use-

ful article by Baffour Ageyman-Duah, “Military Coups, Regime Change, and Interstate Conflicts in West

Africa,” Armed Forces & Society 16, no. 4 (Summer 1990): 547-70. The most recent relevant article in this

journal is Boubacar N’Diaye, “How Not to Institutionalize Civilian Control: Kenya’s Coup Prevention Strat-

egies 1964-1997,” Armed Forces & Society 28, no. 4 (Summer 2002): 619-40.

3. Patrick J. McGowan, “African Military Coups d’Etat, 1956-2001: Frequency, Trends and Distribu-

tion,” Journal of Modern African Studies 41, no. 3 (September 2003): 356.

4. The data comprise event descriptions of every identified coup, failed coup, and coup plot for all inde-

pendent, majority-ruled sub-Saharan African states. Each event description includes the country, type of

event, date, what happened, participants in the event, alleged causes of the event, and sources used. For 1956

to 1984, these data and the data-making procedures used were first reported in Pat McGowan and Thomas H.

Johnson, “African Military Coups d’Etat and Underdevelopment: A Quantitative Historical Analysis,” Jour-

nal of Modern African Studies 22, no. 4 (December 1984): 633-66. An updated set of data for 1956 to 2001 is

reported in McGowan, “African Military Coups.” The year 1955 was added because some sources, such as

Tormond K. Lunde, “Modernization and Political Instability: Coups d’Etat in Africa, 1955-85,” Acta

Sociologica 34, no. 1 (1991): 13-32, report that there was a military-led coup attempt in Liberia in that year.

Our research concluded that there was no military or security service participation in this event. The partici-

pants in the failed attempt to assassinate President Tubman were a former policeman and several opposition

civilian politicians. See Patrick J. McGowan, “African Military Intervention Events, January 1, 1955 to

December 31, 2004” (Unpublished manuscript Arizona State University, 2005), 214. These event data are

available to other researchers; contact the author at patrick.mcgowan@asu.edu.

5. These data are fully reported in part II.

McGowan / Coups and Conflict in West Africa 19

6. The following discuss Cape Verde’s political system: Colm Foy, Cape Verde: Politics, Economics

and Society (London and New York: Pinter Publishers, 1988); and Richard Lobban and Marlene Lopes, His-

torical Dictionary of the Republic of Cape Verde (Metuchen: NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1995).

7. Since many of these conflicts resulted from the region’s illogical colonial-era borders, Cape Verde’s

insular geography has reduced its conflict potential. On the conflict potential of African boundaries, see Ravi L.

Kapil, “On the Conflict Potential of Inherited Boundaries in Africa,” World Politics 18, no. 4 (July 1966):

656-73.

8. Richard Jackson, “Violent Internal Conflict and the African State: Towards a Framework of Analy-

sis,” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 20, no. 1 (January 2002): 32; and Milton Leitenberg, Deaths

in Wars and Conflicts between 1945 and 2000 (College Park: Center for International Security Studies,

University of Maryland, 2001), 43. Also available online at http://www.puaf.umd.edu/CISSM/People/

Milton-files/deaths%20wars%20conflicts%20NEW.pdf (accessed December 9, 2004).

9. Reuters, “U.S. Diplomat: Al Qaeda Launders Money in Africa,” Washingtonpost.com, January 13,

2004, http://www.washingtonpost.com (accessed January 27, 2004).

10. Edward Harris, “Al-Qaida’s Diamond-studded Reign of Terror,” Independent Online, August 8,

2004, http://www.iol.co.za (accessed August 8, 2004).

11. Barry Schweid, “U.S. Military Supporting Chadian Forces,” Washingtonpost.com, March 12, 2004,

http://www.washingtonpost.com (accessed March 14, 2004).

12. Jeremy Kennan, “Americans & ‘Bad People’in the Sahara-Sahel,” Review of African Political Econ-

omy 99 (2004): 130-39; and National Public Radio, “All Things Considered: The U.S. Military’s Growing

Role in Africa,” October 11, 2004, http://www.NPR.org (accessed October 11, 2004).

13. Craig S. Smith, “U.S. Training African Forces to Uproot Terrorists,” nytimes.com, May 11, 2004,

http://www.nytimes.com (accessed May 11, 2004); “Chad Rebel Group Says It Holds Qaeda-linked Terror-

ist,” nytimes.com, May 14, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com (accessed May 19, 2004); and “Militant Slain in

Algeria: Ties to Qaeda Are Reported,” The New York Times, June 21, 2004, A6.

14. Kennan, “Bad People,” 132.

15. For a general analysis of this problem, see Timothy J. Hilton and Jeffrey G. Williamson, Refugees,

Asylum Seekers and Policy in Europe (Working Paper Series 10608,National Bureau of Economic Research,

Cambridge, MA, 2004).

16. Kennan, “Bad People,” 139.

17. Somini Sengupta, “Liberia Needs $500 Million, Report Says,” nytimes.com, February 2, 2004, http://

www.nytimes.com (accessed February 2, 2004); and Warren Hoge, “U.N. Gets $520 Million Pledge to

Rebuild War-torn Liberia,” Washingtonpost.com, February 7, 2004, http://www.washingtonpost.com (accessed

February 9, 2004).

18. Central Intelligence Agency, World Factbook 2003, available online at http://www.cia.gov/cia/

publications/factbook/ (accessed February 2 and 9, 2004).

19. This variation in stability and democracy will be examined in part II of this article.

20. Arthur A. Goldsmith, “Risk, Rule and Reason: Leadership in Africa,” Public Administration and

Development 21 (2001): 78-79.

21. Thomas R. Shannon, An Introduction to the World-System Perspective, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO:

Westview, 1996); Immanuel M. Wallerstein, “The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System:

Concepts for Comparative Analysis,” Comparative Studies in History and Society 16, no. 4 (September

1974): 387-415; Immanuel M. Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Ori-

gins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974); Christo-

pher Chase-Dunn, “Interstate System and Capitalist World-Economy: One Logic or Two,” International

Studies Quarterly 25, no. 1 (1981): 19-42; Christopher Chase-Dunn, Global Formations: Structures of the

World-Economy (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989); and Christopher Chase-Dunn and Richard

Rubinson, “Toward a Structural Perspective on the World-System,” Politics & Society 7, no. 4 (1977):

453-76.

22. Jackson, “Violent Internal Conflict”; and Paul Collier, “Africa’s Revolutionary Routine,” Foreign

Policy 142 (May/June 2004): 82-83.

23. Mancur Olson, “Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development,” American Political Science Review

87, no. 3 (September 1993): 567-76; and Goldsmith, “Risk, Rule and Reason.”

20 Armed Forces & Society

24. Robert Guest, “Africa Earned Its Debt,” The New York Times, October 6, 2004, A31.

25. Immanuel M. Wallerstein, “Africa in a Capitalist World,” in The Essential Wallerstein, ed. Immanuel M.

Wallerstein (New York: New Press, 2000), 56.

26. Chase-Dunn and Rubinson, “Structural Perspective,” 456-57.

27. A prosperous class of cocoa planters–businessmen did emerge in Côte d’Ivoire and, to a lesser extent,

in Ghana during the late colonial era, but their farms were much smaller than the great landed estates of His-

panic and postindependence Latin America as were their business enterprises.

28. In the early 1960s, Ghana was West Africa’s most prosperous and developed country. Yet its “middle

class” of absentee cocoa farmers, liberal professionals, secondary school and university teachers, middle

and top grades of the civil service, and business managers numbered “not more than fifteen thousand fami-

lies . . . in a population of about seven million.” Robert E. Dowse, “The Military and Political Development,”

in Politics and Change in Developing Countries: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Development, ed.

Colin Leys (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 233.

29. Shannon,World-System Perspective, 106; and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and

John D. Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

30. Immanuel M. Wallerstein, The Modern World-System III: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the

Capitalist World-Economy, 1730-1840s (New York: Academic Press, 1989), 143.

31. Thomas Packenham, The Scramble for Africa, 1876-1912 (London: Phoenix Press, 2001), 175

(emphasis added).

32. Wallerstein, “Africa,” 58-59.

33. Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (New York: Vintage, 1989), 34-55.

34. For a detailed, critical description of this process, see Packenham, Scramble.

35. A critical analysis of West Africa’s colonial political economy is given by Samir Amin, L’Afrique de

l’Ouest bloquée, l’économie politique de la colonisation, 1880-1970 (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1971), pub-

lished in English as Neo-colonialism in West Africa (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973).

36. Guest, “Africa Earned,” A31.

37. For structural explanations of domestic political conflict, see J. C. Jenkins and K. Schock, “Global

Structure and Political Processes in the Study of Domestic Political Conflict,” Annual Review of Sociology

18 (1992): 161-85.

38. Goldsmith, “Leadership in Africa,” 77-79; and Robert H. Bates and Anne O. Krueger, eds., Political

and Economic Interactions in Economic Policy Reform (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1993).

39. Goldsmith, “Leadership in Africa,” 77-78.

40. Ibid., 78.

41. Olson, “Dictatorship,” 571.

42. Ibid., 573.

43. Xavier Renou, “A New French Policy for Africa?” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 20, no.

1 (January 2002): 5-27; and Samuel Decalo, “Coups and Military Regimes 1974-2004:Has Anything Really

Changed?” (Paper presented at the U.S. State Department Conference on Military Coups in West Africa and

Regional Instability, Washington, DC, March 5, 2004).

44. Renou, “New French Policy”; and McGowan, Military Intervention Events, 263.

45. On January 19, 2005, Conté survived an attempted coup when army dissidents tried to assassinate

him by firing on his convoy. Saliou Samb, “Guinea President Escapes Assassination Attempt-Govt.,”

Washingtonpost.com, January 19, 2005, http://www.washingtonpost.com (accessed January 19, 2005); and

Reuters, “Army Dissidents Suspected of Guinean Leader Attack,” nytimes.com, January 20, 2005, http://

www.nytimes.com (accessed January 20, 2005).

46. Goldsmith, “African Leadership Data”; and World Political Leaders 1945-2005, http://www

.terra.es/personal12/monolith/00index.htm (accessed January 24, 2005).

47. Charles Tilly, “Violence, Terror, and Politics as Usual,” Boston Review 27, no. 3 (Summer 2002),

http://www.bostonreview.net/BR27.3/tilly.html (accessed February 17, 2004).

48. The United Nations Development Programme’s first report in 1990 included just thirteen West Afri-

can states (Cape Verde, Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau were excluded), and they were all in the “low human

development” category with Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Mauritania, and Benin being

among the ten lowest ranked countries out of 130 that were ranked; United Nations Development

McGowan / Coups and Conflict in West Africa 21

Programme, Human Development Report 1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 111. While

comprehensive data for Liberia are not available, life expectancy at birth was estimated to be only 41.4 years

in 2002, adult literacy was only 56 percent, and 42 percent of the population were believed to be undernour-

ished; United Nations Development Program, Human Development Report 2004, 250. After more than two

decades of misrule by Samuel Doe and Charles Taylor and two civil wars, Liberia’s Human Development

Index (HDI) score must be comparableto Niger’s and Sierra Leone’s, that is, about the worst in the world.

49. Liberia’s 3.2 million people were excluded from this calculation because we do not have estimates of

their per capita income.

50. Jackson, “Violent Internal Conflict,” 48.

51. Africa News on Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe, “West Africa’s Military and Its Troubles,” Con-

cord Times, October 16, 2003, http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe (accessed January 2, 2004).

52. Reuters, “Attackers Kill Three Soldiers in Southern Senegal,” Washingtonpost.com, January 13,

2004, http://www.washingtonpost.com (accessed January 27, 2004); and Diadie Ba, “Senegal Signs Peace

Deal with Casamance Rebels,” Washingtonpost.com, December 30, 2004, http://www.washingtonpost.com

(accessed December 30, 2004).

53. In this regard, see Charles I. Jones, Introduction to Economic Growth, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton,

2002).

54. Jones, Economic Growth, 140; and Janvier D. Nkurunziza and Robert H. Bates, “Political Institu-

tions and Economic Growth in Africa” (Working Paper Series/2003-03, Oxford Centre for the Study of Afri-

can Economies, 2003).

55. Put another way, “corruption makes it hard to do business in Africa. Manufacturers need smooth

roads, reliable electricity and efficient ports. But too often in Africa, the roads are craterous because some-

one has looted the maintenance budget, the power fails because the state monopoly utility company is staffed

with politicians’idiot cousins, and the customs officers hang onto your goods for weeks in the hope that you

will bribe them to hurry up”; Guest, “Africa Earned,” A31.

56. Nkurunziza and Bates, “Political Institutions,” 8.

57. According to Transparency International, Global Corruption Report (Berlin, Germany: Author,

2004), only Bangladesh and Haiti were more corrupt than Nigeria in 2003. See also Dudley Althaus, “Oil

Dependence Nurtures Corruption within Nigeria,” Arizona Republic (December 17, 2004), A31.

58. The Economist’s African editor, Robert Guest, recently provided first-hand witness to these prob-

lems: “Nigeria, like much of Africa, ought to be rich but is miserably poor. The main reason is that rather than

striving to create an environment in which their people can freely seek prosperity and happiness, most Afri-

can governments have chosen instead to rob them. This culture of criminality has spread throughout the rul-

ing class, down to the Nigerian border guard who threatened to beat up my driver last month if I didn’t give

him a dollar”; Guest, “Africa Earned,” A31.

59. Tilly, “Violence.”

60. Jeffrey Herbst, “Economic Incentives, Natural Resources and Conflict in Africa,” Journal of African

Economics 9, no. 3 (2000): 286.

61. William Reno, Warlord Politics and African States (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998); and Reno,

“Junior Officers’Coups and Civilian Militias” (Paper presented at the U.S. Department of State Conference

on Military Coups in West Africa and Regional Instability, Washington, DC, March 5, 2004).

62. Frederic C. Lane, Profits from Power: Readings in Protection Rent and Violence-Controlling Enter-

prises (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1979).

63. Peter Fabricius, “Africa Must Bite the Bullets of Sacrifice and Compromise—or Risk Bullets of

Chaos, New Colonialism,” Cape Times, February 16, 2004, 9. The question arises, if West African states like

Liberia are so weak, why then have they survived more than forty years of independence? The answer lies

outside the region in the shared norms of behavior promoted by the Organization of African Unity and its

successor African Union and the legal framework of the international system and United Nations that

ignores empirical conditions and upholds the juridical sovereign statehood of all system members. See Arie

E. Kacowicz, “‘Negative’ International Peace and Domestic Conflicts, West Africa, 1957-96,” Journal of

Modern African Studies 35, no. 3 (September 1997): 367-85; Robert H. Jackson, “Juridical Statehood in

Sub-Saharan Africa,” Journal of International Affairs 46 (Summer 1992): 1-16; and Robert H. Jackson and

22 Armed Forces & Society

Carl G. Rosberg, “Why Africa’s Weak States Persist: The Empirical and the Juridical in Statehood,” World

Politics 35, no. 1 (October 1982): 1-24.

64. Jackson, “Violent Internal Conflict,” 38-39; and Collier, “Revolutionary Routine,” 82.

65. Jean-Paul Azam, “The Redistributive State and Conflict in Africa” (Working Paper Series/200.3,

Oxford Centre for the Study of African Economies, 2001), 7; and Aristide Zolberg, “The Structure of Politi-

cal Conflict in the New States of Tropical Africa,” American Political Science Review 62, no. 1 (March

1968): 70-87.

66. Azam, “Redistributive State,” 12.

67. Immanuel M. Wallerstein, The Modern World-System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the

European World-Economy, 1600-1750 (New York: Academic Press, 1980), 113. Sharing this viewpoint are

Lane, Profits from Power, and more recently, Robert H. Bates, Prosperity and Violence: The Political Econ-

omy of Development (New York: Norton, 2001).

68. On African predatory regimes, see the classic article by Richard Sklar, “The Nature of Class Domina-

tion in Africa,” Journal of Modern African Studies 17, no. 4 (December 1979): 531-52; and more recently,

Arthur A. Goldsmith, “Predatory Versus Developmental Rule in Africa,” Democratization 11, no. 3 (June

2004): 88-110. In this regard, it is worth remembering that in 1960, Ghana and South Korea had similar per

capita incomes, and both were poor and peripheral. Ghana was better endowed with its gold mines and pro-

ductive cash-crop agriculture, whereas Korea had suffered a devastating war that ended only in 1953. Yet, in

2002, Korea’s HDI rank was 28th in the world, while Ghana’s was only 131st. Korea’s Purchasing-Power-

Parity per capita income of $16,950 was eight times greater than Ghana’s. The key difference between these

two countries was the political leadership they experienced after 1960. Culture was not the major cause as

Korea was poor and Confucian for centuries before its rise to core status in the world-system during the sec-

ond half of the twentieth century. Its leaders were strongly motivated by international security concerns to

build a strong and rich state. Beginning with the Nkrumah regime, Ghana has suffered many civilian and mil-

itary predatory rulers who were motivated to take their “rewards now—and to take as much as possible”;

Goldsmith, “Leadership in Africa,” 78-79.

69. Olson, “Dictatorship”; and Bates, Prosperity and Violence, 101-15.

Patrick J. McGowan is professor emeritus of political science at Arizona State University and extraordi-

nary professor of political science at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. His most recent book was

coauthored and coedited with Philip Nel, Power, Wealth and Global Equity: An International Relations Text-

book for Africa (2002). His most recent previous article was, “African Military Coups d’Etat: Frequency,

Trends and Distribution,” in the Journal of Modern African Studies (September 2003). Besides aspects of

African and South African politics, his current research focuses on the role of universities in the global politi-

cal economy. Address for correspondence: Patrick J. McGowan, Department of Political Science,

Stellenbosch University, Private Bag X1, Matieland 7602, South Africa; e-mail: pjm@sun.ac.za.

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