Of democracy versus development: the Ethiopian dimension
A few years back, the rest of Ghana looked on helplessly while the two dominant political parties, toggled the tenure of senior high school education between three and four years.
At a point in time, one batch of final year students had to graduate with their immediate juniors whose tenure had been reverted to three years; their combined numbers to vie for the already competitive slots in tertiary education.
This allusion is only a facet of the general incoherence in policy and development strategy that sometimes occurs under multiparty democracy.
Realizing that, Ghana is now preparing a 40-year development plan.
Does democracy hamper development? Do dictatorships develop faster? Is democracy getting in the way of Africa’s development? Which should countries pursue first, democracy or development?
The Africa Report and the Mo Ibrahim Foundation offered a platform for this debate in Accra, part of events marking the annual Mo Ibrahim governance weekend.
Democracy first
Launching the debate was President John Mahama who as “an unapologetic social democrat”, was dismissive of the notion that democracy hampers development.
Democracy, he argued, is in itself part of development and going only by the archaic economy-centric definitions of development could one argue against democracy.
He also said that humans have an unquenchable desire for freedom, which as the world had seen, could sometimes override the satisfaction of development under dictatorships.
“If development under dictatorship was more valuable, Muammar Gaddafi would still be alive”, Mahama said.
The President further pointed out that the development that seems to have taken place under the dictatorships of Singapore’s Lee Kwan Yew and Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, occurred amidst flagrant human rights violations that are difficult to ignore: “progress at what price?” he asked.
On the democracy side of the argument also, were Sudanese entrepreneur Mo Ibrahim, South African politician Jay Naidoo and Professor Audrey Gadzekpo of the University of Ghana’s School of Communication Studies, who noted that Africa’s dictators had brought little to the continent by way of development.
In attempting to advocate dictatorship also, there’s no telling whether a country would end up with a Lee Kwan Yew or an Idi Amin.
“Our history is littered with dictators who came and did nothing about development,” Mo Ibrahim said.
Mo Ibrahim also pointed out that the context of Singapore’s story is too often ignored – the context of Singapore’s own distinct characteristics, its geographic location, the state of affairs at independence etc.
In his view, some leaders simply try to use examples of what looks like development under dictatorship, as a reason to advocate dictatorship for their own selfish interests.
Development First
While about 70 per cent of Africans are against dictatorship and restriction of freedoms, polls suggest many do think development should come first, Carlos Lopes, Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), who was first to argue against democracy, said.
The crux of his argument for “development first” however, was that there is difficulty and a lot of vagueness in defining democracy, and democracy does not necessarily include development, whereas development always includes democracy.
“For me, human development is about expanding people’s choices, expanding people’s opportunities. If that is the case, it includes democracy but the contrary is not true. Because of the vagueness of the definition of democracy it may not include development but when you talk about development, it always has to include democracy.”
South African politician Trevor Manuel also on the development side of the argument, said that amidst slow development, some “democracies”, especially those in which the people simply vote in elections, are not democracies at all, leaving the people with the worst of both democracy and development.
The Ethiopian Dimension
Among the arguing voices, one participant in the debate seemed to have the answer – Ethiopian Foreign Minister Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
Prior to the debate, simple voting saw 78 in favour of democracy, and 69 for development. But after espousing Ethiopia’s position on the argument, 106 were in support of Tedros’s and Ethiopia’s position on the subject.
The Foreign Minister said that his country’s answer to this “longstanding chicken and egg argument” in which neither answer had been validated conclusively, was to pursue both democracy and development – the concept of the democratic developmental state.
While neither democracy nor development may be the right precursor to the other, Ethiopia believes both are compatible and reinforce each other: development can foster and consolidate democracy and democracy can aid in the sustainability of socio-economic development by being the conduit for consensus.
“We don’t succumb to this chicken and egg type argument in which either democracy or development is considered as the first thing to pursue and often at the expense of the other. We believe that both democracy and development are desirable goals in and of themselves.”
“The twin goals of democracy and development are the alpha and omega of our country’s survival,” he said.
The Democratic Developmental State
The notion of democratic developmental state is based on the premise that democracy and development (in its traditional view) are complementary. This premise had been questioned, empirically and theoretically, during the second part of the 20th century and the debate is increasingly relevant in times where the post-2015 development agenda is being re-discussed, a publication by the Comparative Research Programme on Poverty says.
The Late Ethiopian Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi vigorously pursued this ideology arguing against what he calls neo-liberalism which promotes rent seeking and corruption.
He argued that the neo-liberal paradigm of development, which is sometimes also called the Washington Consensus and which has become the dominant paradigm in Africa, is a dead end.
“And that this is so not merely for reasons of implementation difficulty or due to excesses in articulation of the underlying theories, but rather on account of its inherent flaws,” he said in a presentation to Ethiopian economists.
Arguing further he reiterated that, “democratic developmentalism provides a more hopeful alternative to the flawed neo-liberal vision.”
Meles Zenawi posits that firstly, while neo-liberalism rests on the belief or faith in the efficiency of free and competitive markets, it obviously admits that there are in practice few, if any, truly free and competitive markets.
He notes that liberalism goes on to argue that the theoretical case for efficiency, or Pareto optimality, of such markets is unassailable, and hence the closer one gets to the theoretical ideal the more efficient the outcome.
“The corollary is that, though there are market failures, they are neither as pervasive nor as critical to development as its critics suggest. In any case, government action to correct market failure, neo-liberals famously argue, is, as a rule, a cure that is worse than the disease,” he says.
According to Zenawi, the second theoretical pillar articulated by neo-liberal political economists has to do with the nature of the state. The argument here, he says, builds on the assumption that the participants in an economy or a market are rational, self-interested players who always look to maximize their own private benefits. Neo-liberals, he stresses proceed to extend this hypothesis from the economic to the political realm so that the state, no less than the market, is conceived as being populated by such self-interest maximizers.
Zenawi held the view that, the conclusion that follows from this supposition is clear.
He says, “If the state were to be involved in allocating resources in an economy, it would do so in the interest of the self-serving individuals who populate and control it rather than of the society at large. To avoid such perverse outcome, its role will therefore have to be limited to that of a night watchman – to the use of its monopoly of coercive power for the purpose of enforcing the rule of law and of carrying out other limited regulatory tasks. Keep the state small and its hands off the cookie jar to prevent the wielders of state power from grabbing a disproportionate share of the cookie for themselves.”
Zenawi while alive had been able to persuade the African Union (AU), the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) and the African Development Bank (AfDB) to adopt democratic developmentalism.
At the end of the Fourth Annual Conference of African ministers of Finance, Planning and Economic Development, held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, under the theme, “The Role of the State in Economic Transformation,” a consensus was reached with participants urging their governments “to promote developmental states that would transform Africa’s political systems from rent-seeking into a developmental one.”
Commemorating three years since the passing of Zenawi, the foundation named after him, the Meles Zenawi Foundation held its first Symposium in Kigali, Rwanda on August 21, 2015 under the theme “The African Democratic Developmental State.”
Delivering the keynote address at this symposium, President Paul Kagame of Rwanda argued that Africa’s poverty is due to the fact that the role of the state has been replaced with non-state actors like NGOs.
“Every developed economy, without exception, is the fruit of a free market, and a strong developmental state, working in tandem. The orthodoxy of shrinking the state to the bare minimum, and replacing it with externally-funded non-state actors (here you can say NGOs), left Africa with no viable path out of poverty,” he said.
“Not to forget the fact that some of the problems of our continent are really self-inflicted. A third way had to be found and fortunately there has been some progress in this regard,” he adds.
Kagame argued that, secondly Meles’s starting point was that democracy and development are actually inseparable.
“There is no trade-off, no choice to be made between them. Indeed, they are almost the same thing. While there may be some examples of non-democratic developmental states, they should not be the example for Africa, with all its diversity,” he said.
Kagame believes that one cannot make sense of the development gains that have been recorded in parts of Africa without understanding how deeply its citizens are involved in governance and accountability.
According to him, democracy and development both depend on good politics, in which there is no room for the powerful special interests who benefitted most from the predatory states created by colonialism, and propped up by Cold War cynicism.
“Yet lately, the word ‘democracy’ has been twisted to bring developing countries, our own, to some kind of order, especially those which have sought to liberate themselves from these prejudices. Our democratic advances are constantly negated, and in actual fact subverted,” he said.
Mr Kagame noted that the youth of Africa are constantly being told that the continent’s backwardness is the fault of their leaders and cultures.
“They are told that an external buffer is needed to protect Africans from their governments and even from themselves. It is time for clarity,” he said.
He stated, “the democratic ideal has been at the heart of our various liberation struggles from the beginning, and it has guided us ever since, as we build new modern institutions. Ours is the true democracy of citizens, not the false one of institutionalised corruption and division (or ‘rent-seeking’, as Comrade Meles usually said). We cannot be bullied into accepting policies that misrepresent us and do us harm in the end, as we have seen over many years,” he said.
Adding, “If some of us took up arms to fight for our future, it was so that our children would never have to do so,” he said.
He called on African intellectuals, think tanks, and others who should be speaking up, to do so and “be fearless in articulating our stories and our aspirations for the future,” he said.
Some of the panelists at the symposium questioned why African countries endowed with natural resources like minerals for instance would lease out land to multinationals to mine the minerals while they simply receive rent, which is often meagre, while the companies make huge profits at the expense of their citizens.
They also argued that the democratic developmental state builds consensus by involving citizens and seeking their views on how they should be governed.
The proponents of this ideology believe that it would enable African countries to own their resources which itself would empower them in the fight against poverty.
The recommendations of the symposium were to be submitted to the AU.
Ethiopia today
Meanwhile, only about 30 years ago, Ethiopia which is the leading proponent of the democratic developmental state, and current day Eritrea suffered famine. Eritrea was part of Ethiopia until it seceded in 2000 after some conflict.
It was the worst famine to hit the country in about a century.
The country has however, moved on to confirm the argument of existing development literature that one-party states do better when it comes to development, even though human rights issues always remain thorny.
The ruling party in Ethiopia holds 100 per cent of the country’s parliamentary seats.
That is also among others, some of the things some investors and foreign commentators hold against Ethiopia, the lack of political choice and free expression.
The country is the largest producer of coffee in sub-Saharan Africa, producing about 39 per cent of the total quantity of coffee produced in Africa.
Ethiopia is among the few countries expected to achieve all the Millennium Development Goals. It is also the first country in sub-Sahara Africa to build a light rail system.
The economy has been growing continuously for the last 10 years. In 2013-2014, the economy grew at 10.8 per cent, making it one of the five fastest growing economies in the world according to the International Monetary Fund.
A recent study of taxes, poverty and inequality carried by the CEQ Institute says Ethiopia is also doing well in redistribution of funds to the poor.
By Emmanuel K. Dogbevi & Emmanuel Odonkor