Patrimonial Politics as a Functional Threat to Good Governance and Development in West Africa
Beyond the abstract use of the term ‘patrimonialism’ and its variants appended with prefix “neo-” or adjectives ‘modern’, ‘traditional’ or ‘developmental’, the leadership challenges in Africa manifesting in festering governance crisis have not benefitted from the deserved scholarly debate in a particularized manner. From the writings of the German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920), in particular his Economy and Society and his tripartite dichotomy of leadership – legal, traditional, and charismatic – to the different notions of patrimonialism, patronage or clientelism employed by notable writers like Roth (1968); Lemarchand and Legg (1972); Eisenstadt (1973), all have fallen short of explaining the functional threat to destructive politics and underdevelopment of African societies. Even the neo-liberal scholars like Le Vine’s (1980) attempt to coin ‘African patrimonialism’ have foundered in understanding the pattern of political organisation, struggle and puzzling change translating into democratic authoritarian rule of the few, characterized by co-optation, factionalism, and clientelism, and other modes of elitist domination. In contrast to all the works discussed above in which a universalistic approach to patrimonialism is taken, this paper adopts a particularistic approach to grapple with the narrow and narrowing peculiarities that currently dominate the processes and structures of leadership crisis, which has led to dearth of good governance and development occurring in Nigeria, in particular, and a number of West Africa countries. The paper argues that a culture of institutionalised subjugation of the political sphere over the economic pervades in the sub-region, leading to a norm of profoundly state-driven economy and a character of patron-clientele interactions between the state and the economy. Following independence, for instance, both Ghana and Nigeria have a leading sector (cocoa and petroleum respectively), which might have
