Book Review: Ken Opalo’s Legislative Development in Africa
I consider Ken Opalo, one of the leading political scientists on African legislative development, to be a friend. When I say friend I mean it in the African sense. Friendship in Africa is often characterized by astute, brutal, often unsolicited, questionable advise and incitement to overindulge. The greeting, “gosh, did you dress in the dark?” signals a burgeoning friendship. On the other hand, “that is an interesting choice of attire” definitely comes from an enemy who is not to be trusted.
A good friend will find a way to blame your faults on someone you hold dearly. Men will, invariably, find a way to bring up your wife when you let them down. Women — especially if they are modern, and truthfully there is no other kind left in Africa — suffer their friends with the intergenerational sins of their fathers and mothers-in-law, having already completely tamed their husbands. What I am trying to say is that Opalo’s “Legislative Development in Africa: Politics and Postcolonial Legacies” is a great book. Whenever it stumbles, it is due to the fetters of the politico-scientific research methods.
The book is the result of a bold undertaking that seeks to rewrite much of what is known about legislative strength under autocratic regimes in Africa. In it, Opalo distinguishes two types of legislature: those able to effectively bargain with the president and those not able. He associates the former with legislative development whereby “much of the lawmaking process takes place within legislatures”, that is, they have means independence. He associates the latter is with legislative underdevelopment whereby much of the lawmaking is directed by the president, that is, they have means dependence. In this manner means independent legislatures are able to develop internal differentiation and the organizational infrastructure for handling intra-elite bargains and sharing of government rents while means dependent legislatures are unable to do so. In addition, Opalo argues, the sense of security of the president determines the type of legislature: presidents who are secure produce means independent legislatures while those who are insecure produce means dependent legislatures.
The main implication of the analysis is the provocative counterintuitive argument that African countries with a history of autocratic chief executives “create[d] the organizational foundations for the emergence of strong democratic legislatures.” The empirical evidence to back this claim is drawn from a comparative analysis of Kenya and Zambia. Opalo contrasts the legislative developments in these two countries during the colonial and postcolonial periods based on the postulate that Kenya’s legislature had means independence while its Zambian counterpart did not. As Opalo states it, “In Kenya, parliament was the main game in town, while in Zambia the ruling party reigned supreme” [emphasis in the original]. This logic is extended to the transition from autocracy to democracy in the early 1990s based on the notion that “autocracies with strong legislatures on the eve of transition are more likely (relative to those with weaker legislatures) to have strong posttransition legislatures.”
How well these claims are supported by the available data is a technical questions that is beyond the scope of this post. Serious students of African legislative development will have to buy the book and examine the facts for themselves. I will comment on conceptual questions raised by the book under two two headings: terminology and applicability.
Terminological Difficulties
I will be brief. As African scholars, we have done a poor job of interrogating the terminology that has been handed down to us from other places and events. I have expressed myself on “colonialism” here. Whereas “colonial” poorly describes the diverse sociopolitical systems, and events, upending African societies between 1880 and 1980, it may be suited for the tendency of philanthropy-funded white western academics based at elite US and UK universities, who have lost their influence at home, to push the decidedly exploitative ideologies of modern-day robber barons on developing countries. These academics infiltrate African presidencies, often as consultants seconded by Washington, D.C.-based institutions, so that what is generally described as presidential power is merely the outcome of misrepresentation, impersonation, coercion, and so on. In addition, it can be argued that what matters in “autocracy” is not necessarily the struggle between legislature and the executive for the control of government but the changes to the government’s control of society in the mostly rural and informal economies of African countries.
The problem of how to properly use these terminologies in our analysis of diverse events across space and time can be resolved easily by not using them at all. Since they are, for the most part, opinion adjectives, little of the intended meaning will be lost. Take, for example, paragraph 2 of page 3 which reads:
This book engages this question by examining both postcolonial legislative development in Africa under autocracy and the conditions under which strong and effective democratic legislatures can emerge from their autocratic foundations.
If we stripped all opinion adjectives, we would get:
This book engages this question by examining legislative development in Africa, and the conditions under which strong and effective democratic legislatures can emerge from their foundations.
Another example. Section 1.2 reads:
Across Africa, autocratic postcolonial presidents fought to subordinate legislative institutions to their will. Due to their colonial inheritance of “overdeveloped” powers, many succeeded
If we stripped all opinion adjectives, we would get:
Across Africa, presidents fought to subordinate the legislature to their will. Due to their inherited “overdeveloped” powers, many succeeded
Once these opinion adjectives have been excised, the reader will find that Opalo has done a commendable job of explaining the variation in legislative institutional independence.
Applicability
The extent to which legislative institutions in Africa, developed or otherwise, can contribute to the developmental aspirations that citizens have for them is the basket with which Opalo has been asked to carry water. At fault, obviously, is the politico-scientific ground that Opalo must stand on. The predominant theories of the profession provide a jumble of unsatisfactory analytical tools to guide the researcher. Social choice theory, in particular, is a dispute over the seriousness of the so-called “paradox of democracy”. That is, whether voting provides the method for “the tastes, preferences, or values of individual persons [to be] amalgamated and summarized into the choice of a collective group or society” considering “the coexistence of coherent individual valuations and a collectively incoherent choice by the majority rule” (Riker, p. 1; see also Arrow, 1951).
Opalo provides a twist to this paradox whereby the valuations that guide the legislature are different from those that guide the executive. The main source of the difference is the context of the study: autocracies. Therefore, the observed intra-elite competition over, or sharing of, power is driven by the selfish desire of politicians to secure government rents (p. 74) rather than serve the people. The usefulness of studying such pathologies to aid our understanding of legislative institutions in Africa becomes a serious concern.
This concern takes us in two different directions. First, the path dependent developmental approach favored by Opalo where the stickiness, or continuity, of these pathologies provides the justification for a historical-institutionalist approach. The second where the face-value of current incentives determine observed behavior. Therefore the question of legislative institutions in Africa revolves around whether legislative development is functionally complete after the importation and adoption of progressive constitutions [i.e., appropriate (dis)incentive structures] or whether significant pathologies exist so that legislative development is incomplete unless it is buttressed by a well funded independent bureaucracy.
Readers can make up their own minds, I personally favor the Madisonian view that popular participation in government and limited tenure provide the necessary and sufficient conditions to guarantee liberal democracy (Riker, p. 9).
Economics decisions
It is instructive that Kenneth Arrow begins his seminal study on “social choice and individual values” (p. 1) with the following sentence: “In a capitalist democracy there are essentially two methods by which social choices can be made: voting, typically used to make “political” decisions, and the market mechanism, typically used to make “economics” decisions” (1951, p.1, emphasis added). Yet political scientists continue to examine economic problems within the political decisions paradigm. However, political scientists cannot be faulted too much for ignoring the main lever used by national governments to drive and steer the market economy, they are merely following the instructions given to them by economists. The early 1990s, in African, heralded not only the transition toward electoral democracy but also toward market capitalism. Even the most casual observation of African countries reveals that it is the monetary policies of the central bank, the IMF and the World Bank — rather than the actions of politicians — for example, bouncing between political parties — that determine the rate of economic growth and development. It is therefore a legitimate question to ask whether all the energy and resources spent on electoral politics is misguided. It is also legitimate to ask whether technical questions around infrastructure development and industrial policy should be left to politicians.
