Question

The countries of both Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are characterized by patron-client political systems.

(a) What aspects of their respective histories and present realities have led to the pervasiveness of these systems?

(b) What are some of the differences in the way these patron-client relations are exercised in oil- exporting and non-oil-exporting countries in MENA?

(c) How does this “clientelism” relate to the phenomenon of failed states in Sub-Saharan Africa?

Answer 1

A. Patron–client systems are among the oldest political forms in the world. Before humans developed self–conscious political systems, people organized themselves around leaders of hunting and gathering bands that were generally composed of people related by blood or marriage. Ideally, the head of the band would have been the father or the oldest male relative. Because such leaders probably acted more as patriarchs, facilitators, and guides, and because society would have been relatively undifferentiated and unstratified, such leaders should not be considered political leaders. Rather, they were simply hereditary heads of families or informal heads of very small communities.

However, as society became more complex, as wealth became more pronounced, and as defense became more challenging, men, and at times women, emerged as leaders and defenders of families or regions. In many parts of the world, archeologists have discovered very early burial sites in which a small minority of the people were interred with symbols of wealth and political power. Presumably, those people were seen as big people, leaders charged with defending and guiding the community. People generally would have used the language of kinship to describe such leaders who would have been regarded as fathers or senior kin. But, in fact, the patron's entourage was composed of people with varying degrees of genetic attachment and many people were connected to their patrons by bonds of choice rather than blood. This was the beginning of politics.

C. Clientelism

Specifically African problem is actually a general characteristic of all developing countries undergoing processes of primitive accumulation and associated political corruption. The key analytical challenge is to explain why some countries are able to create more developmental outcomes in the context of clientelism and corruption and why other states do not. For example, functionalist theories cannot explain why economic growth rates vary across (clientelist) sub-Saharan African polities, or why many countries in sub-Saharan Africa achieved rates of growth close to East Asia and Latin America in the period 1960-80.

Critiques states an idea that there is one type of patrimonial politics in Africa. They makes a distinction between two variants of the post-colonial state moving beyond the simple neo-patrimonial description. They argues that the response to the instability of clientelism in some states, including Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Senegal and Cote d’Ivoire was to centralise and bureaucratise power. Political parties were displaced as the main distributors of clientelist resources by a bureaucracy under control of the President. In other states, including Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Uganda, Ghana and Somalia, critiques argues the incipient crisis of clientelism was not resolved; leaders did not bureaucratise, nor did they centrally control clientelism. The system became more unstable. They describes these regimes as having ‘spoils politics’ with a more winner-take-all nature of electoral politics, more pervasive and fragmented corruption, greater economic crises,with a greater disintegration of political institutions and mediations. It is these regimes that give full expression to Bayart’s notion of ‘politics of the belly’.