1. GOVERNANCE AND THE CHALLENGE OF STATE RECONSTRUCTION
Kayode Fayemi
Why Governance matters?
The task of creating and maintaining a viable and legitimate State that is
accessible, efficient, accountable, transparent and equitable has been one of the
most critical and complicated challenges of the transformation process that
African countries are currently undergoing. Governance has been the major
vehicle for attaining this legitimacy and viability. Fundamental to the notion of
governance is the ability of the state to provide efficient and well functioning
institutions and infrastructures of government – legally backed and socially
coherent – that together establish and maintain an enabling environment in
which human security and human development takes place.
The notion of good governance has gained greater prominence in the
democratisation discourse since the collapse of the cold war in the early 1990s.
Equally, its meaning has been the subject of contestation between promoters of
the shrinking State and the champions of the inclusive State in which the
establishment of a wide range of governmental and non-governmental
institutions enable people to participate in society. Despite the debate that
raged on the nature of the state, there has been a great deal of unanimity on
the need to arrest the ‘desertion’ by citizens that characterised the ‘old’ cold war
State, in Africa in the quest for a transparent, trusted and accountable State.
In that old State – the constitution became the defining instrument for
organising unaccountable governments and it was largely viewed as a set of
rules and administrative arrangements, meant not to regulate or limit excessive
state power, but rather to validate the newly independent states. Post-colonial
governments used the letter of the law as the instrument for control and
repression, and the military regimes that overthrew them perfected the art of
manipulating the law to justify their hold on power. Helped by the dominant
super-power politics of the cold war era that facilitated monopolies on power by
coercive rulers, the manipulation, trivialisation, and disregard of the constitution
became the defining characteristic of governance in much of post-colonial
Africa.1 Constitutions that sanctioned one-party states and racial segregation
have been not only seen as legal, but also legitimate documents regulating the
conduct of state affairs, often to the detriment of the population.2
1
Julius Ihonvbere, Towards the New Constitutionalism in Africa (CDD, 2000).
2
Thus, some of the technical and administrative concessions known as “sun-set clauses” granted in the post-
independence constitutions of Kenya, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa remain key sources of neuralgia
in the current struggle for constitutional change in these countries.

2. Yet a constitution by its very nature should be more than a mere set of rules and
laws regulating society and government. It is more than a social contract or even
the grundnorm. It is rather an expression of the general will of a nation. It is a
reflection of its history, fears, concerns, aspirations, vision, and indeed, the soul
of that nation. A constitution is obliged to express the mind of the majority; but,
in doing so it also has to take into account the fears and concerns of the
minorities. The constitution is that single document under which diverse and
even ideologically opposed groups unite and rally in defence of democracy.
However, for this to happen, the citizenry must claim ownership of the
document. It must be respected and revered by all.
Indeed, the hostility to the old State in the intervening cold war years has
encouraged the notion of a new constitutionalism that is people driven and
process led – aimed at reconstituting the African State along equitable,
transparent, socially responsible and just lines in the post cold war era. At every
level on the continent, the idea has taken root that the African State must be
refashioned to reflect the realities of their multifaceted societies. This has been
reflected in the constitutional conferences in Benin, Mali, Niger, the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, and Cameroon in the early 1990s, in the successful
constitutional arrangement of South Africa, and in the process-based
Constitutional commissions in Uganda, Ghana and Eritrea.
From the experience of these countries, the last decade in Africa has witnessed
an upsurge in the demand for constitution-based governance that broadly
reflects, in terms of process and outcome, the will of the people. Today, the
struggle for constitutional reform is on going in at least twenty African countries
and typfies to the generality of the people why rule-based and consensus driven
governance matters.
The change in focus from constitutionality - where these documents are merely
legal instruments with no standing with the people to constitutionalism - where
constitutions are now seen as a tool for bridge-building among members of civil
society, represents the first and perhaps most critical step in shifting state
ownership from the leaders to the people. Yet, focus remains mainly on
government, giving less importance to consensus building amongst civil society
and between the ordinary citizen and the state.
Yet in order to formulate African political cultures grounded in human rights and
good governance, an organic link is needed between the constitution as a rule of
law instrument primarily concerned with restraining government excesses, and
the constitution as a legitimation of power structures and relations based on a
broad social consensus in diverse societies. Many have seen the task at hand is
to move away from the old constitutionality which overemphasised law and state

3. power towards a new political and socio-economic constitutionalism aimed at
restoring trust in the State whilst arresting desertion from it.
Governance in the Public Sector
Although governance has always featured in the management of public sector, it
was rarely defined as a partnership between the rulers and the ruled aimed at
the efficiency of State structures. While the clamour for this type of partnership
has featured in the struggles for the transformation of authoritarian structures
and one-party states, the idea of a people driven governance was largely ignored
by the command economies that dominated the world in the cold war era. The
idea that the people ought to have a say in deciding governance strategies was
seen as an anathema and generally discouraged. In the search for strong states,
strong rulers were seen as the sine-qua-non. The more unaccountable these
rulers were, the more legitimate they became in the hands of the metropolitan
powers and their supporters. Even when the command, interventionist
economies of the 1970s and early 80s gave way to structural adjustment
programmes in the mid-1980s, governance defined as partnership aimed at
achieving ownership, social equity, equality and development was still missing
from the equation.
Indeed, the end of the cold war brought economic globalisation – the
homogenisation of the world economy which tended to separate the State from
the market in the belief that a strong state cannot produce a strong market.
Given the above, it was not surprising that even most of the elected
governments in Africa collapsed in the wake of the structural adjustment
programmes and the succeeding authoritarian regimes sharpened the state
instruments of coercion in coping with the resistance that developed against
economic reform programmes of the period.
It was only later that the notion of governance became acceptable to the
promoters of structural adjustment programmes and policies. This coincided
incidentally with the collapse of the Berlin wall and the various ‘people power’
revolutions in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Indeed, before the World
Bank’s 1989 report “Sub-Saharan Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Growth”,
governance was a rarely used term. Even when it was introduced into the IFIs
literature, its operational use was limited. In its use of the term, the World Bank
identified three distinct aspects of governance:
1) the form of the political regime;
2) the process by which authority is exercised in the management of a
country’s economic and social resources for development; and,

4. 3) the capacity of governments to design, formulate and implement policies
and discharge functions.(World Bank, 1994b)
Although they recognise the holistic nature of governance, the World Bank and
other multi-lateral agencies have concentrated mainly on the third aspect in their
governance related work – the capacity of governments to design, formulate and
implement policies and discharge functions. Public sector reform and
management has been the most visible area of activity in this regard. This
ranged from capacity building and institutional strengthening in civil service
reform; government budget, public investment programme, modernisation of
public sector accounting and auditing; government financial management
information systems, development assistance and aid coordination, economic
management agencies and all other sections of government that are pivotal to a
well functioning public sector. Governance in the public sector has also been
concerned with the levels and quality of relationship between different layers of
government – central government and its subordinate tiers as well as the public
and private sectors.
The basic thrust of this reform process has been state retrenchment in all its
ramifications and this has been manifested in the shift from a highly
interventionist paradigm in many African states to one in which the role of
government is primarily that of an enabler for the private sector, a regulatory
framework and a provider of public infrastructure for the efficient running of the
market. Tied to the structural adjustment reforms whose objective was to
establish market friendly set of incentives that can encourage accumulation of
capital and more efficient allocation of resources, this shift often necessitated
conflict between capital and labour and it resulted in huge labour cuts arising out
of privatisation of inefficient state institutions with serious social consequences –
leading often to a disconnect between the shrinking State and the deprived
Society.
The challenge with institutional reform in many of the sectors highlighted above
has always been one of building convergence between the demands of the new
corporate governance environment and the legitimacy for enforcement provided
by the local context. It is for the problems associated with reconciling the State
and Civil Society in the public sector reform process that sustainable institutional
capacity building has been difficult. (Dia, 1996)
Governance in the security sector
Although the quest for ‘good governance’ began to touch on many aspects of the
State reform agenda in the late 1980s, one sector that was hardly touched was
the security sector. Except in the narrow sense of the concerns expressed about
levels of military expenditure, development agencies and multilateral institutions

5. hardly connected governance in the security sector with the notion of improving
the capacity and efficiency of security forces to effectively meet changing
challenges in their local and international environment. Even in their exclusive
focus on militarisation and military expenditure, this was seen more as a bean-
counting exercise in which reduction in military expenditure automatically
translated to increase in development and social spending. Several studies have
since argued, including those produced by World Bank staff (Landau, 1993) that
the evidence for this trade-off hypothesis is very thin.
More fundamentally, the fact that militarisation and military expenditure were not
seen as a process whereby the civilian sphere of society is increasingly militarised
– a multi-dimensional process that is qualitative and quantitative - containing a
range of phenomena including defence spending, the growth of armed forces,
the increasing use of force in conflict management and resolution, the role of the
military in political decision making process and the spread of militaristic values
in society underscored the limited understanding of governance in the security
sector. Equally, the fact that this trade-off hypothesis’ focus was exclusively
military, rather than the entire security sector had negative policy implications as
it not only failed to take cognisance of objective security threats that states faced
but also encouraged States to shroud security issues in needless secrecy. States
were quick to rebuff any effort at subjecting security sector affairs to public
scrutiny as “undue interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state”.
Consequently, in many of the states in question, the defence and security budget
was not a subject for public debate, even in the few elected parliaments in the
continent at the time. This was partly due to the culture of secrecy that
surrounded military and security activities, but more fundamentally to the lack of
capacity to offer effective, civilian oversight of security sector activities.
The transitions to democracy in the last decade however presented African
countries with two key challenges in this sector: on the one hand, that of
establishing effective and accountable security agencies, capable of protecting
the security not only of the state but also of its citizens, and, on the other, that
of establishing effective civilian oversight of the armed forces and security
agencies. The decade of the 1990s - which saw the rise of people driven
challenges to militarisation and authoritarianism of African politics—also
witnessed a sharp deterioration in the security environment in a large number of
African countries. Paradoxically, these two processes were somewhat inextricably
intertwined. As Hutchful observed, “the decomposition of the security apparatus
of the state was intrinsic to the collapse of authoritarian arrangements on the
continent and hence facilitated the transitions to democracy; at the same time,
however, it also undermined the ability of the state to extend security, eroding
too the professionalism essential to democratic control of the armed forces.”
(Hutchful, 2000)

6. Democratic consolidation requires that both issues — that of ‘security’ and that
of ‘accountability’ be addressed in a comprehensive manner. For this reason,
security sector reform is a deeply political issue, not a technical one. Equally, for
the transformation of the security sector to work, it must not be pursued in
isolation, but rather form part of a more comprehensive restructuring agenda
aimed at improving governance and promoting democratisation.
Hence, the crux of the debate about governance in the security sector is also a
discussion about the development of effective oversight mechanisms, as well as
of viable security institutions able to attain security for the state as well as for
ordinary citizens, in the quest for democratic development and ownership of the
state. As we argued above, the current constitutional reform taking place in many
countries on the continent is the latest episode in a long search to construct stable
polities and civil-military relations. No aspect of institutional design in Africa has
proved more elusive, problematic and vexatious than that of civil-military relations.
Building viable security sector institutions has been no less difficult. This is
indicated by the alarming deterioration in the security situation in Africa, and the
high visibility of issues of civil-military relations and security in the new political
equation, evident in the emergence of new force structures (in particular regional
security complexes) and relations of force, rethinking of the very concept of
security, demands for security sector reform, and much more open (and active)
international and regional engagement with issues of security –including the entry
in recent years of an array of non-traditional actors and institutions.
To put it in another way: the democratic transitions have given rise to attempts
to bring security structures into the mainstream of constitutional governance and
overall public sector management reforms. A recent DFID document (DFID 2000:
46) has attempted to define the benchmarks of ‘good governance’ in the
security sector in the following words:
‘The key principles of good governance in the security sector can be summarized
as follows:
• Security sector organizations, particularly in the security forces, are
accountable both to elected civil authorities and to civil society;
• Security sector organizations operate in accordance with the international
law and domestic constitutional law;
• Information about security sector planning and budgeting are widely
available, both within government and to the public, and a comprehensive
and disciplined approach to the management of defence resources is
adopted;
• Civil-military relations are based on a well-articulated hierarchy of
authority between civil authorities and the defence forces, and on a

7. relationship with civil society that is based on the respect for human
rights;
• Civil authorities have the capacity to exercise political control over the
operations and expenditure of the security forces and civil society has the
capacity to monitor the security forces and provide constructive input to
the political debate;
• An environment exists in which civil society and be consulted on a regular
basis on security policies, resource allocation, and other relevant issues;
• Security-force personnel are adequately trained to discharge their duties
in a professional manner consistent with the requirements of democratic
societies;
• Fostering an environment supportive of regional and sub-regional peace
and security has a high priority for policy-makers”.
Meeting these benchmarks poses a significant challenge to current African
regimes. Governance structures and practices have traditionally been weakest
and least defined in the security sector. How much progress has there been in
this area? And what legacies did the departing authorities bequeath to the new
governments that now have to confront these demands by the populace. Any
evaluation is complicated by the fact that, while civil-military relations in Africa
(as in many newly democratising regions) are in a state of flux, these changes
are occurring in varied political contexts, with their own local dynamics and
challenges, and incorporating rather different prospects for the development of
democratic norms and controls. Divergent trajectories of transition have
produced a wide assortment of post-transition political configurations on the
continent – some complementary and progressive, others contradictory and
worrisome. This necessarily inhibits generalisation. Nevertheless, it is clear that
most African countries are far from achieving the elements of ‘good governance’
in the security sector as described above.