Its lack of influence on policy also leads to its marginalization in accessing resources and public services, resulting in poverty, poor knowledge, and a poor information base, which, in turn, limits its ability to exert influence on policy. In African-style democracy the rule of law is only applicable to ordinary people unconnected to the governing party leadership or leader. Under the circumstances, it becomes critical that traditional leaders are directly involved in local governance so that they protect the interests of their communities. With its eminent scholars and world-renowned library and archives, the Hoover Institution seeks to improve the human condition by advancing ideas that promote economic opportunity and prosperity, while securing and safeguarding peace for America and all mankind. Such post-electoral pacts reflect the conclusion that stability is more important than democracy. One of these is the potential influence exerted by the regions leading states, measured in terms of size, population, economic weight, and overall political clout and leadership prestige. Still another form of legitimacy in Africa sometimes derives from traditional political systems based on some form of kingship. Fitzpatrick 'Traditionalism and Traditional Law' Journal of African Law, Vol. A more recent argument is that traditional institutions are incompatible with economic, social, and civil rights (Chirayath, Sage, & Woolcock, 2005). For example, the election day itself goes more or less peacefully, the vote tabulation process is opaque or obscure, and the entire process is shaped by a pre-election playing field skewed decisively in favor of the incumbents. Certain offences were regarded as serious offences. "Law" in traditional Igbo and other African societies assumes a wide dimension and should be understood, interpreted, and applied as such, even if such a definition conflicts with the Western idea. If inclusion is the central ingredient, it will be necessary to explore in greater depth the resources leaders have available to pay for including various social groups and demographic cohorts. Yet, the traditional judicial system in most cases operates outside of the states institutional framework. The introduction of alien economic and political systems by the colonial state relegated Africas precolonial formal institutions to the sphere of informality, although they continued to operate in modified forms, in part due to the indirect rule system of colonialism and other forms of reliance by colonial states on African institutions of governance to govern their colonies. The Ibo village assembly in eastern Nigeria, the Eritrean village Baito (assembly), the council of elders (kiama) of the Kikuyu in Kenya, and the kaya elders of the Mijikenda in the coast of Kenya are among well-known examples where decisions are largely made in a consensual manner of one kind or another (Andemariam, 2017; Mengisteab, 2003). However, the system of traditional government varied from place to place. Since then, many more have been formulated, but the main themes and ideas have remained. Suggested Citation, 33 West 60th StreetNew York, NY 10023United States, Public International Law: Sources eJournal, Subscribe to this fee journal for more curated articles on this topic, Political Institutions: Parties, Interest Groups & Other Political Organizations eJournal, Political Institutions: Legislatures eJournal, We use cookies to help provide and enhance our service and tailor content. However, almost invariably the same functions, whether or not formally defined and characterized in the same terms or exercised in the same manner, are also performed by traditional institutions and their leaders. Executive, legislative, and judicial functions are generally attributed by most modern African constitutions to presidents and prime ministers, parliaments, and modern judiciaries. Hindrance to democratization: Perhaps among the most important challenges institutional fragmentation poses is to the process of democratization. Our data indicate that traditional leaders, chiefs and elders clearly still play an important role in the lives The movement towards a formal state system is characterized by its emphasis on retribution and punishment. Cold War geopolitics reinforced in some ways the state-society gap as the global rivalry tended to favor African incumbents and frequently assured they would receive significant assistance from external powers seeking to build diplomatic ties with the new states. In this context the chapter further touches on the compatibility of the institution of chieftaincy with constitutional principles such as equality, accountability, natural justice, good governance, and respect for fundamental human rights. A second conflict pattern can develop along the lines of ethnic cleavages which can be readily politicized and then militarized into outright ethnic violence. The swing against western norms was captured in an interview with Ugandas repeatedly re-elected president Yoweri Museveni who remarked How can you have structural adjustment without electricity? Political and economic inclusion is the companion requirement for effective and legitimate governance. One of these will be the role and weight of various powerful external actors. Ethiopias monarchy ended in 1974 while the other three remain, with only the king of Swaziland enjoying absolute power. Different property rights laws are a notable source of conflict in many African countries. Unlike the laws of the state, traditional institutions rarely have the coercive powers to enforce their customary laws. These consisted of monarchy, aristocracy and polity. One common feature is recognition of customary property rights laws, especially that of land. Many other countries have non-centralized elder-based traditional institutions. Prominent among these Sudanic states was the Soninke Kingdom of Ancient Ghana. A Long Journey: The Bantu Migrations. 1. 14 L.A. Ayinla 'African Philosophy of Law: A Critique' 151, available at Thus, despite abolition efforts by postcolonial states and the arguments against the traditional institutions in the literature, the systems endure and remain rather indispensable for the communities in traditional economic systems. According to the African Development Bank, good governance should be built on a foundation of (I) effective states, (ii) mobilized civil societies, and (iii) an efficient private sector. There are very few similarities between democracy and dictatorship. Reconciling the parallel institutional systems is also unlikely to deliver the intended results in a short time; however, there may not be any better alternatives. There is one constitution and one set of laws and rules for ordinary people, and quite other for the ruling family and the politically connected elite. African states are by no means homogeneous in terms of governance standards: as the Mo Ibrahim index based on 14 governance categories reported in 2015, some 70 points on a scale of 100 separated the best and worst performers.16. Greater access to public services and to productivity-enhancing technology would also help in enhancing the transformation of the subsistence sector. This study notes that in 2007 Africa saw 12 conflicts in 10 countries. African indigenous education was. Extensive survey research is required to estimate the size of adherents to traditional institutions. While empirical data are rather scanty, indications are that the traditional judicial system serves the overwhelming majority of rural communities (Mengisteab & Hagg, 2017). On the one hand, they recognize the need for strong, responsive state institutions; weak, fragile states do not lead to good governance. It should not be surprising that there is a weak social compact between state and society in many African states. A third pattern flows from the authoritarian reflex where big men operate arbitrary political machines, often behind a thin democratic veneer. Against this broad picture, what is striking is the more recent downward trend in democratic governance in Africa and the relative position of African governance when viewed on a global basis. With the exceptions of a few works, such as Legesse (1973), the institutions of the decentralized political systems, which are often elder-based with group leadership, have received little attention, even though these systems are widespread and have the institutions of judicial systems and mechanisms of conflict resolution and allocation of resources, like the institutions of the centralized systems. The traditional and informal justice systems, it is argued offers greater access to justice. This theme, which is further developed below, is especially critical bearing in mind that Africa is the worlds most ethnically complex region, home to 20 of the worlds most diverse countries in terms of ethnic composition.8. Governments that rely on foreign counterparts and foreign investment in natural resources for a major portion of their budgetsrather than on domestic taxationare likely to have weaker connections to citizens and domestic social groups. Hoover scholars form the Institutions core and create breakthrough ideas aligned with our mission and ideals. Paramount chiefs with rather weak system of accountability: The Buganda of Uganda and the Nupe in Nigeria are good examples. In the centralized systems also, traditional leaders of various titles were reduced to chiefs and the colonial state modified notably the relations between the chiefs and their communities by making the chiefs accountable to the colonial state rather than to their communities (Coplan & Quinlan, 1997). Chester A. Crocker is the James R. Schlesinger Professor of Strategic Studies at Georgetown University. Posted: 12 May 2011. Judicial marginalization: Another challenge posed by institutional fragmentation relates to marginalization of the traditional system within the formal legal system. The analysis presented here suggests that traditional institutions are relevant in a number of areas while they are indispensable for the governance of Africas traditional economic sector, which lies on the fringes of formal state institutions. No doubt rural communities participate in elections, although they are hardly represented in national assemblies by people from their own socioeconomic space. Overturning regimes in Africas often fragile states could become easier to do, without necessarily leading to better governance. Africa contains more sovereign nations than any other continent, with 54 countries compared to Asia's 47. Womens inequality in the traditional system is related, at least in part, to age- and gender-based divisions of labor characterizing traditional economic systems. This layer of institutions is the subject of inquiry of this article. Legitimacy based on successful predation and state capture was well known to the Plantagenets and Tudors as well as the Hapsburgs, Medicis, and Romanovs, to say nothing of the Mughal descendants of Genghis Khan.14 In this fifth model of imagined legitimacy, some African leaders operate essentially on patrimonial principles that Vladimir Putin can easily recognize (the Dos Santos era in Angola, the DRC under Mobutu and Kabila, the Eyadema, Bongo, Biya, and Obiang regimes in Togo, Gabon, Cameroon, and Equatorial Guinea, respectively).15 Such regimes may seek to perpetuate themselves by positioning wives or sons to inherit power. The optimistic replyand it is a powerful oneis that Africans will gradually build inclusive political and economic institutions.18 This, however, requires wise leadership. As a United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) study (2007) notes, traditional leaders often operate as custodians of customary law and communal assets, especially land. The formal institutions of checks and balances and accountability of leaders to the population are rather weak in this system. Figure 1 captures this turn to authoritarianism in postindependence Africa. . This we might call transformative resilience.21. This category of chiefs serves their communities in various and sometimes complex roles, which includes spiritual service. The relationship between traditional leadership and inherited western-style governance institutions often generates tensions. A Sociology of Education for Africa . 20 A brief account of that history will help to highlight key continuities spanning the colonial, apartheid and the post-apartheid eras in relation to the place of customary law and the role of traditional leaders. The participatory and consensus-based system of conflict resolution can also govern inter-party politics and curtail the frequent post-election conflicts that erupt in many African countries. Roughly 80% of rural populations in selected research sites in Ethiopia, for example, say that they rely on traditional institutions to settle disputes, while the figure is around 65% in research sites in Kenya (Mengisteab & Hagg, 2017). Basing key political decisions on broad societal and inter-party consensus may help to de-escalate cutthroat competition that often leads to violent conflicts. The political history of Africa begins with the emergence of hominids, archaic humans andat least 200,000 years agoanatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens), in East Africa, and continues unbroken into the present as a patchwork of diverse and politically developing nation states. the system even after independence. The endurance of traditional institutions entails complex and paradoxical implications for contemporary Africas governance. Evidence from case studies, however, suggests that the size of adherents varies from country to country. Africas rural communities, which largely operate under subsistent economic systems, overwhelmingly adhere to the traditional institutional systems while urban communities essentially follow the formal institutional systems, although there are people who negotiate the two institutional systems in their daily lives. Such adjustments, however, may require contextualization of the institutions of democracy by adjusting these institutions to reflect African realities. These events point to extreme state fragility and a loss of sovereign control over violence in the 11 affected countries, led by Nigeria, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic (CAR). However, there are customs and various arrangements that restrain their power. African Governance: Challenges and Their Implications. My intention in this chapter is to explore the traditional African ideas and values of politics with a view to pointing up what may be described as the democratic features of the indigenous system of government and to examine whether, and in what ways, such features can be said to be harmonious with the ethos of contemporary political culture and hence can be said to be relevant to . In many cases European or Islamic legal traditions have replaced or significantly modified traditional African ones. Botswanas strategy has largely revolved around integrating parallel judicial systems. On the other hand, their endurance creates institutional fragmentation that has adverse impacts on Africas governance and socioeconomic transformation. As noted, African countries have experienced the rise of the modern (capitalist) economic system along with its corresponding institutional systems. He served as assistant secretary of state for African affairs from 1981 to 1989. Traditional and informal justice systems aim at restoring social cohesion within the community by promoting reconciliation between disputing parties. Against this backdrop, where is African governance headed? The selection, however, is often from the children of a chief. The African state system has gradually developed a stronger indigenous quality only in the last twenty-five years or so. This page was processed by aws-apollo-l2 in. African Traditional Political System and Institution: University of The Gambia, Faculty of humanities and social sciences. The result is transitory resilience of the regime, but shaky political stability, declining cohesion, and eventual conflict or violent change. A third objective is to examine the relevance of traditional institutions. In Africa, as in every region, it is the quality and characteristics of governance that shape the level of peace and stability and the prospects for economic development. Learn more about joining the community of supporters and scholars working together to advance Hoovers mission and values. An election bound to be held in the year 2019 will unveil the new . Traditional leadership in South Africa pre-existed both the colonial and apartheid systems of governance and was the main known system of governance amongst indigenous people. Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Politics. Communities in the traditional socioeconomic space are hardly represented in any of the organizations of the state, such as the parliament, where they can influence policy and the legal system to reflect their interests. Seeming preference for Democracy in Africa over other governance systems in Africa before and after independence 15-17 1.5. Freedom House calculated that 17 out of 50 countries it covered were free or partly free in 1988, compared to 31 out of 54 countries in these categories by 2015. The first objective of the article is to shed light on the socioeconomic foundations for the resilience of Africas traditional institutions. West Africa has a long and complex history. The most promising pattern is adaptive resilience in which leaders facing such pressures create safety valves or outlets for managing social unrest. By the mid-1970s, the military held power in one-third of the nations of sub-Saharan Africa. Other governance systems in the post-independence era and their unique features, if any. The place and role of African Youth in Pre-independence African Governance Systems 19-20 1.7. Impact of Historical Origins of African State System2. Within this spectrum, some eight types of leadership structures can be identified. Many others choose the customary laws and conflict resolution mechanisms because they correspond better to their way of life. In the thankfully rare cases where national governance breaks down completelySouth Sudan, Somalia, CARits absence is an invitation to every ethnic or geographic community to fend for itselfa classic security dilemma. In addition, according to Chirayath et al. It also develops a theoretical framework for the . According to this analysis, Africas traditional institutional systems are likely to endure as long as the traditional subsistent economic systems continue to exist. In some societies, traditional, tribal authorities may offer informed and genuinely accepted governance, provided that they are not merely government appointees pursuing decentralized self-enrichment. Careful analysis suggests that African traditional institutions lie in a continuum between the highly decentralized to the centralized systems and they all have resource allocation practices, conflict resolution, judicial systems, and decision-making practices, which are distinct from those of the state. Their "rediscovery" in modern times has led to an important decolonization of local and community management in order to pursue genuine self-determination. Keywords: Legal Pluralism, African Customary Law, Traditional Leadership, Chieftaincy, Formal Legal System Relationship With, Human Rights, Traditional Norms, Suggested Citation: To illustrate, when there are 2.2 billion Africans, 50% of whom live in cities, how will those cities (and surrounding countryside) be governed? Contents 1. A key factor in the size of adherents of rural institutions, however, seems to depend on the ratio of the population in the traditional economic systems to the total population. Competing land rights laws, for instance, often lead to appropriations by the state of land customarily held by communities, triggering various land-related conflicts in much of Africa, especially in areas where population growth and environmental degradation have led to land scarcity. Hoover Education Success Initiative | The Papers. However, the winner takes all system in the individual states is a democracy type of voting system, as the minority gets none of the electoral college votes. The key . All life was religious . To complicate matters further, the role of traditional institutions is likely to be critical in addressing the problem of institutional fragmentation. The traditional African religions (or traditional beliefs and practices of African people) are a set of highly diverse beliefs that include various ethnic religions . If African political elite opinion converges with that of major external voices in favoring stabilization over liberal peacebuilding agendas, the implications for governance are fairly clear.17. Rules of procedure were established through customs and traditions some with oral, some with written constitutions Women played active roles in the political system including holding leadership and military positions. However, at the lower level of the hierarchy of the centralized system, the difference between the centralized and decentralized systems tends to narrow notably. Long-standing kingdoms such as those in Morocco and Swaziland are recognized national states. Consequently, national and regional governance factors interact continuously. In this regard, the president is both the head of state and government, and there are three arms and tiers of rules by which the country is ruled. The third section looks at the critical role of political and economic inclusion in shaping peace and stability and points to some of the primary challenges leaders face in deciding how to manage inclusion: whom to include and how to pay for it. In Module Seven A: African History, you explored the histories of a wide diversity of pre-colonial African societies. Similarities between Democratic and Authoritarian Government. The development of inclusive institutions may involve struggles that enable political and societal actors to check the domination of entrenched rulers and to broaden rule-based participation in governance. At the same time, traditional institutions represent institutional fragmentation, which has detrimental effects on Africas governance and economic transformation. Somalilands strategy has brought traditional leaders into an active role in the countrys formal governance by creating an upper house in parliament, the Guurti, where traditional leaders exercise the power of approving all bills drafted by the lower house of parliament. An analytical study and impact of colonialism on pre-colonial centralized and decentralized African Traditional and Political Systems. If a critical mass of the leaderse.g., South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, Cote dIvoire, Algeria, Egyptare heading in a positive direction, they will pull some others along in their wake; of course, the reverse is also true. The long-term, global pushback by the leading authoritarian powers against liberal governance norms has consequences in Africa and other regions as governments directly act to close the space for civil society to operate. Even so, customary law still exerts a strong . This provides wide opportunity for governments to experiment, to chart a course independent of Western preferences, but it can also encourage them to move toward authoritarian, state capitalist policies when that is the necessary or the expedient thing to do. Broadly speaking, indigenous systems of governance are those that were practiced by local populations in pre-colonial times. The implementation of these systems often . Rather, they often rely on voluntary compliance, although they also apply some soft power to discourage noncompliance by members with customary laws. The scope of the article is limited to an attempt to explain how the endurance of African traditional institutions is related to the continents economic systems and to shed light on the implications of fragmented institutional systems. African conflict trends point to a complex picture, made more so by the differing methodologies used by different research groups. Despite the adoption of constitutional term limits in many African countries during the 1990s, such restrictions have been reversed or defied in at least 15 countries since 2000, according to a recent report.6, The conflict-governance link takes various forms, and it points to the centrality of the variable of leadership. Such a consensus-building mechanism can help resolve many of the conflicts related to diversity management and nation-building. It seems clear that Africas conflict burden declined steadily after the mid-1990s through the mid-2000s owing to successful peace processes outstripping the outbreak of new conflicts; but the burden has been spiking up again since then. The same technology vectors can also empower criminal, trafficking, and terrorist networks, all of which pose threats to state sovereignty. The government system is a republic; the chief of state and head of government is the president. Customary law, for example, does not protect communities from violations of their customary land rights through land-taking by the state. Legal norms are an integral part of the discussion about inclusivity since they affect every aspect of economic and personal life; this poses a critical question over whether individual rights or group rights take precedence in the normative hierarchy. There were several reasons for such measures. A more recent example of adaptive resilience is being demonstrated by Ethiopias Abiy Ahmed. More frequently, this form of rule operates at the sub-state level as in the case of the emir of Kano or the Sultan of Sokoto in Nigeria or the former royal establishments of the Baganda (Uganda) or the Ashanti (Ghana). Abstract. FUNCTIONS OF GOVERNMENT.
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