Between governance & under‐development: accumulation & Africa's ‘catastrophic corruption’

Abstract

Capital eschews no profit, or very small profit, just as nature was formerly said to abhor a vacuum.With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 per cent will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 per cent will produce eagerness; 50 per cent positive audacity; 100 per cent will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 per cent and there is not acrime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged. If turbulence and strife will bring a profit, it will freely encourage both. Smuggling and the slave trade have amply proved all that is here stated.

T J Dunning, quoted in Karl Marx, Capital I (1976:926, fn.).

This paper explores aspects of the tension between, on the one hand, international efforts by multilateral and bilateral creditors and aid donors to reduce corruption in developing countries and, on the other, the role played by political corruption in promoting local accumulation of wealth, property and capital in Africa. The process of globalisation includes a concerted effort to reduce the costs and increase the predictability of international business activities. The effort has been particularly directed at countries undergoing economic restructuring and democratic change. The weak bargaining position of African states, where debt and underdevelopment make dependence on international creditors and aid donors especially acute, has led to a variety of direct, unsubtle pressures to force these states to undertake ‘governance’ reforms. While many of these measures address important problems undermining African development, they also misunderstand the nature of corruption as an African problem in two important ways.

First, they seek to impose rules and norms of proper public behaviour, developed for and within liberal democracies, in environments where liberal democracy is not established. And, second, they threaten the dependence of the African petty bourgeoisie on access to the state and its resources. In the context of underdevelopment, local accumulation rests heavily on political power and the ability it provides to appropriate public resources. Corruption provides a means of transferring public resources to the new middle class and bourgeois strata which emerged in the post‐colonial order. And underdevelopment ensures that dependence on political power for accumulation is continuous. Africa's development crisis has intensified dependence on the political domain even more and increased conflict as claimants fight over a diminishing pool of resources. Far from arresting the upward spiral of corruption, liberalisation and governance measures imposed by the donors have encouraged the development of new forms of corruption.