Developing Democracy in Africa: African and International Imperatives By Larry Diamond Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution email: diamond@hoover.stanford.

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From the early 1990s, Africa has experienced a "second liberation" that has opened up new prospects for democratic development on the continent. After 1990, most of the 48 countries in sub-Saharan Africa legalized opposition parties and held competitive, multiparty elections. But those elections have often not met the minimal democratic criteria of freeness and fairness. Many incumbent parties have exploited institutional advantages to deny the opposition any chance of winning power in the new multi-party regimes. These regimes are best understood as "pseudodemocracies" or what Ri chard Joseph has termed virtual democracies. A distinction between a merely electoral democracy and a more substantial form, what may be termed "liberal democracy" is crucial to understanding the limits and possibilities of democratic development in Africa. In a liberal democracy, elected officials have power as well as authority, and the military and police are subordinate to them. The rule of law is upheld by an independent and respected judiciary. As a result, citizens have political and legal equality, state officials are themselves subject to the law, and individual and group liberties are respected. People are free to organize, demonstrate, publish, petition, and speak their minds. Newspapers and electronic media are free to report and comment, and to expose wrongdoing. Minority groups can practice their culture, their faith, and their beliefs without fear of victimization. Executive power is constrained by other governmental actors. Property rights are protected by law and by the courts. Corruption is punished and deterred by autonomous, effective means of monitoring and enforcement. If we are to understand the prospects for democratic development on the continent, we must have a clear conceptual framework for measuring the real extent of that progress. And we may also want to examine the relationship between the extent of democracy and the likelihood of its consolidation. It is certainly plausible to argue that liberal democratic regimesthose which are more politically inclusive, accountable, and respectful of civil libertiesare more likely to become broadly valued and legitimate, and hence consolidated. This is not to suggest, however, that a rapid transition to liberal democracy is everywhere realistic, or the only path to democratic progress. If, with Richard L. Sklar, we view democracy in developmental terms, as emerging in fragments or parts by no fixed timetable or sequence, then the presence of one fragment of democracy can provide space, experience, initiative, or inspiration for the emergence of others. From this perspective, every increment of democratic progress is significant and should be encouraged. Thus, the presence in pseudodemocracies of legal opposition parties that may contest elections and of somewhat greater scope for civil society groups to organize and educate the people can gradually erode the hegemony of the ruling party and even produce a surprising breakthrough to electoral democracy. By the same token, although electoral democracy may have many illiberal features, the ability to turn the ruling party out of power is a crucial threshold for democratization, especially given Africa's harshly authoritarian experience. Most liberal democracies that do emerge in Africa will probably do so after passing through (or even slipping back to) some period of "merely" electoral democracy. The democratic situation in Africa today is very fluid. Many of the remaining African authoritarian regimes have weaker domestic support bases and face more vigorous and organized opposition, especially in civil society. Some of the pseudodemocracies, such as Kenya and Ethiopia, at least have more political pluralism and freedom. Senegal experienced a breakthrough in March 2000 from pseudodemocracy to electoral democracy, as a result of international pressure and domestic vigilance that produced a surprisingly free and fair election and the defeat of the ruling Socialist Party after 40 years in power. The regime of Robert Mugabes ZANU-PF has become even more repressive of late as it has come under greater political and electoral pressure, but this could not prevent unprecedented electoral gains by opposition forces in 2000. Most remaining authoritarian regimes in Africa are fragile. The problem is that most of the new democracies are as well. Increasingly Africa is threatened by the specter not just of authoritarianism but of the breakdown or disintegration of the state altogether. Because of the low legitimacy and pervasive weakness of state structures of all kinds, the democratic prospect appears more open-ended in Africa, more subject to the influence of a number of key variables, than in any other region of the world.

This essay assess some factors likely to shape the prospects for the development of democracy in Africa. Although the obstacles appear formidable, my analysis counsels against the prevailing trend of profound "Afropessimism" signified by the recent cover story title of an Economist magazine, The Hopeless [ Continent. The roots of Africa's developmental crisisand the hopes for its renewalare political and institutional. The overriding imperatives are to strengthen state structures, and to implement procedures for greater transparency and accountability in governance. This in turn requires careful and creative institutional design, to give political leaders and groups incentives to behave in ways that will enhance democracy, lawfulness, stability, and trust, rather than destroy them. It will not be easy to achieve such institutional change, but growing awareness and pressure from below, in civil society, and from outside, among international actors, raise new possibilities for serious institutional reform. Determinants of the Democratic Prospect If Africa is going to develop, politically and economically, it will have to do so democratically. The past three decades have discredited the notion that East-Asian style developmental dictatorships are possible in Africa. Even in East Asia, economic growth was fostered not by pure authoritarianism but by the rise of more accountable, rule-based institutions that controlled corruption and limited the arbitrary power of government. In East Asia, disciplined leaders found it necessary to develop these institutions partly to secure their own domestic and international legitimation. In Africa, the greater depth and complexity of ethnic divisions, the more fragile nature of the postcolonial state, differences in political culture and other factors precluded the emergence of that type of authoritarian rule dedicated to transparent governance with an emphasis on rules, protection for property rights, and limited government. As a result, corruption, favoritism, and "neopatrimonial," ruleless patterns of behavior became so deeply entrenched that it is now virtually impossible to imagine how political closure can produce anything other than exclusion, violence, corruption, and waste. In economics and in politics, Africa needs openness and competition, accountability and predictability.

Economic Development There is overwhelming evidence of a positive correlation between economic development and democracy. Recent African experience would seem to confirm the finding of Adam Przeworski and his colleagues that the level of economic development does not appear to be associated with the likelihood of a transition to democracy, but rather is strongly correlated with the likelihood of democracy enduring once initiated. Democracy is significantly less likely to break down in prosperous countries, and the number of years a democracy can be expected to survive increases steadily with greater levels of per capita income. However, this is not to say that democracy is impossible in Africa (or in other poor countries), for several reasons. Economic development is not the only factor that affects democracy, and the level of "human development," as measured by factors such as literacy and life expectancy, appears to be more closely correlated with democracy. Second, economic development appears to improve the likelihood of democratic survival through its impact on several crucial intervening variables - the strength and vigor of civil society, the relationship between state and society, the class structure, the political culture, and the linkage to the international system. These variables can be pushed in a democratic direction, or "accelerated," by factors other than economic development, and if that happens the prospect for democracy will be considerably greater than would be predicted by the country's poverty. And third, Przeworski et al. show that democracies in poor countries have significantly better prospects if they can maintain economic growth with low to moderate inflation. If African countries can regenerate at least modest economic growth while also restraining inflation; and if they can make progress on some of the other factors I consider below - particularly getting the institutional frameworks right - their poverty will become much less of an obstacle to democracy. In economic terms, then, the real danger for Africa is the combination of poverty and prolonged economic crisis and decline. This raises the imperative of regenerating economic growth in Africa. It is beyond the scope of this essay to propose anything like a strategy for that challenge, which appears even more formidable with the paucity of growth after more than a decade of structural adjustment in Africa. However, part of the answer appears to lie in the intricate linkage among political and economic factors. The basic economic principles are clear, and more effort is needed to educate African policymakers and publics about their compelling logic: currencies should be convertible, tariffs low, barriers to market entry and business incorporation low or nil, taxes low, simple, and easy to administer. Yet economic growth requires not only economic policies and institutions that encourage savings, investment, and trade; it also needs a political "enabling environment."

The political environment has to breed confidence in the future to attract foreign investment and retain the capital of domestic elites: it has to ensure peace, stability, low transaction costs, and a rule of law. It also requires workable physical infrastructure, including roads that connect agricultural producers to national markets and international ports. Finally, it demands effective investment in basic public education and health - key foundations of the East Asian miracle. International and domestic policymakers must grasp this fundamental reciprocal linkage between stable, responsible, accountable, democratic politics and economic growth. Democracy, in this sense, can provide the best enabling environment for growth in Africa. In fact, statistical analyses show that Athere is no trade-off between development and democracy,@ and that "democracy need not generate slower growth." At [ every level of development, fewer children die in democracies than in dictatorships, and in the poorest countries, the level of democracy is also positively correlated with improvements in per capita income and life expectancy as well. But if democracy is to facilitate economic development in Africa, it must function democratically. One of the highest imperatives in this regard, as I argue below, is to control corruption. In many African countries today, roads are not being built, wells are not being drilled, taxes are not being collected, teachers and civil servants (and even soldiers and police) are not being paid, and children are not being educated and inoculated, because of pervasive corruption. These absolute imperatives for long-term economic growth cannot be provided unless the nature of politics and governance in Africa changes radically. State Building and State Collapse

Corrupt, decadent, authoritarian regimes face three prospects in Africa over the next ten to fifteen years. If their countries are lucky, a combination of societal opposition congealing into broad coalitions and of major international powers pressuring for change (through political conditionality on loans and aid) will produce transitions to democracy, as in Benin, Mali, and Malawi. Alternatively, the authoritarian regimes could hang on - through repression, guile, divisions among domestic opposition, and cynicism and inefficacy among the major international powers. But hanging on risks a third option, the collapse into civil war, warlordism, and anarchy, as has happened in Angola, Mozambique, Liberia, Somalia, Sierra Leone, and the Congo (the former Zaire). Where a country falls into civil war, democracy provides the best means for restoring state integrity and societal peace. However, negotiating a democratic transition out of civil war is a complicated, difficult, and costly process, typically requiring a level of international intervention, mediation, monitoring and assistance for which the major Western powers (acting through the UN, other coalitions, or even unilaterally) have shown a limited and declining appetite. When countries have been brutalized and devastated as horribly as Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Angola, it is conceivable that the electorate will give power to a warlord like Charles Taylor simply to sue for peace. Such an election may bring peace, but not likely democracy (as recent Liberian experience is showing). After a civil war, the political culture bears traumatic scars of intolerance, distrust, bitterness, and revenge, and rebuilding state authority, economic viability, and political trust become formidable challenges. Unless international monitors, advisors, peacekeeping (and even policing) forces are prepared to stay on the ground for many years - which, unfortunately, they were not prepared to do in Cambodia and Haiti - a tenuous political order may be restored, but it is not likely to remain a very democratic one. (Mozambique has been an exception that merits close study.) Therefore, the earlier that political decay can be arrested through real (not pseudo) democratization, the more viable will be the state that is left behind, and the better will be the eventual prospect for democracy. The above underscores another pivotal determinant of the democratic prospect in Africa. As Samuel Huntington argued a generation ago, before there can be democratic order there must first be political order. This does not mean that there must be an authoritarian regime to build a strong state before democracy can take hold. On the contrary, the evidence from Africa increasingly shows that authoritarian misrule has gravely weakened states, and in turn, Prolonged state decline and attendant corrosion of the effectiveness and legitimacy of the public realm have exacerbated cleavages of ethnicity, religion, and race. In Africa, democracy is much more likely to provide the accountability, transparency, rule of law, and ethnic inclusiveness necessary for broad legitimacy and political stability. Strategies for democratic development in Africa will thus need to think of state building and democracy building as simultaneous and complementary tasks.

The state in Africa cannot be truly strong unless it enjoys a broad base of legitimacy. This requires a democracy that works to some extent to include all groups, and this in turn requires an appropriate institutional design, as I argue below. But this is not enough. There are three other elements of a strong state that generate particular problems for Africa: a professional military appropriate to the country's security, an effective police force and judicial system for maintaining law and order, and a competent - or what Linz and Stepan call "useable" - bureaucracy. With very few exceptions (such as Botswana and South Africa), African countries suffer enormous deficiencies in all three respects. Each of the above segments of the state is weak in capacity, heavily corrupt, and often undermined in its coherence and professionalism by the pervasive pulls of ethnic, familial, and factional ties. One of the elements of a useable bureaucracy that African countries most lack is a cadre of highly trained, professional economic technocrats who understand the dynamics of markets domestically and internationally and the basic requirements for generating economic growth. In fact, there is probably no major region of the world that is so severely lacking in the needed expertise. A major element of state building - and democracy building - in Africa would therefore be to train a new generation of economic analysts and policymakers, able to design and manage responsible macroeconomic policies and development strategies without excessive and embarrassing reliance on internation al experts, who are often unable to adapt sound principles to Africas very particular realities. (A cadre of well-trained entrepreneurs and private-sector managers is similarly needed). Such competent economists and administrators also need to have economic rewards and institutional milieus that will induce them to make a commitment to their own countries. This in turn requires official salaries high enough to attract and retain talented people, while deterring corruption. How to offer such salaries is a formidable challenge, both politically and fiscally, for poor African states. International assistance may be able to help with this challenge, and with the broader process of civil service streamlining, professionalization, and reform. International assistance could also help improve state frameworks and institutions for collection of revenue, but the fact is that taxes will never be collected effectively in Africa until corruption is controlled and people feel some sense of identity with and commitment to the system of government. This may strengthen the case for fiscal federalism, for shifting some of the burden down to lower levels of government with which citizens are more likely to identify. It may also argue for simpler, flatter taxes, and consumption taxes, that are easier to collect. Another high priority for state strengthening involves police training, and improving or overhauling the administration of justice. Legal codes need to be modernized, streamlined, documented, and made more accessible. There is a massive need for improved law schools, legal assistance clinics, and programs to train judges, public prosecutors, and public defenders, as well as to enhance their resources and autonomy. Appointment, supervision, and pay of judges and other legal personnel needs to be entirely depoliticized, turned over to an autonomous body that is separated from partisan politics and power manipulations. To some extent in every country, impartial administration of justice is an ideal that will not be fully met, but the institutional structures to enable it must be put in place, or there will be no hope to develop a rule of law in Africa - and thus no hope for democracy, or for sustainable economic development either. The dilemma for Africa is that it will require renovated and strengthened state structures to foster both democratic and economic development, and it costs money to build states: to construct honest, competent bureaucracies and judicial systems, for example. Expertise is also needed. Given the limited nearterm prospects for economic growth in Africa - particularly in the absence of the enabling environment that a competent, disciplined, well trained state would provide - it is difficult to see where the resources will come from if not substantially from the outside. Whether these vital dimensions of a workable state emerge will depend in part on the assistance strategies and priorities of the principal bilateral donors and multilateral development banks. Combating Corruption

The strong state is not necessarily large in the proportion of societal resources it commands, but it is disciplined, transparent, and governed by impersonal rules in utilizing the resources at its disposal. States will not function effectively and democracy will not become legitimate in Africa until corruption is substantially reduced. Controlling corruption is one of the highest imperatives for developing democracy and political order in Africa. The endemic nature of corruption - in politics, governance, the bureaucracy, the military, the police, the judiciary, and virtually every other institution of authority - has diffuse perverse consequences. It places an impossibly high premium on winning political office, because control of political decisions and allocations then becomes the best instrument (or certainly one of the most reliable) for the accumulation of personal

wealth. It fosters electoral fraud, both by raising the premium on power, and therefore the incentive to acquire it by any means fair or foul, and by corrupting the process directly with money and ineffective oversight. It raises considerably the incentive of the military to take power and keep it - whether explicitly or implicitly, through the conversion to civilian party politics that Jerry Rawlings in Ghana and other "retired" young officers have engaged in. It intensifies ethnic conflict, by undermining the credibility of the rules of the political game, and by entrenching nepotism, ethnic favoritism, and other unprofessional criteria for filling state offices and allocating scarce resources. At the most basic level, it breeds an "uncivic society," riven by a "culture of self-interest, fragmentation, exploitation, cynicism, dishonesty, and distrust - a striking absence of enduring shared commitments to the formal political community, most of all to the nation but also to lower levels of political authority." In these various ways, it totally contradicts decent, credible, trustworthy governance and the rule of law. How can endemic corruption be controlled in Africa? The World Bank and IMF have placed excessive faith in structural reform of the economy to reduce the scope for rent-seeking that inheres in excessive regulation and artificial prices. To be sure, these structural economic reforms are essential and hopeful steps. But they are not enough. If there are no effective legal constraints on corruption, then when one avenue for collecting rents is closed to state officials they will find another. There is always the route of simply stealing state resources, by embezzling state funds and property or, as in Nigeria, illegally lifting oil (or selling secret concesssions for that purpose). No matter how much the economy is liberalized, elected officials, bureaucrats, and judges will still have discretion to make decisions, and thus to sell them for a price. Somehow, it must be made risky for them to do that: the costs of engaging in corruption must come to outweigh the benefits. No progress can be made in controlling political corruption unless a government somehow acquires the political will to get serious about the problem. Getting serious means institutionalizing a structure of oversight and accountability that is exceptionally resourceful, serious, and independent. Many specific institutional arrangements can achieve the necessary effect, but the generic requirements are these: a Code of Conduct for government officials that meticulously rules out bribery, embezzlement, favoritism, and any other use of political office or influence for private gain; a comprehensive system for individuals to declare their assets upon entering elective office or government service, and to regularly update those declarations; a highly professional, adequately staffed, courageously led, technically endowed, and rigorously independent body to monitor compliance with the Code of Conduct, including the veracity of the assets declarations, and to investigate charges and complaints; a structure (whether it is the regular judiciary or a separate tribunal) that is again highly professional, resourceful, and autonomous for trying corruption charges and punishing the guilty; and an infrastructure for auditing the accounts of government agencies and ministries, including not only independent auditors within the ministries but some kind of auditor-general or general accounting organization. To these government structures must be added a vigorous and open civil society. Civil society is filled with all kinds of organized groups, and in a corrupt system most interest groups may be corrupt, both in their internal operation and in their hot pursuit of favored treatment by the state. However, two kinds of organizations in civil society are important for combating corruption. One is an anti-corruption civic organization that educates society about the long-term costs of corruption, campaigns for procedural reforms, and independently monitors the conduct of public officials and reports abuse of office. Many human rights organizations, religious groups, and professional associations (such as the branches of FIDA, the Federation of Independent Women Lawyers) have the credibility in society and understanding to play this role, or to form new organizations to do so. The capacity of domestic civic organizations to fight corruption will be greatly enhanced to the extent that they can link up with international civic efforts to discourage foreign investors and contractors from offering bribes. This is the logic of Transparency International (TI), which seeks to establish national chapters and forge broad coalitions to gradually squeeze bribery and other corrupt practices out of specific sectors of the economy. A number of TI chapters have already been established in Africa. The other crucial element of civil society is a free press, particularly one that develops the capacity for investigative journalism (and the discipline and professionalism to engage in it responsibly). Today in Africa, newspapers and magazines are on the front line of the struggle against political corruption, and are paying the price in intimidation, harassment, and repression from their governments. This points to the crucial variable. Pressure from the public and exposure from the media will be vital. Appropriate institutional designs are essential. But none of this will matter unless there is the political will at the top of the system to make the institutions work, to let civil society press for reform and expose wrongdoing, and to press on with reform, even though powerful interests will resist. In the current circumstances of Africa today, the political will to reform is unlikely to be generated by political leaders themselves. Neither is domestic societal pressure likely to be strong enough to compel them. Only with

massive, consistent, principled but sympathetic international pressure will most African political leaders become persuaded that the costs of tolerating (and engaging in) corruption exceed the benefits. Only such pressure - in the form of strict political conditionality for aid of all kinds - will enable well-meaning political leaders to overcome the enormous resistance to reform that is likely to be mounted by political, military, bureaucratic and business elites who have benefited lavishly under the old system. A democratic leader or government must be able to demonstrate to such vested interests that there is simply no alternative to reform, that they all must adapt to a new kind of system. Even then, the struggle to institutionalize accountability and a rule of law will be tortuous, protracted, and even physically dangerous. Even with such pressure, real reform seems impossible under certain types of regimes where political corruption has become an absolutely integral method of political domination. These regimesMois in Kenya, Biya's in Cameroon, Bongo's in Gabonmay simply have to fall before progress will be possible. For in situations like these of endemic corruption, progress is not simply a matter of strengthening institutions and altering incentive structures; it is first and foremost a matter of changing the existing structures of power and accumulation.

Civil Society I have already mentioned one respect - controlling corruption - in which a strong, vibrant, resourceful, and autonomous civil society is vital for democratic development in Africa. The strength and pluralism of civil society, and its ability to unite in a broad front, has been a crucial factor propelling democratic change in Africa. Civil society performs many other crucial functions for democratic development and consolidation: limiting the power of the state and challenging its abuses of authority; monitoring human rights and strengthening the rule of law; monitoring elections and enhancing the overall quality of the democratic process; educating citizens about their rights and responsibilities, and building a culture of tolerance and civic engagement; incorporating marginal groups into the political process and enhancing the latter's responsiveness to societal interests and needs; providing alternative means, outside the state, for communities to develop; opening and pluralizing the flows of information; and building a constituency for economic as well as political reforms.

The problem is that civil society does not only consist of the above kinds of democracy-building groups and functions. It is also an arena of conflict (and often very intense conflict) between organized interests of various kindseconomic, social, and ethnic. And civil society organizations in Africa are too often are crippled by the same problems of poverty, corruption, nepotism, parochialism, opportunism, illiberalism, and willingness to be coopted that plague the society in general. Where civil society draws together in broad coalitions, it can bring down longstanding authoritarian regimes, as in Zambia, Malawi, Benin, Niger, and most dramatically, South Africa. But even then, civil society typically tends to fragment after the transition and recede in political significance. A particular problem in Africa and other less developed regions is that the ranks of civil society leadership are very thin, and are often severely depleted by the demands of governance and party politics in the new democratic order. In this sense, they may perform their task of recruiting and supplying alternative political leadership all too well. Still, this is not the whole story. One of the greatest threats to democracy in Africa has been the intense politicization of social life. The state has traditionally dominated the distribution of what people want and every major group has wanted desperately to obtain access to or control over it. Virtually all major groups (political and civil) have been oriented to what they could get from the political system, rather than to making it work fairly. Competitive politics in the typical African country is bound to be corrupt, controversial, and equivocal in its commitment to democratic rules and principles for some time to come as it has been in most democracies when they were just beginning to emerge. What is vitally needed in these circumstances is some neutral, trusted umpires and monitors whose commitment is unequivocally to the process, not to any particular outcome, party, faction, group, or leader. In new and fragile democracies, regulatory institutions e.g., the electoral administration or the judicial system that should restrain and discipline contending forces are extremely poorly developed, or are themselves heavily politicized and lacking in public trust. Civil society can fill some of this gap. Independent election monitoring groups can play a crucial role in deterring electoral fraud, identifying it where it occurs, and validating the fairness of an election that losers are almost invariably bound to dispute. The credibility of founding elections in new African democracies such as Benin, Zambia, Malawi, and South Africa was clearly enhanced and the transition to democracy smoothed by international observation and domestic election monitoring.

Even where democracy seems a distant or unlikely prospect, the regime is utterly venal, and the political class is generally discredited, civil society organizations may do much to keep the quest for democracy alive, to raise the consciousness of society, and to contain the abuses of the regime (in part by exposing them before the international community). In the face of continual pressure, intimidation, and even arrest and physical danger, human rights groups and other civic organizations in Nigeria and Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) courageously pressed on with the struggle for democracy. These groups played a major role in the democratic transition that ultimately took place in Nigeria in 1999. Civil society tends to grow naturally with education and political development, but low levels of development need not mean a feeble and impoverished civil society. Despite its poverty, India has had for several decades an impressively vibrant, vigilant, and pluralistic civil society, and this has been a key foundation of its democratic persistence. Political culture, leadership, and organization can make a difference. Two essential requirements are political space in which to operate autonomously and some resource base to enable civil society organizations to organize and mobilize autonomously from the state. The international community can help with both. Bilateral and multilateral donors should make it clear that they consider the ability of NGOs, interest groups, and mass media to operate freely a critical condition for good governance in Africa. This should be a prominent condition for official development assistance and debt relief. Financially, African civic and development organizations desperately need help. It is easy to argue in principle that civil society organizations should be, or eventually become, self-supporting, that dependence on international donors is not much better than dependence on the state. However, many of the most crucial civil society organizations in Africathose engaged in election and human rights monitoring, civic education, policy-oriented research, institutional rethinking, the political empowerment of women, and campaigns for political reformsimply could not exist without foreign funding and will probably be dependent on it for many years to come. The dilemmas this generates can be mitigated by the following guidelines: 1. African recipient NGOs should be encouraged to seek a broad base of funding from many different international donors. 2. Donors should have clear performance criteria and careful monitoring for the renewal of grants. 3. Recipient NGOs should be encouraged to raise some of their fundseven a relatively token proportionfrom member dues and other local sources, in order to build a broader and deeper base of indigenous support. 4. Most recipient NGOs should be expected to reach out to, cultivate, and educate popular constituencies, rather than working only in narrow elite circles. 5. The grant-making process should remain competitive and open to newly emerging organizations, so that the field does not become stale with domination by a few internationally favoured groups that grow complacent over time. International assistance to civil society is fraught with dilemmas. If interest groups are strengthened and emboldened too indiscriminately, it could undermine political parties or the viability of the state itself. Democratic development requires that civil society not simply monitor, check, and criticize the state but also give it loyalty and positive support when it is faithful to democratic principles. It also requires political parties that are linked to interest groups but not captured or overawed by them. There is also the problem of strengthening some class or ethnic groups in civil society over others. Most African civil society organizations have an urban bias, and tend to draw disproportionately from certain ethnic groups that have higher levels of education or play a more marginal role in government and politics. International donors should use their funding in part to encourage and enable civil society organizations to reach out across these types of divides and build broad ethnic, regional, and class bases of support. The challenge of strengthening civil society will vary sharply across different types of African countries. In liberal democracies, where the political environment is fairly open, international donors will have much more scope to work with a broad range of organizations and mass media, giving them funding, training, and other crucial technical resources, such as computers and access to the Internet. Given the staggering communication difficulties and growing isolation of Africa from the rest of the world, electronic integration through the Internet looms as an urgent priority and potentially dramatic boon not only to civil society empowerment and interconnectedness but also to the strengthening of education and research in Africa. Beyond strengthening democratic civil societies, this technology has great potential to help open up closed regimes.

In the near term, the most important electronic medium of civil society is the oldest and simplest: radio. Given Africa's poverty, low literacy rates, and lack of infrastructure, radio is the most flexible and powerful medium for broadly reaching the ethnically diverse and often physically remote populations of African countries. Programmess can be transmitted in a variety of indigenous languages and can be used to cultivate democratic citizenship through the diffusion of knowledge of issues and candidates, information about the structure of government and procedures for contacting government officials, and awareness of people's rights as citizens. Radio can convey these themes in dramatic and palpable ways. The key is to develop pluralism as well as professionalism, so that radio becomes another dimension in the growth of civil society and not a means for strengthening government control over society. Authoritarian regimes often attempt to frustrate assistance to democratically minded media and civic groups. Donors need to recognize the potentially risky nature of civil society assistance. High-profile assistance to human rights and other anti-authoritarian groups could only make those groups more compelling targets for the authoritarian state. Yet, unless such groups are strengthened, a transition to democracy may be unlikely, and authoritarian regimes should be made to pay a very stiff price for punishing peaceful prodemocracy groups in civil society. Ultimately, the decision as to whether such groups will put themselves at greater risk by receiving such international assistance should be for the groups themselves to make. Challenging groups in civil society would seem likely to enjoy more protection if their support comes from a relatively broad base of donor countries, including some (like the U.S. and prominent EU states) that have and are willing to exercise leverage over the regime in question. This makes them less liable to be cynically branded by the authoritarian state as the agent of a particular country and its imperialist designs.. Reforming and Constraining the Military The military still looms, behind a faade of civilian rule in some countries (such as Gambia and Niger) and waiting in the wings in others, as a major threat to democracy in Africa. Unless Africas civilian regimes can be helped to function more effectively in controlling corruption, building a rule of law, managing ethnic conflict, and delivering broad-based development, their legitimacy will wane and more military coups will be likely. There is a growing and constructive literature that can counsel new democratic regimes and societies [23] on how to reduce military prerogatives and establish civilian supremacy. Most of this thinking, however, has focused on countries (as in Latin America and parts of Asia) where the military is presumed to have some commitment to a truly national mission. Most militaries intervene in politics out of some mix of national or systemic, corporate, factional, and personal motives. However, in Africa the mix is so heavily tilted toward the factional (ethnic) and personal (corrupt) motives that the models of civilian empowerment and control are of limited value. Educating a corps of civilian specialists in national security strategy, as Stepan and others recommend, is not going to help much to establish civilian control over the military in Africa. African militaries do not existand certainly do not functionto defend against external threats. They are there to hold the state together, and increasingly not even to do that, but rather to prey on its citizens whenever the opportunity presents itself. The problem of the military in Africa is first and foremost one of power. If politics is nothing more than the pursuit of power for personal enrichment and group aggrandizement, the struggle for power is bound to be debased to the Hobbesian point where the men with the guns will always win. And as we are seeing in Africa, this struggle is prone to degenerate into Hobbes's worst nightmare, the rise of rival bands with guns and the disintegration of the state in the struggle among them. How can the militaryand the Hobbesian nightmare of civil warbe held at bay? The only real guarantee against future military coups is good governance that builds popular legitimacy and active public support for democracy. Many of Africa's new democratic regimes, most strikingly Nigerias, start with one advantage: people are so disgusted with military rule that they are not likely to call for the military to rescue them any time soon. Yet, when democracy malfunctions, it can provide the opportunityas it did in Niger early in 1996for ambitious military officers to claim they are rescuing the country from chaos. Where civil society is weak and the politicians are corrupt and divided, the military will prevail in that moment of opportunity, even if it is still distrusted or even despised. Even in the absence of more dramatically effective governance in Africa's new democracies, the politicians must at least remain willing to work with one another, and stand resolutely united against any coup attempt.

Civilian political leaders need to respect and develop the professional capacity, coherence, and autonomy of the military as an institution. Their basic operational needs should be provided and their salaries paid. Democrats are inviting trouble when they do not attend to these most justifiable expectations of the military. Conditions of life and service in the military need to be decent enough so that the soldiers are not driven to challenge civilian authority out of desperation. The size of the military may needs to be reduced so that the state can afford to pay, house, and equip what military it has. Civilian leaders should not interfere in the ordinary process of military promotions and discipline, and the military must not become or be allowed to remainthe captive of one particular ethnic group or region. This can generate (as in Burundi and Nigeria) a profound tension between democracy and the military. Ethnically broadening a military that has become, or historically been, dominated by a narrow group by political fiat could itself provoke a coup. Change may need to come incrementally through more balanced and inclusive recruitment, while places are found for retiring officers in other state offices, or meaningful pensions are offered them. Military coups could also be prevented by occupying the officers with other projects in order to rebuild their professionalism. The obvious role here is not participation in the country's economic and social developmentthe goal should be to extricate them from any domestic political or developmental function. Rather, regional and international peacekeeping seems a natural and much needed route to restoring professional purpose, pride, and lan to African armed forces. Integrating the operational capacities of African militaries through joint training and operations that enmesh them in contact with Western military officers and the armed forces of more secure African democracies (especially South Africa) might also help to dampen the temptation to revert to unprofessional intervention in politics. Africa sorely needs a military capacity to respond to its own conflicts. While the Organization of African Unity would be in principle the logical mechanism, it is unlikely to be able to reach the consensus necessary to intervene. More promising are the two regional organizations dominated by Africas most important powers, SADC (the 12 -member Southern Africa Development Community) with South Africa as its center of gravity, and ECOWAS (the Economic Community of West African States), in which Nigeria dominates economically, and in peacekeeping, militarily. The miserable ECOWAS intervention in Liberia should not discredit the idea of establishing a capacity for collective intervention that would draw from national armies and trained and equipped for this purpose. Western financial, material, and technical assistance, as the United States is now set to offer Nigeria precisely for peacekeeping purposes, is essential to facilitate the capacity for effective regional peacekeeping and peacemaking. However valuable and needed it may be, such a new military mission will not end the military threat to democracy in Africa. There would still be military forces in the country with the capacity to intervene, and they would even be better trained and equipped as a fighting force. At any given time, much if not all of a country's armed forces would remain in the country, and many countries would probably not participate in the joint peacekeeping force. Military culture will change only slowly, and if things get messy politically at home, a seat in the cabinet and a hand in the treasury may still look a lot more appealing than holding a truce line on an ethnic killing field. The most effective antidote to military coups in Africa would be for the international community whether through the UN or some ad hoc coalition of major democratic donor countries, hopefully acting in concert with African democratic statesto say to African military usurpers : This will not stand. Yet, if the demand for military is to be effective, it must be backed up with the credible threat of force. And this force is less credible and meaningful when it is exercised as it has been to date (e.g, Frances intervention in the Central African Republic in the mid-1990s)by a former colonial power acting episodically, unilaterally, and from a desire to sustain its own continuing hegemony rather than to advance democracy. Real deterrence would come when one or two putative African military presidents are forcibly removed by an international democratic alliance, then arrested, turned over to the restored democratic government, and tried and punished for treason. Simply standing fast to present Sierra Leones murderous rebels from seizing power (or even retaining control of the countrys diamond mines) would help to sen d a message to future military thugs. Even if the will to intervene forcibly can be mobilized, it will not be practical in all circumstances. Although he was said to fear it obsessively when he first came to power (and then watched the U.S.-led intervention in Haiti), Nigerias General Sani Abacha must surely have realized that no international power would ever muster the will and resources to topple a military regime in Nigeria. But the fact that the international community can not act everywhere militarily should not keep it from acting anywhere militarily. Nor should it prevent democracies acting collectively in defense of democracy everywhere, with some kind of serious strategy. In large countries with large military establishments like Nigeriathe international community could at least mobilize stiff economic and political sanctions. This should be part of the political conditionality for Africa: automaticsuspension of aid, trade, and cultural ties, a total embargo on weapons

sales, and other specific sanctionsapplied by all major donorswhen the military seizes power, and so long as it remains in power. The military has nothing left to contribute to governance in Africa except to get out. Political Institutionalization and Institutional Design

The development challenge in Africa is preeminently a political one. Institutions must be builtin the state, politics, and civil societythat can channel citizen participation in constructive ways and deliver minimally decent, accountable, effective governance. With regard to electoral politics and political representation, African countries face two principal challenges. One is common to all new and emerging democracies: to develop political parties that have some institutional depth, coherence, organization, and autonomy from other social forces. Ideally, political parties should have linkages to civil society organizations but not capture them or be captured by them. Institutionalization requires a subtle mix of continuity and adaptability. To provide the foundation for stable governance, parties should have some reliable base of support in society over time, but not be frozen in that base. This leads to the second challenge, which is not unique to Africa but is faced more pervasively in Africa than in any other region of the world. Political institutions must be designed to allow for the meaningful representation of distinct interests in society without polarizing the contest between them. In particular, institutional designs must find ways to manage ethnic conflict and provide incentives for interethnic cooperation and accommodation. A key mechanism for accomplishing this is federalism, or at least decentralization of power. Democratic development and stability (not to mention civil peace) in Africa require that each significant ethnic or regional group feel some identification with and stake in the political system. This requires that, even if they have no share in power at the center they at least have control over their own more local affairs, and the capacity to utilize their resources, manage their schools, and pursue their culture and advancement as they wish (within the bounds of the constitution). Democracy is also likely to be more accountable and responsive when officials exercise real power and must regularly face the voters at the local and provincial or state levels. The most important variable for shaping the party system, and the nature of the political game at the national level, is the electoral system. If any generalization about institutional design seems sustainable, it is that majoritarian systems are ill-suited for countries with deep ethnic, regional, religious or other emotional and polarizing divisions. Where cleavage groups are sharply defined and group identities (and inter-group insecurities and suspicions) deeply felt as they are in most of Africathe overriding imperative is to avoid broad and indefinite exclusion from power of any significant group. If democracy is to retain the loyalty of all major ethnic parties and groups to the constitutional system, each group must feel it has a stake in the system. To achieve this, institutional designers must do several things. First, they need to provide incentives for different groups to form coalitions or pool votes in national politics, ideally in ways that will give rise to multiethnic parties. Second, as indicated above, they need to distribute power vertically, so that territorially based groups can have some control over their own affairs and pressure on the political center is relieved and diffused. And third, they need to ensure that all ethnic and nationality groups have political equality. In particular, no one should be denied equal citizenship in the state because of nationality or ethnicity.

Proportional representation (PR) in some form generally provides the best tool for ensuring that all groups in a deeply divided society feel included in the political process, and even for encouraging the development of cross-cutting cleavages that can moderate ethnic or regional conflict over time. As Reynolds has strikingly shown in his comparative study of five electoral systems in Southern Africa, even where (as in Malawi) the single-member-district plurality system produces a highly proportional translation of votes into legislative seats, the territorial concentration and cohesion of ethnic groups that ensures that proportional outcome also creates regional or ethnic fiefdoms. Such majoritarian systems have the particularly perverse effect of denying legislative representation to precisely those voters who represent the greatest hope for accommodation, the ones who are willing to vote for a party other than the one that dominates among their group or region. With proportional representation, as in South Africa, votes are not wasted, so parties have an incentive to construct ethnically (or racially, or regionally) inclusive lists of candidates, and thus to reach out, integratively, to develop a political base among groups that are predominantly represented by rival parties. In this way, South Africa's two main political parties have each developed surprisingly broad multiethnic or

multiracial profiles, both in their lists of party candidates and in their profiles of voter support The problem in South Africa, and with all PR systems based on national lists or large-sized districts (South Africa has some of both), is that there is no means for holding individual legislators accountable to specific voters. One promising option is the use of smaller multimember constituencies with open lists, combined with some topping off from a national list, or set of provincial lists, to achieve greater proportionality among the parties. This would produce several positive effects. It would provide more direct lines of communication and accountability between specific representatives and clearly demarcated territorial constituencies. It would give voters more choice in the selection of individual candidates. It would go some ways to breaking up the hegemony of individual parties within their presumed ethnic or regional strongholds. And finally, it would give each national party a better chance (through their regional or national "topping off" lists) to elect some candidates from ethnic groups and regions where it is not (yet) particularly strong. There are, of course, a wide range of other alternatives, and these multiply further when one calculates the ways that alternative electoral systems can fit (oddly or naturally) with presidential, semipresidential or parliamentary government. With its awkward division of power between president and prime minister, semi-presidentialism is poorly suited to the ethnic divides and weak institutional arrangements of Africa. The divided executive power can lead to disputed claims to authority and thus debilitating, even polarizing, political conflict (as in the failed democratic experiments in Niger in the 1990s and Nigeria in the 1960s). Donald Horowitz has offered some compelling thoughts on how presidentialism can help to provide a transethnic symbol of ethnic accommodation where, as in Nigeria, the election is structured to require presidential candidates to assemble broad multiethnic bases. Still, even in Nigeria once the election is held the country perceives that a certain group has "captured" the national government, and this played no small role in the decision of the military to annul the election of the first Yorbua civilian president, and in the decision of many powerful forces in the north to appeal for and rally behind that annulment. A parliamentary system is more fluid and less zero-sum. It more naturally encourages the formation of coalitions where (as is the case in most African states) no party wins an absolute majority, and it is less susceptible to the aggrandizement and abuse of executive power. The advantages and disadvantages of different institutional designs have been and will continue to be vigorously debated. What is unfortunate is the low level of awareness in Africa of these debates and alternatives. Africa is likely to be for many years to come what Richard Sklar has called a workshop of democratic invention and experimentation. This is a necessary element of finally "getting the politics right" in Africa. But if this experimentation is to maximize the prospects for success, it must draw in an informed way from theory, information, and past regional and global experience. This is another respect in which the international community can play a constructive and much needed role. With long-term funding and technical assistance, international donors could help to establish on the African continent some outstanding intellectual and policy centers for the study of institutional alternatives. These centers could act as resource agencies and advisors to African countries that are in the midst of designing or reforming their constitutional systems. They could also stimulate and mediate the debate that is so urgently needed on the best ways to structure democratic institutions to meet the peculiar challenges confronting African societies. The Necessity for Conditionality Increased aid and political and intellectual engagement is needed from the West if Africa is to develop, democratically and economically. But aid, particularly economic assistance, must not come without conditions. The entire approach to aid needs to be rethought. Western donor agencies view it in part as a charitable act, a demonstration of their generosity and enlightenment, as well as their self-interest in lifting countries out of acute poverty and in developing new markets. But it is neither charitable nor enlightened to indulge and sustain wasteful, corrupt, abusive governance. Neither will anything be gained for human development by unconditionally relieving the debts of poor countries, as a growing chorus of private groups and European governments is proposing. For the poorest nations of Africa and other parts of the developing world, there needs to be a new bargain: debt for democracy and development for good governance. Relief of debt and official economic assistance (other than emergency humanitarian aid) must be conditioned on freedom of the press, freedom of association, judicial independence, electoral accountability, and independent means for monitoring the conduct of public official and punishing corruption. Conditionality must lock countries into these institutional conditions for good governance, not offer a one-time reward for political concessions that can quickly be withdrawn or undermined. Instead of canceling the date of qualifying countries, the major creditor states and multilateral banksshould suspend debt repayment for qualifying

countries and then retire the debt at 10 percent a year for every year the qualifying state adheres to these basic conditions for good governance. It is not enough to require that countries move to meet these conditions as they receive aid. This has led to a hopeless cat and mouse game with cynical dictatorships such as the Moi government in Kenya. Effective conditionality requires that states meet the conditions, or at least a good number of them, in advance of any debt relief and as a requirement for any continued aid, which should otherwise quickly be phased out. States should be required to make binding and credible institutional reforms, and in many cases constitutional reforms, in order to qualify. The only way to promote real economic development is to help develop the foundations of accountable, transparent, and responsible governance, based on the rule of law. Unless corruption can be controlled and property rights and predictability entrenched under the law, there will be no incentives to invest and generate new wealth. Without the above conditions of freedom, openness, political choice, and autonomous institutions to enforce the provisions of the law, there is no hope for controlling corruption and waste and generating an enabling environment for development. This is why a much greater proportion of international development assistance should be spent on developing the political foundations for development in a democratic, accountable state and a vigorous civil society committed to reform. Tough, clear, consistent conditions, tied to long-term institutional changes and political assistance to build those institutions, can help to transform the nature of politics and governance in many countries around the world. The more the state is dependent on Western aid and engagement, the more the population is demanding freedom and accountability from below, and the fewer are the levers of power that the state can exercise against the Western donor democracies, the more effective conditionality and political assistance can be. To be sure, a number of dictatorships that could not survive any serious attempt to honor these conditions would reject the package, and would no doubt denounce it as shameless neocolonialism that seeks to enslave Africans all over again. But it is the dictators themselves who have enslaved, degraded, and improverished their own people. And, apart from the oil states, few can survive indefinitely without the lifeline of international aid and credit. Initially, probably only a small minority of African states would meet serious conditions of democracy, transparency, and accountability in exchange for debt relief and substantial development assistance. However, if those democracies that do meet the conditions also receive new aid flows and trade concessions, they will experience sustainable and even dramatic improvements in economic and human development. And as those countries benefit, they will generate demonstration effects that will tantalize their neighbors. The recalcitrant authoritarian, corrupt, and pseudodemocratic regimes that refuse to meet the conditions will fall demonstrably behind. Then they will come under growing pressure from their own peoples to reform, in order to qualify for the new international bargain. The problem with Africa for thirty years has been the paucity of models of developmental success. Really, there has been only one success story on the African continent, Botswana. But its formula for successdemocracy, limited government, and restraint of corruption, resulting in high levels of international assistance and rapid economic development has powerfully influenced its regional neighbors. What Africa needs now is more Botswanas. Even half a dozen, lifted up by the stimulus to good government that conditionality generates, could transform the future of the continent.

What Prospect? While the circumstances in Africa today are dire, they are not hopeless. In fact, they offer more grounds for hope than at any time in the past three decades. Against the greed, suspicion, fragmentation, exploitation, violence, and decay that has characterized African politics since independence, counter-trends are now taking shape. There is among many African elites a growing, if still grudging and partial, acceptance of market mechanisms and democratic principles. There is a widespread popular weariness with civil war and greater readiness for accommodation, purchased, to be sure, at a dear price. Public cynicism with government and politics remains dangerously high in many countries, but it is accompanied by growing intolerance of corruption and greater recognition of its costs to society. Most important, perhaps, is the emergence of a new type of social and political actor, in the form of civic organizations (and mass media) that seek better, more liberal, responsible, and humane governance for the society rather than immediate, material rewards for themselves. In their dedication to the wider political community and the rule of law, and in their greater transcendance of the ethnic identities that cleave party politics, these new organizations represent the seed of

a new African phenomenon: a civic community, built on honesty, trust, tolerance, cooperation, political equality, law abidingness, and public spiritedness.

Africa is a very, very long ways from the predominance of cross-cutting cleavages and civic virtue that characterize such a civic community at the national level. This would entail a transformation of political culture and an enormous accumulation of social capital (in the form of these cross-cutting, civically engaged organizations). Nevertheless, a potentially historic and profound process of change is underway. If this trend is nurtured, through the types of institutional reforms and international assistance and conditionality recommended here, it could put a number of African countries firmly on the path to democracy, development, and political stability. And those success stories would become models for neighboring countries, as they have in Asia and Latin America. From this perspective, the prevailing mood of Afro-pessimism in the West is both unwarranted and self-defeating. Much of Africa is ready for a new departure. But it remains to be seen whether the major international actors have the vision, discipline, and commitment to foster it.