Africa Page 18

  The spectacle of two of the most eminent African rulers in bitter dispute did not augur well for the performance of the OAU or for the concept of unity. During the remaining years of the decade the OAU faced two major conflicts – first in the Congo and then the civil war in Nigeria – but hardly acquitted itself with distinction in either case. What it had to learn were the lessons that had also faced the United Nations since its inception in 1945: it was one thing to create an Organisation of African Unity; it was something else to achieve unity among more than 30 nations at that time, a figure that would eventually rise to more than 50.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Coup d’Etat and the One-Party State

  COLONIAL MILITARY STRUCTURES

  The 1960s may have been an exhilarating time for Africans, as the bastions of colonialism fell and independence spread across the continent, yet it was soon apparent that the political kingdom, which Nkrumah had insisted should be sought first, held many pitfalls. Independence was not simply a question of changing flags and replacing the colonial administration with an African one. The systems inherited from the departing British and French often did not fit: they did not answer to either the conditions that existed on the ground or the ambitions of the new leaders. Moreover, ‘Colonialism was based on authoritarian command; as such, it was incompatible with any preparation for self-government. Africa was the continent of bureaucratic rule. In that sense, every success of administration was a failure of government. Government was run not only without, but despite the people.’1 When Africans replaced the departing Europeans, therefore, they did not move into ready-made democratic systems that they had already been practising for some time; they took over authoritarian structures that had been created to enable the colonial authorities to rule their subjects without their consent. Colonial officials had been a class to themselves: set apart from those they ruled and an anachronism back in the rapidly changing metropolitan societies from which they came. All the assumptions of colonial societies were based upon the conviction that the administrator was both right and superior: right in that he knew what was best for the country; and superior because the people over whom he ruled accepted his judgements and were content with the good government he dispensed. Even when it became plain that independence was approaching few changes to the administrative structures were made, while the apparatus of coercion, such as the state of emergency, which was the ultimate means of colonial control, remained intact at the time of handover so that, for example, at the end of the century in troubled Zimbabwe President Mugabe could use the same colonial measures of coercion that had been deployed by Ian Smith and previous Rhodesian governments. According to Ruth First, ‘More than anything else, colonial administrations resembled armies. The chain of authority from the top downwards was untouched by any principle of representation or consultation. For long periods in some territories, indeed, the colonial administration not only resembled armies, in their paramilitary formation and ethos; they were, as in the Sudan, the instruments of military men.’2

  Once they had taken control of these structures the new rulers had to decide what to do with them and to what extent they could and should be altered to accord with the political freedom that their followers believed they had at last attained. They had to do this, moreover, against a wave of new external pressures that included those emanating from the old colonial powers, anxious to retain as much ongoing influence as possible while safeguarding their economic interests, and from a number of new players in Africa, most notably the United States, the Soviet Union and China. The United States had had little involvement in Africa prior to 1957 but this changed rapidly thereafter and, for example in 1958, when the representative of the British chiefs of staff, General Lathbury, visited Washington he found extraordinary interest among US officials in the developments which the War Office was then promoting in Africa. By 1961 the US had become deeply involved in Africa, in the first instance through the Congo. Although at first a majority of conservative leaders were content to take the colonial structures as they found them, a few desired to institute radical changes at once and in four cases – those of Ghana, Guinea, Mali and Tanganyika – the leaders created mass parties as instruments to change their entire societies and lead them away from the colonial structures they had inherited. Despite these radicals, in a majority of cases there was an identity of interest between the new elites and the departing colonial administrators that made a peaceful transfer of power that much easier to carry out. In most cases there had been no real preparation for independence, only an eleventh-hour scramble to provide ‘an ideology of delay’. The point became clear over the first years of independence when few of the models of government that had been bequeathed lasted for more than a few years. Thus, from the end of 1960 to the beginning of 1962, 13 states either revised their constitutions or produced new ones. Another aspect of the handover that quickly became apparent was that the departing colonial authorities were prepared to hand over political power as long as doing so did not affect their economic stakes. Rapid Africanization then provided jobs for the new elites, few of which had any inclination to change the system that placed them in the positions of prestige and power, which had formerly been occupied by the departing whites.

  The military coup d’état had already become a feature of African politics in 1960, the annus mirabilis of independence, with the overthrow of Lumumba and the first army takeover under Mobutu in the Congo. In the Congo, moreover, these changes, which defied the legitimacy of the colonial inheritance, were done with the connivance of the West and the United Nations under Western pressure, to set a precedent of external interference in support of government changes that would continue into the indefinite future. Nigerian and Ghanaian army officers who served in the Congo under UN auspices saw at first hand the power of the soldiers to arbitrate or coerce politicians and took such lessons home with them. African armies soon learnt that their intervention could be decisive while the politicians learnt that foreign intervention could be even more decisive.

  Few colonial armies had been prepared for independence in the sense of having a trained African officer corps. The first officer cadets from the Gold Coast were only sent to Britain in 1953, from Uganda in 1959, from Tanganyika in 1961. In fact, the last functions of colonial rule transferred to African control were those concerned with internal security and defence so that African armies after independence were still largely officered by whites, a cause of deep resentment that played its part in the army mutinies in the Congo, Kenya, Tanganyika and Uganda. Different kinds of military coup would emerge during the 1960s but the first was the pay mutiny or, more generally, a strike for better conditions that included anger at the slow rate of Africanization for officers. This was the case initially in the Congo and East Africa. However, the sheer number of coups that were mounted during the 1960s, averaging just under three a year, suggested that a great deal was wrong with state structures that were clearly fragile and perhaps unworkable as they stood. In two months over 1965 into 1966, for example, five states experienced military coups: Dahomey (Benin) in December 1965, Central African Republic, Upper Volta (Burkina Faso) and Nigeria during January 1966, and Ghana in February 1966. Armies had no tradition of standing apart from politics while the loyalties of the soldiers, for example to different regions or tribes, would prove easy to exploit. Power seekers, whether military men or politicians, soon recognized the need to cosset their armies. At the same time the more fragile the state the greater the need for external help and the more such aid was sought and relied upon the greater the discontent within the ranks of the army. In 1968, for example, a total of 1,400 senior officers and NCOs of the French army, marines and air force, the medical corps and the gendarmeries were employed as technical assistants in 12 Francophone countries. These were in addition to the 6–7,000 troops of the French army actually stationed in Senegal, Chad, Niger, Côte d’Ivoire, Central African Republic, Gabon and Madagascar. This was overt neo-colonialism, accepted none
theless by weak governments that on a number of occasions were obliged to turn to these forces to keep themselves in power. The African armies were the creation of the colonial powers and were moulded to the needs of the West. In the post-colonial period they remained bound to the West for training, equipment and aid. It soon became clear, moreover, that African armies were in the best position to obtain more than their share of the state’s limited resources.

  When assessing how post-independence politics developed in Africa, it is impossible not to return, again and again, to what the colonial powers developed, or failed to develop, before they departed. There were a number of reasons why so many of the colonial-bequeathed systems broke down so quickly after independence. These included: challenges to the legitimacy of the government that actually succeeded to power; vulnerability of the government to outside interference; weak or poorly tested state structures in the face of internal challenges (such as those by the military); and regional pulls against the centre based upon tribal loyalties. The new rulers had to work out their own concepts of a viable state that would take into account the strengths and weaknesses of their societies in a way that the colonial authorities had never attempted to do because to have done so would have destroyed the premises upon which colonial authority rested. Once a territory had been subdued the colonial rulers saw law and order in economic terms: how to organize the people to provide the labour required for the mines and plantations that produced what the metropolitan powers sought from their empires. Otherwise, they were content to leave traditional activities and their leaders alone, always provided these became their allies in maintaining a status quo that served colonial interests. The new rulers, on the other hand, had to reorganize their entire societies and bring them into a modern, competitive world from which they had been sheltered by the colonial system. There were huge economic gaps – primarily in industrialization – that had been ignored by the colonial authorities; and there were the expectations on the part of the elites for career prospects and on the part of the mass of the people for an improved life that would lift them out of poverty. In these circumstances the new regimes automatically saw their military establishments as instruments to be used in nation building and that, if necessary, included controlling opponents of the government. This view of the military’s role came before the more traditional view that the army existed first and foremost for national defence purposes.

  In many African states the military came to be seen as central to the nation-building process:

  At the heart of many African ambitions for the development of a state which will provide the basis of order, is the belief that the methods of consultation used in the ‘stateless societies’ of pre-colonial Africa can be adapted for modern use. The justification of the ‘one-party state’ has always contained an element of appealing to past tradition (the consensus of the tribe).

  The political ideals of populist thought confuse distinctions between civil and military. By stressing the need to mobilize the population in support for the regime and in work to improve the wealth of the country, each government attempts to inculcate some of the virtues of military organisation.3

  African armies found themselves – or forced themselves – to the forefront of the political process in the early stages of the independence era. Sometimes thereafter, as in 1966 in Ghana, they seized power to protect their position. Both the British and the French had encouraged stereotypes of warrior tribes and had recruited their colonial armies from such tribes. There was, moreover, keen competition among the peasantry to enter the army, which was both comparatively well paid and seen as a life of relative privilege. At independence the British had come to regard their local defence forces as the national forces of each territory, but if the majority of the soldiers had been recruited from a particular tribal group (or groups) this presented problems for the future in an independent state. It was to be resolved in Kenya under Kenyatta by apportioning a quota system for recruitment from different tribal regions. The French, on the other hand, had created regional colonial armies and at independence had to divide up existing regiments according to the origin of their personnel in order to establish national forces for each territory that emerged to independence in 1960.

  French military involvement in Africa remained substantial for many years after independence. At the request of governments French forces intervened at least 12 times in Africa between 1960 and 1963: several times in Chad, in Cameroon, in Niger, in Mauritania, in Congo (Brazzaville) and in Gabon. In the late 1960s French troops were used in Central African Republic to prevent a counter-coup against President Bokassa who himself had come to power by means of a coup. Throughout the 1960s France sustained President Tombalbaye of Chad in power: partly because Chad was strategically placed in the centre of the continent and the French air base and communications centre at Fort Lamy (N’Djamena) was the centre of French military organization in Africa. The 1967–68 budgets of eight out of 15 Francophone countries allotted between 15 and 25 per cent of their finances to their armies which by then were able to exercise a powerful leverage on the political system to obtain more than their share of what, in most cases, were extremely limited resources. Writing at the end of the 1960s Ruth First could argue: ‘Within a decade of independence, and in some countries less, Africa has travelled from colonial government to a very close copy of it. Lugard and Lyautey of the last century have given way to Mobutu, Gowon and Bokassa of this one. Once again the pattern of rule is military-bureaucratic in type.’4

  In the immediate post-independence years what African states needed most of all was a period of uninterrupted peace in which they could re-forge the instruments of government and work out the paths of political and economic development they wished to follow. This they did not get. Instead, they were overwhelmed with pressures from outside the continent: the Cold War was brought to Africa through the 1956 Suez crisis in Egypt and the 1960 Congo crisis as the United States and the Soviet Union vied for influence in a world confrontation that Africa could not escape. The two superpowers were soon followed by China, which was determined to spread its influence in a region that it considered to be ripe for revolution. At the same time the departure of the colonial powers was more apparent than real as they increased their economic grip on their erstwhile colonies to compensate for the loss of direct political control. Moreover, Africa found itself the target for a burgeoning new class of modern empire builders in the form of United Nations, World Bank and national aid agencies and advisers as well as a new breed of non-government organizations, all seeking to guide the new states along development paths more in the interests of the external world from which they came than those of the new states.

  Nkrumah’s readiness to interfere in countries that he considered inimical to his obsession with African unity, and US determination to prevent the spread of Soviet influence in Africa, both helped to destabilize regimes that at best were based on brittle foundations. According to one military commentator ‘Nkrumah’s reception of freedom fighters into special training camps inside Ghana, where they received instruction from Chinese training teams, was based upon the principle that havoc could be caused in the political system of an unfriendly regime by a few men with a few primitive weapons. The Chinese in their aid to the revolutionary movements in the Congo, channelled largely through Burundi or through Congo (Brazzaville), concentrated on guerrilla methods.’5 And in the Congo the US determination to intervene against Lumumba, whom Washington viewed as dangerously ‘red’, led to Mobutu’s two coups – of 1960 and 1965 – which were both supported and part engineered by the CIA, provided a precedent for future interventions throughout the years of the Cold War. Even so, these Cold War reasons for intervention were only part of the story: ‘The issue was not whether the Congo should have a government headed by Lumumba, Kasavubu, Mobutu or Tshombe; but whether an African state should seek an option other than dependence on the West.’6

  COUPS IN WEST AFRICA

  During the 1960s the
military coup became a habit in West Africa, affecting Ghana, Mali, Upper Volta, Togo, Dahomey, Nigeria and Sierra Leone. In Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah determined to entrench his power by creating a one-party state in which the Convention People’s Party (CPP) would dominate all aspects of public life. A national referendum, held over 24–31 January 1964, returned an overwhelming majority for a one-party state. Electors were asked to approve amendments to the constitution to make Ghana a one-party Socialist State with the CPP the sole national party. The amended constitution would also give the President the right to dismiss judges of the Supreme Court and High Court at any time. In Britain the Guardian commented that if the voting were free Nkrumah would be hard put to win the referendum. ‘It would probably do more damage than good to the Commonwealth for Britain to take any initiative on seeking Ghana’s expulsion.’7 The Ghanaian High Commissioner, Kwesi Armah, took exception to the Guardian comment and said the referendum would be free and that observers were welcome to attend. ‘I remind you that the Convention People’s Party has gone to the country four times within twelve years. We have gone to the polls more often than any nation in the world, because we realize that our mandate to govern must always be derived from the people.’ In the event, an overwhelming majority of Ghana’s electorate supported the creation of a one-party state: out of 2,877,464 registered voters, 2,773,920 voted yes, 2,452 voted no. There was criticism of the way the poll was conducted and correspondents doubted that it was either free or fair. The CPP had canvassed for a 100 per cent ‘yes’ vote and government papers had warned voters that all ballot papers must ‘find their way into the “yes” box’. In nearly 104 constituencies the ‘no’ boxes were completely empty and in many areas, according to The Times, voters were not given a choice: either the ‘no’ boxes had been removed by polling officials or the slits for ballots had been sealed. West Africa said of the referendum that while in the past the CPP had been identified with the state, now the state was to be identified with the party. Party officials would be regarded as State officials, just as much as civil servants. The Party’s governing body would have the same standing as the cabinet.8 In December 1964 the government tightened its grip further when it set up a committee with powers of censorship over publications in bookshops, libraries, schools, colleges and universities. The committee ‘will work out a system to ensure the removal of all publications which do not reflect the ideology of the Convention People’s Party or are antagonistic to its ideals’.