Relationship between patrimonialism and corruption and its implications for the explanation of underdevelopment in Africa

The notion of patrimonialism started to be widely used in the 80s, under various notions: patrimonialism, neo-patrimonialsm, corruption, prebendalism, rent seeking, predatory state, or “belly politics”- due to development failures and the failure of the state.
The African state is not a patrimonial state, it is rather a patrimonialised state, and that is why it is better to call it neo-patrimonial state (a combination of legal-rational domination and patrimonial domination).
The African political life has always been characterised by lack of clear-cut line between the private and the public sectors. The concept of neo-patrimonialism subsumes related practices like nepotism, clientelism, patronage, prebendalism, tribalism, ethno-regionalism and corruption, which to various degrees are part of African political life.

According to Max Weber (Weber, 1968), there are three types of domination:
1) Legal-rational domination: based on western bureaucratic impersonal rule
2) Charismatic domination: by virtue of prestige of a person due to his high extraordinary qualities
3) Traditional domination: based on the belief in the sacred character of immemorial traditions

He further distinguishes three different but strongly related forms of traditional rule:
1) Patriarchal rule
2) Patrimonial rule
3) Feudal rule

Patrimonialism develops out of the most basic form of traditional authority called patriarchalism. Patriarchalism is based on a strictly personal loyalty, and not on the adherence to abstract and impersonal rule as in the case of legal-rational domination.
In patriarchalism, the head of the household dominates over the other members of the household. The authority and domination of the head of the household is based on the filial respect of members of the family and other dependents for the patriarchal chief (head). The head exercises authority, so that in securing compliance the patriarch does not need administrative or military machine, being solely dependent on the authority traditions gives him augmented by his control over key resources such as land, grazing rights, cattle and women.

Patrimonialism first appears along with the political differentiation when patriarchalism must extend its authority to meet the need of the expanding political community and when the patriarch (head) exercises his authority beyond his own domestic group, over people who are no longer relatives or servants, which is ultimately the state.

With this expanded sphere of administrative activities, authority can no longer be exercised directly and must be mediated by administrative officers, personal retainers like servants, relatives or slaves. What determines the relation of the administrative staff to the chief is not the impersonal obligations of office, but rather the personal loyalty to the chief (Weber, 1968; Medard, 1995).

Patrimonialism signifies a particular type of administration, one that differs very markedly from the legal-rational bureaucracy. Legal-rational bureaucracy is based on hierarchy of graded authority (rational ordering of relations of superiors and juniors), fixed jurisdictional areas with clear-cut procedures and regulations, salaried officers who are recruited and promoted according to objective qualifications and experience, strict separation between incumbent and office, between the private and the public spheres.
In contrast, under patrimonialism, office holders are the personal dependents of the ruler, appointed at his whim on the basis of criteria that are subjective and non-standardised. In patrimonial administration, office holding is at the pleasure of the ruler and any patrimonial bureaucrat may be moved or dismissed by the ruler when it is expedient. Throughout the patrimonial administration there are no clear-cut procedures for taking decisions and decision-making tends to have an ad hoc character (Theobold, 1990). Consequently, the defining characteristic of patrimonialism is the absence of a distinction between the public and private domain, the private servant and public officer, the public purse and the private purse-main, which bears the hallmark of African political life.

To analyse the performances, failures and the capacity of the African state from the standpoint of cross-fertilisation between patrimonialism and the legal-rational mode of governance, a new conceptual framework is paramount. The application of patrimonialism that is a mode of traditional administration to modern political system is at the origin of the use of the notion of neo-patrimonialism instead of the one of patrimonialism. Within the African state, two mixed dual forms coexist and are articulated together in the same system. This dual form combines the logic of bureaucracy and that of patrimonialism, the product of a radically different historical trajectory.
In present western states, the legal-rationality that characterises their bureaucracies have been developed from an overlapping of feudal and patrimonial kingdoms which transformed through the centuries into approximation of the legal-rational and bureaucratic model. In contrast, in Africa, an approximation of a legal-rational state was exported to Africa through colonialism. It was through colonialism that Africa became a modern bureaucratic and territorial state (Medard, 1995). But before this, African state to the extent that it existed then was already partly patrimonialised. After independence, at the same time the bureaucratic administration were multiplying, they were also being patrimonialised, that is, they were being privately and informally appropriated by the agents of the states. This patrimonialisation of the state has brought about a “neo-patrimonial” state, a hybrid of patrimonialism and bureaucracy.

The formal structure of the state is bureaucratic, a written law exists, the civil servants are recruited through examination, but there is no real state law and the functioning of the state is largely patrimonialised. Many developing countries continue to be characterised by the appearance of a weberian “legal-rational” administration. But beneath the trappings of formal bureaucracy, procedural rules, and law, their regimes are based on networks of personal loyalty, patron-client ties and the concentration of powers on a single ruler or a narrow oligarchy at the apex of clientelistic pyramid. Public and private resources are melded, as assets come under discretionary control of political elites, and public offices serve as conduit for private accumulations (Lewis, 1996). Consequently, this leads to the personalisation of power: private means personal and the lack of differentiation between what is political and what is economic. The behaviour of the African “big man” shows that economic and political resources, wealth and power are directly related. Due to the lack of distinction between the office and the person in charge of the office, power is personalised instead of being institutionalised. In the sense that the public officer uses his office as private possession, the public is thus privatised. The office and the office holder are formally and structurally differentiated, but not functionally. Every agent of the state uses his public position to extract resources from the state or from the people.
To cite but a few examples: In some African countries, they talk of politics of the belly. They know that the goat eats where it is tethered and that those in power intend to eat. When a presidential decree relieves a manger of his post, his friends and family explain it to the villagers by saying they have taken his meal ticket. In Nigeria, they talk of sharing or eating the national cake. This phrase, sharing or eating of the national cake conveys desires and practices far removed from gastronomy. It refers to the idea of accumulation of wealth, opening up of possibilities and enabling the holders of power to “set themselves up”. E.g. policemen will extract money from taxi drivers, a schoolteacher will ask for bribes to register a child in school or to sign a testimonial.
Due to the low degree of differentiation between what is economic, political and social, the search for power and the search for wealth and prestige tend to overlap. A predictable by-product of such a model of state administration has detrimental effect on policy implementation. As a result of patrimonialisation of the state, one can speak of the failure of the African state in the sense that since patrimonialism is inversely proportional to the degree of institutionalisation of the state, it illustrates the failure of one of the projects of the African founding fathers, who basically showed two aims: building a nation state and promoting development (Me´dard, 1995).

African political economy reflects the central hallmarks of neo-patrimonial rule. Post-independent African states have been characterised by numerous writers as a prebendal order.
The following salient aspects portray this system (Prebendalism):
1) Public resources are widely appropriated for personal or parochial gains
2) Ethnically delineated patron-client networks pattern such allocations.
3) The distributive areas are largely decentralised and clientelistic relations are diffused and pervasive.

“Prebend” is an office of state, which an individual procures either by examination or as a reward for loyal service to a lord or ruler. The definition of prebend by Weber was to illustrate the extensive corruption in Nigeria.

Neo-patrimonial rule has been sustained by a narrow political elites and controlled exclusively by narrow single rulers or oligarchy.
Power is concentrated in the hands of few through coercive forces with the help of a variety of institutional and informational apparatus. For example, an array of state security forces acquiring extensive latitude, encouraging increasing surveillance and repression against dissidents or putative rivals, Organisations of civil society, notably labour unions, student unions, human right and professional groups, are persecuted and subverted. These measures result in the removal of potential restraints on presidential powers, whether in the military, the political elites or the broader society.
Repression is augmented by material inducement, requiring close discretion over public resources as well as a ready pool of available funds. Revenues from public resources are sidelined to off-budget accounts, which represent an enormous diversion of public resources for discretionary and personal use.

Finally this system leads to deliberate and conscious erosion of central public institutions, replaced by corresponding hegemony of a close circle of ethnic and personal loyalties.

The concept of patrimonialism is very useful in understanding African states practices because it provides the common denominator for all the different concepts currently applied to African politics such as nepotism, clanism, regionalism, tribalism, ethnicity, patron-client ties, clientelism, corruption, predatory state, pebendalism. To a varying degree, these may be present in a country allowing a country to be characterised by nepotism, clientelism, corruption or prebendalism. It is therefore useful to have a comparative concept such as patrimonialism to be able to subsume these different aspects into one general concept.


To understand Africa political life, therefore, it is important to refer to the mixed and dual type of neo-patrimonialsm, which takes into account precisely both the general and specific aspects of what is called corruption in Africa. The neo-patrimonial nature of administration means that political exigency, personal consideration, the manipulation of benefits and liabilities have constantly dominated the implementation of government policies. This has resulted in a small circle of civilian cronies largely circumventing the formal economy through unprecedented corruption, including large diversion of oil, diamond, bauxite, uranium, revenues and significant commercial fraud.

The combination of personal calculations and clientelistic pressures within the system, which has led to a more personalistic and predatory control of the state, makes a mockery of public policies.
The exacerbation of patromonialism has become self destructive because the private appropriation of the state by various leaders and bureaucrats has destroyed the very economic base of the state. Certainly, it is not possible for a few ruling elites or cliques, in the long run, simply to bleed a nation financially dry to the point that it leads to political instability and economic bankruptcy without damage to itself (damage in policy implementation as cost-benefit consideration).

To conclude, neo-patrimonial model of administration in African state approximates to criminalisation of the state, which has deterred to a greater extent the development of African countries. This has invited IMF-world Bank hash conditionalities in most African countries, which have led to hunger, diseases, and economic stagnation and in most cases wars. The common people, who had nothing to with the destruction of the economy through corruption, had to suffer the consequences of IMF-World bank economic bailouts.
If African resources were appropriately and in a sustainable way managed by our neo-patrimonial leaders, there would have been no reason for the international financial institutions to intervene in order to salvage our rubbed economy in exchange for hash conditions.
Unlike many Asian states e.g. south Korea, Taiwan, where public office corruption has often coincided with high sustained growth rates, the African cases demonstrates that corruption linked to top-heavy or swollen patrimonial states and predatory ruling group can have extremely debilitating consequences, as seen in politics such as Siaka Steven’s APC (all peoples congress) regime in Sierra Leone during the 70s and 80s, Moi’s Kenya and Mobutu’s Zaire.
The political realm’s centrality in African development, as a rent-seeking state, employer and locus of economic and political power partly explains the damaging effects of public sector corruption. High –level corruption has legitimised low-level corruption.


This article will be incomplete without a brief mention of Sierra Leone, whose well-organised, effective patrimonial and predatory system under the leaderships of pa Steven and pa Momoh not only bled the country economically but also prepared the conditions for the civil war.

In Sierra Leone, primitive accumulations of forest and mineral resources have fed modern politics dominated by patrimonial distribution (elites build support through distributing resources on patron-client basis to followers).
Few resources are distributed according to principles of bureaucratic rationality or accountability.

Once in power in 1968, the APC regime made pragmatic attempts to forge an alliance of political support from among largely rural and often educationally disadvantaged groups. This brought about the upshot of conservative patrimonial state already begun to take shape under SLPP (sierra Leone peoples party) regime. Patrimonialism in sierra Leone was effective because the long established political legitimacy of patrimonialsm in the eyes of a largely rural and conservative electorate, to whom the state sponsorship was but a village-level moral economy in which patron –client relationship were essential to survival in a hash and capricious agricultural environment.
From the late 70s the mineral economy went into a sharp decline (marampa mines were closed in1975 and De beers quit Yengema mines in 1982, after much of the best deposits were worked out). The APC regime then became more and more dependent on aid support to balance its budget. Donors demanded a more open and accountable use of state resources and reduce the inflated state budget for salaries and wasteful spending. The international donors’ demand had very serious implications for the smooth running of the patron-client politics of the APC regime. This demand placed the regime in a dilemma: they either accept the donors’ conditionalities and get the aid support necessary to balance the budget and forego the patrimonial support base by reducing salaries, sacking of ghost workers, eradicating wasteful spending necessary for the effective operation of the patrimonial system or reject the demand and continue the status quo. The latter was chosen by the regime.
After the expatriate-owned mining of iron ore and diamonds ceased, mining of alluvial diamonds by informal pre-industrial methods emerged as the main source of wealth in the economy. This type of mining was an easy prey to the patrimonial politics of the regime, depending: on quiet deals, on ad hoc licensing arrangements and on political protection from higher oligarchy. Under this system, diamonds were pocketed and smuggled across the country’s porous borders at will. It was a matter of must that all political leaders had a stake in the clandestine diamond trade, without this source of magic money they would lack the political charisma necessary to keep the patrimonial shadow state afloat.
In the 80s through combination of factors, resources available for patrimonial redistribution in Sierra Leone went into sharp decline, a decline exacerbated by the ending of the cold war and a general reduction and tightening up of overseas aid budgets. Due to political machinations and resource shortages the state capacity to control some of its peripheral region was weakened. The Liberian border region was a particular casualty of this aspect of state recession, allowing dissidents to enter the country from Liberia to deploy methods of social destabilisation invented in the course Liberian civil war (1989- 1996). The war in Sierra Leone arguably was the product of this protracted, post-colonial, crisis of patrimonialism.


































What really matters: management of the effects of globalisation or political ideologies


Poverty is no excuse for violence, but evil people are more successful when they can feed off and get sanctuary and support in places of rampant injustices and poverty.
The struggle against terror is a battle for freedom and a race to lift living and educational standards and realise our hope for better alternative. This battle will be costly in blood and treasure. But those who are not prepared to pay for liberty and freedom don’t deserve it.
Moderates everywhere are in majority, but we have learnt that failure to act on the problems of the world empowers extremists.
Poverty is a breeding ground for all sorts of ills, from TB to political and religious intolerance. Osama Bin laden is part of a wealthy family, educated elite with utopian goals, who envisions a different world and resort to violence to achieve it, such elites are more successful when they can feed off and get sanctuary and support from places where rampant injustice and poverty reign. This is not new. There are parallels:
1) The brutality and injustice of the Czarist Russia produced its Lenin
2) The arrogance and injustice of the French aristocracy, its revolution
3) Polpot and Hitler both took power because they were seen by desperate, disillusioned people as a solution to the problems created by the governing class.
Without the great depression, massive unemployment and inflation, would Lenin and Hitler have had chance? Or would they have been dismissed as eccentric crackpots they were?
Today, poverty and injustice, diseases, environmental degradation, terrorism and crime don’t recognise national borders. These issues are globalized and they require global solutions. Failed states don’t only create problems for their own people, their pollution, dangerous ideas and diseases migrate around the world.
Solutions for world problems must be sought. Why? because we can no longer keep our distance from suffering. We now live the pain we see on TV every day and night. We know the dangers of failure. Every one is our neighbour now, their suffering degrades us all, and their success inspires us all. Globalisation means there is nowhere for policy makers to hide. Foreign policy has been democratised by information. The problem for the world is to ensure access to globalisation advantages and to maintain rules and regulations for safety and fair play. We need to incorporate better standards and ethics expected in our family, community and nation into international best practices that are transparent so that instrument of civil society can do their scrutiny, forcing better outcomes.
I don’t believe in the end of history: our history has just begun. Market access for developing countries’ products into rich subsidised and protected markets of the north would be crucial for the survival of their fragile democracies. Democracy works best on a full stomach.
Nation states will survive the globalisation of the economy and information revolution that accompanied it. But they will be greatly changed nation states, especially in domestic fiscal and monetary policies, foreign economic policies, control of international businesses and perhaps in their conduct of war.
The great distribution problem or debate inside nations and between nations is increasingly about access to knowledge and education. Knowledge is the key ingredient of adding value to every product, new and old. Societies that act as meritocracies because they have open democratic access to higher education will prosper; those based on old school ties and restricted access to higher skills necessary for this present future will slip behind and perish.
The class system is too costly; the class war is over in most successful countries. They people have won. New York has more Internet connections that all of Africa, Singapore more investment than all of Africa. This could teach us something. Democracy and freedom will increase, not contract with globalisation. Open economies will eventually force open political systems. Tyrants fear information because knowledge is power. The powers of governments over traditional areas of the economy are being transformed by the new logic of Internet.
The most dangerous mental faults are laziness and impatience. Laziness of mind means unwillingness to face unfamiliar, complex and refractory realities. Impatience leads to infatuation with supposedly all-explanatory theories in lieu of thought and judgement. We must insist, as against the utopian concepts, that a human being is neither an Ant nor a Shark.
These still heroes, be they 9/11 rescue workers, teachers in Afghanistan, or moral leaders who changed the political landscape e.g. Nelson Mandela, Lech Walesa, were great people.
But now, greater transparency, increased media investigation and copious examples of blatant disregard of their responsibilities by many of those in power are fuelling a new age of scepticism. Politicians must now answer to a searching media and public. The searchlight trained on leaders is wonderfully unrelenting, driving change and replacing those who don’t respond.
The biggest danger to avoid is apathy and cynicism. The current distrust of governments in many democracies is fed by the misdeeds of an establishment that was once looked up to and respected. The young are told to respect their elders and traditional values. Yet if we were to examine, for example, the situation where 2 out of 5 marriages fail and more children are being born out of wedlock. Church leaders have been exposed as child abusers, sport heroes abuse steroid, music icons take drugs, business leaders break the rules with impunity and politicians are perceived as lying spin masters and outright thievery.
Governments that build in sand get washed away in flood. The walls are now down and they can no longer hide.
As economies and societies become more open, domestic politicians have fewer levers to pull, so their answers often fail to meet constituents’ needs and expectations. Ultimately political differences will become, not so much a matter of political ideologies (left or right), but of how politicians manage, resist or encourage the various manifestations of globalisation- a force that is anyway beyond their direct control. Globalisation is the tsunami of ever-increasing interdependent financial and trade flows, as well as ideas and people. It has increasingly being joined by the worldwide trend towards greater transparency, democratisation and speedy dissemination of ideas accelerated by global electronic media and Internet. The latter has levelled the playing field. It allows the most remote, smallest player access to the economic, social and political market place.
Anti-globalisation protests reflect a new reality. Wider civil society will, no longer tolerate being divorced from decisions that affect their lives. It is a very healthy development. Our challenge therefore is to find creative new ways to positively facilitate the exchange between wider civil society and the international and multinational bodies set up to manage national interactions.

Governments and individuals must either surf these powerful waves of change or get crushed trying to stop them. Finally and most important governments now have to cooperate with and facilitate the new forces unleashed by the democratisation of information. How governments cooperate, humanise and share these problems and opportunities will decide their relevance and success.