 African political thought 5. Today we're going to be discussing military rule in Africa and the thought that goes behind military rule. For a long time there was an image of Africa as a continent that was beset by military rulers. This was I think to a very large extent unfair. Latin America for instance throughout the entire first half of the 20th century was beset by military dictatorships of one sort or another. And it wasn't so long ago in Europe in the 60s for instance that you had military governments in Spain, in Portugal, in Greece, and of course a succession of such governments in Turkey. So it's been a phenomenon which has been international. There's been the possibilities of coups in post-war France and it seems very very difficult to escape this particular phenomenon. But the African military dictator has always been painted in bizarre stripes. There's the association with figures like Idi Amin for instance who was the ruler of Uganda. A volatile person often depicted as clown-like and irrational. And this kind of portrayal of the African military dictator has typecast the entire genre. What we've been doing in this course so far however is to look at different kinds of rulers and we can make a short summary of the kinds of rulers that we've been looking at. We've had ruthless military originated family-based and kleptomaniac rulers like Mobutu of Zaire whom we discussed last week. Sometimes as I said you have people like Amin who seem military and ridiculous at the same time. So we have him and you also have his counterpart in the Francophonic side of Africa, Bokassa in the briefly named Central African Empire. I think you have the kind of ruthless military dictator which is a form of government depending not just on force but very very much on cultural manipulation. Charles Taylor who's now up on criminal charges at the Hague for instance is one such figure. Then you have ruthless military dictatorship with all the same a strong technocratic base. Someone like General Abacha in Nigeria might fit into that particular mode. You have technocratic military dictatorship with impulses towards the return of civilian democratic rule and President Abasanjo in his first incarnation as a military president would fit that particular mode. And then you have the idealistic military dictatorships usually of younger officers people like the young Jerry Rawlings of Ghana, particularly people like Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso. And of course you have the incompetent military dictatorships, young dictators who've got no idea how to run the country that they seized people like Momo of Sierra Leone for instance. That's a typology just of military rulers and of course they take their place alongside other rulers of varying authoritarian stripes, patronizing elder statesmen running one-party states with disgust, Zambia's Kenneth Kounder, with disgust, Tanzania's Julius Nyerere. And last week we also discussed the self-aggrandizing presidential one-party states of people like Hastings Bander in Malawi. What we've got therefore is a very curious mixture of different types of government, all of which bespeaks certain forms of weakness in the African state that allows the strong man, the big man, whether military or otherwise to take over. And this weakness at the heart of the African state of course gives the lie to a lot of theory on what is called civil-military relations. Many theorists posited the idea that in newly developed societies you had as it were a core of weakness in civilian government and this weakness was like a vacuum that grew in the great strength of military organization. The problem of that kind of formulation is that both the civilian side and the military side of things were weak. You had an underdevelopment that was expressed in both sides of the great civil-military divide. But certainly in so far as there are two types that we want to look at at this moment in time, the technocratic reforming type of military government, the sort led by Al-Pasandjo in Nigeria in the 1970s that meticulously time planned a return to civilian rule. It was an almost engineered return to civilian rule with great technological inputs. And the idea that he was committed to this, the idea that he wanted to give up power, stood him in great stead at a later phase when he stood for election as a civilian president. And his mark is still very, very great in the Nigerian body politic. Another previous military president in Nigeria, Buhari, is now the recently elected civilian president of that particular country. So the possibility of transitions not only back to democratic rule, but the transition from being a military figure to being a genuine democratic figure is there. So we want to look at the technocratic bases of people like that. But today I want to spend a little bit of time discussing the idealism and the philosophical commitments of some of the younger officers. People like Jerry Rawlings, who seized power, gave it up, seized power again in the 1980s, and then felt his way towards a form of government that was properly informed. Rawlings had no sense of economic government. He had to take weekly lessons from the professor of economics at the University of Ghana and was humbled enough to do that, to sit down, learn how to do it. And the end result was that Ghana, this is controversial, of course, but it's held up as a success story by the IMF of a failed state in economic terms being brought step by step under Rawlings' guidance, with a lot of advice, of course, from the IMF to some kind of financial stability. And of course Rawlings himself was able in the end to hand back power to civilian successors. He himself resigned as commission and became a civilian president. And the idealism associated with that era gave a new light upon the whole phenomenon of military presidents. But it was Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso, who came to a very mysterious and quite clearly violent end, who I think has captured the imagination of most people looking at the phenomenon of the young, militarized, uniformed leader of Africa. He had genuine ideas for a free state in which tribalism was overcome, in which women had far greater rights than they had before than in other African countries. He looked towards a new person in Africa, male and female, and that this new person in Africa would be germinated in his own country of Burkina Faso. This was an idealism married to a very specific philosophical outlook. Marxist in part, French in part, idealistic throughout and seeking to find a way forward, both in thought and in action, and then in policy for the creation of a new nation.