The Foreign Service Journal, May 2004

flush with success is still trying to avoid real political reform, assuming that UNITA’s disarray after Savimbi’s death will allow it to win an easy vic- tory in the forthcoming elections. The Angolan government, in other words, is still hoping it can build an internationally acceptable political façade without changing much. The administrative failure of the big African states has received much less attention than the very obvious political failure, but the problem looms as large. Big African states do not control their territory well, do not have adequate administrative structures, and thus encounter serious problems in implementing policies and delivering services. None of the big states discussed here has been able to administer its entire territory effec- tively and in a sustained way over time. Despite the often-decried bloating of the civil service, big African states are today even more “underadministered” than they were in colonial days. In the most extreme case, that of the DRC, it is not only the administrative infrastruc- ture that has disappeared, depriving the population of services and leaving unpaid teachers, civil servants, and soldiers scrambling to survive; the transport and commu- nications infrastructure has disappeared as well. Restoring administration in big states at this point requires road building as much as civil service reform. Big States Try to Face Their Problems Some of Africa’s big states have made a conscious effort to devise systems of governance to deal with the challenges posed by size and diversity. Others have sim- ply ignored the problem. None has so far found a satis- factory solution likely to last. Angola has systematically ignored the challenge of size. In keeping with the Portuguese legacy, the Marxist tradition of the early years of independence, and later more simply with the ingrained authoritarianism of the leadership, the country has been governed in a highly centralized manner. Angola has been painfully slow in adopting any kind of reform, either political or econom- ic. The true impact of a centralized and bureaucratized system will become more evident if the country remains at peace and the government is forced to turn its atten- tion to its long-neglected socioeco- nomic problems. The DRC has also failed to deal systematically with the governance challenges imposed by size. Theoretically, it has a central- ized system; in practice, there is no authority exercising power except in limited areas. The result is a medieval mixture of local fiefdoms and contested territories, not a decentralized modern state. Nigeria, Ethiopia and even Sudan, in contrast, have sought to address directly the problem of how to gov- ern a large, diverse state but have not yet been successful in devising a lasting solution. Nigeria . A federal state composed of three large regions at independence, Nigeria has tried to refine the federal formula since the end of the Biafra War. It has repeatedly increased the number of states, which now total 36. It has adopted a constitutional clause, subse- quently copied by other African countries, that stipulates that a presidential candidate must show nationwide sup- port by winning at least 25 percent of the vote in two- thirds of the states to be declared the winner. It has tried to provide representation for all major groups in the civil service and cabinet posts. It has tried different formulas for the distribution of oil revenue, most recently increas- ing the share that goes directly to state and local govern- ments. None of these steps, however, has provided a real solution. Increasing the number of states has eliminated the danger of a direct confrontation among large regions, but it has not eliminated traditional divisions. There is no longer a predominantly Muslim northern state, but there are now 12 states in the north and center of the country that have incorporated sharia, in a fundamentalist inter- pretation, in their laws. Increasing the number of states has not eliminated discontent. With several hundred dif- ferent languages spoken in the country, the number of groups that could demand their own state is virtually end- less. Similarly, the revision of the oil revenue distribution has not quelled the discontent of the population of the oil-producing Niger Delta. The new formula has also likely created the incentive for the formation of new states and led to the decentralization of corruption rather than to more accountable government. F O C U S 30 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A Y 2 0 0 4 Although all the countries have had their share of ruthless strongmen, conflicts have extended past the political life span of any individual.