by Oyebade Kunle Oyerinde
“We have a system of government in which we have no hands to define and design and we continue with it, even when we know that it is not working for us.” – Olusegun Obasanjo, 2023
Introduction
It remains disconcerting that government—or control—designers persistently ignore that individuals in diverse human societies inherently possess self-governing capabilities by which they deal with their daily exigencies and learn from their mistakes in social orders that have spontaneously emerged from their interactions. At the same time, government designers often engender sociopolitical catastrophes by surreptitiously or deliberately forcing societies to appropriate government structures foreign to the values and interests of individuals in those societies, consistent with the November 2023 lamentation of former Nigerian President Obasanjo about the post-colonial governments in Africa. It remains uncontentious that if government designers succeed in transplanting governance structures from some societies, they face the impossibility of transplanting the spirit—or the creativity, interests, and values—of the people behind the development of those mechanisms.
The puzzle becomes more complicated with agonizing calls for Africans to return to pre-colonial institutions of governance without consideration for the self-governing capabilities of individuals, which, unfortunately, are being dismissed or otherwise stifled as informal, illegal, extralegal, and/or traditional. In West Africa, the self-governing capabilities of diverse individuals have led to the emergence of neighborhood associations, market women associations, road transport unions, trade guilds, and village assemblies, on which ordinary West Africans survive. This article addresses this puzzle by exploring the extent to which Friedrich Hayek’s reasoning on social order makes sense concerning designed governments and polycentric orders in West Africa.
Friedrich Hayek, in departing completely from European colonialists, implies that the catastrophes of deliberately planned social orders may be avoided when social order emerges as a gradual and unplanned outcome of the natural tendencies of free individuals who voluntarily adjust their behavior toward one another in the pursuit of their interests based on their creativity and values that are not “ever being concentrated in a single mind or being subject to those processes of deliberate coordination and adaptation which a mind performs.” Coincidentally, human experiences suggest that this historically is largely the case as diverse individuals and groups act voluntarily in the pursuit of their separate interests. As individuals and groups adjust their relationships toward each other, polycentric orders—or self-governing systems of overlapping and interdependent relationships—spontaneously emerge that benefit society. Indeed, the invisible and complex interconnectivity of the actions of free individuals and groups is fundamental to the emergence, maintenance, and evolution of social orders rooted in the creativity, interests, and values of the people.
Can we doubt Hayek and claim that Hayek does not make sense in West Africa? But what if Hayek makes sense in West Africa? Or can we think of West African circumstances in which these contradictions play out? Let us journey together and explore how Hayek does not make sense at all in West Africa before looking at the reverse.
Designed Disorder: Hayek Does Not Make Sense to West African Elites and their Colonial Masters
Hayek makes no sense to West African elites and their European colonial masters. From the 1950s, the colonialists were busy with Western-educated Africans in designing governmental or control structures that would roughshod the values and interests of ordinary West Africans. The allegedly new structures represent the continuation of the colonial command-and-control mechanisms by which ordinary West Africans would be perpetually held chokingly to the heel of new African elites who today operate as regional and national despots. As the dawn of political independence rattlingly loomed, West African elites and their colonial masters pointedly dismissed the creativity, interests, and values of ordinary individuals as pathologically antithetical to modern sociopolitical development. The bright and glorious future, as envisioned by the African elites and their colonial masters, instead lay exclusively in the transplanting of Euro-American political structures to the new African countries. Consequently, independence came to fruition with awkwardly cloned versions of Euro-American parliamentary and presidential structures. New African elites gleefully swung into action congratulating ordinary Africans on the joy of having the new governmental structures whose modus operandi and modus vivendi ordinary individuals would have to learn through formal education rooted in Euro-American values. Indeed, the African elites relished revolutionizing the mentality of the African masses with a new culture that the national government—or the national control of individual action—is the ultimate democratic accomplishment, which, if virtuously managed by the elites, would messianically benefit all. This mentality appears to explain why the design of subnational governments by the national government disregarded scaling governmental levels and jurisdictions to public services.
The question remains, why would Hayek condemn Africans to the Stone Age or “backwardness” and imply in his “shunned” reasoning that governing relationships would better serve Africans if those relationships and their structures were driven by their creativity, interests, and values not ever concentrated in African elites and European experts as well as professionals at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund? Hayek seems to make no sense at all because he has completely forgotten that West African elites had succeeded in transplanting Euro-American democratic structures that the elites would shove down the throats of the African masses and would be financially put perpetually on life support by international financial institutions.
Probably what followed immediately after political independence in West Africa was a trance-like experience for government designers. The joy of decolonization crumbled helplessly into dictatorships, chaos, and bloodshed. Tribal and ethnic divisions and tensions, well-cultivated in the colonial chamber of divide and rule, aggressively roared across West Africa and turned the African region, which probably produced the wealthiest person—Mansa Mūsā of Mali—in history, into a one-time strong alligator being fatally swallowed up by the overpowering python of power centralization. Indeed, the stench of domination by some ethnic groups over other ethnic groups became unbearable for the constituent ethnic groups. As their frustration climaxed, the daring children of disillusioned ethnic groups in the military staged coups to remedy the situation, allegedly with foreign support. West Africa quickly metamorphosized hysterically into a theater of coups and counter-coups thoroughly drenched poignantly in the blood of messianic military officers, except for Senegal, a democratic misnomer that has perfected the mechanisms for caging opposition forces. In the final analysis, a groundswell of political assassination busted ravenously over the African region in the 1960s, with casualties including, but not limited to, Nigerian Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa (1966), Northern Nigerian Premier Ahmadu Bello (1966), Western Nigerian Premier Samuel Akintola (1966), Chadian President François Tombalbaye (1975), and Togolese President Sylvanus Épiphanio Olympio (1963). Some independence leaders, such as Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah, successfully fled into exile. Independence leaders who survived assassination became idols whom their respective tribes triumphantly venerated as angelic human species possessing the rare acumen for the salvation of their respective countries. One independence leader was so revered that his ethnic group believed the Western powers had stamped his two fingers of victory on the moon. Members of his ethnic group, including the author of this article, threw sanity to the wind and would come out in the evening to watch the politician’s ghostly fingers on the moon.
Surprisingly, the early 1960s to the mid-1970s were considered the golden era of physical infrastructural development and economic growth in West Africa. In addition to the colonial infrastructural legacy, more physical infrastructures—such as electricity grids, transportation networks, and universities—were built that served cities conterminous with national and subnational governmental seats of centralized power. The pressure on those public services was minimal initially, creating a false impression of efficient and effective supplies of public services and booming economic growth. Meanwhile, ordinary West Africans were largely confined effectively to the countryside—or rural areas, sedulously laboring to supply farm produce for the glory of their new country. The elite in government used produce control boards as the intermediary channel between rural producers and the international market where West African countries had (and still have) no voice in price dictation. Before the discovery of petroleum and other mineral resources in commercial quantities, the elite used much of the farm produce proceeds to finance public service provision that had no root in the interests, values, and creativity of ordinary West Africans. The increasing embrace of formal education and city life by teeming populations from the countryside weighed heavily on public services, whose quality went into a tailspin as of the mid-1970s.
Generally, West African countries have, since political independence, oscillated between one-party rule or military rule and “multi-party democracy”. The West African military-rule landscape today includes Burkina Faso, Gabon, Guinea, Mali, and Niger. The remaining West African countries presently shield dictatorship with the adornment of Western democratic paraphrenias, such as periodic elections and legislative assemblies. The West African “enduring” democracies include Benin, Cameroon, Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Senegal. Ordinary Africans in these West African democracies perform the demeaning electoral duty of exercising periodic referenda on the ruling elites who controversially survive their respective party primaries. Certainly, the electoral process has reduced West Africans to children in need of supervision by Western election observers who allegedly possess the democratic maturity and sophistication needed to determine the credibility of elections in West Africa. Whenever the opposition won a general election and took over the national government of a West African country, Western observers and their despotic African allies often demonstrated that Hayek did not make sense by admiring the country as an example of “maturing” democracy, as in the case of Nigeria in 2015, Ghana in 2016, and Liberia in 2018 and 2024. Yet opposition parties are ruthlessly tamed in the supposedly maturing democracies.
If Hayek makes no sense, has disorder represented by the designed governments in West Africa made sense at all? Despite the vast amount of expertise invested in the deliberately designed governmental structures in West Africa, security of life and property has become a pipedream with the growing number of terrorist groups recruiting “disenfranchised youths looking not only to belong somewhere but to fight back at whatever power, be it real or perceived, foreign or domestic, that initially sentenced them to lives of poverty and despair.” In addition, public services are provided in declining quality and quantity. Water is very scarce in rural and urban areas, let alone erratic electricity supplies and deplorable road conditions. Education systems in West Africa are epileptic, while it remains illegal to use West African languages—such as Akan, Fulah, Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, and Wolof—to teach natural, physical, and social sciences as well as humanities, the same way the English, Danish, French, Finish, and Swedish languages are used as the languages of instruction in Europe. Kids who dare speak native languages at school in West Africa risk physical and verbal abuse from parents and teachers who pride themselves on socializing school kids out of their cultural heritage with either English or French or both.
At the same time, corruption, a malignant disease on steroids in the opportunistic mentality of government officials, has spiraled out of control in an environment where hospitals have become places for the masses to go and die. As a result of poor hospital conditions, West African elites extravagantly go on medical vacations to Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. What is more, police officers and military personnel are sometimes indistinguishable from armed robbers and terrorists. At the same time, the deliberately designed governmental structures, the main employer of labor, have been unable to provide enough employment opportunities, while the revenue collected at the national level has become a national cake that no one wants to bake but that everyone wants to share gluttonously. In 2018 alone, the percentage of the population living on less than $5.50 per day was 90% in Burkina Faso, 92% in Niger, 93% in Mali, and 92% in Nigeria. In addition, many employees are poorly paid in West African countries, further making private sector and government employees more audacious to collect bribes from their clients as an income augmentation. For example, the processing of international passports, university transcripts, and birth and marriage certificates is sometimes consummated with bribes—or the wetting of the dry ground—for the government officials in charge. Indeed, prospective employees sometimes pay an illicit fee to get a job offer from private and government organizations. Opportunistic entrepreneurs now have a field day profiteering from leading ethnic groups in demanding separate nations, such as Biafra for the Igbo people of Nigeria and a Yoruba nation for the Yoruba people of Nigeria. Unfortunately, the implementation of privatization and decentralization—or more power to subnational governments—and civil service reforms, supported by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, has turned into bottomless pits of resource waste escalating the burden of out-of-control national debts that will soon exceed over one trillion dollars for the African continent.
The designed disorder the governmental structures represent in West Africa has compelled Nigerian Bishop Matthew Kukah to “encourage young people who want to leave Nigeria to please, feel free to leave…We can assure you that by the time you settle down in the United States of America…, you will discover that Nigeria needs you.” Since 2014, however, over 20,700 Africans, whose decisions fitted Bishop Kukah’s proposition and former Nigerian President Obasanjo’s planned brain drain, have perished in the Mediterranean Sea in their unsuccessful bids to escape to Europe on unsafe inflated rubber boats operated by opportunists from North Africa. Looking at the bottomless depth of hopelessness and disorder in West Africa, former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, who ordered the November 1999 massacre of unarmed residents of the Odi community in Bayelsa State, Nigeria, and who appeared to agree that Hayek seems to make sense in Africa, recently lamented:
We have a system of government in which we have no hands to define and design and we continue with it, even when we know that it is not working for us… We are here to stop being foolish and stupid. Can we look inward and outward to see what in our country, culture, tradition, practice, and living over the years that we can learn from, adopt, and adapt with practices everywhere for a changed system of government that will service our purpose better and deliver?
No doubt, Obasanjo’s lamentation compels a look at governance practices before colonialism in West Africa. However, scrutinizing all the precolonial polycentric order cases is beyond this essay’s scope. Nevertheless, a journey into 19th-century Ibadan in today’s Western Nigeria may give us a glimpse into how Hayek makes sense regarding the evolutionary process of social order that may minimize the catastrophes of today’s designed governments in West Africa.
Polycentric Order: Hayek Makes Sense to Ordinary West Africans
Ibadan is a Yoruba city in southern Yorubaland in today’s Western Nigeria. The Yoruba city, as an unplanned polycentric order, began its evolutionary development on the creativity and values of freedom lovers, outcasts, and restless soldiers who were pursuing diverse interests in warfare and trade. The human migration that led to the development of Ibadan as a new Yoruba settlement followed the collapse of the Old Oyo Empire, the largest Yoruba kingdom. In the late 18th century, the invading Hausa-Fulani calvary from today’s Northern Nigeria doomed the Empire. Restless soldiers from the ill-fated Empire fled in staggered waves to Ibadan in southern Yorubaland from 1829, seeking a safe place where they would relate as equals. Admittedly, the development of camps, compounds, quarters, trade guilds, and the central governing unit was not the purpose of the migration. Camps, however, spontaneously emerged as the immigrants engaged in warfare and protected their lives and property, counterintuitively creating an impression that the 19th-century immigrants were reading and implementing Hayek’s 20th-century reasoning on social order. The prevailing value of equality of individuals in the new settlement attracted outcasts and freedom-lovers from Yoruba and non-Yoruba communities, who freely joined camps of their choice. Blood ties played an insignificant role in camp membership as camps competed with one another and attracted individuals from different trade backgrounds, including hunters, farmers, and blacksmiths.
More governing units evolved in Ibadan, consistent with Hayek’s evolutionary nature of social order, as individuals freely interacted with one another to pursue their separate interests. The constituent camps evolved into compounds, which served as local structures within which compound members freely conducted their compound affairs. As provisional governing units, quarters emerged from the efforts of compound members to address inter-compound concerns. A central governing unit emerged as the inhabitants of Ibadan worked together to defend the growing city against external aggression and to protect trade routes to other Yoruba and non-Yoruba communities. As individuals pursued different professions, such as warfare, blacksmith, and farming, diverse trade guilds also evolved and flourished in Ibadan.
The order in which the constituent governing units emerged in Ibadan remains unclear because it was likely that the central governing unit for Ibadan might have emerged before quarters. Nevertheless, as individuals and groups in Ibadan adjusted their relationships toward each other, Ibadan evolved into a self-governing system of overlapping and interdependent relationships based on the shared values of equality of individuals and the constituent governing units and public accountability as well as the value of personal achievement as the basis of officeholding. Members of compounds, quarters, and trade guilds worked with the central governing unit in the defense of Ibadan without losing the independence to govern themselves within their respective jurisdictions. The central governing unit in Ibadan neither designed nor created the constituent trade guilds, compounds, and quarters, unlike the national governments in West Africa that designed the constituent subnational governments. In Ibadan, compounds, quarters, and trade guilds emerged as individuals freely interacted with one another in pursuing their interests and values.
Personal achievement in warfare, impartial judgment, and trade served as the criterion for competing for office in the constituent governing units and trade guilds. Individuals vied freely for vacant positions outside their compounds and quarters. However, officeholders were sometimes dismissed for irresponsibility, unpopularity, and/or declining ability. For example, poor performance by officeholders sometimes induced their respective constituents to compare them with their predecessors and colleagues in other jurisdictions, usually to their disadvantage. Unpopular officeholders were removed from office when they did not heed warnings from their constituents. At the same time, dissatisfied individuals freely moved either to better compounds and quarters or developed new ones as a statement against their unpopular officeholders. To avoid the dissolution of their governing units, officeholders usually attempted to establish and maintain good relations and ensured that their constituents had access to impartial conflict resolution and attractive livelihoods. Holding officeholders to limits—public accountability—benefited from the non-hereditary nature of leadership positions in Ibadan and from making decisions on vital issues at public meetings, which further shows aversion to despotism in Ibadan.
Important outcomes in Ibadan largely prove that Hayek makes sense concerning polycentric order. The political and economic reforms of the designed governments in West Africa have woefully failed. For example, land reforms by designed governments in West Africa have yielded violence and poorly defined land rights. However, the polycentric order in Ibadan facilitated an inheritance reform in 1858 on the shared value of personal achievement. Before 1858, maternal siblings, rather than the children, were the primary beneficiaries of the deceased. Unfortunately, maternal siblings of successful individuals had become less enterprising, preferring to wait for the death of their successful siblings to inherit considerable wealth. In affirming personal achievement as the basis of social mobility and protecting the inheritance rights of the deceased, a consensus was reached in 1858 which successfully made the children the primary beneficiaries of their deceased parent.
In addition, the freedom blacksmiths in Ibadan enjoyed in pursuing their interests triggered an unprecedented transformation of weapon technology. Blacksmiths were so innovative that they devised complex techniques for using local materials to produce the firearms needed to defend Ibadan against external aggression. Unlike the designed governments in West Africa that rely heavily on Europe, America, and Asia for weapon production, the inventiveness of Ibadan blacksmiths significantly reduced the burden of firearm importation. As a result of the new weapon technology, compound and quarter members successfully worked together in securing their respective jurisdictions against kidnapping and property theft, the same security challenges that have spiraled out of control for the designed governments in West Africa. Similarly, the protection of individual liberty and the new weapon technology in Ibadan propelled hunters from the constituent compounds and quarters to work together in policing trade routes to Yoruba and non-Yoruba communities, unlike the police officers and military personnel of the designed governments in West Africa who are sometimes indistinguishable from armed robbers and terrorists. The complementary efforts of diverse individuals in Ibadan facilitated the exchange sector such that Ibadan citizens freely went to Yoruba and non-Yoruba communities to trade. People from other communities also came to Ibadan in pursuit of diverse economic interests. The resultant peaceful co-existence provided a common market where, according to Falola, numerous farmers in Ibadan “operated far above the subsistence level; its military rulers provided the necessary peace and control over the economy; and its exchange sector allowed for the distribution of surplus local items and imports.” Hayek made sense to free individuals in 19th-century Ibadan!
Conclusion
As demonstrated in the foregoing, the social catastrophes of designed governments can be greatly avoided in polycentric orders that evolve as individuals and groups freely interact with one another in the pursuit of their separate interests. Some caveats are in order, nevertheless. The case of Ibadan does not imply that Africans must go back to precolonial institutions and adopt those institutions. Instead, the Ibadan case calls the attention of those who care about democratic governance to the need to allow governance to evolve from the actions of individuals who freely interact with one another in the pursuit of their separate interests based on their creativity and values. In addition, polycentric orders may face imperfections even though polycentric governance is increasingly becoming the wave of the future.
Oyebade Kunle Oyerinde is an Associate Professor of Public Administration at Clark Atlanta University. Send him mail.
Isonomia Quarterly 