Predatory State – Gabon Edition
May 11th, 2008 by SocProf and tagged Corruption, Human Rights, Politics, Poverty, Power
Via the Guardian, Omar Bongo, the President of Gabon, is the world’s longest-serving leader that isn’t a monarch (good thing Fidel Castro stepped down, otherwise, the race would still be on). How does one maintain oneself in power for over 40 years? Well, mostly through patronage and corruption. And a great deal of self-aggrandizing megalomania:
“There are many ways of measuring Omar Bongo’s rule. You could count the monuments: the Omar Bongo Triumphal Boulevard, the Senate Palace Omar Bongo, and the university, football stadium, gymnasium and military hospital that all bear his name. You could look at a map of Gabon, and find the name of his hometown, Bongoville, or work out how many French presidents he has befriended and outlasted: five, from Charles de Gaulle to Jacques Chirac.”
Because nothing says self-enriching corrupt leader than a bazillion things named after you while you’re still alive to name them that way. And yet, compared to its neighbors or the region, Gabon is a peaceful country. There is no civil war brewing, no apparent ethnic conflict (in spite of over 40 different ethnic groups) degenerating into ethnic cleansing. What is the secret here?
“Bongo’s rule has been a masterclass in the use of patronage. His ascent to the presidency coincided with Gabon’s rise to being Africa’s third-biggest oil producer, and he quickly realised that money could be more effective than bullets in keeping power.”
So, Bongo used money to buy the stability of his country by co-opting political opponents, expanding the civil service dramatically and spending enough to keep the population slightly above regional standards. At the same time, as a former colony, Gabon could count on the French patronage (there is still a French military base in Libreville) in exchange for sweet oil deals with French oil companies. And then, of course, ministerial portfolios are distributed either to family members or very close clients. Cronyism and corruption are the rule: the state and businesses are not separate. Which is why the bongo family is one of the richest in the world while half the population of Gabon lives in poverty.
“Most of [Bongo's] wealth is hidden overseas. In the 90s, US investigators found that more than $100m had passed through US bank accounts linked to Bongo, while in France it was alleged he had received tens of millions of dollars in kickbacks from the oil company Elf. Last year, French prosecutors found the Bongo family owned 33 properties in France alone, including a $27m villa. At the same time, Ali-Ben Bongo’s wife, Inge, appeared on a US reality television show, Really Rich Real Estate, shopping for a $25m mansion in California. The theft of billions of dollars of oil money has stalled the country’s development. Nearly 50 years after independence, Gabon has fewer miles of paved road than it has of oil pipelines.”
By all measures, and because of its abundance of natural resources, not just oil, Gabon should be at the very least, a middle-income country. Instead, it has a shortage of schools and clinics. Gabon has so little agriculture that it is not self-subsistent. It gets milk from France and fruits and vegetables from Cameroon. And people are now used to having government jobs and have not been socialized into entrepreneurship.
Gabon is a perfect case of what master sociologist Manuel Castells calls predatory state in his book End of Millenium (Third and final volume of the masterful trilogy, The Information Age). The predatory stage is described as “Elites with no other strategy than reaping the riches of their countries, and of their countries’ international linkages” (96). The predatory state is one of the reasons why Africa is lagging behind in terms of development and poverty reduction. Castells delineates the characteristics of the predatory state as such:
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Access to external resources such as diplomatic contacts, military resources and Western know-how
- Jobs in the public sector as the major source of regular income
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Positions of predation, using power to extract goods, cash or labor (such as a public official controlling mining production in the countryside)
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Prebends obtained without violence, through bribes and donations that create a state informal economy
- Links to foreign trade and investment as crucial sources of private accumulation
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International aid channeled through private interests so that it never reaches the needy or its target
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State officials or political elites use some of the wealth to buy property and invest in agriculture and transport businesses, always looking for short-term profitable investments and controlling the valuable resources of their countries
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Privately appropriated wealth is then exported out of the country and deposited in bank accounts in Switzerland or other countries with friendly banking statutes
Of course, this is nothing new to anyone familiar with the dependency theory but it certainly goes a long way to explain the obscene wealth of ruling families, like the Bongos, at the expense of their own people, with, quite often, the “generous” help of former colonial powers.
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