Civil-Military Relations in Post-Independent Africa*

Dr Simon Baynham, Director of Research, Africa Institute of South Africa

Paper presented at a conference on Civil-Military Relations in a Post-Settlement South Africa, hosted by the Institute for Defence Politics in conjunction with the Hanns Seidel Foundation, CSIR conference centre, Pretoria, 23 April 1992.

Published in South African Defence Review Issue No 3, 1992

INTRODUCTION

It has often been noted that armed forces occupy a unique position in society because they enjoy what is called a 'monopoly of weapons'. Yet in most polities many other people are entitled to keep firearms who are actually not members of the military. Thus the real difference between armed forces and, for instance, pistol clubs lies in their organization and training rather than in the firearms they carry. In addition - and unlike most civilian bodies - members of the military (but not so much conscripts) are not simply doing a job but are embracing a whole way of life. It is a total commitment as part of a 'total institution'. Only a few elements of the civilian community live in total institutions, most notably the inmates of boarding schools, prisons and lunatic asylums!

Again, unlike most civilian organizations armed forces have a more rigid hierarchy of ranks, stricter discipline and virtual self-sufficiency regarding, inter alia, power supplies, transport, welfare and secure communications. This characteristic is frequently reflected in the way soldiers view society. Put another way, soldiers are conscious that they are different from civilians (and vice versa) and the phenomenon of a 'military view' of the world is well established.

The maintenance of internal law and order, and the necessary provision for protection against external threats, are the primary responsibility of any political grouping, be it a primitive people surrounded by hostile neighbours or a technologically-modern and militarily-powerful nation-state on the eve of the twenty-first century.

But there is, paradoxically, a danger inherent in this Hobbesian imperative. For while Napoleon Bonaparte's maxim may be true that without an army there is neither independence nor civil liberty, it is equally important to stress Edmund Burke's warning that an armed disciplined body is, in essence, dangerous to liberty. The potential threat to an incumbent administration, and to society at large, is further emphasized because armies use force to achieve their objectives. They generally have a cohesion, a discipline and a specialist training which is designed for one thing only - war. In these respects, and as Professor Finer has argued, they have three crucial advantages over civilians: "A marked superiority in organization, a highly emotional symbolic status, and a monopoly of arms ...", which thereby give them "... overwhelming superiority in the means of applying force."1

To sum up the above: the armed services of any state are to a greater or lesser extent a body apart; and although they may not have an absolute monopoly of weaponry, they do at least have an effective monopoly in the organized use of violence. It is therefore important that they should utilize this power in a responsible manner for the benefit of society, rather than in an uncontrolled and self-serving fashion. In order to ensure that this takes place, most societies have insisted on the subordination of the armed forces to the political authority of the day.

In the West, it is commonly assumed that it is 'natural' for the military establishment to obey the civil powers. But in the world at large, this is far from being the normal pattern of events. Since 1945, for instance, more than three quarters of the countries of Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East have experienced varying levels of intervention from their military forces. Some states such as Syria, Pakistan and Thailand have been repeatedly prone to such action. And in Africa - as will be examined in greater detail below - more than half of the continent's countries have been host to a coup d'état.

Even in the West - which is mistakenly viewed by many as an area synonymous with civilian super ordination - efforts to control the political ambitions of the military have often been less than successful. In France, for example, the constitution has always stated that the political authorities reign supreme over the armed forces, yet in 1799, 1815, 1851 and 1958 the army was responsible for changing the form of government. In 1960 and 1962, it tried to do so again and when it failed some of its members embarked on a campaign of terrorism and the attempted assassination of General de Gaulle. In Portugal there was a successful military coup in 1974, when the army intervened to end Lisbon's wars in Africa; and in both Greece and Turkey, the soldiers have dismissed the politicians on a number of occasions since 1945.

More widely, and more recently, the power of the military on the political stage has been forcibly brought home by last year's KGB/CPSU plot against Mikhail Gorbachev - when the world held its collective breath for four days as it witnessed the death-throes of Soviet communism - and also by the February 1992 coup attempt in Venezuela - where rebel paratroopers attempted to assassinate President Carlos Perez in a move that came perilously close to ending constitutional rule in mainland Latin America. And on the African continent, 1992 has already witnessed several military coups or attempted coups, namely in Algeria (successful), Congo-Brazzaville and Zaire (both abortive).

With the foregoing introductory perspectives in mind, we move now to a closer examination of African civil-military relations since Independence and especially to three crucial but overlapping issues.

Firstly, what is the record and what are the reasons for the widespread influence of the armed forces in the continent's domestic political arena? Secondly, what have been the most salient characteristics of military rule and disengagement? Lastly, how have civilian regimes attempted to ensure the subordination of the military to their authority? These sets of questions warrant more than casual attention on the part of South Africans in the current era of transition.

Military intervention: the record2

In his 1962 preface to Black Mischief, Evelyn Waugh wrote:

Thirty years ago it seemed an anachronism that any part of Africa should be independent of European administration. History has not followed what then seemed its natural course.3

Similarly, some quarter of a century back, when the 'white man's burden' yielded to indigenous political and bureaucratic elites, few observers predicted a prominent role for the post-colonial military forces. At an Ibadan University conference in 1964, for example, Lloyd declared that:

... in few of the independent [African] states is the military elite much in evidence in the social and political life.4

This evaluation was not challenged (in fact it was endorsed) by several leading commentators of the day. Also, inside these territories, the initially dilatory pace of officer indigenization and the continued employment of expatriate staff in the military hierarchy:

... encouraged both apathy and ignorance about the armed forces among the emerging African elite.5

Yet looking back on continental developments from the vantage point of the early 1990s, it seems surprising that the potential impact of the army was not more fully anticipated. Given Third World experience elsewhere - especially in the Middle East and, much more spectacularly, in Latin America - military uprisings in Africa should have come as no sudden bolt from the blue.

The apparently insignificant size, and certainly the limited experience and expertise, of the new states' embryonic armies beguiled both scholars and foreign chanceries into ignoring or minimizing the military threat. But rebellion from this quarter - whether in the golpe de estado (coup d'état) or golpe cuartelazo (palace revolt) - has seldom involved more than a few hundred troops.

In Ghana, the National Liberation Council (NLC) came to power in February 1966 when 500 soldiers, from an army of 10 000, overthrew the regime of Kwame Nkrumah; in Congo (now Zaire), Mobutu 'neutralized' the conflict between Lumumba and Kasavubu by occupying Léopoldville (today Kinshasa) with 200 or so men in September 1960; while General Soglo of Dahomey (now Benin) was ousted from office by five dozen paratroopers in December 1967. In similar fashion, two of the most recent African coups - those toppling the military heads of state in Mali (General Traoré on 26 March 1991) and in Lesotho (General Lekhanya on 30 April 1991) - involved a tiny proportion of these countries' respective total armed forces.

Thus, early predictions to the effect that the imperial legacy in Africa was likely to create armies in the image of the colonial powers - and as such unlikely to interfere in politics - have had to be hastily revised. Throughout much of the continent today, militaries, no matter how small, represent virtually the only disciplined organizations at large. As such, even if not ruling directly, they are almost unchallenged umpires - the ultima ratio regum - of who should govern and under what conditions and terms.

At the time of writing (April 1992), about a quarter of Africa's states are governed in one form or another by their armies. Most of the coups d'état from the modern-day men on horseback have been directed against civilian administrations (often for a second or third time, as the cases of Uganda and Benin so graphically illustrate); but an increasing proportion are staged from within the armed bureaucracies, by one set of khaki-clad soldiers against another: as in Nigeria (1966, 1975, 1985), Ghana (1978, 1979), Sudan (1985). And as noted above, both 1991 putches (Mali, Lesotho) were military-on-military affairs.

Although there had already been a number of coups d'état in Egypt (1952), Sudan (1958) and Congo (1960), the main sequence of African interventions began in Togo in 1963 when President Sylvanus Olympio was assassinated by army rebels. A new government was installed under the civilian president Nicholas Grunitzky, but he was in turn overthrown by Colonel Etienne Eyadema on the fourth anniversary of Olympio's murder. Eyadema has been in office ever since.

Following the great wave of independence that traversed Africa in the years 1960-63, military coups swept through the continent. There were four coups in 1965; the next year there were six, two within the space of six months in Nigeria. By 1972, Dahomey (now Benin) had seen no less than five coups d'état. This record is now equalled by Ghana.

In numerical terms, 31 African states have already experienced military intervention and 19 have been subjected to more than one. On average, there have been three successful coups per annum during the past quarter century - as well as a rash of attempted but abortive rebellions. For every successful coup in Africa, there have been at least two unsuccessful ones. Congo-Brazzaville hosted seven attempted coups d'état between 1966-77.

More recently, during the past 24 months, there have been confirmed accounts of failed coup plots in nine African states. By the beginning of 1987, half the continent's countries were under military rule, in many cases for the second or third time. Some of them (for instance, Ghana, Nigeria, Sudan and Libya) have been governed by the armed forces for most of their independent existence.

MECHANICS AND MOTIVATIONS

How can one account for the political virility of the African armed forces in achieving such a remarkable success rate in the seizure of office and, secondly, what motivates the military in this respect? There are a number of answers to these questions.

On the one hand, the virtual monopoly of organized state violence enjoyed by the military (and police) forces in societies where the central political symbols and institutions are weak have enabled soldiers to seize power with relative ease.

At the same time, the concentration of government buildings, party officials and symbols of state in the capital city makes an armed rebellion relatively simple. Once a few key officials and locations have been seized (government ministers, the presidential palace, radio and television stations and airports), the success of the soldiers is virtually assured - confirming Bronowski's observation that:

... in modern times communications are typically the first target in a revolution ... because if they are [severed] then authority is cut off and breaks down.6

Nevertheless, the opportunity and means for the violent overthrow of ruling administrations fails to explain why soldiers actually do so with such frequency. Given the impressive volume of literature addressing itself to the causes of coups - why and under what circumstances military forces intervene in politics - it would be superflous to replicate, even in synoptic fashion, all facets of that debate here. The list seems to be almost endless, ranging from economic crisis, persistent poverty, regional/ethnic rivalries, government repression and corruption, maladministration, foreign interference, personal and corporate ambitions and so on.

What is clear, however, is that the interventionist inclinations of the military in post-independent Africa are, to an important extent, a legacy of the way in which the continent was divided during the last part of the nineteenth century. The political role of the military is also linked to the pace and manner in which the metropolitan powers withdrew from the artificial states they had created. Critical issues relating to the distribution of power and to the resources associated with the occupancy of political office were left unresolved. No wonder, then, that so many of the new African armies were sucked into the political centre-stage.

Frequently, too, institutional instability within the armed forces was engendered by the total indigenization of the officer corps within a few years of Independence. For example, in March 1957, when Ghana attained sovereignty, there were 209 Britons and 29 Africans in the army officer corps. Localization was fully implemented four years later. A similar pattern obtained in the Nigerian Army, which was completely Africanized by 1965. Only seven years earlier, there had been 45 African commissioned officers and six times as many British ones.

The result of political as opposed to military imperatives, rapid localization led to an erosion of professional skill and in many cases to a breakdown in discipline. The accelerated elevation of inexperienced officers to high executive posts generated unrealistic career aspirations at lower levels; and in most cases, such expectations were not borne out following the initial wave of promotions.

Had recruitment and advancement been more carefully regulated, promotional bottlenecks - a breeding ground for discontent and conspiracy - might have been largely avoided. These and related dislocations had wider repercussions, since a lack of coherence within the armed forces themselves lessens contraints upon military adventurism in the political sphere. Indeed, indiscipline inside the security services is a constant problem for all regimes, civilian and military, that rely principally on force to survive.

MILITARY RULE AND DISENGAGEMENT

The military's structural differentiation from society is especially vulnerable once the barracks have been abandoned for political office. For as First noted, once armies step beyond the barracks to engage in public policy-making, "... they soak up social conflicts like a sponge."7

It is not the intention here to examine the nature of military governance in detail (for many excellent studies on the subject already exist), save to say that administrations run by soldiers seem strikingly similar in many respects to those dominated by civilians. The explanation for this state of affairs is rooted in the nature of politics in Africa.

Since Independence, political conflict has converged upon attempts by the Western-educated elites to gain control of the resources associated with governmental or state power. Invariably, the state is the largest employer of skilled and educated labour in Africa. It is a monopoly source of import and export licences for international trade, as well as the most important origin of contracts to local and foreign business. It is also the major fount of credit, loans and assistance to domestic businessmen and farmers. In addition, the state has almost total control over the distribution of communications, clinics, schools, sanitation and other amenities.

Given this overwhelming concentration of power and patronage, it is hardly surprising that individuals, ethnic groups and localities have seemed utterly absorbed with jockeying for representation in, or control over, the central structures of government and through them for influence in a polity whose main function is apparently to provide handouts for its clientele. The result of this concentration of resources has been the tendency of African citizens - civilian and military - to associate the state with limitless power, endless wealth and high prestige.

The dependence on the government of the majority of individuals who make up the educated elite for their salaries, status and overall economic security means that politics in Africa may be viewed, largely, as a perennial struggle by individuals and groups (both primordial and horizontal) to maintain and extend their economic standing by gaining control over the allocative arms of the state.

Many theories of society have stemmed from certain assumptions about the characteristics of the individuals who compose it. The theory of economic behaviour argued here is that one of the prime motivations of man is the desire to pursue economic goals and to maximize his material satisfactions and social status. And the individuals who have constituted the hierarchy of the armed forces during the first few decades of Independence have been as much a party to, and participated in, the system as their civilian counterparts.

In embracing such an approach, the argument, quite simply, is that armed intervention and military rule should not be viewed (at least primarily) "... as an attempt by an external body to mediate between ... antagonistic elite groups or between politicians and masses."8 Instead, such action should be seen as something quite different, namely as an attempt by the military (or a section of it) to protect and extend its privileged position and material perquisites in competition with other societal interests.

Briefly stated, the rhetoric of altruism and patriotism is for the most part a screen to shield the soldiers' sectional interests; and the maintenance of public order carries with it the maintenance of the domination of those who control that order.

Given their obvious strength in relation to civilian groupings and institutions, what then induces the armed bureaucrats to head back to the barracks? In an early study of military rule and demilitarization, Pinkney argued that one country (Ghana) "... provided an example ... of a military government keeping to the timetable it had set itself for restoring civilian rule."9 But he fails to appreciate that this had more to do with threats to the cohesion of the army-police National Liberation Council (NLC) and to the troops in the barracks (following the junior ranks' abortive counter-coup in April 1967) than with the Council's undertaking to abdicate early.

In point of fact, abdication to civilian rulers is invariably forced on military juntas - assuming, of course, that they survive the praetorian proclivities of their own primary constituents, the garrisoned troops. For as noted earlier, coups within coups have become a secondary growth industry on their own account. It is now commonplace to remark that military disengagement from overt rule occurs through the cumulation of three conditions: first, the disintegration of the original conspiratorial cabal; second, a growing divergence of interests as between the ruling uniformed bureaucrats and those that have remained behind in the barracks; and, in the third place, the political and economic difficulties faced by the regime.

Abdication, however, is not the only way out. Recivilianization - an incremental transfer of office from a semi-civilianized military government to a civilianized one (as envisaged, for instance, by the senior command responsible for ousting General Nimeiri in 1985) - or 'decompression' - to use a term with a similar meaning borrowed from Latin American studies - offers an alternative mode of withdrawal.

But whatever the route, the road back to barracks is strewn with uncertainties. By surrendering office, soldiers lose not only direct control over the ideological orientation of the state and the allocation of public resources from which they benefit so lavishly under their own rule, but also they risk retribution from vengeful civilians. This is why military disengagement from politics might best be described as 'formal' or 'conditional', rather than as 'definitive' or 'absolute'.

Indeed, to continue with the Ghanaian case-study, one classic example of conditional withdrawal was Flight-Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings' handover to President Hilla Limann in September 1979. Addressing Limann at the ceremony inaugurating the Third Republic, Rawlings articulated his "... fervent hope that you will develop sensitivity to the tenets of [my] revolution." Earlier in the speech, he cautioned: "You must be prepared to do justice to all our people. The whole nation is watching you."10 Rawlings re-seized office two years later, thereby earning the distinction of being the only African to have overthrown both a military and a civilian administration - all in the space of 30 months.

While there are signs that the era of interminable intervention by the military may be coming to an end - especially given the impact on Africa of political and economic reforms in Eastern Europe, together with pressures emanating from the West for the implementation of multi-party politics and open government - civil-military relations in the majority of African states during the past quarter century have been characterized by a cyclical or perpetuum mobile pattern of successive coups, counter-coups and disengagements. It is an assessment reached elsewhere by J'Bayo Adekanye in his study of politics in the 'post-military states':

It is rare for the process of demilitarisation to lead to any stable pattern of civilian rule. Much more often, the military's return to barracks is the prelude to a period of weak civilian government which sooner or later ends in reintervention ... Re-entry takes place because there is no longer anything to prevent it.11

CONTROL STRATEGIES: THEORY

On the other hand, the armed services have not been politically dominant throughout Africa. Far from it in fact. A significant number of regimes have maintained civilian authority over their military establishments for periods exceeding 25 years: Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Senegal, Gabon, Swaziland, the Gambia, Botswana, Tanzania, Mauritius, Kenya, Malawi and Zambia all fit into this category.

Indeed, added together, well over a third of the continent's states have remained free of military domination since Independence. And in a number of cases, civilian supremacy has remained intact despite top-level leadership successions - for instance, when Jomo Kenyatta died in 1978 and after Julius Nyerere handed office to Ali Mwinyi in 1985.

We come therefore to a crucial issue in the study of African civil-military relations: that is, to the question of political control of armed force - in other words, of how civilian governments mobilize resources and mechanisms to protect themselves from their own security forces. Clearly, this is a subject of key importance but one that has received inadequate attention in the study of African political affairs.

At some risk of simplification, conceptualizations of civilian control over military institutions tend to be of three types, the first of which - the traditional model - may be discarded for our purposes since it is premised upon the absence of differences between civilians and soldiers, as exemplified by seventeenth century European monarchies where the "... aristocracy simultaneously constituted the civilian and military elite ... [In short] The same men wore both hat and helmet."12 In this model, civilian supremacy is maintained because the differentiation between military and non-military elites is absent or insignificant, the corollary of which is no armed intervention. From the 1800s, the system gradually disappeared with the introduction of standing armies and the displacement of ascriptive by achievement criteria as the basis for selection and promotion.

However, since the traditional system is a mainly historical phenomenon, and therefore of marginal contemporary applicability (some conservative Gulf emirates excepting), the theoretical and practical interest here is on the alternative liberal and penetration models which roughly replicate Samuel Huntington's 'objective/subjective' pattern variable.

In his classic text on the theory and politics of civil-military relations.13 Huntington gives considerable attention to the question of how civilian supremacy over the armed forces might be assured. He begins by making a conceptual distinction between what he calls 'objective' and 'subjective' control.

In the former, the officer corps is disciplined by its own professionalism, the most important constituent involving service to the community. He concludes that the more professional an army (that is, the more it saw itself serving society), the less of a threat it would pose. This objective or liberal model is closely associated with Western parliamentary democracies (United Kingdom, Scandinavia, USA etc.), where control is affected through the maximization of military professionalism, thus

... rendering them politically sterile and neutral ... A highly professional officer corps stands ready to carry out the wishes of any civilian group which secures legitimate authority within the state.14

Or put another way, the formula operates on the premise that the soldiers internalize, or become attitudinally disposed to, their own subordination. At the same time, the politicians are expected to exercise due regard for the internal professional autonomy of the fighting forces.

According to the subjective model, civilian supremacy is enforced by the denial of an independent military sphere. Here the military becomes an integral, though subordinate, part of the political authority and is inculcated with civilian political values and interests.

The subjective format is most clearly identified with absolutist or totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi Germany, Cuba and the former USSR, where policy is or was ultimately determined by force and coercion. In such states, internal military power is checked, inter alia, by:

breaking up the officer corps into competing groups,



establishing political armies and special military units (Waffen-SS, Soviet MVD security troops etc.),



infiltrating the armed services with parallel political chains of command (commissars)



and by indoctrination, covert surveillance and close party supervision in the appointment of reliable officers to sensitive commands.

This system approximates to Eric Nordlinger's penetration (as well as Robin Luckham's apparat) model, where civilian dominance is ensured through the widespread deployment of ideological controls and surveillance, founded upon a dual structure of authority in which military personnel are subordinate to political functionaries.15

To sum up the above in Huntington's own words:

Subjective civilian control achieves its end by civilianizing the military, making it the mirror of the state. Objective civilian control achieves its end by militarizing the military, making them the tools of the state.16

MILITARY SUBORDINATION IN AFRICA: PRAXIS

In the Third World - and certainly in Africa - civilian authority over the military owes most of what success it has had to the subjective (or penetration) model rather than to the objective (or liberal) formula outlined above. This brings us to a more focused examination of the actual techniques and institutional mechanisms utilized by African civilian regimes in their efforts to subordinate the armed services to their authority.

Eight strategies or devices are discussed here, but it should be stressed that (i) there is some overlap between them and (ii) most regimes employ a combination of strategies to pre-empt the praetorian ambitions of the military.

ETHNIC/KINSHIP SELECTIVITY

Experience in India had led the British to believe that some tribes were inherently fit for soldiering: the concept of the 'warrior type' and 'martial races' - of whom ready loyalty and absolute obedience to command could be expected - was deeply entrenched. The same attitude prevailed in Africa, where the colonial authorities deliberately manipulated the ethnic profile of locally recruited forces in order to build reliable armies for the subjugation and pacification of the native population.

This technique has been borrowed by the post-Independence political elites, as exemplified in Daniel Arap Moi's Kenya, where the Kalenjin (Moi's group) dominate the top positions in the security establishment. Today, only one of the seven most senior security posts in the military, para-military and police is occupied by a Kikuyu, whilst the Commandant of the General Service Unit (GSU) and President Moi's Sandhurst-trained Chief of Military Intelligence are just two examples of a virtual Kalenjin monopoly in Kenya's top military brass.

Another case in point is Chad, where President Idriss Deby relies on his own ethnic group for his personal security. In other countries, the ascriptive manipulation of posts has been taken one step further by the appointment of presidential family members to strategically important commands in the security services. Ian Khama's meteoric rise through the ranks of the Botswana Defence Force (BDF) is just one instance in many.

INSTRUMENTAL PAY-OFFS

A second stabilizing control mechanism has been to 'buy' the loyalty of soldiers through the maximization of material satisfactions relating to pay, privileges and related rewards.

This might entail, for example, the allocation of a very high proportion of the defence budget to pay and benefits rather than to hardware.17

In Zambia, but also in Kenya and other African states, the senior officer ranks have been drawn into the inner circles of privilege by the allocation of land grants for commercial farming. Other methods of patronage for keeping the military 'sweet' include selection for overseas diplomatic posts and training courses. Such postings inevitably carry special allowances and other financial perks, particularly the rare opportunity of returning home with a duty-free motorcar.

In countries where civilian governments have included the armed forces in economic austerity measures, the result has often been military intervention - as in January 1972, when the expelled premier, Dr Kofi Busia, described Colonel Acheampong's takeover as 'an officers' amenities coup'.

POLITICAL/BUREAUCRATIC CO-OPTATION

Closely linked to the instrumental purchase of fidelity through the provision of creature comforts is the widely-used method of co-optation. In a number of African states, senior and even middle-ranking members of the officer corps, have been drawn temporarily into government circles by appointments to the boards of parastatals or as regional governors and party/political functionaries.

In a deliberate strategy to neutralize the interventionist inclinations of the Tanzanian People's Defence Force (TPDF), the CCM (Chama Cha Mapinduzi) has incorporated the TPDF into the party/ governmental system along the lines seen in Mexico during the 1920s. The Tanzanian armed forces are, in fact, part of the governing elite, with frequent transfers of officers from the TPDF to ministerial, diplomatic and party positions and back again.

When this writer visited Tanzania in late 1990, General Kimario, for example, had just been appointed Regional Commissioner for Dar es Salaam, having been Minister for Home Affairs (and thus of Cabinet ranking) before that. Until late 1989, General Luhanga was Chief of Operations and Training; but for the past three years, he has been Regional Commissioner for Ruvama - a civilian appointment. Similar examples of co-optation are provided in Gabon, Zambia and Ivory Coast, to name but a few.

MANIPULATION OF MILITARY MISSION

Another control device is what might be called manipulation of the military mission. By this is meant the deliberate deployment of the armed forces in order to keep them fully occupied and - hopefully - professionally happy. This may take the form of countering external threats, or it might mean using the military for civic action programmes or for domestic law and order operations in aid of the civil power. There is, however, a danger to civilian control here since internal security commitments have a potentially politicizing impact on the minds of the military - as some claim has occurred in the RSA.

IDEOLOGICAL INDOCTRINATION

A fifth technique - and one which mostly reflects the subjective mechanisms of control still seen in the People's Republic of China and in Castro's Cuba - is to deliberately indoctrinate the armed forces with the ideological values of the party-state.

After the mutiny by the First and Second Battalions of the Tanganyika Rifles in 1964 (a mutiny put down by British marines at Nyerere's request), the army was virtually dissolved and a new one the TPDF - was created whose members were obliged to join TANU, the Tanzania African National Union (now the CCM). Since then, and in order to identify the military with the ideology, policies and orientation of the governing party, the officers and ranks have been systematically subjected to political education which accounts for 20 percent of the time devoted to training.

Another example comes from Ghana, where in 1962 the Minister of Defence issued a directive that party education would be introduced into the army through an Armed Forces Bureau; and officers were to be sent on extended courses to the Kwame Nkrumah Institute of Ideological Studies. For Nkrumah, the inherited (British) model of civil-military relations clashed, diametrically, with his vision of a one-party state encompassing the national institutions of Ghana. What was required, he argued, were politically committed armed forces who owed loyalty, not only to Ghana, but to the Convention People's Party (CPP) and to President Nkrumah personally.

In this context - and there are plenty of other African examples - Western traditions of political detachment and neutralism are rendered meaningless and are replaced by an ethos in which enthusiasm for the existing regime becomes an essential quality in a military officer.

This view has been expressed succinctly by the former Tanzanian leader, Julius Nyerere:

Our conception of the President's office is obviously incompatible with the theory that the public services are and ought to be politically impartial.18

EXPATRIATE RECRUITMENT

Another method of control has been the recruitment of foreign officers (or mercenaries) to the crucial command posts and to other sensitive appointments inside the security establishment - a strategy with a time-honoured lineage as seen in the Vatican's Swiss Guard.

One African example is Gabon, "... where a major mainstay of Bongo's control of the Gabonese armed forces is the number of [expatriate] appointments of this kind."19 This method of control maintenance is also characteristic of a number of Gulf states, where British officers and NCOs (including former Special Air Services personnel) have acted as loyal guardians for the likes of the Sultan of Oman.

DIVIDE ET IMPERA: SECURITY COUNTER-WEIGHTS

The appointment of expatriates to serve as sentinels for the security of the regime is closely associated with one of the most prominent mechanisms for control visible in independent Africa: the creation of rival security formations to act as a check on the regular armed forces.

The Ghanaian case, with which this writer is most familiar, provides one of the best examples of an attempt by politicians in a one-party state to subordinate the military to civilian authority.20 In the early 1960s, President Nkrumah set up a National Security Service (NSS) - composed of five units (Military Intelligence, Counter-Intelligence, a Cuban-trained bodyguard, Special Intelligence and the President's Own Guard Regiment) - which duplicated and usurped the functions of the regular military and police.

In this deliberate system of institutionalized dualism, Nkrumah encouraged rivalries and dissensions among officers, thereby hoping to discourage them from taking united action against him. In fact, he was unsuccessful in this objective because in February 1966, shortly before the counter-weight security apparatus threatened to become effective, Nkrumah was overthrown by his army and police.

In many cases, the counter-weight military and para-military forces are trained by a foreign government or even by a number of foreign armies. For instance, in Zaire - where Mobutu Sese Seko's political longevity lies in the creation of numerous security agencies - the Civil Guard (Garde civile) is Egyptian-trained, the army's 31st Brigade is French-trained and the elite Special Presidential Division (Division spéciale présidentielle) is Israeli-trained.

It is interesting to note that the DSP is composed mainly of Ngwandi, Mobutu's own ethnic group, and that several of its officers are foreign nationals. In short, the Division (which was responsible for flushing out army rebels from the Voice of Zaire in the January 1992 coup attempt) reflects a cocktail of control techniques within one organization. On top of this, divisional and brigade commanders in Zaire are constantly moved and re-posted in order to undercut any base of support they might otherwise develop.

A final two examples worthy of special note are Kenya's para-military General Service Unit (GSU), built up by President Moi to break the monopoly of the regular armed services, and the heavily-armed Police Field Force in Tanzania, one of six bodies comprising that country's security establishment in a comprehensive system of checks and balances.

EXTERNAL GUARANTEES

The penultimate, and more than usually effective, method of civilian control in this inventory boils down to external guarantees from friendly foreign powers. With the possible exception of Cuba, French military policy has attracted the greatest international attention in this regard. Almost every Francophone African state has - or continues to have - defence agreements with Paris; and standing French garrisons in the Central African Republic (CAR), Djibouti, Gabon, Ivory Coast, Cameroon and Senegal have been an abiding hallmark of the continued French presence on the continent for the past 30 years.

In all these countries, Paris has underwritten - and at various stages acted - in order to ensure the stability of her African friends. Indeed, on one occasion, French Legionnaires intervened to restore the civilian administration of President M'ba after he was overthrown in the coup of 1964.

The United Kingdom has been much less active in this manner. Nevertheless, British troops were responsible for putting down the East African army mutinies in 1964 (in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda) and elite troops from the SAS moved into the Gambia to restore Sir Dawda Jawara to power in 1981.

It is often assumed that outside foreign powers have played the only deterrent role in this regard. But that is not so. A large number of African states have provided military assistance to protect endangered civilian neighbours from the political ambitions of their own armies.

Surprisingly perhaps, Guinea emerges as the leading exponent of the external use of military power, having intervened to support friendly civilian regimes on no less than five separate occasions. But Tanzania comes a close second with regime-supportive military assistance to governments in the Comoros, the Seychelles and Uganda. (Of course, Tanzania's forces were also responsible for the best-known instance of regime-opposing intervention, when 20 000 Tanzanian troops invaded Uganda and overthrew Idi Amin in 1979). A final example of African outside military guarantees is in Equatorial Guinea, where President Obiang retains office assisted by a large detachment of Moroccan troops provided by King Hassan.

Although the issue is not included in the list of mechanisms offered above, there is another critical determinant of control that has little to do with the military at all. "It is the existence of civil institutions which are both legitimate and effective "21 especially over an extended period of time.

As regards the relationship between effective legitimacy and the format of civilian control, one might as follows:

The higher the levels of legitimacy and effectiveness, the more likely it is that control will take 'objective' forms (self-restraining military professionalism ...); and the lower the levels of legitimacy and effectiveness, the more likely control is to assume 'subjective' forms.22

To sum up the above: from the evidence available, it seems clear that once the subordination of the military has been engineered, subjective control may be singularly effective. But its limitation lies in the fact that it can only be implemented at great risk.

Before concluding this section, two other observations must be noted, both of which have relevance to the current and future pattern of civil-military relations in South Africa.

In the first place, it is important to stress that, to a greater or lesser extent, all armies intervene in politics. In Finer's continuum, the possibilities range from 'influence' (legitimate inputs into defence budget decision-making), to 'blackmail' (intimidation of the civilian authorities), to 'displacement' (removing, or permitting the removal, of one set of civilian politicians for another) and, finally, to 'supplantment' (where the military seize power and install themselves in office).23

In the second place, a sense of military professionalism may make the armed forces less rather than more responsive to civilian control. This is because the soldiers may see themselves, first and foremost, as the servants of the state rather than of the particular government of the day. In such circumstances, the military might intervene to protect the national interest (as it sees it) from a parochial or ineffective administration.

CONCLUSIONS

With the major general exception of Southern Africa, military coups have been widespread on the African continent, escalating in number over time as the process of decolonization created ever more sovereign states. By the 1970s and eighties, armed interventions had become the principal manner by which governments were changed.

The erosion of constitutional channels of opposition in one-party states, against a backdrop of escalating economic decline, helps to explain why so few African governments have changed hands in an orderly fashion. Peaceful transfer from one civilian administration to another following free and fair elections has occurred only half a dozen times since Independence - mostly since 1991, when the ruling single-party incumbents were swept from office in Cape Verde, Sao Tomé, Benin and Zambia. Power, as Mao Tse-tung wrote, flows from the barrel of a gun, or so it has seemed in Africa.

But rather than resolving domestic conflict, military rule in Africa - which has been characterized both by excesses and inadequacies - has contributed to a pattern of lasting political instability in the majority of African countries. The question today is whether or not this state of affairs will continue to hold true for the remainder of the 1990s and into the twenty-first century?

Western conditionality regarding democratic and economic reforms - together with similar demands for an improvement in human rights and for major reductions in defence spending - suggest that the answer is no.

On the other hand, there are plenty of reasons why we should expect continued, indeed heightened, levels of political turmoil in Africa during the next decade and beyond. There are at least four reasons for this assessment:

economic sacrifices and social suffering: which are inherent in the implementation of structural adjustment programmes



heightened expectations raised by the surge towards political pluralism and democracy: inevitably, the process is going to be an extended and painful one and popular aspirations will not be matched by material results in the short to medium-term (if ever)



the global renaissance of ethnic/nationalist sentiment and secessionist demands: the outside world is already providing a role-model for separatist tendencies; indeed, the creation of new and internationally - recognized states such as Armenia and Croatia (and the virtual recognition of Eritrea) suggest that the status of Africa's colonial borders will not remain wholly sacrosanct



finally, there is the danger of marginalization: the West is totally pre-occupied with the Middle East and with the monumental tasks confronting the CIS republics and Eastern Europe; for these reasons, the dangers of aid fatigue are very real and Africa faces a fate worse in some respects than being fought over - being ignored.

All these developments suggest growing and parallel problems relating to domestic and regional security. Under such conditions, the armed forces of Africa may become more, rather than less, interventionist. And in a number of countries, the future may quickly resemble Hobbes' savage state of nature, where life is "... solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."

REFERENCES

S.E. Finer,  The Man on Horseback: the role of the military in politics, London: Pall Mall, 1962, p. 6.



Much of this and the following two sections are taken from S. Baynham, Security issues in Africa: the imperial legacy, domestic violence and the military,  Africa Insight, Vol 21, No 3, 1991, pp. 180-189.



Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962, p. 5.



P.C. Lloyd (ed),  The new elites of tropical Africa, London: Oxford University Press, 1966, p. 9.



C.E. Welch, Praetorianism in Commonwealth West Africa,  Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol 10, No 2, June 1972, p. 206.



J. Bronowski,  The ascent of man, London: BBC, 1977, p. 100.



R. First,  The barrel of a gun : Harmondsworth: The Penguin Press, 1970, p. 436.



P.C. Lloyd,  Africa in social change, Harmondsworth: The Penguin Press, 1972, p. 337.



R. Pinkney,  Ghana under military rule: 1966-1969, London: Methuen, 1972, p. ix.



Ghanaian Times, (Accra), 25 September 1979.



The politics of the post-military state in Africa, in C. Clapham and G. Philip (eds.), The political dilemmas of military regimes, London: Croom Helm, 1985, pp. 64, 76-77.



E.A. Nordlinger,  Soldiers in politics: military coups and governments, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1977, p.11.



S.P. Huntington,  The soldier and the state, New York: Random House, 1957.



Ibid, p. 84.



E.A. Nordlinger, op. cit, p. 11; and R. Luckham A comparative typology of civil-military relations, Government and Opposition, Vol 6, No 1, Winter 1971, pp. 23-24.



Huntington, op. cit, p. 83.



D. Goldsworthy, Civilian control of the military in black Africa, African Affairs, Vol 80, No 318, January 1981, p. 60. Goldsworthy goes further into the debate in Armies and politics in civilian regimes, in S. Baynham (ed), Military power and politics in black Africa, London: Croom Helm, 1986, pp. 97-128.



The Observer, (London), 3 June 1962



S. Decalo, Towards understanding the sources of stable civilian rule in Africa: 1960-1990, Journal of Contemporary African Studies, Vol 10, No 1, 1991, p. 73.



See, for instance, S. Baynham, The military and politics in Nkrumah's Ghana, Boulder and London: Westview Press, 1988; and S. Baynham, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?: the case of Nkrumah's national security service, Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol 23, No 1, 1985, pp. 87-103.



Goldsworthy, op. cit., p. 56.



Ibid.



Finer, op. cit, chapter 10.