State-tradition Interface

The evolution of formal and informal institutions has been well articulated in the works of many renowned institutional theorists (Eggertsson 1990, Knight 1992, North 1990, etc.).

Every country’s evolutionary trajectory of institutions, whether church, state, or tradition hinges on peculiar cultural tenets and unique histories. Church-state separation for instance was originally a foreign idea in most African countries. Before the Berlin Conference of 1884 when there was scramble for Africa that led to indiscriminate borders that sometimes partitioned one ethnic group into two different countries, the notion of church was little known. Only in parts of Africa where the European missionaries had made incursions had Christianity been introduced such as when the Portuguese berthed at Elmina in Ghana in 1482. Methodism for instance, started in Ghana with the arrival of the Methodist missionaries in 1835 following the

colonization of Ghana. The trans-Saharan trade relations also brought in Islamic influences.

However, these religious effects were not in contention with state institutions or leaders Monsma and Soper describe in terms of legal-constitutional premises. It is not surprising therefore that there is very little scholarly work on church-state separation in Africa.

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Indeed, with the increasing population of Christians in Africa, Phiri (2001) has identified the contentious role of churches in African politics, especially during the third wave of

democracy that occurred in the 1990s. Normally, the relationship between the church and state is relatively harmonious, but “church-state conflict occurs when churches assume the functions of groups and organizations that the state has either repressed or liquidated” (Phiri 2001, 17).

Thus, when the church expresses itself in the public arena, the institutions of the church and state come to matter in the political world. The church therefore resides more in the private sphere, what Bayart (1973) refers to as ‘collaborative.’ I draw on Bayart’s framework of three models of church-state relations: collaborative, complementary and conflictual⁹.

In the collaborative model, there is very little interaction between the church and state because the preferences of both the state and the church coincide, especially, in the aftermath of independence. The complementary model suggests indifference in the relationship between the state and church because each is pursuing their interest without threatening the other. In effect there is no ‘unity of purpose.’ However, much like developmental nongovernmental

organizations (NGOs), churches may start to fill the political and social vacuum, supplementing the delivery of public goods and services where the state fails to meet the demands of the

community – examples include prominent school buildings and helping farmers in Africa today.

In Ghana, churches have established universities to make up for the shortfall in the public universities. Consequently, we have the Methodist University College, Catholic University College and Central University among others. In the process, these church-based universities, much like other private universities such as Ashesi University, require government accreditation.

9 Bayart’s work is in French, so I take the translated version of his conceptual framework from Phiri’s study. (Bayart, Jean-François. 1973. “La Fonction Politique des Eglises au Cameroon,” Revue Francaise de Science Politique, 3 (3 June): 514-536.

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It is this church venture into the political economy that the condition gradually merges into Bayart’s conflictual model.

In this case of Ghana’s religious or church sponsored universities, I find that central government leadership agrees to limit interference into church (university) affairs and allows a level of autonomy, while the church leaders agree to limit interference into other central

government affairs beyond university education and providing needed local services. This is the result of continuous bargaining and renegotiation. Thus, in Ghana, the separation of church and state would not reflect parallel institutions with no interaction. If we observe the development of parallel institutions with no interaction as in the collaborative model, then this may result in no mediation and conflict resolution mechanisms.

The key issue that central government leaders in Ghana as well as other African rational leaders have to contend with is the resilience of tradition and traditional leaders (i.e., chiefs).

The traditional practices surrounding chieftaincy in Africa has the same social prevalence as the Western democracies. Indeed, when studying Ghana and other African nations, government and traditional practices are key political variables. Traditional leaders or chiefs in Ghana represent the similar social standing as church leaders in European democracies. As Assimeng (1997) contends, chieftaincy is the embodiment of traditional rule in institutionalized form. Further, in examining the case of Ghana and South Africa, both Schmidt (1997) and Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (1994) respectively note that chiefs were instrumental in the daily public lives of African citizens. It is this “[t]raditional rule…the indigenous system of government which is common and intelligible to the people, however simple such a society might be” (Abayie Boaten 1997) that colonialism sought to usurp in mostly sub-Saharan Africa. Both direct rule and indirect rule – where chiefs were co-opted as leaders, but in reality, were instruments of the

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colonial masters – were used to separate state from tradition by the colonialists; in effect bringing to the fore the distinction between formal (state) and informal (tradition) rules.

During the colonial era, the British introduced indirect rule through diarchy. This was a system that allowed for a measure of local autonomy as long as the local leaders accepted British rule. In the process, persons who were not qualified as chiefs, or who were not initially leaders of a community (as pursued by the French colonizers in their policy of assimilation), were

imposed alongside willing chiefs to indirectly rule their subjects. Indirect rule partially displaced the decentralized rule of chiefs and deliberately instituted chiefs as traditional “Big Men.” There are many instances across Africa where the British created warrant chiefs, starting in Nigeria. In fairness to the British, they were only continuing what their Fulani predecessors had done

previously in northern Nigeria by interfering in the succession rules and the hierarchical regulations concerning local political heads. Similar to church-state separation, the British system of indirect rule was predicated on the idea “that the local political authorities which the British encountered, should be maintained insofar as this did not conflict unduly with British principles of proper administration and morality (Van Rouveroy van Nieuwaal 1987, 9).

Westermann (1949 cited in Van Rouveroy van Nieuwaal 1987) has observed that the British were only being practical, and had no intent to destroy the indigenous institution of chieftaincy, which would not have inured to the benefit of the local population.

In Ghana, during the post-colonial era in the 1960s decentralized rule of chiefs was further eroded when the nationalist leader Kwame Nkrumah weakened the authority of chiefs while simultaneously strengthening the center. Personal rule and “Big Man politics” flourished in Ghana (as well as other African nations). Central government imposition reinforced the parallelism between the state and tradition and marginalized the authority of chiefs. Indeed,

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these formal rules in Ghana, authoritarian in nature, met with resistance at the local level. Van Rouveroy van Nieuwaal (1987) suggests that the primary focus on Ghana in most research at that time, rather than other African countries, is because of the “actions of its first President, Kwame Nkrumah – one of the most outstanding modern African political leaders to date – for years set the political image for the whole of Africa. Ghanaian chiefs, in general considered a

conservative element, were kept down…” (15). Van Rouveroy van Nieuwaal collates a rich variety of works that shows how the first breed of African leaders after independence overtly and covertly decimated the chieftaincy institution¹⁰. That chieftaincy (tradition) and state are the two most important institutions in West Africa can be gleaned from Donald Ray’s exposition on power and legitimacy in chief-state relations in Ghana. He states that “chiefs derive their legitimacy, authority and indeed even sovereignty from their pre-colonial roots, while the contemporary African state is a creation of, and a successor to, the imposed colonial state.”

Subsequently, “chiefs form a parallel power to the post-colonial state…” (Ray in Ray and Van Rouveroy van Nieuwaal 1996).

With the power of chiefs whittled away, the new African elites started the phenomenon of presidential supremacy. Rather than promoting development and national integration in the newly independent African countries, African leaders with their newly acquired presidential hegemony spawned “a form of rule – neopatrimonialism – in which unfettered presidential discretion and informal access to the president became more important than compliance with formal rules” (Prempeh 2008, 111). One-party rule and one-party elections, manipulations of the

10 Examples range from Guinea through Ghana, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Burkina Faso. For instance, the Kabaka, the king of Buganda kingdom in Uganda, was repressed by President Obote’s military and this led to the abolition of all the five kingdoms in Uganda. It took an act of Parliament to restore the kingdom in 1993 and the 1995 Constitution to institutionalize the Buganda kingdom. By 2010, four kingdoms with the exception of Ankole kingdom had been reinstated (Green 2010). On the contrary, the support of chiefs in Sierra Leone for the emergent ruling party ensured a constitutional recognition when the country attained independence.

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constitution, and the emergence of military regimes marked this 30-year authoritarian period (e.g., Lindberg 2006).

Eliminating neopatrimonialism implied a focus on institutions, defined as formal rules underpinning democratic governance. More than a decade ago Olowu (1994, 22) hinted on a paradox of the African state, “[T]he African state is strong in those areas in which it ought to be weak (repressive power) and weak where it ought to be strong (popular mobilization,

responsiveness, etc.).” Three years later, Schmidt (1997, 41) in assigning eight reasons for the importance of local or regional level in the African context, suggested that “[e]ffective

decentralization and local self-government could be a solution to the paradox of the African state, which is simultaneously too weak and too strong.” To overcome issues such as poor governmental performance, rapid urbanization, democratic transition, shifts in international donor strategies, and societal demands, decentralization became the panacea for deepening democracy (Diamond 1999). Ghana’s recent decentralization plan includes national laws that aim to increase empowerment, equity, political inclusiveness, and local accountability.

However, the policies and laws designed to speed up decentralization were vague, in order to allow local leaders to adapt to local conditions.

Unfortunately, decentralized democracy is turning out to be a variant of the non-democratic British diarchy. Ironically, because the 1979 and 1992 constitutions of post-independence Ghana permit using both national laws (statutory) and customary usages

(traditional) in governing the country, this decentralization process now means there is greater interaction between central laws and chieftaincy institution at the local level, where District Chief Executives (DCEs), not chiefs, are now the local political heads. In a decentralized

democracy, power is supposed to devolve to local political heads. The structure and institutional

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framework of the decentralization process further weakens the authority of chiefs at the local level, where chiefs have always dominated. This marginalization of chiefs is made worse through an unintended outcome of this devolution, at least in Ghana. What is emerging is that DCEs are spawning a semblance of local “Big Man politics,” what I term “Little Man politics.”

In the grand scheme of things, the “Little Man politics” has implications for whether or not local traditional elites accept formal rules. The playing field for the interaction of the parallel

institutions which was previously between the state at central level and chieftaincy at the local level, has now shifted with decentralization to an all-out local affair between the actors. Before I show how this interaction can manifest in institutional bargaining at the local level, it will be prudent to put the emerging dynamics into context with the evolution of local government and decentralization in Ghana.