murutongore
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- Jun 29, 2013
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Tomas J. Campbell
I have just returned from two weeks' teaching at Ashesi University in Ghana. When I asked my students what world leader they admired most, the most frequent answers were Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore and Paul Kagame of Rwanda.
Singapore and Ghana each started independent statehood at roughly the same level of economic development, in the years after World War II.
In the intervening years, Singapore has achieved astronomical economic growth; Ghana had grown modestly. Singapore has no natural resources. Ghana had, at independence, more than half of the world's supply of cocoa and was a net food exporter.
Yet, Singapore has far surpassed Ghana, and the reason is governance. Lee Kwan Yew's political organization has ruled Singapore without a break since independence.
He created an open economy with low taxes on foreign businesses seeking to do business there. The Singaporean government famously banned chewing gum, to keep sidewalks clean.
The punishment for a juvenile delinquent who "keyed" cars on a residential street was to make him work to pay for the damage he had done, but first be publicly caned on his backside.
Above all, however, Lee Kwan Yew's government was known for its zero-tolerance of corruption. Civil servants did not solicit or accept bribes, and a foreigner who offered a bribe did so at mortal peril.
No serious political opponent was ever a threat to Lee; and no one could mistake the Singapore political system for an open, freely elected democracy.
In Rwanda, Paul Kagame came to power at the head of a rebel army that had invaded from Uganda. His troops were from the Tutsi ethnicity, whose parents had fled Rwanda in 1959, to escape a pogrom launched by the majority ethnic group, the Hutus.
When the Hutu president's plane was shot down in 1994, the Hutu government launched a preorganized genocide of Tutsis, killing 800,000 in four months.
Kagame's army put an end to the genocide and took control. The Tutsis constitute only 15 percent of Rwanda's population, yet Kagame, since taking over, has won every election for president by more than 90 percent.
As president, he has attracted world attention for scrupulous antipathy to corruption.
Ministers of his own government have been imprisoned, or exiled, for dishonesty. The country has enjoyed exceptional economic growth, and is held up by many international aid agencies as a model for efficient use of developmental assistance.
In favoring Kagame and Lee, my students were voting for authoritarianism over democracy, not for authoritarianism's own sake, but because authoritarianism was identified with anti-corruption. Democracy, as it has been practiced throughout sub-Saharan Africa, has been a battle for spoils.
Ideological differences between political parties are hard to define, but who gets the graft is clear: Election winners do. (My wife once asked a group of opposition Members of Parliament in Mali how they were different from the ruling party.
They replied, "We'll be able to tell you once we are in office.")
Democracy, at its core, allows the choice of government by the people. With an electorate that is largely illiterate, this choice often comes down to which political group will promise to give more of what can be stolen to the ethnicities most loyal to the group.
Democracy becomes something more resembling a contest between rival crime syndicates in a big American city of the 1920s.
In that context, authoritarianism appears attractive.
Several years ago, I was teaching in Eritrea, a former Italian colony on the horn of Africa. It was liberated by Britain in World War II, next ruled by the communist government of Ethiopia and eventually became independent.
A popular joke says that, when the Italians ruled, one could eat plenty but speak little; when the English were in charge, one could speak much but had little to eat; and when the communists were in charge, one could neither speak nor eat.
The joke was told with wistfulness for the Fascist Italian era. That is the devil's bargain my Ghanaian students were mulling for their country, and it shows how intolerable corruption has become. Kagame and Lee are not Benito Mussolini. But, in accepting autocracy, my students were willing take that chance.
Tom Campbell is dean of the Fowler School of Law at Chapman University. He has taught at African universities in Eritrea, Rwanda and Ghana.
Source:ocregister
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/singapore-639649-lee-government.html
