Historical imperatives for the emergence of development and democracy: a perspective for the analysis of poor governance quality and state collapse in Africa

"Bad governance has often been identified as the explanans for the weakness and subsequent collapse of the African state. Derivatively, African rulers have been advised and admonished to govern their societies well. But these analyses, advices and admonitions have been undertaken with little recourse to material conditions that have influenced the emergence ofgood governance and economic development in modern societies with a view to addressing the issue of whether these conditions ar available in Africa. The following analysis tries to identify these conditions which are political-economic in nature and posits that they are lacking in Africa. Employing the method of process tracing in a narrative manner, it draws attention to the historical development of the lack of such conditions within the structures instituted by colonialis and maintained through neo-colonial policies. The paper concludes by advising the donor community and international agencies that without the creation of those or similar iperatives, all efforts at socio-economic development and state capacity building may come to nought." (author's abstract

Eptd Discussion Paper No. 118

this paper. The preparation of the discussion paper was supported by the IFPRI. The paper was prepared while the author was a Visiting Professor at the African Studies Center at Michigan State University. Dr David Wiley, the Director of the Center and other colleagues in the Center and in the Department of Agricultural Economics offered valuable administrative and technical support and encouragement. Steve Haggblade and Carl K. Eicher provided incisive comments on the various drafts of the paper. ii EXECUTIVE SUMMARY consumed. In the early 1960s, Africa accounted for 42 percent of world cassava production. Thirty years later, in the early 1990s, Africa produced half of world cassava output, primarily because Nigeria and Ghana increased their production four fold. In the process, Nigeria replaced Brazil as the worlds leading cassava producer. The cassava transformation involves a shift from production as a low-yielding, faminereserve crop to a high-yielding cash crop increasingly prepared and consumed as gari, a dry cereal. This discussion paper aims to document the key factors which are driving the cassava transformation in Nigeria and Ghana, two of the three largest cassava producing countries in Africa: Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Ghana. In Nigeria and Ghana, four key factors are driving the cassava transformation. First, the IITAs new high-yielding Tropical Manioc Selection (TMS) varieties boosted cassava yield by 40 percent without fertilizer application. Second, high consumer demand for cassava by rural and urban households fueled the producer incentive to plant more land to cassava. Third, the use of the mechanical grater to prepare gari released labor, especially female labor, from processing for planting more cassa..