At independence, African politicians faced a significant challenge of developing administrative capacities to control the state territory and population. Colonial powers had constructed minimal state structures with a view that colonies should be fiscally self-sufficient. This limited their ability to enforce the formal rules set up in the metropole and made them reliant on African auxiliaries. Decolonization meant transferring the power to define the rules, and the means to enforce them, to the local governments. Local populations’ role in defining the rules, however, remained marginal and endogenous capacities to enforce them weak. Political power in all francophone West African states was concentrated to the president but the countries varied in their approaches to building national military capacities. Postcolonial governments took diverse decisions in developing the manpower, skills, equipment, positioning and logistical arrangements of the national armed forces. This paper focuses on these differences and analyses the factors that influenced building national capacities.
Because of the relatively peaceful decolonization of francophone West Africa, the national military capacities were first determined by colonial structures – who the French recruited to their army, how those troops were trained and equipped and where they were located. These structures were not designed to assure the territorial integrity of new states or to provide security for their citizens. Altering colonial institutions was, nevertheless, hampered by insufficient endogenous material resources and technical capacities. In the 1960s and 1970s, the opposing sides of Cold War were willing to invest considerable resources in expanding their influence to the newly-independent countries. France, in turn, sought to maintain exclusive relations with its former colonies through military assistance and close personal relations with African political and military elites. The external environment, therefore, provided African governments opportunities to mobilize external resources to assure internal authority.
The most visible difference between Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea, Niger, Mali, Mauritania, Senegal and Togo was the kind of foreign resources and expertise that governments were able to attract in developing national capacities. Guinea and Mali received significant military assistance from communist countries. Others continued to receive most of their economic assistance and weapons from France. The amount of assistance, nevertheless, varied depending on French economic interests and personal relations with African decision-makers. Cote d’Ivoire and Senegal imported most French weapons and received most of the economic assistance.
Available resources were nevertheless not the sole determinants of how state coercive institutions are developed. The perceptions of actors that were likely to challenge state control further guided policy decisions. Colonial rulers were mainly preoccupied with potential local contestations of their authority, and internal threats rather than external menaces continued to guide the development of postcolonial coercive institutions. Foreign economic aid allowed governments to meet the demands of part of the population, whilst outside military assistance helped them to dismiss others. In all nine countries, decision-making was concentrated to few individuals and state coercive power exceeded the strength of its political institutions. Because of the weak systems of political participation, soldiers were often the only actors capable of challenging the government.
By 1974, five out of the nine countries had experienced a military coup and until today, only Senegal has avoided a successful coup. Soldiers intervened in politics most in Benin, Burkina Faso and Togo. The value of arms imports to these three countries was the lowest and there was no significant French military presence. Financial mismanagement reduced the resources available to the army and contributed to soldiers’ willingness to take political roles. The concentration of power and resources to few individuals gave the populations few reasons to object to soldiers’ claims to protect the nation against corrupted politicians. Poor economic performance was, however, not a sufficient cause for a coup, as the case of Senegal shows. A threat of a military coup, however, decreased governments’ willingness to build endogenous capacities. Multiple military coups in the region made presidents to limit soldiers’ access to arms and munitions, to create fragmentation and animosities between competing agencies and to increasingly rely on foreign military expertise rather than developing national capacities.
Even if colonial and postcolonial coercive institutions might have contributed to some predictability in social interactions, the local capacities to enforce the official rules were limited. More deficient was, however, national armed forces capacity to contribute to national security, because of citizens’ minimal involvement in defining the rules that underlay the purpose and functioning of state institutions.