Why We Need Governments, Good or Bad

Introductory Remarks

Government is how a state is constituted, and can take various forms including but not limited to democracies, absolute monarchs, mixed democracies and monarchs, military dictatorships, civilian dictatorships, oligarchies (plutocracies), kleptocracies,  one-party systems, two-party systems  and multi-party systems. We should at the very onset clarify that a republic is not necessarily a democracy, as it may constitute some of the above enumerated forms of government. Governments also exist in the spiritual world both in heavens and the underworld, and whilst the government above in the heavens is ideal, the one in the underworld is worst. Ideally, a government should be a government of the people, by the people and for the people as famously proclaimed by President Abraham Lincoln on the occasion of the dedication of fallen American heroes at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on November 19, 1863 in the aftermath of the Union victory in the Battle of Gettysburg, July 1-3, 1863, but in reality governments tend to serve the rulers, who include even the elected representatives. No human government is perfect as it will usually succumb to human iniquities of greediness, corruption, nepotism, tribalism, and even incompetence. Thus why Christians look forward to paradise during the end of the times and world when Jesus Christ is believed to form a just government free of corruption and delivering on its commitments and mandate to those fortunate citizens of the country called Paradise, for not everyone is guaranteed of the citizenship there.

President Abraham Lincoln, the 16th US president, revered by many for his honesty, objectivity and strong, good leadership during adversity.

The focus of this instalment shall be on human government, which though not ideal or adequate is very necessary. Given the bad governments and/or governance on earth which almost dominate all states, curious students of politics and economics may be justified to ask; why then do we need governments? The answer to that question is the focal point of this essay.

To answer the question let us look at the functions of a government. A government essentially exist to create some kind of order and predictability in the lives of the governed. It is perhaps the ability of a government, bad or good, to guarantee orderliness, law and security. This is because power should be seen to originate from a particular source be it the Emperor or King or Queen’s throne, President, Chancellor, Premier, Senate, Congress, Parliament, General, Governor, Chief Priest or Prophet. The moment citizens suspect or convinced that there is no government and therefore the possessor of power, chaos and anarchy reigns. He who first picks up a powerful weapon will thus declare that he/she is now the ruler of men. Examples abound but I will zero in on the following classical cases to emphasize the supreme importance of a central authority or government.

 The Libyan Question

Maomma Gadhafi was truly an eccentric leader with absolute power in the oil rich nation of Libya, North Africa.  He ruled Libyans with absolute power with no institutions of governance like parliament. To the world, especially in the west, Gadhafi was an epitome of a worst form of government, perceived to be ruthless, cruel and his presence practically stifling citizens’ civil rights. It was these half-truths that the United Nations Security Council mistakenly adopted a resolution to remove Gadhafi from power so as to free the Libyan people from a cruel, tyrannical, and despotic ruler. As a replacement they envisaged a fully-fledged democracy molded in a form of a republic. What transpired later is public knowledge, but I will remind the readers that the removal of Gadhafi’s government was immediately followed by great anarchy which reigns up to the time you will reading this article and no one, including the architects of Gadhafi’s removal knows when it will end.  How is it then possible that a cruel dictatorship’s removal will result in havoc? It is precisely because the removal of the central authority creates an opportunity for power hungry constituents to occupy the power vacuum and assert themselves. Power allows its holder to access the riches of the state and through the exercise of power one can then enjoys all the material pleasures of the earth, and thus why every man, and a greater majority of women want it.  Many Libyans now regret the removal of Gadhafi and certainly wished if he was alive. They are not saying dictatorship is better than democracy, it’s just that they were well protected during that dictatorship, as life was predictable, and there was law and order unlike now where militias jostle to rule in the midst of great bloodshed.

The slain Libyan strongman, Moamer Kadhafi

 

The ruins of Sirte in the aftermath of a civil war, a once serene coastal city of Lybia

Iraq Problem and the genesis of Isis

Similarly, the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, has not only created problems for the Iraqis alone but has degenerated into a global crisis. What started as a localized Middle East problem has now unleashed global terrorism in the form of ISIS and clearly no one knows how to end it. Isis is terrorizing even the developed world and things will only get worse. But how did this happen? Saddam Hussein was not a democrat in the sense of western democracy. He indeed exhibited extreme cruelty, like where he would gas entire villages just because of difference in opinions or religion or ethnicity, but what the western world failed to realize is that he represented a functioning government. A government which could guarantee security, law and order. Life under Saddam Hussein was predictable, as children would go to school, government workers knew that at the end of the month they will certainly receive their pay checks, and traders will take their wares to the market peacefully, and so on. The removal of Saddam Hussein resulted in baring of the fault lines which existed in Iraq and the greater Middle East region causing a great social tectonic movement which was accompanied by social volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis never seen before. As I write this article England has been directly attacked by terrorists both in Manchester and London resulting in loss of life and damage to property, and as politicians and security strategists there grapple with the terror attacks, we urge them to pose for a moment to establish what exactly caused the reemergence and hardening of terrorist ideologies, and if they are frank and objective, they are likely to discover that it was because of the fall of Saddam Hussein.  The painful truth is that the architect of Saddam Hussein’s removal and hence the upsurge of terrorism in the region was the British Premier, Tony Blair, who was a cheer leader of a war monger, US President, George Bush. Solving Isis problem will mean going back to Baghdad, this time without guns, but accompanied with doves and white flags in great humility and certainly not as a sign of surrender, but to earnestly seek each other, to learn from the inhabitants there what is that the world, in its unison, can do to redirect the youths and elders of that part of the world into productive trajectory. It will be a conversation of genuinely seeking the causes of anger and desire to cause collateral damage to their enemies, real or perceived.  These would be, in my humble view, the kind of conversations which will heal the scourge of terrorism in the world.

 

The late Iraq Leader, Saddam Hussein 

 

The destructive nature of war, after the battle of Mosul, Iraq

 The Menace of Al-Shabab in Somaliland & greater East African Region

The genesis of the political crisis in Somaliland in the Horn Africa can be traced back to the removal of the government of Major General Mohamed Said Barre in 1991. In fact the absence of central authority, government, in an environment of intense and serious armed opposition – clan based groups jostling for power was a harbinger for great turmoil, whose fires are still smoldering to this very day. It would appear to the discerning eye that Said Barre was actually the glue that held Somaliland together, and the removal of that glue resulted in the eruption of civil war which has claimed over half a million souls and counting. In an environment of armed conflict the country has been ill-equipped to deal with challenges of climatic change and has been on the receiving end of great famines continuously revisiting its shores. Armed militias have also engaged in piracy, though the causes of this illegal activity can be traced to illegal dumping and fishing by vessels from the developed world.

The local, civil conflict in Somalia has now been internationalized, in that al-Shabab has created and cemented links with other terror groups outside Somaliland, including al-Queda located in Afghanistan and Islamic Maghreb of the Sahara desert and Boko Haram of Nigeria to terrorize not only Somaliland but the entire Eastern African region, with gruesome murders like the one at Kenya's Garissa University College on 2 April 2015, where they massacred about 150 people, mostly Christian youthful students. It was an irony in that al-Shabab means youth in Arabic. It is known that foreign Jihadists are fighting and aiding al-Shabab in the hinterlands of Somaliland. A small faction has already defected to Isis making the whole thing even more global and extremely dangerous to the Horn of Africa, and Africa at large.

The Deposed Somali Leader, Major General Mohamed Said Barre

 

A woman wails in war-ravished downtown Mogadishu, Somalia

The Rivers of Blood in Rwanda

Immediately after the death of Rwanda’s president, Juvenal Habyariama, after his plane was shot down over Kigali airport on 6 April 1994, a genocide whose proportion had never been witnessed in the continent commenced in the heart of Africa. It was here in a small country called Rwanda that 800 000 people were massacred in a space of 100 days, from April to June 1994. Many people, across the world saw bodies floating and rotting in rivers and felt helpless and disgusted. The reason why rivers in Rwanda were flowing with blood was not only because of the scale of the massacre but due to the fact that most of the victims, the Tutsi minority are believed to have their ancestry from Ethiopia, and by throwing them in the rivers, was literally a way of sending them back to Ethiopia, albeit lifeless. There are several accounts detailing the origins and causes of the mortal animosity between the majority Hutus and minority Tutsis, and among the potent one is the colonial legacy of the Belgians, who introduced a system of societal segregation based on ethnicity, reinforcing a foreign concept to Africans of superiority of one tribe above the other. Africans did not know that someone could be considered superior to the other, if they are all humans. The African philosophy of co-existence under the guidance of sagacious elders in a community headed by either a chief or king revolves around interconnectedness (Ubuntu/ Hunhu) rather than individualistic values of the west. It was totally alien to Rwandese that all of a sudden job opportunities, promotions, better housing, scholarships among other things were now the preserve of Tutsis at the expense of Hutus. Thus it was a tragedy when the international community failed to intervene in Rwanda, mistakenly believing that it was Rwanda’s problem. That genocide can equally be blamed on the Belgian colonists who surely sowed the seeds of divisions among African communities and whose fruits were the 800 000 souls floating and rotting in Rwanda’s rivers of blood.

However what is pertinent is that the removal of central authority, the government of President Juvenal Habyariama, created a power vacuum wherein militias then took advantage to inflict harm to civilians. It should also be seen in the context of tribal tensions, and an already highly polarized environment of rebel movements aligned to ethnicity and tribal fault lines. 

 

President Juvenal Habyariama of Rwanda

 

Rwanda's Rivers of Blood, 1994

The Reality of Life in America’s Wild Wild West

Though America’s Wild West is romanticized in folklore, movies and other forms of art and indeed captures the imagination of the old and young, people who resided in these vicinities then would flatly disagree about this image.  There was nothing romantic about life there as they lived in a lawless place and terrorized by outlaws who included bandits, robbers, murderers, rapists, cattle rustlers, among other criminal hardcore elements and malcontents. So many lives were lost in the skirmishes which included range wars, ambushes, and gun-fights. Many a people were truly traumatized to endure a life of constant fear, lack of security, serious human rights abuses, including invasion of privacy. Surely the Wild West was a lawless jungle with no semblance of law and order where criminals of all sorts took center stage.  There was no law and order and here criminals roamed the frontier unhindered causing great suffering of residents there. If people nowadays demand protection from governments against criminals, it follows therefore that the people in the American Wild West yearned for the day central authority will reach them. Surely when government eventually arrived as seen by setting up of properly manned sheriff’s offices, life became normal, as criminal gangs were hunted and killed, and for the first time people could get on with their lives. 

 

Stunning young woman mimics life in American Wild West, Moscow, Russia, June 2011

 

Not-so-romantic real scenes in American Wild West, lifeless bodies of the Dalton Gang, 1892

How is order preserved?

The instrument of order is that of great anguish and terror – the gun.

When the gun is in the hands of a legitimate institution like a national army, police it brings order and tranquility, and when it is in the hands of bandits, thugs, malcontents, gangs, terrorists, criminals or excitable individuals, it causes great disorder and anarchy.

Why governments fail

Political failures – autocratic regimes, where there is no plurality of political ideas, are ordinarily inflexible to change or too slow to implement political changes or guarantee civil liberties and resort to rule by instilling fear in the hearts of citizens and generally cause despondence. Excessive greediness of practically accumulating wealth for oneself at the expense of the majority. This manifest in corruption, cronyism, patronage, nepotism and weakening of  state institutions of governance including a weak judiciary and parliament, who are gradually transformed into cheer leaders of the executive arm of government and stampede in rubber stamping dubious and ridiculous policies, legislations and interpretation of the same. The result is a predatory political machinery which practically lives off the citizens by exacting exorbitant taxation directly through the fiscus and indirectly through unjustified levies to fund its voracious appetite for lavish spending. Since there is no one who can stop them as the voting system cannot change the status quo, given that the security apparatus is involved in conducting fake elections, the result is a hell-hole, where citizens are practically reduced to be slaves of the ruling elite with no recourse to any institution of governance whatsoever, and sadly the UN system will observe from a safe distance, hoping and wishing that political slaves will one day rise against their political masters.

State capture involves private individuals, local or foreign, having considerable power on government operations thus weakening state institutions like cabinet, local authorities and even parliament, as state capturers then dictate the state agenda for their well-being and not for the prosperity of the nation or the well-being of the generality of the population.

Regulatory capture is where the regulated connive with the regulator which loses its independence and become part and part parcel of rent seeking behavior.

Economic failure due to poor economic policy frameworks and economic decisions devoid of economic rationality, rent seeking behavior, corruption, crowding out of private investment, excessive tax burden, inefficient public sector which is burdensome to private enterprise e.g. excessive regulatory environment, delays in obtaining trade permits, licenses all reduce the economic competitiveness of the country and cause poverty.

Social Failure caused by neglect of social groups, discrimination of certain groups in society, high crime rates including flagrant practice of witchcraft, drug-peddling even in residential neighborhoods or operation of brothels in the vicinity of schools, poor or non-existent service delivery and general societal indiscipline and collapse of the moral fabric.

Geographical Failure – Africa was failed at Berlin Conference in 1887, wherein the continent was haphazardly partitioned in a very reckless manner, creating many small and landlocked countries. Given the current cost of transportation these economies’ fate were sealed at Berlin Conference. They just can’t be viable. The issue will be tackled in detail in my next and final installment. 

World Failure - Again the world political and economic structure has failed and will continue to fail small nations. The extraction of raw materials at almost zero cost to the Multinational Corporation and manufacture of things in the developed world which are then priced 1000 times the cost of raw materials is beyond criminal. The world governance has therefore failed dismally in creating opportunities for reducing global poverty through fair trade agreements, rather the developed world clearly exists on the back of world poverty and that’s unsustainable.

What’s needed to promote good governance?

There are basic principles of good governance;

·    1. To seek the prosperity of a nation, its government should not take more than what is legitimate and necessary for the proper function of the state. Thus the tax burden should not be punitive in nature, rather the focus should be to raise enough revenue for service delivery. Illegitimate taxation can be likened to a cruel farmer who continue milking a malnourished, sick and dying cow. Excessive taxation has been a source of great acrimony before, even during the time when our Lord Jesus Christ was here on earth.

·      2.  When citizens are excessively taxed there is high likelihood of a rebellion, as colonists discovered when they occupied Africa, and imposed various heavy taxes on the indigenous populations. Naturally people resent taxes as people implored and pleaded with Jesus Christ to help them drive out Romans who were taking more than enough from Israelites for their lavish wellbeing.

·        3. Governments, instead, should try to endeavor that as much money remains with the citizens for the following reasons;

(a)   The quantum of savings increases and this forms a true and sustainable bedrock upon which a true and robust economy can then be build.

(b)  They encourage entrepreneurship creating a strong economy owned by citizens, instead of relying on foreigners, who like prostitutes will never be relied upon to build a resilient economy. Foreign investors are naturally not committed to the development of the host country and will go to the ends of the world to take their money out of the country, and it is therefore foolhardy to concentrate on foreign investment, instead of building local capacity. FDI is only necessary in areas where a host country lacks the technical knowhow, and again even if the host country wants to leverage the investment for technological transfer, this should be time based with clear milestones and deliverables. 

(c)   The legitimate revenue thus derived from taxation is judiciously used to invest in infrastructure such that the state can continue to operate competitively spurring private sector growth and seamless service delivery to citizens.

·         4. There should always be consultation of the governed to ensure that policy address grassroots issues and is inclusive. There should not be a monopoly of ideas, but allow for cross-pollination of ideas, creating a health participative democracy. A clear vision should anchor the function of the state, coupled with execution of strategies, plans and tactics on real time basis.

·    5. Discovering, nurturing and developing talent, including relentless research is a prerequisite for prosperity. A country which does not recognize talent among its citizens will never prosper because as mentioned earlier there are hidden costs of foreign direct investment, including tax concessions, repatriation of dividends etc.

·      6. Strong, independent legal framework which protects citizen’s rights to property, civil liberties thus unleash their potential.

·      7. Strong security sector to fend off foreign war mongers and aggressors while quelling domestic upheavals to protect citizens from criminals, mercenaries and terrorists. Security sector should know their boundaries and avoid meddling in civilian issues or being abused by power holders and brokers to threaten, undermine and directly weak state institutions, including freedoms of association, speech, and association as well as choosing their representatives.

·       8. Strong oversight institutions like parliament and constitutional bodies which are meant to counter the excesses of the executive arm of government and enhance accountability and ensuring the country is governed within the tenets of the law and that vulnerable groups are protected from draconian government policies and forced movements resulting in dispossession of their land, water and other natural resources, inadequate or nil compensation when they lose property or livelihoods through action of central governments, ruling elites, mafia states sponsored or in cahoots  with foreign multinationals.

·      9. Environmental protection and climatic change mitigation to ensure that the next generations get a country in a condition which is almost the same if not better when it was bequeathed from previous generations. The protection of habitats, including wet lands against corrupt government officials both at central and local authority who parcel the land for a quick buck endangering the livelihood of many, as famines  or deadly floods will then visit society after reckless behavior of a few greedy individuals.

·      10. To promote social cohesion of various people even with different interests, ensuring that diversity is used to enhance creativity and certainly not as a weapon for creating divisions for purposes for entrenching power. Celebration of achievement and condemnation and punishment of bad behavior will give clear direction to the youth of what is expected of them as they enter manhood and womanhood.

Concluding Remarks

This paper was aimed at specifically answering the question whether governments are necessary evils, and the answer has been deduced as an emphatic yes, and we however found that it is highly desirable to change them from necessary evils to angels, even before the coming back of Jesus Christ. It is acknowledged that the human heart is generally corrupt and thus concerted effort should be made to ensure strong state institutions which can provide the checks and balances and guarantee protection of citizens and even foreign nationals in their jurisdictions from power abuses, poverty and lawlessness. Governments’ roles were found to have evolved significantly from the earliest forms of governments in that apart from guaranteeing law, order and security, there is greater expectation for them to provide seamless service delivery and ensure prosperity of the governed by creating the conditions necessary for human endeavor. Society has a duty to contribute to orderliness and follow rules and laws, including moral tenets, as these contribute in creating stable and prosperous societies which are not tormented by outlaws and bad governments, for if we raise good children instilling in them the virtues of discipline, empathy and compassion, we are assured that as they take positions of leadership, we shall experience, at the very minimal, a markedly reduced incidences of gross human rights abuses and extreme corruption.