All the characteristic features of a traditional society are, for obvious reasons, reflected in the education system. For example, is it more effective to negotiate a power-sharing pact among key parties and social groups (as in Kenya) or is there possible merit in a periodic national dialogue to address issues that risk triggering conflict? The colonial state, for example, invented chiefs where there were no centralized authority systems and imposed them on the decentralized traditional systems, as among the Ibo of Eastern Nigeria, the Tonga in Zambia, various communities in Kenya, and the communities in Somalia. PDF African Traditional Justice Systems Francis Kariuki* 1.1 Introduction 17-19 1.6. They also serve as guardians and symbols of cultural values and practices. Government, Public Policy Performance, Types of Government. The origins of this institutional duality, the implications of which are discussed in Relevance and Paradox of Traditional Institutions, are largely traceable to the colonial state, as it introduced new economic and political systems and superimposed corresponding institutional systems upon the colonies without eradicating the existed traditional economic, political, and institutional systems. Long-standing kingdoms such as those in Morocco and Swaziland are recognized national states. eLimu | Political developments and systems Traditional institutions already adjudicate undisclosed but large proportions of rural disputes. In some cases, they are also denied child custody rights. PDF Structure of Government - EOLSS Democratic and dictatorial regimes both vest their authority in one person or a few individuals. References: Blakemore and Cooksey (1980). When conflicts evolve along ethnic lines, they are readily labelled ethnic conflict as if caused by ancient hatreds; in reality, it is more often caused by bad governance and by political entrepreneurs. Oromos are one of the largest ethnic groups in sub-Saharan Africa belonging to the Cushitic-speaking peoples in Northeastern Africa in general and in modern Ethiopia and Kenya in particular. This is done through the enforcement agencies such as the police force. African conflict trends point to a complex picture, made more so by the differing methodologies used by different research groups. The selection, however, is often from the children of a chief. The link between conflict and governance is a two-way street. In this respect, they complement official courts that are often unable to provide court services to all their rural communities. Presently, Nigeria practices the federal system. This outline leads us to examine more closely the sources of legitimacy in African governance systems. Non-official institutions and civil society may have very different ideas from the national government on this issue, leading to debates about legitimacy. not because of, the unique features of US democracy . On the one hand, traditional institutions are highly relevant and indispensable, although there are arguments to the contrary (see Mengisteab & Hagg [2017] for a summary of such arguments). Sometimes, another precedent flows from thesenamely, pressure from outside the country but with some support internally as well for creating a transitional government of national unity. In this regard, the president is both the head of state and government, and there are three arms and tiers of rules by which the country is ruled. Political and economic inclusion is the companion requirement for effective and legitimate governance. However, they do not have custodianship of land and they generally do not dispense justice on their own. Regardless, fragmentation of institutional systems poses a number of serious challenges to Africas governance and economic development. Act,12 the African system of governance was changed and transformed, and new structures were put in place of old ones.13 Under the Union of South Africa, the Gov- These features include nonprofits, non-profits and hybrid entities are now provide goods and services that were once delivered by the government. The US system has survived four years of a norm-busting president by the skin of its teeth - which areas need most urgent attention? In light of this discussion of types of inclusion, the implications for dealing with state fragility and building greater resilience can now be spelled out. It may be useful to recall that historical kingships or dynasties were the common form of rule in Europe, India, China until modern times, and still is the predominant form of rule on the Arabian Peninsula. Chief among them is that they remain key players in governing and providing various types of service in the traditional sector of the economy because of their compatibility with that economic system. Traditional leaders would also be able to use local governance as a platform for exerting some influence on national policymaking. Governance: Why democracy is failing in Africa - GhanaWeb The first objective of the article is to shed light on the socioeconomic foundations for the resilience of Africas traditional institutions. An alternative strategy of bringing about institutional harmony would be to transform the traditional economic systems into an exchange-based economy that would be compatible with the formal institutions of the state. Gadaa as an Alternative Understanding of Democracy in Africa Careful analysis suggests that African traditional institutions lie in a continuum between the highly decentralized to the centralized systems and they all have resource allocation practices, conflict resolution, judicial systems, and decision-making practices, which are distinct from those of the state. Poor leadership can result in acts of commission or omission that alienate or disenfranchise geographically distinct communities. PDF Traditional Leaders In Modern Africa: Can Democracy And The - ETH Z A second objective is to draw a tentative typology of the different authority systems of Africas traditional institutions. Another basic question is, whom to include? The laws and legal systems of Africa have developed from three distinct legal traditions: traditional or customary African law, Islamic law, and the legal systems of Western Europe. We do not yet know whether such institutions will consistently emerge, starting with relatively well-governed states, such as Ghana or Senegal, as a result of repeated, successful alternations of power; or whether they will only occur when Africas political systems burst apart and are reconfigured. Wise leadership respects ethnic diversity and works toward inclusive policies. The Aqils (elders) of Somalia and the chiefs in Kenya are good examples. The traditional justice system, thus, does not have the power to grant any rights beyond the local level. African Politics: A Very Short Introduction | Oxford Academic The traditional African religions (or traditional beliefs and practices of African people) are a set of highly diverse beliefs that include various ethnic religions . African states, along with Asian, Middle Eastern, and even European governments, have all been affected. A long-term route to political and economic success has been comprehensively documented by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson in their global study of why nations fail or succeed. Space opened up for African citizens and civil society movements, while incumbent regimes were no longer able to rely on assured support from erstwhile external partners. But the context in which their choices are made is directly influenced by global political trends and the room for maneuver that these give to individual governments and their leaders. Government and Political Systems. Government: A Multifarious Concept 1.2. Legitimacy based on successful predation and state capture was well known to the Plantagenets and Tudors as well as the Hapsburgs, Medicis, and Romanovs, to say nothing of the Mughal descendants of Genghis Khan.14 In this fifth model of imagined legitimacy, some African leaders operate essentially on patrimonial principles that Vladimir Putin can easily recognize (the Dos Santos era in Angola, the DRC under Mobutu and Kabila, the Eyadema, Bongo, Biya, and Obiang regimes in Togo, Gabon, Cameroon, and Equatorial Guinea, respectively).15 Such regimes may seek to perpetuate themselves by positioning wives or sons to inherit power. It may be good to note, as a preliminary, that African political systems of the past dis played considerable variety. Thus, another report by PRIO and the University of Uppsala (two Norwegian and Swedish centers) breaks conflict down into state-based (where at least one party is a government), non-state-based (neither party is an official state actor), and one-sided conflicts (an armed faction against unarmed civilians). The structures of leadership of African traditional institutions are diverse and they have yet to be mapped out comprehensively. The usual plethora of bour- Botswanas strategy has largely revolved around integrating parallel judicial systems. 20 A brief account of that history will help to highlight key continuities spanning the colonial, apartheid and the post-apartheid eras in relation to the place of customary law and the role of traditional leaders. One of these will be the role and weight of various powerful external actors. Pastoral economic systems, for example, foster communal land tenure systems that allow unhindered mobility of livestock, while a capitalist economic system requires a private land ownership system that excludes access to others and allows long-term investments on land. Another driver of governance trends will be the access enjoyed by youthful and rapidly urbanizing populations to the technologies that are changing the global communications space. Africas states are the worlds newest, and it can hardly be surprising that Africans define themselves in terms of multiple identities including regional, tribal, clan-based, and religious onesin addition to being citizens of a relatively new state. Customary law also manages land tenure and land allocation patterns. Should inclusion be an ongoing process or a single event? One layer represents the formal institutions (laws) of the state. Galizzi, Paolo and Abotsi, Ernest K., Traditional Institutions and Governance in Modern African Democracies (May 9, 2011). Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Politics. Since then, many more have been formulated, but the main themes and ideas have remained. How these differences in leadership structures impinge on the broader institutions of resources allocation patterns, judicial systems, and decision-making and conflict resolution mechanisms is still understudied. The African Charter: A Printed Futility or a Reflection of Human Rights Its ability to influence policy is limited in large part because of its institutional detachment from the state and because of its poverty and lack of capacity to participate in the political process. By Sulayman Sanneh Date: September 10th, 2021. fIntroduction Africa is a vast and . As institutional scholars state, institutional incompatibility leads to societal conflicts by projecting different laws governing societal interactions (Eisenstadt, 1968; Helmke & Levitsky, 2004; March & Olsen, 1984; North, 1990; Olsen, 2007). Rather, they often rely on voluntary compliance, although they also apply some soft power to discourage noncompliance by members with customary laws. THE FUTURE OF AFRICAN CUSTOMARY LAW, Fenrich, Galizzi, Higgins, eds., Cambridge University Press, 2011, Available at SSRN: If you need immediate assistance, call 877-SSRNHelp (877 777 6435) in the United States, or +1 212 448 2500 outside of the United States, 8:30AM to 6:00PM U.S. Eastern, Monday - Friday. Africas economic systems range from a modestly advanced capitalist system, symbolized by modern banking and stock markets, to traditional economic systems, represented by subsistent peasant and pastoral systems. The Constitution states that the institution, status and roles of traditional leadership, according to customary law, are recognised. List of African Union member states by political system There is no more critical variable than governance, for it is governance that determines whether there are durable links between the state and the society it purports to govern. Less than 20% of Africa's states achieved statehood following rebellion or armed insurgency; in the others, independence flowed from . Indications are, however, that the more centralized the system is, the lower the accountability and popular participation in decision making. The features associated with this new form of governmental administration deal with smaller government responsibility for providing goods and services. On the one side, there are the centralized systems where leaders command near absolute power. Roughly 80% of rural populations in selected research sites in Ethiopia, for example, say that they rely on traditional institutions to settle disputes, while the figure is around 65% in research sites in Kenya (Mengisteab & Hagg, 2017). This brief overview of conflict in Africa signals the severity of the security challenges to African governance, especially in those sub-regions that feature persistent and recurrent outbreaks of violence. Despite such changes, these institutions are referred to as traditional not because they continue to exist in an unadulterated form as they did in Africas precolonial past but because they are largely born of the precolonial political systems and are adhered to principally, although not exclusively, by the population in the traditional (subsistent) sectors of the economy. "Law" in traditional Igbo and other African societies assumes a wide dimension and should be understood, interpreted, and applied as such, even if such a definition conflicts with the Western idea. The Obas and Caliphs of Nigeria and the Zulu of South Africa are other examples. Table 1 shows the proportion of the population that operates under traditional economic systems in selected African countries. PDF NNSO OKAF, Ph.D. (a.k.a. OKEREAFEZEKE) Pre-colonial Administration of the Yorubas. There were several reasons for such measures. It is also challenging to map them out without specifying their time frame. Large segments of the rural populations, the overwhelming majority in most African countries, continue to adhere principally to traditional institutions. Most of the states that had attempted to abolish chieftaincy have retracted the abolitionist decrees and reinstated chiefs. However, three countries, Botswana, Somaliland, and South Africa, have undertaken differing measures with varying levels of success. But established and recognized forms of inherited rule cannot be lightly dismissed as un-modern, especially when linked to the identity of an ethnic or tribal group, and could be construed as a building block of legitimacy. MyHoover delivers a personalized experience atHoover.org. (PDF) The role and significance of traditional leadership in the This process becomes difficult when citizens are divided into parallel socioeconomic spaces with different judicial systems, property rights laws, and resource allocation mechanisms, which often may conflict with each other. These consisted of monarchy, aristocracy and polity. We know a good deal about what Africans want and demand from their governments from public opinion surveys by Afrobarometer. The abolishment of chieftaincy does not eradicate the systems broader underlying features, such as customary law, decision-making systems, and conflict resolution practices. Note that Maine and . Yet, governments are expected to govern and make decisions after consulting relevant stakeholders. Rules of procedure were established through customs and traditions some with oral, some with written constitutions Women played active roles in the political system including holding leadership and military positions. In other cases, however, they survived as paid civil servants of the state without displacing the traditional elder-based traditional authority systems. This principle is particularly relevant for diversity management, nation-building, and democratization in contemporary Africa. Perhaps a more realistic transitional approach would be to reconcile the parallel institutions while simultaneously pursuing policies that transform traditional economic systems. In direct contrast is the second model: statist, performance-based legitimacy, measured typically in terms of economic growth and domestic stability as well as government-provided servicesthe legitimacy claimed by leaders in Uganda and Rwanda, among others. The traditional and informal justice systems, it is argued offers greater access to justice. Judicial Administration. The settlement of conflicts and disputes in such consensus-based systems involves narrowing of differences through negotiations rather than through adversarial procedures that produce winners and losers. 2. In most African countries, constitutionally established authorities exercise the power of government alongside traditional authorities. Another measure is recognition of customary law and traditional judicial systems by the state. With respect to their relevance, traditional institutions remain indispensable for several reasons. Authority in this system was shared or distributed to more people within the community. The question then becomes, how to be inclusive?19 A number of African states have decentralized their political decision-making systems and moved to share or delegate authority from the center to provincial or local levels. There was a lot of consultation between the elders before any major decision was made. They include: Monarchs (absolute or constitutional): While the colonial state reduced most African kings to chiefs, a few survived as monarchs. There is no more critical variable than governance, for it is governance that determines whether there are durable links between the state and the society it purports to govern. This category of chiefs serves their communities in various and sometimes complex roles, which includes spiritual service. They are the key players in providing judicial service and in conflict management in much of rural Africa. However, institutions are rarely static and they undergo changes induced by internal transformations of broader socioeconomic systems or by external influences or imposition, and in some cases by a combination of the two forces. Since institutional fragmentation is a major obstacle to nation-building and democratization, it is imperative that African countries address it and forge institutional harmony. While traditional institutions remain indispensable for the communities operating under traditional economic systems, they also represent institutional fragmentation, although the underlying factor for fragmentation is the prevailing dichotomy of economic systems. Others contend that African countries need to follow a mixed institutional system incorporating the traditional and formal systems (Sklar, 2003). PDF The role and importance of the institution of traditional leadership in My intention in this chapter is to explore the traditional African ideas and values of politics with a view to pointing up what may be described as the democratic features of the indigenous system of government and to examine whether, and in what ways, such features can be said to be harmonious with the ethos of contemporary political culture and hence can be said to be relevant to . 7 Main Features of a Traditional Society - Sociology Discussion This study points to a marked increase in state-based conflicts, owing in significant part to the inter-mixture of Islamic State factions into pre-existing conflicts. This page was processed by aws-apollo-l2 in. Somalilands strategy has brought traditional leaders into an active role in the countrys formal governance by creating an upper house in parliament, the Guurti, where traditional leaders exercise the power of approving all bills drafted by the lower house of parliament. Violating customary property rights, especially land takings, without adequate compensation impedes institutional reconciliation by impoverishing rather than transforming communities operating in the traditional economic system. The cases of Nigeria, Kenya, and South Sudan suggest that each case must be assessed on its own merits. Even old-fashioned tyrants learn that inclusion or co-option are expensive. Leaders may not be the only ones who support this definition of legitimacy. Perhaps one of the most serious shared weakness relates to gender relations. Traditional leadership in South Africa pre-existed both the colonial and apartheid systems of governance and was the main known system of governance amongst indigenous people. A Sociology of Education for Africa . As a result, it becomes highly complex to analyze their roles and structures without specifying the time frame. Stated another way, if the abolition of term limits, neo-patrimonialism, and official kleptocracy become a regionally accepted norm, this will make it harder for the better governed states to resist the authoritarian trend. There is strong demand for jobs, better economic management, reduced inequality and corruption and such outcome deliverables as health, education and infrastructure.22 Those outcomes require effective governance institutions. Judicial marginalization: Another challenge posed by institutional fragmentation relates to marginalization of the traditional system within the formal legal system. The roles that traditional authorities can play in the process of good governance can broadly be separated into three categories: first, their advisory role to government, as well as their participatory role in the administration of regions and districts; second, their developmental role, complementing government?s efforts in mobilizing the . If African political elite opinion converges with that of major external voices in favoring stabilization over liberal peacebuilding agendas, the implications for governance are fairly clear.17. For Acemoglu and Robinson, such turning points occur in specific, unique historical circumstances that arise in a societys development. Less than 20% of Africas states achieved statehood following rebellion or armed insurgency; in the others, independence flowed from peaceful transfers of authority from colonial officials to African political elites. In other words, the transition from traditional modes of production to a capitalist economic system has advanced more in some countries than in others. Relevance of African traditional institutions of Governance For example, the election day itself goes more or less peacefully, the vote tabulation process is opaque or obscure, and the entire process is shaped by a pre-election playing field skewed decisively in favor of the incumbents. 1. Indigenous education is a process of passing the inherited knowledge, skills, cultural traditions norms and values of the tribe, among the tribal member from one generation to another Mushi (2009). Some African leaders such as Ghanas Jerry Rawlings, Zambias Kenneth Kaunda, or Mozambiques Joachim Chissano accept and respect term limits and stand down. African Governance: Challenges and Their Implications. Traditional governments have the following functions; In a few easy steps create an account and receive the most recent analysis from Hoover fellows tailored to your specific policy interests. This proposal will be subject to a referendum on the constitutional changes required.16.2e 2.4 Traditional leadership Traditional leaders are accorded Changes in economic and political systems trigger the need for new institutional systems to manage the new economic and political systems, while endurance of economic and political systems foster durability of existing institutional systems. Yet, the traditional judicial system in most cases operates outside of the states institutional framework. Relevance of African traditional institutions of governance | Eldis The colonial system constitutes the second section. What Is a Command Economy? - The Balance Traditional Types of Government: Definitions, Strengths & Weaknesses The terms Afrocentrism, Afrocology, and Afrocentricity were coined in the 1980s by the African American scholar and activist Molefi Asante. Stagnant economy, absence of diversification in occupational patterns and allegiance to traditionall these have a bearing on the system of education prevailing in these societies. Security challenges can impose tough choices on governments that may act in ways that compound the problem, opening the door to heightened risks of corruption and the slippery slope of working with criminal entities. African political systems are described in a number of textbooks and general books on African history. African governance trends were transformed by the geopolitical changes that came with the end of the Cold War. However, their participation in the electoral process has not enabled them to influence policy, protect their customary land rights, and secure access to public services that would help them overcome their deprivation. Competing land rights laws, for instance, often lead to appropriations by the state of land customarily held by communities, triggering various land-related conflicts in much of Africa, especially in areas where population growth and environmental degradation have led to land scarcity. Evidence from case studies, however, suggests that the size of adherents varies from country to country. In addition to these measures, reconciling fragmented institutions would be more successful when governments invest more resources in transforming the traditional socioeconomic space. The size and intensity of adherence to the traditional economic and institutional systems, however, vary from country to country. It also develops a theoretical framework for the . Contents 1. Under conditions where nation-building is in a formative stage, the retribution-seeking judicial system and the winner-take-all multiparty election systems often lead to combustible conditions, which undermine the democratization process. To learn more, visit While this attribute of the traditional system may not be practical at the national level, it can be viable at local levels and help promote democratic values. The link was not copied.

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