Identifying System Goals:
The Role of the State

We perceive the state as an action agency geared to coping with tasks which the people pose for it through the vehicle of a leadership elite. It engages in purposeful behavior aimed at furthering systemic "self-determination."^[1] Self-determination" encompasses both economic and poltical dimensions. The former includes the expansion, efficient allocation, and equitable distribution of resources. The latter involves an increase in political innovativeness to achieve systemic goals. "If we define the core area of politics as the area of enforceable decisions or, more accurately, of all decisions backed by some combination of a significant probability of enforcement," remarks Karl W. Deutsch, "then politics becomes the method par excellence for securing preferential treatment for messages and commands and for the reallocation of human or material resources. Politics thus appears as a major instrument for either retarding or accelerating social learning and innovation."^[2]

Viewing the state as a goal-securing and problem-solving mechanism, how is one to evaluate its achievements? We rate the performance of states primarily in terms of their ability to set realizable goals as well as to select the alternatives that will achieve these multiple goals at the lowest possible cost.^[3] As for the first task, a distinguished Zambian has stressed the critical

[1] Karl W. Deutsch, The Nerves of Government (New York: Free Press, 1969), p. 250.

[2] Ibid., p. 254.

[3] James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1971), p. 36.

need to select goals imaginatively and realistically. "Leaders," writes Foreign Minister Vernon J. Mwaanga, "must have a clear perception of what constitutes progress, they must embody an element of rationality in their behaviour, they must have an appreciation of priorities and above all must have integrity which transcends mere rhetoric and sloganeering."^[4] In addition to great skill in goal formulation, leaders must display considerable capacity in fulfilling these tasks. Systemic performance (i.e., the ability to achieve goals in an efficient manner) provides the basis for regime legitimacy and stability. It is the central challenge encountered by all African statesmen and planners—irrespective of the particular policy-making style they have adopted. Thus Knud Erik Svendsen's remark that "the worst enemy of a socialist policy in any African country is bad economic performance" applies to capitalist-oriented and socialist-oriented states alike.^[5]

In the remainder of this section, we concentrate on the first aspect of collective (or state) problem-solving—the task of formulating acceptable system goals. It is evident that certain critical tasks of state building and maintenance are common to the African states as a whole; our problem is to deduce these tasks from general experience. A measure of assistance is given us by the efforts of some members of the Committee on Comparative Politics of the Social Science Research Council to identify the six "crises" of political development which "may be met in different sequences but all of which must be successfully dealt with for a society to become a modern nationstate ."^[6] According to these analysts, a state must cope with the following list of "critical system-development problems or crises" in the process of modernizing: (1) the identity crisis: the achievement of a conmmon sense of territorial identity; (2) the legitimacy crisis: the need to arrive at a consensus on the valid

[4] Vernon J. Mwaanga, "Zambia Heads for the Big Poll," Sunday Times of Zambia (Ndola), October 14, 1973, p. 7.

[5] Quoted in William Tordoff and Ali A. Mazrui, "The Left and the Super-Left in Tanzania," Journal of Modern African Studies 10, no. 3 (October 1972): 439.

[6] Lucian W. Pye, Aspects of Political Development (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1966), p. 63. (Our italics.)

exercise of authority by political elites and structures; (3) the penetration crisis: the securing of an effective central governmental presence throughout the territory under control; (4) the participation crisis: the channeling of various public demands for inclusion in the decision-making process into legitimate institutional outlets; (5) the integration crisis: the establishment of a coherent system of interactional relationships among the many groups and interests making up the society; and (6) the distribution crisis: the ability of political elites to reconcile the demands for particular goods and services with collective needs for economic growth, resource mobilization, and collective goods (for example, national defense or pollution abatement) that are available to all members of the community.^[7]

This listing represents a useful delineation of certain problems at hand. However, it seems less than complete and not always balanced in the way that issues are emphasized. It enumerates modernization tasks, but it does not compile the broader challenges and objectives implicit in systemic self-determination—particularly from an African point of view. Whereas the categories assume the survival of the state, African leaders (especially those whose countries border on the white states of southern Africa, as well as Kenya and Tanzania, which lie adjacent to President Idi Amin's Uganda, Ghana with respect to the Volta Region, and Ethiopia with regard to Eritrea) remain profoundly anxious over the question of territorial integrity. Moreover, the categories take little or no account of the exogenous variable, when African spokesmen evince great concern over continuing evidences of external control (i.e., neocolonialism).^[8] In general, the political modernization ap-

[7] Ibid., pp. 63–67; James S. Coleman, "Modernization: Political Aspects," International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (New York: The Macmillan Co. and the Free Press, 1968), pp. 395–402; Anthony H. Rweyemamu, "Some Reflection on Contemporary African Political Institutions and their Capacity to Generate Socio-Economic Development," African Review 1, no. 2 (September 1971): 33–34; and Leonard Binder et al., Crises and Sequences in Political Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 110–11, 136–37, 187, 279–81.

[8] In subsequent writings, however, some modernization analysts have shown great subtlety in discussing exogenous causation in developmental episodes. See Gabriel A. Almond, "Approaches to DevelopmentalCausation," in Gabriel A. Almond, Scott C. Flanagan, and Robert J. Mundt, Crisis, Choice and Change (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1973), pp. 28–30.

proach can be said to suffer grievously from a Western-based ethnocentrism. As Naomi Caiden and Aaron Wildavsky argue:

Modernization assumes transformation from a traditional to a modern state, but it gives little indication how this journey may be achieved; it is static, not dynamic. It assumes a dichotomy between traditional and modern without considering the stages in between and patterns of behavior that may even prevent modernization taking place as worthy of discussion in their own right. It equates modernization with Westernization, and current Western society as the ultimate goal for development of other nations. . . . Worst of all modernization theory was culture-bound, seeing economic growth not only as the most important aim, but stipulating that its attainment was irrevocably intertwined with Western organizational forms and values.^[9]

Nevertheless, molernization theory presents a guide to our immediate concern with setting system goals in most African circumstances. Regarding modifications, Lucian Pye's suggestion on collapsing categories is worth recording. Pye remarks that integration relates popular political activity to governmental performance, thereby offering an "effective and compatible solution of both the penetration and the participation crises."^[10]

Furthermore, we note the need for two additional categories: ensuring the survival of the nation as constituted at independence; and securing freedom from external control. Although both variables relate to the international environment, they differ significanly in that the first refers primarily to possible threats against territorial integrity (for example, South Africa vis-à-vis Zambia, Botswana, and Mozambique), while the second applies to the political, economic, and social penetration of political systems.^[11] Postindependence Third World countries

[9] Naomi Caiden and Aaron Wildavsky, Planning and Budgeting in Poor Countries (New York: John Wiley, 1974), pp. 27–28.

[10] Pye, Aspects of Political Development, p. 65.

[11] "A penetrated political system," states James N. Rosenau, "is one in which nonmembers of a national society participate directly and authoritatively, through actions taken jointly with the society's members, in either the allocation of its values or the mobilization of support onbehalf of its goals." "Pre-Theories and Theories of Foreign Policy," in R. Barry Farrell (ed.), Approaches to Comparative and International Politics (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966), p. 65.

are often fragile in both geo-specific and task-specific terms. The low capabilities of such states expose them to various external manipulations and influences. However, it is in the political, economic, and social (not the military) spheres that the greatest of their number are vulnerable to continuing outside pressures. No doubt this sensitivity to the prevailing threat of the international environment explains the skepticism and suspicion of the leaders of poorer countries toward such seemingly supportive activities as multinational corporate investment and foreign aid.

At least one other major modification seems necessary in terms of our immediate purposes: to recognize explicitly the need to expand economic and social opportunities throughout Africa. To be sure, the concept of distribution subsumes a category on mobilizing resources within it. Even so, we regard the enhancement of economic and social capacity to be a challenge of such pressing magnitude as to require full and equal recognition along with the allocative process. An effective and equity-oriented distribution mechanism obviously means little unless it is buttressed by an ability to produce. And even then, the aggregate demands on productiveness are so staggering as to defy easy assumptions about the future. Thus the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reported that, given a continuation of current population trends, the demand for grain in the developing countries will rise from 600 million tons in 1970 to 900 million tons in 1985. The implications of this situation are enormous, for the FAO report estimates that over time the LDCs will have shortages of 85 million tons, a measurement which could easily prove to be on the short side in the event of serious crop failures (such as in the Sahelian area of West Africa during the early 1970s). In order to make up for this 10 percent gap in their needs, the LDCs will have to increase imports—valued, at current prices, at some $17 billion per annum.^[12] The solution to this insufficiency of grain in the LDCs, argued the FAO report, is to increase the amount of

[12] New York Times, June 3, 1974, p. 2.

grain raised in these countries. But this only underscores the critical link between productivity and allocation, a connection which we feel deserves explicit recognition when a list of system goals is formulated.

The crises and problems of political development can now be reformulated into system goals as modified by the above additions and substitutions. To this end, the following collective tasks seem paramount: (1) ensuring systemic survival: maintaining the capacity for collective action; (2) establishing a national identity: fostering an awareness of common ties on the part of the inhabitants of a territorial unit; (3) integrating societies: facilitating the growth, of community-wide interaction and exchange, primarily through an expansion of central institutions and activities; (4) creating an acceptable authority system: acquiring public acceptance of an authoritative and effective legal and political structure; (5) mobilizing and distributing resources efficiently: increasing productive capacity and sharing the output equitably among the members of the community; (6) securing freedom from external control: reducing economic, political, and social dependence on any external actor or set of actors so as to maximize a country's capacity for achieving its collective purposes.

In achieving these collective tasks, decision-makers in each state play a critical role in the determination of priorities. The tasks outlined above are burdensome in themselves, and the fact that they occur simultaneously in the LDCs places a heavy "load" on policy-makers in these countries.^[13] By definition, underdevelopment means an overburdening situation, one in which the claims on the system outpace the capacity of institutions to absorb legitimate demands. In an environment of strain brought on by this capabilities imbalance, choice becomes formidable. Since different opportunity costs (the costs of forgoing another benefit or set of benefits) are involved, the choice as to priorities necessarily entails broad and important implications for patterns of production and consumption in the society

[13] James S. Coleman, "The Development Syndrome: Differentiation-Equality-Capacity," in Leonard Binder et al., Crises and Sequences in Political Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 86.

as a whole.^[14] An understanding of the decision process, then, requires that considerable attention be given to the preferences and predispositions of those engaged in policy-making. And this leads to a wider issue, which we now turn to; namely, the factors conditioning choice.