Does Federalism Matter in Africa?

The academic study of federalism is somewhat unfashionable in Africa, where formal institutions are often regarded as superficial, ephemeral and ineffective, while informal norms, networks, processes and practices are considered to be the real bedrock and substance of politics. Indeed, for decades, a “neo-patrimonial theoretical framework” or “institution-less school” has been the prevailing paradigm for analyzing African governance and politics (Cheeseman 2018, 10-12). As a concept, neo-patrimonialism focuses on the pathologies of personal, “big man” rule, corruption, predation, patron-client networks and other informal ruling mechanisms in Africa. African structures of personalist rule and relations, in this neo-patrimonial conceptual framework, have little or no place for formal federalist institutions of self-rule, shared rule, and limited rule. Consequently, federalism is often regarded as irrelevant, unviable, or invariably doomed to degradation, extinction, and administrative, fiscal, and political recentralization in Africa’s neo-patrimonial governance eco-system. “In short,” in the words of a leading scholar of decentralization in Africa, “federalism can hardly matter where [formal] institutions themselves have little import” (Dickovick 2012, 3).