"What is \u201cState Enchantment\u201d?"

" \r\n What is \u201cState Enchantment\u201d? \r\n\r\n \r\n \r\n\r\nCDD, a governance-focused think tank in Ghana, recently held a meeting at the University of Ghana Business School on corruption. It did so in partnership with the Ghana Integrity Initiative, IMANI (with which I\u2019m affiliated), Ghana Anti-Corruption Coalition, ACEP (a frequent IMANI collaborator), GRASAG, and others.\r\n\r\nThe meeting coincided with the release of Transparency International\u2019s Corruption Perception Index. Whilst local analysts have interpreted results of the latest index as suggesting \u201cstagnation\u201d in Ghana\u2019s fight against corruption, International analysts say that the country is actually one of 5 emerging markets that have seen a significant deterioration over the last couple of years.\r\n\r\nThe meeting also provided the occasion to launch CDD\u2019s latest AfroBarometer survey on corruption, but with a focus on citizens\u2019 concerns (Transparency International tends to focus somewhat more on the perceptions of elite actors).\r\n\r\nI was asked to deliver a short presentation on one of the event\u2019s themes: \u201cstate capture\u201d. Dr. Daniel Kaufmann, a former Chief of the Natural Resource Governance Institute and long-time (anti)corruption guru, who spoke afterwards, also announced a fresh revamp of the state capture index.\r\n\r\nState Capture is too complex a topic to do justice to in a brief talk. So, I focused on a twist to the classic framing.\r\n\r\nBuilding on a long line of literature touching on related ideas such as \u201celite capture\u201d and \u201cstate predation\u201d, experts at the World Bank in the late 1990s seized the opportunity presented by transitioning economies in the post-Soviet space, where once public corporations were hurriedly privatised leading to the rise of \u201coligarchs\u201d, to craft a new discipline for probing the phenomenon of state capture. State capture manifests through efforts by economic elites to shape public laws and institutions to advance private interests in ways that can lead to \u201clegal corruption\u201d. I argued that Africa\u2019s context was not too fertile for this idea to take analytical root.\r\n\r\nUnlike the former Soviet Union, private economic activity in most of Africa was always heavily informal and widely perceived as \u201csuppressed\u201d or \u201crepressed\u201d. Private sector oligarchs \u201ccapturing the state\u201d was thus rarely a headache for many an observer. Within that haze and fog, something else evolved in Africa that I prefer to call \u201cstate enchantment\u201d, a process of hypnosis of the masses and economically non-powerful elites involving private interests perverting \u201cnational success\u201d narratives to disguise parochial underlying private interests.\r\n\r\nWhilst some of these interests may well be inimical to public welfare, the projects of state enchantment are so elaborately disguised that the public is unable to appreciate even the presence of commercial motivation behind the new laws, policies, projects and institutions being created to push the particular enchantment effort.\r\n\r\nI also gave examples especially relevant to Ghana.\r\n\r\n "

"What is \u201cState Enchantment\u201d?"

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