“Nation states fail because they can no longer deliver positive political goods to their people. Their governments lose legitimacy and, in the eyes and hearts of a growing plurality of its citizens, the nation-state itself becomes illegitimate.” (Rotberg 2002).

[The Fragile State is] …an imaginary figure spawned by globalisation… [Some assert that] the rise in the number of civil wars is a sign of the end of the state. We should wonder if the wars are not bloody state-building processes. In the case of sub-Saharan Africa, wars are a way to control the state, even to restore it" (Bayart 2005).

In the era of globalisation, nothing is “foreign”, nothing is “far” from us” (Marthoz 2005).

This paper is a critique of global apartheid and development initiatives that seek to contain poverty in Bantustan-like Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and Low Income Countries Under Stress (LICUS) so that the benefits of modern science and technology can be enjoyed relatively peacefully only in the privileged fortresses of Europe and America. We counter the development industry’s idea that poor people need aid with the very neoliberal suggestion that they need freedom of movement and fair trade and a level global playing field. Only by allowing labour and capital to find their true value on the world market without interference from political and economic monopolies can poverty ever become history. In any case, the development industry is finding it difficult to deal with the reality that certain African countries are currently enjoying economic growth, accompanied by improvements in quality of life, as a result of Chinese investments rather than Western aid. Sudan obviously comes to mind – but there are others. In countries like Ghana remittances from the Diaspora have also shown that if young Africans were allowed to work freely in Europe and America and to invest freely in their home countries, the G8 pledges of handouts and fund-raising concerts for Africa would indeed become superfluous. The idea of the fragile state is thus a dangerous (albeit redundant) concept because it seeks, like apartheid, to reinforce the use of foreign aid (ODA) to keep the natives in their Bantustans so that they do not bring poverty, ignorance, disease and terror to the white republic. It also seeks to lay the blame for human misery on the defunct nation-state when clearly the causes and solutions to the problems of countries ruled by criminals are global. The nation-state is too small to handle the massive problems that humanity faces today and therefore fragility must be seen as permeating through the global community and not the donors’ list of 46 demonised polities called fragile states (see DFID 2005, 7).

Conventional political science finds it impossible to envisage fragile states except as poverty-stricken African states led by kleptomaniacs, and Rotberg’s take on state failure and collapse seems to suggest that even if an illegitimate regime were to occur in Europe or North America, the nation-state itself would not lose its legitimacy, in short it is not possible for the old democracies of Europe and America to become fragile. Admittedly one donor does state that “All states are fragile in some respects and states move in and out of fragility” (DFID 2005; 7). I want to suggest that illegitimacy and fragility are intimately connected as Rotberg argues but it is precisely Empire that is inherently illegitimate and thus systemically fragile. History (and Ibn Khaldun) shows us that there is only one way for mighty empires to go and that is down. The Great Emperor who wept when he was told there were no more territories for him to subdue understood this very well. The quintessential fragile state is the world dominating empire because it has a built-in mechanism for obsolescence. So why is the fragile state agenda theorising Somalia and not America, or at least both?

According to the British Department for International Development (Colonial Office?), their working definition of fragile states in brief is "where the government cannot or will not deliver core functions to the majority of its people, including the poor…DFID does not limit its definition of fragile states to those affected by conflict" (http://www.eldis.org/static/DOC17283.htm). Do you want to know why the state is unable or unwilling to function normally?

The fragile state agenda, according to one report (Cammack et al. 2006, ix) dates back to the 1990s. Africans will remember this period as the second lost decade, one in which their governments were no longer attempting to implement development but were engaged in poverty alleviation. Fragile states are defined in many different ways, and so Iraq under Saddam Hussein accused of having Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) was a problem for the USA in a way that Liberia under Charles Taylor frustrating Post Conflict Reconstruction and Development (PCRD) was not. So how are we to make sense of the fragility of:

• Colombia that is unable or unwilling to stem the flow of cocaine into Europe and America? And what about America’s own failure to reduce demand?

• Somalia that has no functioning state structures but working telecommunications and power companies?

• Oil rich Nigeria that still battles to generate electricity or conduct elections – something that even smaller and poorer countries have managed to with more success?

• Angola and Venezuela that can use their petrodollar windfall to tell the “International Community” Bwana go home! We do not need you anymore, the Chinese will help us!

The only thing that these countries have in common is that they are perceived as a problem for the “International Community” (of which most of Africa is not). And since 9/11 the fear that state failure in Afghanistan can translate into terror attacks on New York or London – the two most well-organized centres of capitalist civilization - has reached paranoid proportions. Whether it is global warming, HIV, Avian flu, cocaine or dirty bombs, the threat is no longer confined to the uncivilized side of the great wall, nobody is immune.

Donor driven development discourse today is peddling the “fragile state” as the latest manifestation of the LDC. “The state” sounds like something political scientists should be analyzing so it is quite surprising that the donors are the leading advocates of this concept. But why should we be surprised? Did they also not play the leading role in trying to define ‘good governance’ in their previous attempt to modernize the world via the World Bank’s “state building agenda”? The people most concerned about fragile states are not university-based political scientists but professional donors and that is why state fragility is intimately tied to poor countries’ relations with donors and not with their citizens.

Another definition of the concept states: “A fragile state is a state that cannot execute control over its sovereign territory, which fails to perform the basic functions of statehood such as taxation or provision of public infrastructure, or fails to provide the population with basic services and needs, and protect its political rights” Fride, Fragile states backgrounder < http://www.fride.org/File/ViewLinkFile.aspx?FileId=1294>.

Should we not be asking why a state cannot provide public infrastructure? Some countries are too poor to build roads, others have leaders who just don’t care and yet another set have the deliberate policy of not building roads lest rebels use them to advance rapidly into the capital city. Indeed this definition of the ‘fragile state’ fits almost perfectly the description of a Bantustan. Those black satellites of the white racist republic of South Africa were totally illegitimate, completely dependent on handouts from Pretoria, and their main responsibility was protecting the white republic from revolution. One can see that, like other colonial states, the government of racist South Africa chose to leave education and health to charity and focus all resources on regime survival. The colonial state in South Africa was never legitimate from the point of view of the disenfranchised majority and it was able to deliver only to the white minority on the basis of systematic racial discrimination policies of segregation and apartheid. From the perspective of the colonized population the state was not only illegitimate but even irrelevant for their livelihoods. Today in much of the once colonized world we can still see many people living outside the formal/colonial sector. The reason for this is that the colonial state served foreign interests. This quality unfortunately has also been bequeathed to the postcolonial state, especially in Africa, which will do what it can to sell oil to America or copper to China instead of doing with the raw materials what the rest of the world does, namely to manufacture various goods for local consumption and export.

What we are talking about here are not fragile structures that exist in isolation and whose miserable condition is due to the madness of their leaders, but rather irresponsible ones that belong to a global system of power in which the role of some countries is to create an enabling environment for other countries to enjoy a high standard of living. Let us call that system what it is: global apartheid.

One can hardly call a Bantustan a failed state given that by its very nature, it is designed to lack the resources to succeed but state failure and fragility are intimately connected by this theory. Colonialism was always going to exclude the majority of the population from the ‘benefits of modernization’. In certain countries a combination of genocide and disease even turned the native population into an insignificant minority existing only on the margins in special nature reserve-like settlements. Indeed the recent emergence of native-American heads of state in hitherto Spanish-dominated Latin America proves the point that colonial rule is inherently illegitimate and therefore fragile according to the World Bank’s definition. So does the fragility lie in the Bantustan? Or in Pretoria or in the whole system of apartheid? Obviously nobody could have described the apartheid regime as weak, a failed state or even fragile and yet it was so illegitimate that its fall was always inevitable. So why do we assume a) that fragile states are low income countries under stress? or b) that foreign aid and World Bank loans can make an illegitimate Bantustan type colonial state acceptable and secure? Is fragility not intimately connected to the paramountcy of minority interests? How then can it be sanitizedwith ODA? The solution has to be a political one.

Fragility is systemic and global, and Vice President Al Gore’s documentary on climate change has at last managed to show the “First Class Passengers” that even they will perish when the ship sinks, the same logic should apply to other aspects of human life in our globalised world. In a sneaky way the concept of the fragile state does in fact admit that we are all in this together but in apartheid style only sees ‘fragile states’ as a threat to the good life in the West. This donor agencies view of the world is closer to apartheid South African theory than to Al Gore. Thus they say fragile states: a) will not reach the MDGs; b) will have adverse economic effects on neighbouring countries; and c) global spill-overs may follow. This is why apartheid South Africa took the war to Angola in order to keep Pretoria safe but all they had to do was implement the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the war would not have been necessary. Another lesson we learn from apartheid South Africa is that you cannot keep the boys on the border forever even if your greatest fear is that ‘the enemy will follow us home’ as president G.W Bush warns Americans when they demand an end to the war. The right thing to do is to level the playing field globally and not tinker with food parcels for the poor people in LDCs or LICUS entities. Fair trade rather than philanthropy, and freedom of movement for both labour and capital are the way forward.

Even after 30-years of meaningless war, Angola can always be rebuilt, the damage can be repaired and a fresh start is possible. But once the city walls have been breached and/or the provinces start to do their own thing, it is curtains for the world dominating empire and many great civilisations have come and gone for us to be able to say: it is not accidental. And thus it is easy to say quite confidently that the sun will never rise again on the British Empire. Collapsed Sierra Leone on the other hand can be put back on its feet again, and we suggest, that with greater freedom of movement for its young people, and fair trade for its exports rather than annual G8 pledges of aid, the post-conflict reconstruction can be speeded up.

The notion of fragile states like that of less developed countries does not mean what it suggests, it is simply short for ‘Countries that must cooperate with the donors’. World Bank Economists and securocrats in donor countries not political scientists are obsessed with this concept. In most university political science departments, it is the International Relations people that study international economic development/cooperation that are obliged to grapple with it. In real discussions of political power those that cannot think of the USA or EU as fragile states clearly are trapped in their preconceived agenda. Why should the fragility of small states be more serious than that of great powers? If big were better, American SUVs would outsell Asian sedans and the dinosaurs would still be masters of the earth. So, let all fragile state theorists throw all the possibilities into equation like reality does and consider the generic nation-state as potentially fragile. And don’t mention donors.

Jean-Francois Bayart (2005) points us in the right direction (fragile state theorists are pointing us in the wrong direction, which is what the mystification of the title refers to) by highlighting the importance of a) globalisation; b) privatisation of the state; and c) wars that may restore the state (albeit only in black Africa!). Bayart too is unable to see prolonged riots in France or criminal violence in the USA in the same way that he considers violence in sub-Saharan Africa. But if privatisation of the state is bad for Liberia why should it be good for America? If the state loses its legitimacy because it cannot provide for the very basic human security of some of its citizens and we agree that this constitutes state failure, how can we then say but this applies to Angola and not France? Human rights are universal and for too long now we have been fooled into thinking Africans do not need potable water quite as much as Europeans do. But this will not do, the American state needs legitimacy as badly as the African village headman does. Let us try to think of the possibility that the USA is apartheid South Africa writ large. Let us not be blind to the facts because the violence that seeks to rid society of the irresponsible state is not unique to black Africa; so we ask that the concept of fragility be opened up to apply to all political configurations including (I would argue especially to) Empire. If the fragile state is useful only to western donors then it is useless as a political science concept. After all, there are very few poor countries that receive all the aid that donors pledge to them, let alone all the donations that they need in order to overcome the poverty of their citizens. And in any case they would rather have fair trade than wait for the pledges to be honoured.

Tanzanian sociologist Chachage S.L. Chachage (2003) equates structural adjustment with privatisation and the making of the irresponsible state. Chachage’s argument is that:

The road to hell is paved with good intentions and Chachage suggests that the donors who are today trying to rebuild failed states may have inadvertently played a role in unmaking them in the first place. It is good governance and rolling back the state in the Soviet Union that gave the world the Russian Mafia, the skin-heads that go around attacking foreigners and the banks that stole old people’s pensions, and of course the oligarchs who do their shopping in Western Europe and America. So if certain people are indignant it is not because they hate freedom or our way of life but because they have genuine grievances against privatisation and the irresponsible state.

Chachage’s critique of privatisation resonates with the views of many who oppose the idea that the world should be judged by its usefulness to Western transnational firms rather than to humanity. And this is one thing the donors do not seem to understand. Thus 4 million Congolese (people who do not matter to the private sector) who have died since the insurgence from certain neighbouring countries can be used to refer to the process of structural adjustment in Africa as the ‘irresponsibalisation of the state’. That millions have succumbed to HIV while the patent- owning private sector investors fight to protect their profit rights, falls in the same category of irresponsible statutory conduct because an enabling environment for big business may mean death for the poor. And in any case, since they insist that they be paid for investing in research, do they compensate Asian or African countries when they take their scientists away – many of whom were educated at public expense and at no cost to the international companies or the western countries?

Structural Adjustment is essentially privatisation and only the rationalisations can be quibbled upon; but what it always boils down to is the belief that the Market/Private Sector delivers goods and services better than the state. The long queues for consumer goods in socialist states was proof enough of that, but there is more to life than Wal-Mart or Harrods and there are still millions of people who miss the Soviet Union not for its shoddy manufactured goods and shortages of shampoo and toothpaste but for the human security it was able to provide to the old, the sick and the weak.

Many structurally adjusted African countries have discovered that once the city council’s water and sewerage department has been privatised, the government schools and hospitals turned into profit making ventures instead of providers of basic services and crucial investments in the future of the country, the right to life becomes a commodity on the global market. Unless one wins the lottery, Pop Idol, Who Wants to be a Millionaire, or some other game of chance, their place in the global market is not guaranteed. Only those who have access to dollars and Euros can afford to live in gated communities protected by Securicor or ADC patrol vehicles. In the rest of the world even a police checkpoint may deprive citizens of their rights and their property if not their lives. Why? Because the state has not collapsed or become fragile but because it has abdicated its social function in the name of privatization. There are of course criminal elements in countries like Sierra Leone and Liberia, but even there rise to power of criminals was facilitated by the in-action of the state across the globe. It was the state and not the market that brought order back because the private sector was able to make money from the chaos. Social responsibility is a matter for the state, not the market.

South African political analyst Lushaba (2005) has said in similar vein:

As Lushaba shows, even mainstream Western economists like Stiglitz (2002) also highlight the loss of economic sovereignty that follows privatisation and the domination of the financial sector by foreign banks. Through the instrumentalisation of central banks donor governments exert subtle pressure on domestic banks in “fragile states” to obey the rules of the market game so as to not shake prevailing economic conditions to the detriment of Western companies’ interests. Thus when confronted with a possible economic slowdown Western governments can encourage banks to expand credit in order to trigger demand or withhold funds in cases of excess liquidity. Stiglitz (2002) calls this ‘window guidance’. Foreign financial houses operating in fragile African states that do not owe their host government any obligation consciously ignore such signals, or as Stiglitz observes, “foreign banks are far less likely to be responsive to such signals” (2002, 70). It is the responsibility of African and other governments to apply checks and balances against the private sector because too much privatisation is tantamount to bad governance, i.e. criminality.

It does not make sense for Ghana to be celebrating Fifty Years of Independence if in effect the country has again put its fate in the hands of foreign companies. Why then did our fathers fight for independence if not precisely to regain ownership of our history and destiny? A donor-driven existence is a kind of neo-colonialism and the determined effort on the part of donors to make fragile states toe the line is not based on any sort of charitable sense of duty (and if it were it would still be too paternalistic to stand) but quite simply on self-interest. A fragile state is one that the donors find difficult to work with. But what if the difficult state is not led by thieves but by nationalists defending their birthright? Conversely, what if the political leaders enthusiastically implementing structural adjustment policies and privatising everything in sight are defined by donors as easy to work with does that translate into a better society? Actually, the term normally used to describe African champions of structural adjustment is “brave” because they in essence are in confrontation with their own people and it is not for nothing that some of the aid that donors provide to them is riot control equipment.

Keith Hart (2001) has argued that:

Money markets have made a few people very rich and have also ruined the lives of many. Corruption, mismanagement and even genuine errors in the banking industry have turned billions of paper assets into worthless investments and pauperised millions of people in the process. Free markets have failed before and it has taken state intervention to moderate the economics of greed. But the state has never been weaker and people in government are even more ignorant than those in the banks about how the new capitalism works. Unable to regulate e-commerce, the governments have turned their attention to putting up fences in order to prevent the poor from migrating to the wealthy cities.

Given that, only one in fifty people are likely to leave the countries in which they were born and although increasing rapidly, and that only one in sixty people had access to the Internet by 1998, it is obvious that most people stand to benefit from old fashioned agriculture and manufacturing industry rather than money markets. Inequality threatens both economic well-being and political stability but it is only the irresponsible government that will allow genetically modified foods or bio-fuel plantations produced by big corporations to push peasant farmers growing bananas, sorghums and vegetables off the land. Equally irresponsible is the government that leaves welfare matters to charitable organisations at a time when education and health interventions are required to prevent the destruction of an entire generation of young Africans.

One lesson of the tragic Tuesday September 11, 2001 terror attack in America was that that there is no Chinese wall separating the “barbarians” from the “civilised” world in our global village. So in a sense, despite the patriots’ suggestion to the contrary, one can even say that in a globalised world in our global village, it was not a foreign attack because those terrorists were citizens of the world and products of its madness. The War on Terror has failed to smoke the terrorists out of their caves because they are not cavemen anymore; and if in the past they used to ride in from the desert and ransack Sodom and Gomorrah, today they may fly in with the same goal in mind, regime change. Globalisation is not just about the Internet but about basic politics as well and it is not just a country’s registered voters who may decide whether a particular regime is legitimate or not. Indeed we are already accustomed to “the international community” condemning Third World Dictators so we should not be surprised that Third World citizens can also condemn ‘the international community’ for failing to respond to their needs, for violating their basic rights; we are all in this together.

But that is not the only reason why no Great Wall can separate the civilised from the barbarians in a global village. We are all savages now because the irresponsible state cannot protect millions of victims of insecurity, provide clean water or prevent global warming whenever such action hurts the bottom line. And we are all savages now because of the way state officials torture Guantanamo Bay and Abhu Gharaib prisoners. The people who hanged Saddam Hussein were shown to be raving mad men of violence just like him and there was time when we could differentiate the common good from the selfish interests of the criminals, but it is not easy after the privatisation of the state.

The collapse of the economy in Zimbabwe reminds us that social integration is not possible in a society that tends to exclude or marginalize people from participating in the central social arenas, the most important of which is the economy. Landlessness and joblessness are a death sentence and what is the crime that millions have committed to suffer this fate? The tendency towards increasing degrees of exclusion and marginalization in the final analysis must be blamed on political leaders’ failure to keep up with the changes in the economy. For African leaders, their inability to implement an alternative to neo-liberal economic ideologies has caused their countries a lot of harm. For both local and global marginalization problems, some of the solutions are well known; politicians have just lacked the courage to show faith in people over machines, the masses over educated elites, women farmers over biotech agro-business and local resources over foreign aid and investment.

The neo-liberal ideological project that pushed privatisation, informalisation and other anti-state policies was easily criticised for excluding the majority of the population from development. Very few African leaders were however willing to challenge it. Other than Julius Nyerere, who chose retirement to the implementation of structural adjustment, others like Kenneth Kaunda tried to implement policies he disagreed with or, in the case of Yoweri Museveni and Jerry Rawlings, enforced it, more or less at gun point. They were the brave ones, the new breed of African leaders who believe in modernisation. As the food riots were put down, school kids recruited into the informal sector and peasant agriculture denied access to state supportive services, only those who could afford to live were allowed to.

Cost sharing measures were introduced in schools even though it was known that investing in the education of workers resulted in higher productivity, the education of girls was reflected in declining infant mortality levels and yet the leaders failed to defend their previous policies.

It is only after independence that access to health, education and welfare were democratised. This was the experience of all the countries in Africa. When was the last time that education was a luxury enjoyed by the wealthy few? During colonial rule. Go figure. The tremendous growth of education in Zambia or Zimbabwe in the first decade after independence was a great achievement. This (apart from the land) is what people expected from their government. The democratisation of the colonial economy, whatever its achievements in terms of welfare, wage equalisation and the promotion of an indigenous capitalist class, did not go far enough, and more seriously, was unsustainable beyond the first decade after independence. For a variety of local and international reasons, the growth - if not the very existence of a working class and black elite - was seriously challenged by the debt burden and the externally supervised attempts to stabilise economies.

What ESAP did therefore by introducing cost-sharing (fee paying) schemes in the social sector was to take us back to the colonial era. As public sector jobs disappeared and unemployment fuelled the worsening poverty, access to health and education became the exclusive privilege of the black and white elites. The role of government changed from development planning and implementation to poverty alleviation. What was the future meant to be for the children of retrenched civil servants and landless peasants? Now we are told that fragile states are an embarrassment because they “are most off-track in relation to MDGs” (DFID 2005; 9) But there was a time when they were told to stop building schools and focus on debt servicing.

While the flower and vegetable exporters enjoyed their foreign exchange retention facility, as ostrich farms and game ranches became more common, it was clear that larger farms were better placed to benefit than small ones and that state-owned lands were more likely to be turned into wildlife areas than to be redistributed to land-hungry peasants (see Moyo 2000). What then is to become of the landless under ESAP? The diversification of SADC economies away from agriculture and extractive industries has been pursued by many governments for a long time. The establishment of ISI manufacturing in the past was partly motivated by this need to diversify. Under ESAP however, the options open to most governments have declined as private sector investments in information, media, financial and leisure services have been concentrated in the most profitable areas. In most SADC countries, formal sector employment has been in decline throughout the 1990s and the incomplete statistics below are flattering.

Since Keith Hart's seminal work on the informal sector in Ghana World Bank economists have tried to use it as a means of providing for those who have been excluded from or denied access to formal employment. The informal sector however, is more about survival than prosperity, insecurity rather than stability and of course, poverty rather than development. The failure of SAP is precisely in failing to reverse the trend of impoverishment.

* 1994/98

Zambia, as many writers have noted, was once a rapidly growing economy and in the top league of the world's copper producers. Like other African countries, it benefited from the post-war boom although it must be noted that one of the reasons for the high demand for copper was Cold War stockpiling of strategic reserves and the munitions industries. The decline of copper has always been anticipated and Zambia's problem is its failure to diversify the economy. Thus Zambia's decline from a middle-income to a highly-indebted poor country shows that some very poor economic policies have been pursued and the price in human terms is very high.

What the qualification for HIPC status means is reversals in economic, social and development indicators in the last decade. In a country presentation for Zambia at the third United Nations Conference on the least developed countries it was observed that Zambia's economic performance in the last decade has been marked by "decline and decay". The report noted that the livelihood situation in the country has deteriorated in the period with a larger percentage of households resorting to undesirable forms of coping strategies such as reducing food intake, namely the 001 diet of one meal a day or, even worse, every other day.

Zambians have suffered a drastic decline in living standards with per capita Gross Domestic Product of US$300 in 1999 compared to US$720 in 1981 (Government of the Republic of Zambia/UNICEF 2000). There are many factors behind this decline but the standard explanation that most government officials have memorized to repeat without thinking includes the following:

What they will not acknowledge is that they have been following structural adjustment policies that they neither designed nor understood, which only compounded the problem. Many social indicators such as health, education and nutrition have declined in unison with declining economic indicators.

The UN further noted that Zambia was the only country out of 101 for which data on trends in the Human Development Index (HDI) were available that had its HDI value in 1998 lower than 1975. The population living below the kwacha poverty datum line in fact grew from 70 per cent in 1996 to 73 per cent in 1998. On the basis of the international poverty datum line of US$1 a day, well over 90 per cent of the population in Zambia was below it. In the education sector, net enrolment rates in primary schools have not shown any improvement while the quality of education has also declined as revealed by some surveys on learning achievements of grade five and six pupils. Infant and under-five mortality for Zambia has risen in the last decade, making it the highest rates in the world at 112 and 202 respectively per 1,000 live births. If this sounds like an emergency you will not find any indication of panic or crisis in the Zambian government. It is business as usual except that the business of government is no longer development but poverty alleviation and riot control.

The UN report also noted that while some of the economic reform programmes like the Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility were designed to reverse economic downturn, they had failed to address the increased level of poverty in the country and placed too much emphasis on achieving financial stability like low inflation, sustainable balance of payment at the expense of domestic objectives like plain old investment in production and wealth creation.

Amartya Sen (1981) showed that people starve if and when they have no command over food through the legal means available in society. These legal means include production possibilities, trade opportunities and entitlements vis-à-vis the state. People starve either because they are unable to produce food or fail to acquire it through exchange or a combination of both. Starvation is therefore not synonymous with lack of food so much as lack of entitlement to adequate food. By the same token, lack of land, meaningful employment or antiretroviral medication is not due to the lack of resources but lack of access. In the final analysis, the right to life is a commodity freely available on the global market, and the lives of those that have no money, as per St Matthew’s principle, will lose what little value they possess: For unto every one that hath shall be given and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matthew 25:29-30).

Being unable to command food, land, health, dignity or the right to life is nothing but one's entitlement to a commodity bundle. Whereas life is not yet a commodity in the strict sense of the term, the right to life as a legalistic cornerstone of global order is very much exchangeable. The apocalyptic Human Development statistics emanating from the poorest southern African countries are built on a colonial ownership structure and exchange entitlements regime that defines people's life chances depending on their race, gender and economic position. That is colonial capitalism and it is not quite the economy that textbooks make it out to be.

They may also be based on own labour, inheritance and remittances from relatives. These entitlements can be influenced by factors such as being gainfully employed, having assets to sell or ability to produce. Other factors that may influence entitlement relations include the cost of purchasing resources and the nature of the social security system.

The entitlement approach shows the link between starvation and poverty. Famines imply starvation while starvation accordingly implies poverty. However, there is no automatic link between poverty and starvation. Wealth and starvation co-exist globally and locally. People may starve not only due to food shortages but also due to how it is distributed. States, markets, and even customs and traditions can cause starvation.

Starvation may also be caused or exacerbated by 'bad governance' especially in countries without a free press, as was the case in Ethiopia during the early and mid 1970s. One would have thought that the global news media makes this less important a factor than ever before and the Band Aid campaign certainly saved many lives using the new technologies but there are countries that the media ignore and others that are able to keep the press out and even censor internet communications. In the end globalization has not necessarily enhanced democracy or even freedom of the press. People continue to starve and to go without clean water and medicine without this fact necessarily making failed governments vulnerable during elections. If mass starvation tends to occur in colonial and totalitarian dictatorships rather than in democratic society, what are we to say about global governance in a world where communications networks are not limited by national boundaries other than that it is not yet democratic?

Entitlement theory suggests that elimination of poverty (and famines) is a complex process since it does not only involve changes in income and its distribution. Policymakers would do well to understand the complex link between famines or starvation, poverty and entitlements. Elimination of poverty and starvation requires changes not only in income but also in the ownership structure, production and exchange relations and entitlements.

Food is just one example, the most important one, of the services that people expect the state to provide for them. The state that fails to provide for the health, security and general well-being of the population should expect to be removed from office. But does this always occur? As already indicated, colonial and totalitarian dictatorships wield power without a popular mandate and without authority. They have no fear of losing elections and do their utmost to prevent losing power in a popular uprising, the only other alternative method of regime change that can be relied upon.

An unfortunate feature of the modern state in Africa is that the impotent king can rule and survive through drought, disease and famines without worrying about the threat of either elections or uprisings. Because he has access to foreign support he can ensure that he stays in power for as long as he has direct military aid including the presence of French troops in his country. Alternatively he may recruit Israeli-trained bodyguards, mercenaries working for companies set up by former SAS or South African troops and other mercenaries posing as legitimate international firms. In the 1990s when the so called second liberation of Africa took place and made 'democratization and good governance' fashionable, dictators switched from hiring security companies to computer firms that help with the rigging of the elections.

Given that thousands, if not millions, of Africans have died from war, cholera, malaria and HIV/AIDS, how is it that no government has been voted out of office on that account? How is it that the provision of safe drinking water which was achieved under the colonial regime in many African countries has proved too big a task for independent regimes and privatized water companies alike? Surely malaria, cholera and even HIV/AIDS kill people in the same way that hunger does i.e. not because they have an incurable disease but because their entitlement to life has been undermined by specific government policies. Today, as in the ancient past migration from resource deficit to surplus areas continues to be the response to poverty and war that many people adopt. Unlike before, however, they are rarely welcome as an asset and it is not just in the North that immigrants are made to feel unwelcome.

There is a tendency to treat countries, nations and societies as synonymous with states and though this may have been once true in Europe globalization has long put paid to that. In Africa, it has never been a true representation of people’s political or social lives. State borders are colonial borders and national boundaries are slightly different. So although Zambia’s founders, for example, aspired to create one Zambia, one nation, and many Africans value ‘national unity’, there is probably no good reason why we should continue to pay the heavy price of seeking national unity in English, French or Portuguese, too afraid to promote the mother tongue languages. Kiswahili, Hausa, Nyanja or Lingala, Wolof and Amharic, will probably deliver peace, democracy and development better than English if only because the majority of the African people will be able to take part in the conversations around these processes. And so if the colonial state is fragile, African society certainly is not; if it were it would already have perished. The point I want to make anyway is that we should not judge the capability of African societies by the fragility of their European language speaking states. It is because the World Bank and the International Community conducts business exclusively with our states that they are unable to see our nations and societies. Our societies, I want to argue, are more resilient than fragile and have withstood over four hundred years of statutory mayhem and more or less survived – against all odds.

So we are told that we are citizens of failing or failed states, LDCs, HIPCs or LICUS – also known as fragile states. Why? Well, mainly because our states are deemed ineffective business partners of the ‘International Community’ of which we are thus not a part. When does an LDC become a LICUS? When a new generation of Harvard and Oxbridge economists is recruited by the World Bank and re-label all the existing programmes. Behind these Orwellian acronyms lies a powerful bureaucracy of phrasemongers and concept paper production machines that are continually telling us new ways of saying “hungry people need food”. But the trouble is that providing food to the hungry can be charitable or profitable or both. By now everyone knows that for every kind- hearted Irish pop-star trying to make poverty history in Africa there are a thousand transnational types, cosmopolitan profiteers who see opportunities where everyone else only sees human tragedy. “You will always have the poor with you’ (Matthew 26:11) and it follows therefore that the donors will always be with us. Or does it?

The answer to the above question is simple: it is a state that has lost legitimacy. How does a state lose its legitimacy? By failing to be socially responsible and in our era the common route to this shameful end is by privatisation. Needless to say (unless you are a donor economist) this can happen to the biggest and best, it is not an attribute solely of Sub-Saharan or socialist states.

And so which is the fragile state? The corrupt city or the impoverished desert camp? Stagnation, inhumanity and the irresponsible government may be found in the wealthy city rather than in the periphery. The fragile state agenda argues that when Sierra Leone’s youth go crazy and start to chop off babies’ limbs that it is the Sierra Leonean state that has failed. What about the rest of humanity – are you not your brothers’ keeper? Is the only way to help countries like these limited to being their donors, adopting their orphans, distributing powdered eggs and high protein biscuits in their refugee camps or is there an alternative? Does state failure, like Ellis (2005) suggests, necessitate trusteeship – the strong re-colonising the weak? On the contrary it involves the sick getting their medicines, the thirsty having clean water and the freedom of movement being enjoyed by all moving from Haiti to America, Senegal to Spain - just as the Irish and the Italians migrated to escape war, famine, unemployment and religious persecution not so long ago.

According to one Martoz (2005):

Never mind the sixty countries, we can say of the UN that it too “cannot even ensure minimal security and survival for large portions of their populations”. Poor people are a minority in Western countries but even the UK and USA have failed to provide minimal security to some of their citizens, to most of the people in Iraq under their occupation and, in the final instance, to the two billion wretched of the earth who are not European American citizens but as fellow human beings who are very much everyone’s responsibility.

So if you look for it, you will see the fragility of the USA democratic republic; but if your a priori theory is that fragile states are ‘those that the donors label errant’ then you will not see it coming and whether we like it or not it is coming. The first golden rule is “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” and the second ones states simply that, “This too shall pass away”. The fragile state agenda seeks to challenge both, first by creating irresponsible states that can abuse their power, confident that neither the bullet nor the ballot can bring them to account even when they start selling water to those who can afford it in plastic bottles instead of delivering it to all citizens via municipal water mains, and secondly by making reform, structural adjustment and transformation necessary for everyone but themselves. It is a very tall order.

Given that both state and market have failed the African people we have to look at what has kept African society alive and ask:

• How do women raise families on less than 1 US$ a day?

• Why is the freedom of movement and free circulation of commodities good for the poor?

• How do Fair Trades challenge global apartheid and raise income levels more effectively than the ODA?

• Is the trouble with development aid connected to paternalism?

• What makes African societies resilient and how can we allow them to overcome state and market failure?

If there is just one point that this paper sought to underline, it is that Empire is inherently fragile and that therefore there is something very wrong with the theory of the fragile state that suggests that an African state becomes fragile when it annoys a donor whereas depriving citizens of their humanity is a brave thing to do as long as the donors approve. One can thus define a fragile state as, above all else, one that has lost its soul.