From its independence to the events of March 1991, Mali has experienced three decades of political, administrative and economic centralism.

On 22 September 1960, Modibo Keita and his comrades from US-RDA (Sudanese Union-African Democratic Rally) opted for an interventionist regime that draw its inspiration from African values of solidarity and sharing to build a socialist state that would take into account the aspirations of the pluralistic nation that is Mali. However, in practice the fulfilment of this ambition was based on a de facto one-party system which fought all expressions of diversity perceived as an obstacle to achieving the envisaged plan. On 19 November 1968, under the pretext of freeing the people from the constraints imposed by the socialist regime of US-RDA, a group of officers united within the CMLN (Military National Liberation Committee) led by Lieutenant Moussa Traoré, brought a violent end to the 1st Republic by a coup d’état. This military committee, after having observed an extended state of emergency that lasted until 1976, proceeded to establish the 2nd Republic, also characterized by a single-party State by the name of UDPM (Democratic Union of the Malian People). This party which took itself for the only crucible of expression of the pluralistic nation of Mali resulted in disastrous public management and a predatory State that crumbled under the barrage of attacks by demonstrators in December, January, February and March 1991.

The National Conference, which took place from 29 July to 12 August 1991, brought together all elements of the Malian Nation, after a report on the state of the nation presented by the transition power, the CTAP (Transitory Committee of Public Salvation, March 1991- June 1992), led by Lieutenant-Colonel Amadou Toumani Touré. Among other laws, it adopted the draft Constitution and Charter of political parties, affording each Malian citizen the right to create or join the political group of his choice. Through this Constitution which was validated by the 12 January 1992 Referendum, Mali adopted a rule of law rooted in a pluralistic institutional architecture built on the expression and recognition of the diversity of opinion and choice of Malian men and women.

Mali, like the majority of African countries has an enormous potential of natural resources of all kinds (agricultural, aquifer, and mining) and a population in majority young. These people, bound together by several centuries of organized cohabitation , have a solid institutional heritage which has forged their way of being, and living together and with others. The envisaged policies of each of the first two Republics, that were about forming a uniform Nation under the strict control of a centralized State, denied the obvious diversity of the Malian nation that is perceptible in every part of this vast country of transition between white and black Africa.

This mismatch between political plans and the daily life and institutional references of the people is at the root of the fragility of the legitimacy of institutions and state decision-makers thus all forms of crisis and ineffectiveness of public management.

The 3rd Republic by laying the foundations for a pluralist democracy committed the country to building a legally constituted state which not only takes into account diversity, but also recognizes it. This choice to promote pluralism in the political sphere should extend to the cultural, economic and social spheres.

The decentralization of public management begun in 1999/2000; the establishment of local government and their governing bodies; and the creation of the HCC (Upper Council of Local Government) – acknowledgement at central State level of our nation’s diversity – are the first steps on the long road to the reconciliation needed between the State inherited from colonization, and society which has remained rooted in its heritage. State institutions should inevitably reach out to society to embed their legitimacy if they wish for sustainability, credibility and effectiveness.

This question opens up the debate on the democracy project and all the challenges that it engenders. What are the appropriate models (representative and/or participative)? How can choice be expressed (vote and/or consensus)? And what are the approaches to public management (lose/win and/or power sharing).

To the democracy challenge, I have added two other challenges: creating internal wealth in the country, and jobs for the youth who constitute the majority of the population. Mali, like most countries on the continent is in a paradoxical situation: huge natural potential and one of the poorest populations in the world. In my opinion, the veneer of the postcolonial Nation-State, created abroad, on Malian communities remains one of the major obstacles to the country’s development ambitions today. This Nation came into existence in 1960 with two major handicaps:
 first, that of having been thought up and constructed on needs and objectives that were totally alien to the people; consequently, it still remains too remote from these people today; and,
 Secondly, the intangibility of borders inherited from colonization built on dogma .

Fifty years after independence, we are still suffering from the difficulty of questioning the rationale that ruled at the time of establishing the colonial State. Thus, the political power established after independence, often in spite of itself, pursued the colonial endeavour of constructing a specific national identity, limited and exclusive to a territory originally conceived and designed to serve the needs of the colonizer. In Mali, as everywhere in Africa, the major-turned-obsessive policy envisaged in the first fifty years of independence was the construction of a single and homogenous nationality in a territory occupied by communities characterized first by their great human and linguistic diversity.

In building institutions – starting with the Constitution – communities and their diversity are ignored, for the benefit of exclusively emphasizing the identity of the individual and his/her nationality. The diversity in the realities of local and regional territories is obscured for the benefit of the cult of a national territory defined by borders that break up the dynamics of enduring communities.

Centralist Jacobinism has been established as a method of government even if political proclamations and laws say the opposite. Although the Constitution of 22 September 1960 declared that local government should be administered freely by elected councils and that the government representative is in charge of the State’s interests, administrative control and respect of laws, this measure remained in abeyance until the start of the 3rd Republic , which established this basic principle of decentralization.

Nowadays, and despite the establishment of decentralized local governments the people, especially in rural areas, are still considered and treated as ‘administered subjects’ who only have duties, and not as citizens who also have rights and responsibilities. This explains to a large extent, the scant concern that institutions and public decision-makers have for their legitimacy and that of their decisions. Despite ongoing attempts to build democracy for nearly two decades, the political groups and state powers that have resulted still put more into nepotism and corruption than into seeking the support of the people in their projects in so far as they have one for that matter. The worst is that practices such as the use of force and imposing forced labour as a method of social mobilisation instead of looking for the support of the people – practices developed by the colonizer and ‘recycled’ by post-colonial political and administrative powers – have ended up being presented as intrinsic to our society.

Consequently, rural and urban communities have developed two types of attitude toward the national centralized State. On the one hand, its assistance is requested because one must extract the maximum of profit for oneself and for one’s community. On the other, the central State and its dismemberments in the country remain the bête noire which grass-root communities still mistrust nowadays.

I am with those who think that the road to change will not happen by replicating political, economic and institutional models, or by rescue plans devised behind the desks of large international co-operation agencies. It is widely acknowledged nowadays that structural adjustment programmes have only produced human tragedy, and that strategic frameworks to reduce or fight poverty only give rise to a ‘wait-and-see’ attitude and despair. Individual and collective begging has been set up as a management model for society and state affairs.

To resolve the infernal equation of the growing pauperization of the people and of incessant conflicts that lead only to instability, Mali must look to come out of the dead end in which its current bad governance trends are locked. In my opinion, this is achieved by persevering in implementing two major structural reforms:

1- the decentralization of public management to involve the majority of the population in the effort to build development;

2- the promotion of regional integration to strengthen the capacity of the country to exist in a globalised world.

The decentralization of public management and integration of the country involve another way of tackling the management of state affairs. Building a democratic society for the well being of all, cannot be achieved away from values and norms known, understood and accepted by the people. These are the minimum conditions necessary for public management to be legitimate. There cannot be good management of state affairs in a country where urban and rural communities and all other social groups are totally indifferent towards public institutions. An answer to this indifference will only be found if the majority of the people can identify with the State and legitimize its institutions. Strict democracy such the one being built is not an adequate response. Each society should, at each step of its development, devise specific responses to its public management problems based on its culture and challenges, needs and demands of the time.

I shall conclude by saying that Mali, at the start of the 2nd fifty years of its independence, should rely on its age-old rich heritage to devise ways of public management that are rooted and shared by its people. Thus, governance becomes legitimate because Malian men and women of all ages and categories are in agreement, and can identify with the way in which their affairs are run, which is very far from being the case today with the type of State in place. In the area of State-building, as the popular saying goes: ‘must look for shoes that fit our feet instead of struggling to fit our feet in shoes that are obviously not the right size’.

Author: Ousmane Sy, Chair of the AGI Board and ARGA Coordinator