It sounds like a joke to even slightly speculate the existence of a government that does not govern. The irony strikes the mind and a set of questions quickly kick in. What is the essence of a government if not governing? What people on earth would accept such a government to be theirs? Does such a government exist anywhere known in this world? It is neither a thought tweaking proposition nor a joke in cosmic philosophy but our contemporary world is awash with authoritative functionaries who pose like proper governments as an outer shell, but in fact rule their people as conquered societies whose common will and aspirations must be subdued. The only aspect of governing they practice is that of a ruler whose role must be seen as the strong, the master and the feared. The rest of the art of governing, becomes incompatible with the strong, the master and the feared, and thus, inconceivable to these rulers as its not desirable. 

As a result, societies of the Third World are mostly under the grip of recalcitrant and ruthless rulers who never bother to struggle with the political complexities of their countries. Their interest in the public service are not very different from each other. The pleasing sense of being recognized as the most powerful in their own cultures appears to be the prime common denominator of these rulers. In addition, lining up their deep empty pockets is either their ultimate end to power, or a secondary but closely important motivation. Seen through these two premises (power and money), governments instituted and policies exercised under these rulers, divergently depart with our most rudimentary understanding of the essence of governing and policy making.   

These Third World governments (mostly African) defy any easy articulation of their kind, both in form and content. The formation of the government usually considers two factors. First, appearing to the outside world as a full-fledged legitimate government, which of course entails calling the person at the helm as "the president" and the rest of the gang "the ministers". Second, the careful appointment of loyal individuals as the "custodians" of nominal portfolios in dozens of ministries. These individuals must be under no illusion that their role, as members of the government, is solely to help the patriarchal ruler realize his ends: to remain in power and to accumulate wealth. Favorably, they should also have similar aims, albeit lesser aims in scope and limitations.  

Their symbolic appearance as a full-fledged government has its importance in its external; appeal and international interactions. Such a government typically owes its existence and even legitimacy to the hand-outs of the international community. What is calling itself a government, therefore, is a ruler whose quest for power is the only way he knows how to attain self actualization of a peculiar kind: feeling relevant and recognized as important in his own culture and enjoying the luxury of richness in material terms, in the form of estates, gainful trades and stashed cash in distant anonymous banks.  

Ironically, for all practical purposes, the ruling group is usually under no naiveté that they lack any modest attributions of a government. They are very aware, that what is required of them is the simple pass of a credibility test in the international arena, especially the donor countries and the United Nations. The test includes mastering the official procedures of governments in international circles as well as the portrayal of governmental symbolism. They play two inherently contradictory roles in their domestic and international operations 

Compared to the international one, the domestic role is simple. Carrying a shinny, silver tipped, little stick under his arm-bit - so reminiscent of a colonial governor - often enhances the ruler's image of appearing presidential and in control. It seems as though the position of the presidency is not enough for these leaders. Wild claims of total wisdom and uniqueness fill the air. Dubious titles of self-aggrandizement and ego boosting are accorded to the 'president', such as, the father of the nation, the all too powerful, the light of Africa, the mighty warrior, the king of kings, the muwalimu (teacher) and many others. Implicit in these titles is the intentional conveyance of the message: there is no law in the land except the utterances of the ruler. Consequently, legal jurisprudence and even routine administrative procedures would be derived from the speeches, decrees and mere rhetoric of the ruler. Public institutions and the bureaucracy who runs them become agents of implementation and enforcement only. The daunting task of initiating, formulating and delivering any kind of a social policy is relieved from hands of the bureaucracy. The public sphere slowly deteriorates both in quantity and quality. 

 Internationally, a typical 'president', would insist that he only meets with his counterpart of the host country. Who receives him at the airport often becomes a big issue. In addition, long waits before a meeting usually annoys him as a slight to his stature and as a sign of his irrelevance. That insistence - demand indeed- of a red-carpet reception stems from their inner awareness that they are very far from a national government, that they are a government if the world says so, and that official mistreatment might be an early indication of a bad report card; hence a failing grade in the test. Most importantly, their continued appearance as government to their populations would be in jeopardy.

 The structural nature of the international system worked, until lately, in favor of these despots. The world is made up of states and international interactions take place between the states. The system is designed in such a permissive way that states are equal in principle. This makes the 'Ruritanias' of the world to equate themselves with the U.S.A. and since the president of the US is representative of his nation, so is the 'president' of 'Ruritania'. The peoples of the world are, thus, known through a global landscape of state icons that are less than two hundred in their current tally. A great majority of them are not states at all, in the Westphalian sense of statehood. At best, some of them would qualify as quasi-states. At the end of the spectrum, however, there is a third group, mostly African 'states', who are nothing but feudal rulers wielding state sovereignty and international legitimacy. Since the so called 'free-ride' of the Cold-War era is no longer there to support them, the thriving enterprises of these rulers become bankrupt. The recent phenomena of collapsed states is in fact the crumbling of feudal entities who lost their importance after the end of the Cold War. 

At the zenith of their power, the days when the international community poured praise and money to their coffers, their domestic behavior was like a bunch of drunkards, with complete disregard of their domestic front. Brute force and repression was preferred over the application of governmental fair handedness and objectivity. Every possible opportunity was taken to show the public that they are in the saddle for their own interest at the expense of the common-good. With this kind of a relationship to their population, choking off the financial flow renders them vulnerable and not to withstand the fury of the people. Understandably too paranoid of a possible tilt towards that dreaded fait, it becomes an obsession to them to constantly gauge and probe into how the world regards them. In the event of a poor rating - sometimes giving the cold shoulder to them is just about enough - the world of the 'feared' is never the same. If the reputation of ruthlessness used to be the best currency of the feared, it abruptly becomes the inescapable horror that haunts him. Whatever essentially was a solid asset for their continuity and legitimacy turns into a liability and a pay back time of their making starts. The real nature of the interest group starts to become clearer and up close to the people. Astonishingly, the army disappears and police dissolves. The day of the slum boys arrives and life in the capital becomes a "hell on earth". The man who used to call himself as the master, the powerful and the feared, turns into the serf, the powerless and the coward. Along with his group, he flees away leaving behind everything he accumulated when the skies was so laden with generosities from unassuming nations of distant lands. This typically accounts for such rogue rulers like Barre, Amin, Bokasa, Mengistu, Doe (who never made it), Taraore, Bongo, Mobutu, and many others. The prime candidates of the same fate are Moi, Mugabe, Chilupa, Guelleh, Kabila, Al-Bashir, and others.  

At the end of it all, neither the interest of the ruler nor the needs of the people are realized. Invariably their destiny - and that of their entourage - ends with an abrupt exile. Curiously, most of them die shortly after that. One wonders who owns and enjoys the  $6 billions of Mobutu Seso Seko Kuku now, since he is dead. In any way you cut or slice it, their whole effort boils down to utter absurdity.  So you think it is a bleak picture of Africa? Well, wait until you see the next generation of African 'presidents'. Those who failed themselves and their countries succeeded in shaping the political culture of their countries under their image.  

Consider "Chicago" I refer not to Chicago, Illinois, but a slum district of Abidjan, which the young toughs in the have named after the American city. It is a slum: a check work of corrugated zinc roofs and walls made of cardboards and black plastic wrap. It is located in a gully teeming with coconut palms and is ravaged by flooding. The crumbly red latrine earth crawls with foot long lizards both inside and outside the shacks. Children defecate in a stream filled with garbage and pigs, droning with malarial mosquitoes. In this stream women do the washing. Young unemployed men spend their time drinking beer, while gambling. These youth rob houses in more prosperous Ivorian neibourhoods at night.

• Meet Damba Tasele. He came to Chicago from Burkina Fasso in 1963. A cook by profession. He has four wives and thirty-two children. Out of Chicago - he heard an uprising in Sierra Leon - and joined the boys there. After three days of stone throwing the 'government"  fell. The boys who took power in Sierra Leon came from houses like Chicago. In three months, these boys confiscated (Tesele leading them) all the 'official' Mercedes, Volvos, and BMW's and willfully wracked them on the road, in order to erase the humiliation and mitigate the power that the middle class held over him.

• Meet Gen. Mohamed Farah Aideed. He looted the Somali capital, Mogadishu. Killed close to 1/2 a million of Somali population. Starved to death over 1/4 of a million. Sent 1/2 a million into internal displacement within Somalia. Close to a million went into refugee camps in neighboring countries and elsewhere. Destroyed most of Somali cities in the south: Mogadishu, Kismayu, Baidoa, Merca, Brava, Beletwein, Galkayo and others. With that complete and behind him in four years, he called himself the Somali 'president'. At the time he only rules less than a 1/4 of the Somali capital. What is significant about that is the fact that he never bothered whether the world recognizes him as a president or not. He died in a gun-battle trying to expand his tiny turf in Mogadishu.

• Meet Hussein M. F. Aideed. He rules less area than his father used to. He calls himself as His Excellency Hussein Aideed. Similarly he is not seeking a world affirmation of his authority. After all, why bother if he is able to print trash money and rip the population off every so often. That was his prime interest anyway.

• Meet Abdi Qassim Salat Hassan. He shares turf with Hussein Aideed, Qanyare, Atto and Muse Sudi Yalahow. He keeps a throng of several hundred people in family houses and hotels, and calls them as his 'government'. He wasted no time in printing his share of the trash money. Unlike the other two, he would want international recognition but he seems that he is unaware of the changed nature of the international system. As a typical African ruler, he unwittingly concentrated on the international front and disregarded the domestic one. Consequently he lost them both. It is always curious why the two tasks can not be done simultaneously. As it appears these African rulers cannot chew a gum and climp stairs at the same time.

The list of ruler wanna-bees is long. It is almost safe to say that in every African country there is an aspiring Savimbi waiting for an opportune time. There are two major thinking at play here. First, the erroneous conception of governance in the minds of such men. Second, they tend to equate themselves with the late ruler and genuinely believe that it is a business they can very leisurely do, the reasoning being: if Siad Barre can do it, I am sure I can and with flying colors. 

In Somali setting, we all recall Faay Cali and Mooryaan (the likes of Demba Tasele). Why Abdi Qassim is now calling himself the Somali 'President' should not be all that mysterious. To his mind a government is whatever Somalia has done after independence and the kind of rule it had: Barre. Curiously, why Barre failed is not at all a relevant inquiry for Abdi Qassim.

"After forty - five years, I have never seen things so bad. We did not manage ourselves well after the British departed. But what we have now is something worse - the revenge of the poor, of the social failures, of the people least able to bring up children in modern society." --- Sierra Leon Minister of Education.

DOURQUN.

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