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Abstract
This dissertation contributes to the literature on the sociology and politics of contemporary state-building in the more marginalized parts of the world's political economy. It sheds light on why state-building efforts fail in some of the seemingly most propitious cases. It explains why patronage-based political systems become the primary foundations of authority in these cases and describes how these organizations develop. This dissertation specifically looks at why Namibia's Cold War era liberation organization South West African Peoples' Organization (SWAPO) failed to embark on a successful state-building project upon independence from apartheid South African occupation in 1990. Namibia is thus used as a ‘hard case’ to explore why a recent liberation organization would not use its bureaucratic and economic inheritance to mimic successful historical and contemporary state-building projects. Instead, the leadership based its authority on personal control of state resources, the construction of clientilist networks, and attacks on the most productive sectors of the economy even though at the time of Namibia's independence in 1990, the connection between patronage politics and political turmoil amidst economic impoverishment was widely known. One would have expected SWAPO to learn from the experiences of other African countries. What accounts for this paradoxical choice?
This dissertation provides an answer through a close examination and research of the internal politics of SWAPO from its initiation in the early 1960s to the present. It shows that the dynamics of resource acquisition de-emphasized the role of organizational leadership within Namibia from the very beginning. In fact, it was in the interest of the exiled leadership to ensure that grassroots leaders did not become popular enough to challenge their authority. The sudden loss of options in economic strategies in the late 1980s probably played an important role in undermining the organizational cohesiveness of SWAPO, forcing its leadership to consider other political resources. The necessities of electoral competition in this instance enhanced pressures toward patronage-based personalist politics in order to appease voters.
