A Despots Guide to Education

In the past, student activism has been a force to be reckoned with. It helped end Apartheid in South Africa, was the catalyst in the end of the Vietnam War and was the loudest voice in the pro-democracy protests in China in 1989, epitomised by the infamous ‘Tank Man’ protestor of Tiananmen Square. In Malawi and Benin, students at the University of Malawi and Cotonou University led the first anti-government demonstrations in over three decades, hastening the process of democratisation in Africa (Posner, 1995).

Above: ‘Tank Man’ of the Tiananmen Square protests. Source: www.history.com

As these examples show, education can be a powerful force of history. Traditionally, dictators have not sat idly by for this force to determine their fate; on the contrary, they have actively manipulated this force as a means to serve their own ends. To understand how, it makes more sense to view dictators as skilful political agents who deploy a variety tactics to ensure their survival, rather than blundering, Sasha Baron Cohen-style characters.[1] Maintaining power in an autocracy can be viewed as a delicate balancing act: too much repression and dictators risk inciting a revolution; too much liberalisation and they risk losing their iron-grip on power. To keep this balance alive, dictators have used education policy as a vehicle to employ a variety of strongman tactics, including repression, patronage and indoctrination.

Strategy 1: Repression

One way to deal with the threat students pose is to simply intimidate, arrest and even murder prominent activists. A notorious example of this is the case of Steve Biko, the leader of the South African Students’ Organisation. In 1977, Biko was arrested and brutally murdered by the Apartheid regime. To a lesser degree, we can see this tactic in use today in Uganda. President Museveni has actively targeted popular student activists like Kizza Bisigye and consistently shut down peaceful student protests as soon as they start, with the ringleaders arrested and often given lengthy prison sentences (Parkes, 2015).

While this approach is arguably the simplest, an overreliance on heavy-handed repression can produce martyrs and intensify existing grievances. A more subtle form of repression is to simply slash funding to the education sector. This tactic is taken straight from the colonial handbook. For example, in the DRC, Belgian occupiers capped education at the primary level in order to present the emergence of an aspirational and potentially dangerous educated class of Congolese. As a result of this policy, the DRC had just 12 University graduates at the time of independence (Bayart, 1989).

Strategy 2: Patronage

Dictators also use education as a means to distribute favours (or ‘patronage’) to their support base, whilst simultaneously excluding outsiders. The benefits to this strategy are two-fold: support is consolidated amongst the ‘in’ group whilst the ‘out’ group is gradually disempowered. Patronage is often most effective when it is used to exploit pre-existing divisions in a society, such as appealing to the leaders regional, religious or ethnic group.

Education is a popular vehicle to deploy this type of favouritism. As Franck and Rainer (2009) show in Africa, the education enrolment of a particular ethnic group increases when they have 'their man’ in power. Congo-Brazzaville serves as an interesting case study for this phenomena. The country is divided into two main ethnic groups: the Mbochi in the North and the Kongo in the South. From 1960-1968, the country was ruled by ethnic Kongo rulers. This changed in a coup d’état led by Marien Ngouabi in 1968, which installed a series of Mbochi leaders for the next 24 years. The graph below shows that when Kongo leaders ruled the country, the educational completion rate of the Mbochi were significantly lower than that of the Kongo. However, after Ngouabi’s coup, the Mbochi quickly closed this gap and eventually achieved higher rates of primary school completion (and attendance, and female literacy).

Source: Franck and Rainer (2009)

Strategy 3: Indoctrination

Finally, dictators can use education as a means of indoctrination. Similar to patronage, this strategy does more than just allay the threat education can pose. By inculcating in the youth attitudes and beliefs conducive to the ruling party, indoctrination serves as a means to entrench and solidify the regime for many generations to come.

North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un serves as the undisputed poster boy for this tactic. Amidst stories of the glorious defeat of American invaders, North Korean textbooks are also reputedly littered with bizarre claims about the leader himself. Some textbooks claim that Kim Jong-Un learned to drive at age 3, won a yacht race at age 9 and scored 11 hole in ones on his first ever round of golf, only to promptly retire and to never play the sport again (Daily Mirror).

Above: Pages of a North Korea elementary school textbook. Source: http://blog.jinbo.net/

Conclusion

These examples reemphasise the idea that dictators are not simply insensitive thugs who got into power by accident. More often than not, dictators represent rational political actors versed in using the full extent of the state apparatus to ensure the survival of their regime.

Viewing dictatorship in this light confers a number of advantages. First, it guards us against the complacent idea that dictatorships will inevitably unravel due to incompetence at the top. This idea is supported by the history books, which show dictatorship as one of the most durable forms of government that humans have ever invented. Second, this rational actor framework helps explain many things beyond education policy. For example, it can explain why dictators tend to direct a disproportionate amount of public goods towards cities rather than countryside: a phenomena known as ‘urban bias’. Put simply, rioting factory workers pose more of a threat to a regime than disorganised farmers, so are placated with an unequal share of state resources.

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References

Thanks for this blog must go to Brian Klaas, my African Politics tutor at Oxford, who encouraged me to ‘see through the eyes of an elite’ when thinking about autocracy in Africa. Brian has a great book called ‘The Despots Accomplice’ which I would recommend to anyone interested in authoritarianism or democratisation around the globe. 

I would also recommend my friend Charlie Parkes’ article in the Huffington Post, which looks at the strongman tactics being deployed by President Museveni in Uganda: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/charles-parkes/uganda_b_8085226.html

Other articles referenced are given below:

•          Bayart (1989), ‘The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly’
•         Daily Mirror: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/north-korean-school-textbook-claims-5487598
•          Franck and Rainer (2009), ‘Does the Leader’s Ethnicity Matter? Ethnic Favouritism, Education and Health in Sub-Saharan Africa
•          Posner (1995), ‘Malawi’s New Dawn’

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[1] There are of course exceptions to this: most notable is perhaps Jean-Bédel Bokassa of the Central African Republic, who reputedly viewed himself as the genuine reincarnation of Napoleon Bonaparte. His coronation alone cost 10% of CAR GDP.