he set up extractive institutions to cement his power and extract the output the rest of society would produce. But even extractive institutions with central authority concentrated in his hands were an improvement over the situation without any law and order, central authority, or property rights that characterized the Lele society on the other side of the river Kasai. Such lack of order and central authority has been the fate of many African nations in recent decades, partly because the process of political centralization was historically delayed in much of sub-Saharan Africa, but also because the vicious circle of extractive institutions reversed any state centralization that existed, paving the way for state failure.
