When the winds of democratic change started blowing hard
from the early 1990s, Africans took to multi-partyism with gusto. In
countries like Benin and Zambia, voters took the opportunity to sweep
away entrenched ruling parties with landslide majorities.
But in others like Zaire and Togo and Kenya, canny dictators found creative ways of hanging on through divide-and-rule.
Multi-party elections didn’t seem to have
stabilised the situation. And by no means did election rigging become
history. It only become more subtle, more sophisticated. Old-style
constitutions and their legal mechanisms were deemed to give the ruling
establishments an insurmountable head start. Upstart parties were
unlikely to get a fair shake at power.
From the start, pro-democracy forces figured out
that changing these constitutions to bring the “fair” into “free”
elections was the way to go. The Francophone states, especially those in
West Africa, were quick to realise this. Others like Zimbabwe cottoned
on much later. As of now Tanzania is still on its baby steps to rewrite
its constitution, whose architecture is heavily weighted in favour of
the almighty Chama cha Mapinduzi.
At the point we are, “democracy” seems to have
stagnated in many African countries. Violent disputes are the norm even
when an election has been universally adjudged to be free and fair. In
Egypt, Mohammed Morsy won a ringing electoral endorsement but within a
year the barricades were up again in Tahrir Square. He was swiftly
ousted by the army.
A more or less similar happenstance occurred in
Madagascar during the tenure of Marc Ravalomanana, who was elected in
2002. But before he could conclude his tenure, a former deejay then
serving as mayor of Antananarivo organised a furious uprising that threw
out the incumbent. The ex-deejay, Andry Rajoelina, was quickly
installed by the the army.
Winner-takes-all
The oft-cited problem in Egypt is that Morsy’s
long-suppressed Muslim Brotherhood went on a power-accumulation spree,
totally shutting out the liberals and secularists. This is a problem
that, to a large degree, is replicated in sub-Saharan Africa countries,
where multi-partyism came with the sting of winner-takes-all. One-party
autocracies were of course much worse, but they took the trouble to give
a veneer of inclusivity for marginalised groups.
Yet the bigger problem in Africa is that
institutions set up to arbitrate power, or to cushion those who suffer
an electoral loss, tend to be disregarded, or, in the worst scenario,
are dismissed as weak. In the US, George W. Bush openly lost the
majority vote to Al Gore in 2000. A hugely controversial and legalistic
sleight of hand by the Supreme Court handed the presidency to Bush. If
that had happened in an average African country, there would have been
unprecedented violence. And yet, all the parties in the US election
accepted the court ruling.
Madagascan presidential candidate
Robinson Jean Louis (in the background ) delivers a speech during a
rally in Antananarivo on October 26, 2013, the day after the first round
of presidential elections. PHOTO | AFP
In Africa, the biggest flashpoints are the
electoral bodies that manage elections. The latest case is Guinea, where
the long-delayed parliamentary elections have been thrown into a spin
after the opposition rejected the fairness of the electoral commission.
In post-election Kenya and Zimbabwe, there is residual bitterness within
the respective opposition groupings because they have never reconciled
themselves to the outcomes that consigned them to defeat.
Undeniably, there is a tendency in Africa to
over-dramatise things. As can be seen from the recent spectacle of the
US government shutdown, extreme political polarisation is certainly not
unique to this continent. What is distressing about Africa is
the-all-too-often spectre of violence that accompanies the polarisation,
and especially whenever elections are disputed, as they almost always
are.
Better alternative
Nobody in the world has yet devised a better
alternative to democratic elections as a means for transferring power
fairly. It is true misrule occurs in democracies just as it does in
autocracies (Nigeria is a glaring example of a freewheeling democracy
that is very badly run). The saving grace in democracies is that there
are periodic opportunities of changing the government.
Africa has a pronounced tendency of
conceptualising democracy in a superficial, text-book fashion. The art
of give-and-take, of compromise, is treated as alien. Instead,
everything boils down to a zero-sum game. Kenya and Zimbabwe have
experimented with power-sharing between opposing parties following
post-election stalemates. The unique thing was that the arrangement was
largely imposed by foreign powers.
Nonetheless, in both countries the arrangement
became bitterly antagonistic and hardly soothed the tensions it was
meant to contain in the first place. The entangled parties sought to
break away when the earliest opportunity presented itself.
The challenge for Africa is to build polities
where democracy is rooted on civility and conciliation. There is too
much grand-standing, too much acrimony, especially during and
immediately after elections.
You can bet that once the final results of last
week’s Madagascar presidential election are announced, it will be back
to the same old drama of defeated parties noisily rejecting the outcome.
The culture of democracy in Africa clearly has some way to go before it
properly flowers.
SOURCE: AFRICA REVIEW
SOURCE: AFRICA REVIEW
