Africa’s budding democracy should be encouraged to grow

TWO YEARS ago the Economist news magazine published an article on Africa’s budding democracy entitled “a glass half-full.” The article compared Senegal with Mali where in the former, the President conceded electoral defeat to a much younger rival and Mali where junior army officers then stormed and looted the Presidential palace in the capital Bamako, abruptly ending a 20 year stretch of democracy that had raised hopes for the wider West African region. Although Africa has such sad tales like that of Mali, there is optimism in general about prospects for democracy in Africa. Even in countries dubbed difficult with poor annual democratic indices, there are fairly regular parliamentary and presidential elections. It is not unreasonable to suggest that while reflecting on what constitutes a free and fair election we should also reflect at the same time on what constitutes democracy more broadly. We should from the outset liberate ourselves from the idea that elections are equal to democracy. Of equal importance is the fact that there is a growing and unfortunately deepening lack of faith in national political institutions among citizens not only of Africa but the entire world. Although each national context has its own distinctive features, the declining passion for electoral politics in some parts of the world is troubling for the future of democracy. This is more so in the Western world where democracy is being diminished to little more than a liberal oligarchy of the rule by the few in form of elections without the substance of the will of the people being secured. Elections in Nigeria in 2011, Africa’s most populous nation are a case in point. The case of Kenya following the elections of March 2013 is another case of interest. The aftermath of last year’s elections in Kenya is tempting to comment on. The stalemate caused by the said elections remains a grim reminder that democracy in Africa is more that just casting the ballot paper and waiting for the outcome of the vote. The death and carnage that arose from disputes and the hardened positions in 2007 and last year 2013 of the victors and losers coupled with the high stakes involved shows that the struggle for democracy is a hard and long road for Africa. The said Kenya’s Presidential elections that resulted in a stalemate were ultimately resolved through the country’s Supreme Court. Kenyans demonstrated to the world the triumph of democracy. The United States roadmap for democratization published in the early 1990s listed the steps to the promised land of democracy as: struggle, transition, institutionalization, elections and consolidation. This roadmap, prescriptive as it appears, does not seem to work for us in Africa. It should be understood that democracy in Africa is about sharing of resources; it is about peace and security for the man and the woman on the street. It is indeed about the guarantee of basic rights and freedoms as enshrined in the constitution. While it has been agued that democracy and a robust civil society emerge together, it can be said that in developed countries, like the United Kingdom for example, this took nearly seven centuries. This can be attributed to power struggles between the local elites and the central monarchy, not the activity of the masses. Democracy came later. But most importantly, as it has been agued, civil society was achieved in a way that did not destroy a sense of national unity. For Africa to enjoy the fruits of genuine democracy and avoid the devastating conflicts of the 1980s and 1990s, popularly known as the lost decades, we need to do more than just wait to cast our much cherished ballots, the seemingly magic bullet to all that we lost. As has been aptly observed by Patrick Smith, the editor of a London-based newsletter, ‘Africa Confidential’, politics in Africa remains too often an expensive game with the spoils of office being shared between members of the same elite wearing different political colours. For the development of popular and stable democracies in Africa, we need more that routine general elections. Democracy should strive to be participatory, consultative, transparent and publicly accountable. Ultimately, democratic governance rests on the consent of the governed. The writer is a consultant and visiting lecturer at the RDF Senior Command and Staff College, Nyakinama

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Africa’s budding democracy should be encouraged to grow