Moses Khisa
The ‘democratic dilemma’ remains a fundamental conundrum in much of Africa, both in the over-emphasized Sub-Saharan Africa and the often less scrutinized Arab North Africa. In fact, strictly speaking, if one were to apply the benchmarks of Western liberal democracy, North Africa can hardly produce a functioning democracy. By contrast, one can point to a number of Sub-Saharan African countries that have surged ahead on the democratic path. It is not my object here to engage in a caricature of comparisons, rather, I wish to argue that the tendency (by especially Western based Africanists and their African based acolytes, the media and the clichéd international community) to draw a sharp line between Sub-Saharan African and North Africa is misleading, it is superfluous as far as thinking about democracy in Africa is concerned.
One much talked about failure of democracy in Africa is the absence of peaceful and orderly regime change: change of leadership, or and transiting from one ruling group to another. In recent years, as popular politics and electioneering gathered ground, and faced with the possibility of electoral ineligibility due to constitutional provisions that restrict terms of office to two; some African leaders resorted to what in political analyses parlance is now referred to as “life-presidency:” securing life-eligibility for presidency through constitutional engineering. The most recent case of constitutional manipulation to secure indefinite qualification to contest presidential elections took place in Algeria – a North-African country. In the same region, Libya does not hold elections, it has a monarch of some sorts, in power since 1969 and is popularizing a despicable ideology across Africa that ‘revolutionaries’ do not retire; Egypt’s Hossan Mubarak has been in power since 1984 and “wins” elections at will; Omar El Bashir of Sudan, now wanted by the International Criminal Court in the Hague for war crimes and crimes against humanity, has ruled Africa’s largest country since 1989 and shows no signs of stepping down. The situation is not any better across to the northwest in Tunisia and Morocco. What I am trying to underscore here is that the democratic deficit pervades Africa as much as some irreversible democratic gains can be discerned: Ghana, Mozambique, South Africa, Benin have recently surged ahead on the democratic path, joining the old frontrunners like Botswana, Mauritius, Seychelles, Tanzania. I found it worthwhile to make this clarification by citing examples from North Africa because this part of Africa is somehow exempted from democratic scrutiny in much of the literature on African politics for no apparent if convincing reason. Some uncanny theorizations and commentaries on African politics divorce North Africa from the rest of Africa, assigning it instead to the Arab Middle East if anything for ineluctable cultural linkages yet North African leaders like Libya’s Muamar Gaddafi has been rallying Africa (and NOT the Middle East) to shun western liberal democracy anchored on, among other things, electoral politics.
In thinking about problems of democracy and development, another frivolous dichotomy has been a standard procedure: those who look out for an essentialist Africanicity/African-ness on the one hand, and those who emphasize the external production of Africa under conditions of Western modernity. At a philosophical level, while the former searches for an internal unique feature in the African Self to account for social-political phenomena, the latter is bent on confronting “Othering” the African through slavery, colonialism, apartheid and the contemporary imperial hegemonic order; if the former look out for the internally generated consciousness, the apropos of the latter is an externally produced African subjectivity. Then there is the third trend that trades across the dichotomy of internal uniqueness and external constructiveness of Africa. This treats Africa as a discipline but without historical legitimacy, such that approximations are searched through analogy seeking. Accordingly, there is a putative unified and unitary entity – Africa – available as an un-modulated object of inquiry by especially Area-Studies’ specialists in the Euro-American academe.
The analogy seeking takes African studies as a speculative vocation indulged in by, to use Mahmood Mamdani’s words, “many a stargazing academic perched in distant ivory towers.” Clearly all these strands of thought present (and ipso facto misrepresent) Africa as a homogeneous entity, treated with such fetish, as sui generis. Why? The Pope recently provided some insights worth listening to. On his first tour of Africa a few months ago, Pope Benedict XVI, speaking at a congregation in the Angolan capital Luanda took occasion to comment on the situation in Africa: the “African problem”: “This experience is all too familiar to Africa as a whole,” the venerable pontiff remarked; he continued to delineate this familiar experience: “the destructive power of civil strife, the descent into a maelstrom of hatred and revenge, the squandering of the efforts of generations of good people.” The Pope was addressing an audience of a country that is struggling to exorcise the pangs of years of brutal civil strife –Angola– but seemed to have encouraged his audience to take heart, as this was a problem not peculiar to them but pervades the continent. What the Pope seems to suggest is that it is Africa’s intrinsic predestination to be caught up in vicious fratricidal wars and violent inter-ethnic hostilities. For the Pope, every part of Africa is familiar with, and has suffered at the hands of destructive power. But the good Pope may be interested to know that the Republic of Tanzania has not experienced “destructive power of civil strife” since gaining independence in 1961; Botswana has maintained a functional democratic tradition and attained impressive social transformation; the same can be said about Seychelles and Mauritius; Zambia and Malawi are some of the poorest countries in the world yet their recent democratic trajectories have been stable and promising.
The totalizing conception of Africa has, for much of the post-independence period, not only spawned a plethora of literature but also informed the humanitarian activities of Western charities working with local ancillaries. Little wonder that the major International Financial Institutions, to wit, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) have most of their client countries in Africa, making provision of aid and loan-funds to Africa, perhaps, the single most ubiquitous international relations factor, weaving most sub-Saharan African countries into a bloc-spatial field of operation for the IMF and WB. Even when studies have been conducted on individual African states, the conclusions arrived at are taken by these “development-interventionists” to apply across sub-Saharan Africa whose expanse land-body is home to no less than fifty independent countries. Notwithstanding glaring socio-economic and demographic differentiations, variegated social-cultural trends, disparate ideological and political trajectories, it still sounds plausible - if not acceptable - to talk about “Africa”, without regard to disaggregating it.
The strand of thinking that has for long accented external forces as responsible for African pathologies now lays the blame squarely on transitional financial power, to wit, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank (WB), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the G-8, whose policies especially - Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) - fore grounded technocratic and managerial efficiency while sidestepping popular democratic accountability and public scrutiny. This has been a recurrent argument by mostly Africanists influenced by the Marxist tradition. But this does not tell us the whole story. Expecting transnational capital to engender genuine democracy would be the most naïve intellectual mindset. The IMF and WB’s SAPs were never intended to deepen a sustainable democratic tradition. To make sense of the democratic deficit would require taking stock of the contours of local politics and the reconstitution of state power to serve a certain political agenda. In that regard the more convincing argument would be to say that a confluence of the neo-liberal thrust of rolling back the state through SAPs and the determination to hold state power by the ruling elite in many Africa countries ushered in a mutually beneficial domain of politics. For as along as a cosmetic semblance of participatory democracy could be maintained, and to the extent that repressive African regimes ensured a peaceful environment for neo-liberal reforms to flourish, transnational power players were content and unbothered by the torpedoing of democracy.
To argue, as some scholars have done, that African leaders hoodwinked donors to believe that they were indeed seriously implementing democratic reforms is to gloss over the pragmatism of transnational power situating at its helm the Bretton Woods institutions, the London and Paris Clubs, the G-8 and other players like the USAID. As long as African countries implemented market reforms, to wit: assure a deregulated market system while ensuring macro-economic stability, overhaul the public service, expedite privatization (however haphazard), and posit impressive economic growth while keeping inflation rates under check; the IMF, the World Bank, and other external financiers remained largely unbothered by the political developments. Part of their apolitical position rested on a disingenuous claim that their home charters and international law norms generally prohibited them from involvement in political matters of a foreign country yet, needless to say, the process through which African government negotiated with the external financiers and adopted SAPs, among other things, was no less political.
Central to the democratic deficit is the abstract entity called the state, or to be specific the “African state.” It is widely held that there is a problem with this “African state,” and this concern has for decades led to much discussion as to what its proper role is or should be. Confronted with the unending state crises and the adjudged failure of various state led developmentalist governance models, there have emerged calls to think beyond the state in an increasingly transnational world, a call famously trumpeted by Arjun Appadurai. This call, if heeded, would be oblivious to the marginal status of African states in the global power schema. Interestingly, that call is deemed necessary for economically peripheral countries of the third world while the rich Western countries maintain strong state capacities. The heightening of global capitalist networks has pushed much of Africa to the margins of global capital. Many African states are currently more socially fragile, politically unstable and economically attenuated than they were in the immediate post-independence decades. To loose track of this ramification of the shift in global power configurations is to miss the big picture of what many African countries have to grapple with.
I countenance the assertion by some aAfricanists that the African continent is condemned to democracy, in the sense that the development of Africa’s full potentialities on the basis of the aspirations of the majority can only be possible within the framework of democratic politics. To be sure, Africa has experimented with all sorts of governance systems: from immediate post-independence quasi parliamentary democracies and constitutional monarchies of the 1950s and 60s to one-party states of the 1980s; from outright military dictatorships in the 1970s to pseudo multi-party pretensions in the 1990s, only one current has claimed the last laugh – democracy. I still cling onto the somewhat old-fashioned conviction – for which I offer no apologies - that a sustainable approach to most of the problems bedeviling the African continent must necessarily entail a process of popular politics, and that process can only be democratization. While some elements of African scholarship are tempered with moralistic prejudice, the practicalities of African politics are shaping new ways of pushing the frontiers of democracy on the continent. As the Afro-pessimists disingenuously divert the attention of demands for genuine democracy and freedom, African peoples are increasingly taking matters in their hands.
The recent events in Kenya (early 2008) and Zimbabwe (late 2008/early2009) are testimony to the power of collective action in forging a desirable democratic dispensation. The people of Kenya stood up against the Mwai Kibaki establishment, to reject the results of a rigged election. Zimbabweans surmounted all odds to vote against Robert Mugabe and his ruling ZANU/PF party. No amount of imported methods and practices shall hold together democracy in Africa; the copy and paste mentality has proved untenable, thus the African people have to chart their own course of democratic and social transformation. State systems and praxes must perforce be subject to internal public scrutiny if the democratic deficit is to be fixed. The embrace of popular politics through electioneering has come under virulent denigration by especially arrogant elites. But to dismiss popular politics, and even populist policies as necessarily democratically regressive is to wish away a whole dynamic domain of state-society engagement whose irreversibility is no small feat in the democratic strength of the country. No body can rule out for sure the eventuality of the same populist policies that hold together a seemingly undesirable system and sustain a certain regime of power producing the forces that unleash a rapturous passage to a desirable political system
