allAfrica.com: Botswana: Too Much Respect And Leverage Accorded Electoral Losers (Page 1 of 1)

Last December, the people of Kenya spoke and they did so in an undisputedly peaceful but loud and clear voice.

Then, an electoral thief, naked of any democratic intentions, streaked across the country's political landscape, inviting violence and the sudden appearances of sleepy, retired African presidents.

Desmond Tutu, Graca Machel and even the lacklustre Benjamin Mkapa of Tanzania all rushed for television cameras in Nairobi as "elder states-people" but more to remind the world that they were still alive than to solve Kenya's self-inflicted wounds. Even former presidents Joaquim Chissano and Ketumile Masire of Mozambique and Botswana, respectively, also rushed there.

The African Union (AU)'s Chairman, Ben Kufuor, also flew into Nairobi to mediate and suffered diplomatic humiliation as neither Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki nor the presumed winner of the election, Raila Odinga, cared to listen to him. So much for African solutions to African problems! Enter Kofi Annan, the former UN Secretary General. Annan is credited with bringing calm to Kenya by making the two protagonists come together, something that was being prevented by their underlings.

Annan told the winner, Raila Odinga, the people's choice, to get off his pedestal and come down while extolling the loser, Mwai Kibaki, to "come on up."

Annan's remedy was to reward the loser Kibaki with half of the pie that he did not deserve according to the people's votes, not to mention the pivotal bargaining power that he was unwittingly granted or left with.

A precedent is an example where the rules have been broken so they can be broken another time. And Annan set a very bad precedent. This was a travesty of people's wishes. Why, then, bother to vote at all if the outcome is to be negotiated later?

Granted, Annan's quick-fix, band-aid solution slowed down the trickle of dead bodies into mortuaries but, regrettably, it was a very dangerous precedent which will cost more African lives than it saves.

Now, there is this man called Robert Mugabe, a master at rigging elections. He is known to have assisted Sam Nujoma in Namibia where the Democratic Turnhalle Alliance of Namibia posed an electoral threat to Nujoma and his SWAPO during the elections that ushered independence to Namibia.

Mugabe's mastery of electoral thievery was adopted by Mwai Kibaki. Stolen elections have a life of their own as evidenced by the sad, unnecessary loss of life in Kenya. I sit here wondering what might happen to my country of Zimbabwe now that Mugabe's subordinates are spoiling for an undeserved run-off election.

The parallels with the Kenya tragedy are striking and scary: The opposition, in a panic, announces that it is winning and leading in the vote count.The opposition is actually leading but it's still early yet The government, not the Electoral body, denies it. No results are being issued and people are getting restless.

The Electoral Commission plays coy and delays announcing the results; no credible reason is given for the delay. The losing incumbent suddenly "overtakes" the leading opposition candidate in the vote count The Electoral Commission continues to play coy with the results and, surprisingly, refuses to divulge the numbers.The anger is simmering...and then came the explosion.

And the eruption of violence farvours the losing incumbent who clamps down on the country in the name of restoring law and order. And this exercise, almost always, is meant to silence the presumed winner to make him an afterthought while the country is being saved from itself by a losing president, who conveniently forgets he started the bonfire.

Kibaki's behaviour before, during and after the December elections has all the hallmarks of Mugabe's arrogance, almost word for word. While Kibaki learned to rig from Mugabe, today Mugabe is learning from Kibaki on how to behave and manipulate the people, the nation and the media during and after vote counting. After all, a precedent was set by Annan when Kenya experienced such an electoral burglary: you don't have to win to remain president.Mugabe is waiting for Kofi Annan to go to Zimbabwe to give him what the people of Zimbabwe denied him.

When negotiators take something away from the winner, when they minimize the will of the people and actually reward a loser, they do the people a great injustice, a dangerous and painful injustice.Stop-gap measures, such as Kofi Annan used in Kenya, should never be employed.Africa, its leaders and diplomats should never seek to appease a man rejected at the polls and put him at par with the man voted for by the people. The heart of the matter is that a loser should be treated as a loser and, should there be need to negotiate, the losing president should simply be told to accept the results of the election, period.

Why do we accord losing candidates so much leeway and acquiesce when they hold a nation at ransom? By so doing, we encourage losers to defy people's wishes and hope for some other settlement other than the one passed by the people in the voting booths. Rules should never be bent to appease one desperate individual, or any president just because he is considered by other presidents to be "one of us."

Given ZANU-PF's propensity for violence, we should be thankful that so far there has not been a full-blown outbreak of violence but when electoral bodies play around with people's expectations and not releasing the results, we might see a different progression of matters and put people's lives at risk while toying around with a spent but extremely dangerous dictator.

Instead of going to Kenya and shepherding a wayward loser into simply accepting election results, Annan disregarded the people's decision and compromised. And when we compromise, none of us gets what we wanted in the first place. Annan's deal gave Kibaki what the people of Kenya had denied him; Annan gave Kibaki what he did not deserve. Kibaki got what the Kenyan people did not want him to have but Annan gave it to him. And, sadly, on the other hand, the winner was forced to go before international television cameras to accept less than what his own people had given him.

From Odinga's political kitchen, Kibaki was dishing and serving a small portion of food to Odinga and Mugabe was watching!

You negotiate with democratically inclined leaders, not with dictators. Annan's "solution" in Kenya should, maybe, be applauded for diminishing violence, but it should also be taken for what it is: an encouragement to sitting dictators to rig elections and hold on tight till a "peacemaker", eh, Kofi Annan is called in to steal from the voters and appease an electoral thief.Africa does not need another Kenya. Africa does not need to continue seeing the triumph of barbarism over reason. Everyone is watching what is happening in Zimbabwe because it's not going to be the last time for Africa.

I applaud South Africa's warning to Mugabe's trigger happy Service Chiefs that a coup would not be tolerated. That helped more than people realise.

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