Thandika Mkandawire
18 April 2008
opinion
Nairobi — African leaders exhibit a wide array of unethical ways when it comes to the capturing, retention and exercising of political power, the long-term result being the tendency by a people denied the right to a free choice of their leaders to write electoral lists in blood, writes THANDIKA MKANDAWIRE
Around election time, one of the problems we are faced with in Africa is that many leaders seem to think the issue is not voters choosing leaders, but rather leaders choosing voters. This way of seeing things reminds me of playwright Bertolt Brecht's observation: "Would it not be easier for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?" Theoreticians of democracy suggest that democracy consists of institutionalised uncertainty of outcomes. One way to reduce this uncertainty is to choose who votes. And there seems to be no lack of imagination when it comes to how this can be done.
One way of choosing voters is through manipulation of constitutional arrangements. We saw this, for example, in the immediate post-independence period when popularly elected leaders decided that they liked the behaviour of the first electorate and simply refused to accept that any electorate in the future might have different preferences.
Thus, declaring oneself "Life President" became an effective pre-emptive strategy for making inter-generational choices among voters. Indeed, in the 1990s Hastings Banda explained to Malawian voters that there was no point in holding another election because he had received his mandate to deny them the right to vote from voters in the 1960s.
The "classic" approach is brazen theft of the vote: simple election rigging. This has several variants, either rejecting some voters by not counting their votes, counting the favoured ones several times, or creating ghost voters whose voices fill the ballot boxes.
When caught in the act, some of the people involved in electoral rigging have actually responded with the recently all-too-familiar, feel-good consolation: even the Americans rig elections, as witnessed in Florida. Thus Jonathan Moyo, then Minister for Information in Zimbabwe, whose election had raised serious questions about fairness, relished the opportunity of America being caught red-handed.
Democracy means rule of the demos, although it does not say exactly who the "demos" is. Many African leaders have exploited this lacuna, taking the prerogative to define the demos as that which ensures their re-election. This approach to choosing voters entails the introduction of criteria to exclude certain individuals or groups.
There are many ways to do this, one being simply to deny certain ethnic groups or individuals their citizenship rights. A recent egregious case is Côte d'Ivoire, where the mumbo jumbo of "Ivoiritée" has been used to disenfranchise a whole region of the country.
Zambia offers another striking case from the mid-1990s, when the Frederick Chiluba government deported UNIP politicians William Banda and John Chinula to Malawi as illegal immigrants, although authorities had not previously questioned their nationality. (It turned out that Chiluba himself was born in the Congo!) The government of Tanzania has also used its powers selectively to deny nationality.
In 2002 Jenerali Ulimwengu- MP, opponent of Benjamin Mkapa and a veteran journalist- was declared a noncitizen. And in 1980s Nigeria, Alhaji Shugaba, the majority leader of the Borno State House of Assembly, was deported after political foes had him declared an alien.
Ironically, such approaches to choosing voters have become more prevalent with the advent of democracy, leading some to blame democracy for fomenting identity politics. Under dictatorship numbers do not matter, so a minority ethnic group can assume control by simple force of arms (citizenship be damned). With the emergence of democratic politics citizen voices suddenly begin to count, assuming a key role in national debates.
Another approach involves making certain constituencies. This is often achieved by restricting the campaign activities of opposition parties-either refusing permits to hold rallies, or issuing them too late to be of much use. This is tantamount to deciding which voters will be exposed to which views, or denying voters knowledge of alternatives.
Perhaps the most dramatic way to obviate the choice of particular candidates is to kill them. Both erstwhile colonial masters and new imperialists were quite adept at this.
The assassination of Patrice Lumumba remains emblematic of this particular approach; Félix-Roland Moumié, Mehdi Ben Barka, Eduardo Mondlane and Sylvanus Olympio also belong to this catalogue of infamy, as does the sophisticated way of "accidentalising" opponents used by Banda's intelligence operatives in Malawi.
The coup d'état also falls into this category, and has been one of the most common ways in Africa of silencing the voice of the populace.
This strategy entails outright rejection of electoral outcomes that are considered unfavourable. For the defeated incumbent, this can involve arguing that electoral processes were flawed, or were marred by the behaviour of the opposition.
For the opposition, the strategy is to simply declare - with or without justification -that the elections were not free and fair. In more bizarre cases, the opposition rejects the electoral results and then senior officials accept cabinet posts in the supposedly illegitimate government. Such was the case in Gabon, where opposition leader Paul Mba Abessole explained his move as a way to create "convivial democracy".
Similarly in Malawi, Gwanda Chakuamba declared himself the winner in the 2004 elections. When official results gave the victory to his rival, Bingu wa Mutharika, Chakuamba denounced the election as fraudulent. He then went on to shock Malawians by joining the government as soon as he was offered the ministry of agriculture.
Another way to reject election outcomes is to argue that the voters' choice is irresponsible. On 27 June 1970, Henry Kissinger stated: "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people", thereby justifying CIA involvement in the overthrow of the Chilean government. Other cases in point include the overthrow of elected nationalist leaders like Patrice Lumumba, and the reaction of the Algerian government to Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) victory. In Ethiopia, the government has not only rejected elections, but also locked up opposition leaders.
The whole purpose of voting in a democracy is to ensure citizens a say in collective decisions that affect them. The collective actions of elected officials should reflect the purposes and choices decided through democratic processes. Not surprisingly, principles of inclusiveness and transparency are constitutive of a democratic order.
If democratic institutions are hollowed out, producing what I have elsewhere called "choiceless democracy", this also empties the electoral process of all substance and meaning. As Henry Ford allegedly stated about his Model T, "any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black".
Mobutu Sese Seko figured out one way to address international cries for multiparty democracy: personally creating and financing a raft of new political parties in Zaire.
Democracies are also hollowed out in a more insidious way by international financial institutions and donors when they insist on arrangements that place key economic institutions outside the democratic oversight of elected bodies and impose other types of conditionalities.
In this way, even when IFIs are forced to accept electoral results they can undermine the democratic process by regularly seeking to pre-empt certain choices. The trick here is to tell voters, through their elected representatives, that the adoption of certain policies will be severely penalised by financial markets or donors.
Count for nothing
To this long list of deceits and hypocrisies, we must add that elected officials are sometimes for sale.
The intent and practice of such corruption involve the secret making of the votes of large sections of the population - often the majority - count for nothing, as results ultimately reflect the interests of narrowly constituted cabals.
Closely related to this way of choosing voters is one-party-rule, which makes political diversity meaningless by declaring that the only voters that count are those, supporting the candidate of the one party.
In another well-tested approach - though one that has yet to work in Africa - voters elect a puppet candidate, a front for the "real" ruler who works behind the scenes. One spectacular attempt involves Bakili Muluzi and Bingu wa Mutharika in Malawi. Having failed to change the constitution which would have allowed him to rule for a third term, Muluzi chose instead to push Mutharika's candidacy through the party structures. During the election campaign Muluzi made it clear who would be running the show. Mutharika was allowed no more than two minutes at each rally to present himself. From inauguration day on, however, Mutharika took a different path from that of his predecessors, especially on the issue of corruption; he subsequently rejected the cabinet list that Muluzi had prepared for him. Mutharika was eventually forced to quit the ruling party. This was followed by an attempt to impeach him, and other political woes.
Recourse to such obvious transgressions of reason and morality has been commonplace and unpunished. The process of constructing a common political realm of accountability and social cohesion involves not only setting up the right institutions and drawing up the right constitutions, but also leaders' acceptance of the competitive nature of democratic politics, the moralisation of our political life and the conscientitation of the voters. The problem in Africa is perhaps not so much how we choose our leaders, but what importance our leaders attach to the people's choices.
African youth exhibit remarkable enthusiasm for democracy, and many have died in its defense. If they fail to find efficacious legal avenues for voicing their opinions, then voter lists will be literally written in blood. That is a terrible toll to inflict on society.
The writer is the Director, United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), Geneva.
Africa Insight is an initiative of the Nation Media Group's Africa Media Network Project.
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