allAfrica.com: Africa: Insight - In 'African Democracy' the Big Men Believe in Choosing Their Own Voters (Page 1 of 2)

Africa: Insight - In 'African Democracy' the Big Men Believe in Choosing Their Own Voters

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.

web allafrica.com	Enter your search terms	Submit search form
OR subscribers use AllAfrica's premium search engine


Use our pull-down menus to find more stories

Today's Most Active Stories