Catherine Sasman
2 July 2009
interview
Victor Shale, Senior Programme Officer of the Governance Institutions Processes in the Electoral Institute of Southern Africa (EISA) based in South Africa, recently visited Namibia to conduct training workshops for representatives of political parties and to discuss the electoral process as well as party political leadership.
EISA is an independent organisation that strives for excellence in the promotion of credible elections, participatory democracy, human rights culture, and the strengthening of governance institutions for the consolidation of democracy in Africa. The organisation has observed countless elections on the continent. New Era posed some questions to Shale.
What would you say are the characteristics of elections in SADC and Africa over the last five years?
Elections are guaranteed in the region. They differ from country to country. In some countries, elections have been followed by calm as in Malawi and South Africa recently, while in others like Zimbabwe and Lesotho there have been tensions after the elections.
This is owed to a number of factors ranging from the legal to the institutional framework for management of elections. This is, if the elections are not well managed, they can lead to conflict.
Secondly, it is the question of the electoral systems. Sometimes you find that the problem lies with the electoral system, which is not inclusive enough and leads to non-acceptance of elections.
Thirdly, it can be a result of how the election results have been handled.
That is how the tabulation and allocation of seats are carried out. This is the cause of the current problems in Lesotho, for example.
Do you think the execution of elections in Africa leads to greater democratisation?
As indicated above, in some cases elections contribute to the democratisation project (Ghana, Mozambique, South Africa, etc.), while in others, elections have led to the reversal of democratic gains (Kenya and Zimbabwe). So, we cannot generalise.
But to address the issue of what the purpose of elections is if these do not lead to peace and political stability - this is what practitioners and academics are grappling with in the current discourse.
The point is that elections have to be conducted in line with internationally agreed norms and standards and all stakeholders have to ensure that the process is protected so that elections have to add value to democracy.
This should include ensuring that international initiatives that are meant to strengthen the democratisation process are implemented. These include the 2000 Organisation of African Unity's Declaration on the Framework for an OAU Response to the Unconstitutional Changes of Government; the 2002 Declaration on Democracy, Political, Economic and Corporate Governance of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (Nepad), which led to the emergence of the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) and the 2007 African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance, and so on.
Do you think political parties in southern Africa produce democrats?
Parties in southern Africa as elsewhere on the continent are still struggling to inculcate the culture of intra-party democracy. This is one area where parties have to be assisted.
The irony of the democratisation project in Africa is that although parties are the key pillars of democracy, they are the most neglected institutions in most countries in terms of capacity building.
How many times do you see civil society organisations being sponsored through workshops to ensure their capacity to do their role effectively? Compare that with parties then. You will see that even donors are averse to giving money to political party work while they expect those parties to contribute to democracy building.
The argument here is not that parties do not know what to do but that they need to be assisted to be effective just like other organisations.
Now due to lack of funds and other challenges they face - particularly opposition parties - they end up having no proper structures and/or systems in place to be able to do their role effectively.
We know that if you have a dominant party system like in Namibia and most SADC countries, you are not going to have political stability unless you suppress dissent by force or even oppressive law, which goes against human rights as contained in national constitutions such as in Chapter 3 of the Namibian Constitution.
These challenges, notwithstanding, parties are not exonerated from their shortcomings in terms of striving for proper internal functioning.
You have mentioned that political parties are on the decline internationally. What would you ascribe this to?
There are many external and internal factors that lead to the decline. For instance, externally, a lack of funding to parties makes it difficult for them to play their role effectively. But they also have to ensure that they conduct themselves as proper functioning organisations that can be supported by the people. Some parties are run like 'spaza shops', literally translated as private informal businesses, with no proper records and they do not account to membership.
You have also mentioned that there seems to be a trend where politicians circumvent the electoral process and enter into power sharing deals when the outcome of elections are not to their expectation. Why do you think we see this and what are the conditions that make this possible?
It is true that some leaders want to stay in power forever; hence they will try all the tricks in the book to remain in power. Recently, we have seen power sharing deals as one of the strategies such leaders employ to stay in power. In the past, they used to change the party constitution and in some cases even attempted to change the constitution of their countries so that they remain presidents as was the case in Zambia and Malawi.
In your course work with Namibian political parties, you have typified parties into four categories, i.e. cadre versus mass parties; representative versus integrative parties; constitutional versus revolutionary parties; and left-/right-wing parties. Noting the Namibian spectrum of parties, how would you classify these?
Namibian parties follow different ideologies and I am not sure if we can discuss it here. However, the point to be made is that most parties tend to compromise ideological purity given the often-competitive elections. In other words, emphasis is placed on winning elections through a mass support base instead of mobilising along ideologies.
What are the challenges of political parties in building a democratic dispensation?
A number of challenges highlighted previously include a lack of intra-party democracy; a lack of public funding; inter-party conflicts; and a lack of effective outreach strategies.
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