Accra — University of Ghana,2019 Aggrey-Fraser-Guggisberg Memorial Lecture, March 22, 2019
Vice Chancellor Ebenezer Oduru Owusu, Rector Philip Ebow Bondzi Simpson, Mrs. Mercy Haizel-Ashia, Mrs. Mary Chinery-Hesse, former president John Mahama, faculty and students, ladies and gentlemen, it is an honor to stand before you today, this Friday, 22 March, to give my 2nd 2019 Aggrey-Fraser-Guggisberg Memorial Lecture, the topic: Power at the Margins: Opening-up Africa's political systems to women, youth and other disrupters.
Yesterday, I dedicated my lecture to my mentor and friend, Dr. E. Gyimah Boadi, who I refer to as the God Father of modern African democracy.
Today, I would like to direct my lecture to the students of this great university, as the future of Ghana and Africa will be defined by the decisions you take, and the passion you inject into your life's pursuits.
Introductions:
I will not re-introduce myself, as some of you were with me yesterday, but instead, share a couple of facts outside of my CV.
I am the granddaughter of a Holocaust refugee. My two brothers and my sister, after they graduated from college, did an "Aliyah," in homage to my grandmother, Aliyah is the return of the Jewish Diaspora to Israel. Me, I went to Africa to watch the cold war play out, a choice my Oma fully supported.
My first boss was Paul J. Manafort, the former campaign chairman of Donald Trump. He has become quite infamous, as you know.
It was 1987, and I was 26-years-old. He sent me on my first trip to Africa, a war zone, and gave me a front-row seat to a rapidly changing world with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Despite all that unfolded, I will remain grateful to have been given that chance to learn first-hand how events unfold.
Third, by luck, happenstance, and then design, I have found myself working with women leaders on the continent of Africa, in Liberia, Malawi and the DRC.
Finally, just to manage your expectations, I am a student of Africa, but not a professor, nor an academic. Much like in my previous lecture, the knowledge I share does not come from libraries, classrooms or seminars, but from being present for the continent's historical events. As such, my methodology is anecdotal through observation, validated by statistical analysis from NGO's, think-tanks or other scholars.
Yesterday, I gave remarks about Democracy's Protectors: The Rise of the Activist Generation in Africa. Today's subject is the other side of a single coin. Both are social phenomena that have grown in the past two decades with the opening of democratic spaces.
Together, they have the potential to bring change to the continent, with reform, good governance, and economic opportunity more equally distributed.
How do you change the fundamentals of socio, political and economic systems that relegate political outsiders to the margins of power? What I will discuss today.
My lecture will open with sharing demographic trends which demonstrate the urgency to act. I will then discuss the breakthroughs that youth, and women have made over the past two decades, while outlining the cultural and institutional barriers that remain. I will close by offering recommendations.
The Challenges – the demographics:
I know it is a cliché, but Africa is at a tipping point. The continent is set to quadruple its population by the end of the century to 4.4 billion people , an increase far exceeding the projected global population increase of 53% in the same time frame.
Of those 4.4 billion Africans, 60% of them will be youths. This poses a significant challenge for Africa and the world.
The UN has warned that Africa continues to suffer from rapid urban growth accompanied by growing urban poverty, along with other social problems, indicating that the development trajectories followed by African nations since post-independence may not be able to deliver on the aspirations of broad-based human development and prosperity for all.
Chester A. Crocker, professor of political science at Georgetown University and former US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs under Ronald Reagan, asks in a recent publication , "where is African governance headed?"
He notes that while macro variables such as population growth, access to education (notably for women), access to information and technology, climate change, food security, urbanization rates and conflict events will define the continent's future, he argues that the future direction of governance in Sub-Saharan Africa is as important as any macro indicator.
Croker suggests that the region's anchor democracies, like Ghana, South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, or Ethiopia, can have an exponential impact in lifting the continent. However, the reverse is also true. If leader nations fail in governance, their mistakes could drag down neighbor states.
Data also tells the story. As I said yesterday, it does not pick sides and it does not lie.
This year's this year's Mo Ibrahim foundation 2018 index showed virtually no progress over the past decade in creating sustainable economic opportunity. While Africa's overall GDP has risen nearly 40 percent, its average score for sustainable economic opportunity has increased by less than 1 percent. This means that large GDP growth has not translated into a better quality of life for most Africans.
In a statement accompanying the report, Mo Ibrahim said: "This is a huge missed opportunity. It could become a recipe for disaster. With the expected population growth, Africa stands at a tipping point, and the next years will be crucial."
Ibrahim admonished Africa's leaders, stating: "the lost opportunity of the past decade is deeply concerning. Its large and youthful potential workforce could transform the continent for the better, but this opportunity is close to being squandered."
So where does that leave us? Enter the political disrupters!
The political disrupters:
The statistical warning signs are flashing red. Incremental progress in governance can no longer be abided, political systems must be opened to the youth, women and others with fresh ideas, and not captive to the vested interests.
These candidates are out there, in every country, and every community. Despite all the inherent obstacles of mounting a campaign and the costs to them and their families, they are running.
Unlike legacy politicians, political outsiders do not feel entitled to power or privilege but see it as their obligation to make their countries a better place.
The emergence of women and youth into politics is a global trend, one which took hold of the United States during our 2018 midterm elections, which saw the election of more than 100 women into the 116 th Congress, including the return of Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House, and an outspoken 29-year-old Congresswoman from New York, Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez .
Some commentators suggest that the polarizing US president, Donald Trump, has been the best thing to happen to aspiring women candidates in decades.
American political disrupters have it easy. They just need to run a good campaign. In Africa the institutional, cultural and societal barriers to political entry are resilient, and in some countries impenetrable. Campaigns are just a part of it. It is these that we must disassemble.
The entry of the youth as a political force:
The entry of the youth into national political competition is a product of the activist generation that has gone to the streets in protest. I call them "democracy's keepers," Afrobarometer has designated them "dissatisfied democrats."
They are citizens who are not only deeply committed to democracy, but who adopt a critical perspective toward their country's current leaders and institutions — in other words, they are those who demand democracy but do not think they are getting it.
In the past five years, we have seen a select few of the activist generation run for office, testing whether issue-based campaigns, along with new media and technologies, can leapfrog patronage and patriarchy.
And it's tough. Here are a few examples from across the continent, and from varied political contexts.
Uganda:
In Uganda, 37-year old musician Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, known as Bobi Wine , went from the recording studio, to the streets, in protest of President Yoweri Museveni, in power since 1987, after changing the constitution to scrap term limits.
In 2017, Wine ran for a seat in the legislature and won. At first, the political threat he posed was limited, it was just a single parliamentary seat, but that changed in 2018, when the candidates he campaigned for in the by-elections won, beating the ruling party as well as the major opposition.
For his political acumen, Wine was jailed, beaten, charged with insurrection, and if it were not for his fame, he would have been left to rot in jail along with other political prisoners.
Wine was released, he recovered, and with charges dropped, Wine has announced his attention to challenge president Museveni in the 2021 elections.
Nigeria:
Having just returned from Nigeria's presidential and legislative elections in February, I can report to you that there are a lot of dissatisfied democrats after an election that saw the deployment of the military as part of a political strategy. And none more forlorn than the youth movements, including Yiaga Africa, which mobilized the domestic election observers to conduct the Parallel Vote Count (PVT).
Said Dr. Hussaini Abdu, the Chairman of Yiaga, "these were not the elections Nigerians wanted; they were not the elections Nigerians expected; and, most importantly, they were not the elections Nigerians deserved."
Even with the disappointment however, Nigeria's activist generation still had something to celebrate.
Three years earlier, a youth movement #NotTooYoungTooRun launched a campaign calling for a constitutional amendment to reduce the age limits of candidates who run for elected positions. They appealed to the Nigeria's political class that valued the youth vote, where 60 percent of its 190 million people are under the age of 25.
The bill passed .
Nigerian presidential candidates can now stand for office at 35 instead of 40, state government aspirants at 30 rather than 35, and 25-year-olds can now enter the House of Representatives, also a five-year age reduction.
This June, when Nigeria's National & State Assemblies are inaugurated, they will have 25, 26, and 27-year-olds sit in chambers as honorable members making quality contributions to lawmaking, oversight and representation, sending a signal that change is possible with civic activism.
Ethiopia:
Ethiopia's dramatic transition over the past year, while driven by different societal factors, has something important to teach us about the transformative power of youthful leadership.
In April of 2018, 42-year-old Abiy Ahmed was appointed the 12 th Prime Minister of Ethiopia. He is the country's first Oromo leader - the ethnic group at the center of nearly three years of anti-government protests, which left many dead and thousands arrested.
Unlike Nigeria or Uganda, these protests were not primarily driven by an activist generation, but by an ethic community, the Oromos, who felt that they have been politically, economically and culturally marginalized for years - despite being the country's largest community.
The change that has been unleashed in Ethiopia under Abiy is stunning.
In a matter of months, the 42-year-old, not beholden to past political loyalties or historical hangovers, freed thousands of political detainees, ended the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, appointed a woman prime minister, and women to half of his ministerial posts.
If he can keep it up, Ethiopia under Abiy could deliver transformative change for a country that Chet Croker says, could lift-up a sub-region.
These hard-won openings for young people, while notable, impactful and disruptive, can only be consequential in the long-run, if they are accompanied by structural changes that strengthen democratic institutions and breakdown cultural and societal barriers to political entry.
In Uganda, Bobi Wine, no matter his popularity, faces an election which is more likely to be politically engineered, than anything resembling free and fair.
In Nigeria, young, tech-savvy, candidates have turned to GoFundMe pages to raise money. But the sums they may accumulate pale in comparison to the deep pockets of traditional candidates who are shored up by cartels and state patronage, operating in the absence of transparency and campaign finance laws.
And while Ethiopia's 42-year-old prime minister is ushering in much-need change, Abiy is appointed. His longevity, and the durability of his reforms, will depend on the patience of the ruling Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front .
David Pilling , the Africa Editor for the Financial Times, recently wrote a profile on Abiy, celebrating his youth-driven program of reform. In a twitter conversation, I challenged David and his followers to tell me when someone like Abiy will emerge from an open electoral process in one of the anchor economies Africa?
Pilling has no prediction for me, he just quipped back, "well certainly not in Nigeria."
Let's talk about women.
The rise women in politics in Africa:
In the last two decades, sub-Saharan Africa has seen impressive breakthroughs in women's political representation in national legislative bodies.
According to the UN , the number of female legislators on the continent grew from 9.8 percent in 1995 to 23.2 percent in 2016. In comparison, Europe, excluding the Nordic nations, comes in at 24.3 percent and the Americas at 27.7 percent.
At the national level, five of the world's top 15 countries for the number of women serving in parliament are found in Africa. Rwanda, under the leadership of President Paul Kagame, stands out with the highest ratio at 61 percent, followed by South Africa, Senegal, Namibia and Mozambique.
But true political power in Africa remains vested in the executive branch, and here the gains have been less impressive. Despite two decades of women empowerment, with the retirement of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the former president of the Republic of Liberia from office in 2018, there is no single democratically elected female head of state on the continent.
Sahle-Work Zewde, while historic in her own right as the first woman president of Ethiopia, was appointed by the Prime Minister. The other woman serving at the top political level in Africa, Prime Minister of Namibia's Saara Kuugongelwa, was likewise not elected to her office.
Moreover, when you look at cabinet appointments across the continent, with a few exceptions, women are rarely given the top ministries, like Finance, Foreign Affairs, Defense, Commerce and National Security, more often you find them at Gender, Youth and Sports, maybe Health and Social Welfare.
What is going on?
First, the obvious, women are political outsiders, they threaten ruling cartels, and politics conducted by transaction and patronage.
But in Africa, there is something more here. I have seen that when women depart from designated "political safe spaces," and become a real threat to the interests of entrenched power, they are subject to a particularly egregious level of abuse and attack, when compared to their male counterparts.
This level of hatred and dehumanization can be attributed to a legacy of sexism and misogyny and this too, is an obstacle to democratization.
Kate Manne, in her book, " Down Girl, the Logic of Misogyny " explains that misogyny should be understood as the law enforcement branch of a patriarchal order which maintains the overall function of policing and enforcing its governing ideology. "Sexism wears a lab coat, while misogyny goes on a witch-hunt," Manne concludes.
This assessment resonated with me as I considered the Africa women who ascended, (or who tryied to ascend) to the highest level of power like Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, Joyce Banda of Malawi, and Diane Rwigara of Rwanda.
In September of 2017, a few weeks before Liberia's presidential and legislative elections on October 10, CNN published an opinion piece entitled, " Why Africa owes a debt of gratitude to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf ."
The article spoke of the "moral courage" of an African leader in not automatically handing the presidency to her sitting vice president but telling him that he needed to work for it.
For Sirleaf's Unity Party, her decision was hardly courageous. It was a betrayal — a breach of the normal order in Africa. She was subject to blistering, hate-filled public attacks.
Dr. Joyce Banda, Africa's first elected woman vice president, assumed Malawi's highest office after the death of the president in 2012. Once in power, Banda took on corruption, a move applauded by Malawi's donors, with investigations implicating many in her party. As in the case of Sirleaf, where some saw a principled crusade, her political cadres saw a mortal threat. And they would make her pay, including with a failed attempt on her life . She was forced to go into exile and only recently returned to Malawi to resume her political life.
The circumstances of Diane Rwigara, the former female presidential candidate of Rwanda, (jailed for more than a year along with her mother) seem a contradiction in the context of a country that boasts the largest representation of female candidates in parliament in Africa, some 64 percent. But it is not. Rwigara, like Sirleaf and Banda, was not compliant with the normal order.
President Paul Kagame, who is credited with stopping the genocide of 1994 , and with running one of Africa's most efficient, high-growth economies, has been willing to tolerate only a certain degree democracy, limiting both political space and dissent. He presided over a change in Rwanda's constitution, which enabled him to run for a third consecutive term in August 2017, the same election where Rwigara challenged him.
When Rwigara first made her announcement to run for the presidency, nude photo-shopped pictures surfaced to disable her in a society where modesty is a virtue. Not deterred, she collected the requisite 600+ signatures to confirm her candidacy, only to be disqualified by the National Electoral Commission. Kagame eventually won, but even so, Rwigara, like Banda, would remain a target. She was arrested on charges of tax evasion and forgery and only recently released.
Summation:
I imagine it feels like this lecture has been all over the place, Ghana, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, the DRC, Uganda, Ethiopia, Liberia, Malawi and Rwanda, tackling issues from sexism to constitutional amendments to lowering the age to seek elected office. But they are all connected.
They are the challenges that must be tackled to permit the embedding of political outsiders into the governance process.
With youth, as with the women, we see a similar pattern of limited progress. Their participation is encouraged, and at times celebrated by Africa's traditional politicians.
But when they become a real threat, like in the case of Bobi Wine, of Yiaga's harsh criticism of the Nigeria's government's conduct of February elections, or Joyce Banda's corruption campaign within her own party, they are shut down, with a vengeance.
Recommendations:
What is to be done? How do we, those of us outside political office and power, break down barriers? I offer a few suggestions.
One: Take on society's taboos: Africa needs its own #MeToo moment, a reckoning that misogyny and sexism, however manifested, however disguised, must be defeated, as it remains a fundamental impediment to women's participation in politics in Africa. Exposing it, and shaming those who perpetrate it, should be a shared obligation of men and women alike, who wish to see the continent continue its unstoppable march towards participatory democracy.
Africa has a celebrated tradition of revering its elders, respecting their wisdom, and seeking their guidance. But this value, should not get in the way of the emergence of younger political leaders. I hear it all the time, "the older generation will not accept to be guided by a youth." But sometimes it's okay to cut the que, when all those behind you will benefit.
Two: Democratizing Africa's Political Parties: For Africa's democracy to grow, political parties must begin to rethink how they conduct their primaries and set targets for women and youth candidates. In Nigeria's recent presidential elections, the observers' criticism of party behavior was brutal, calling them bereft of quality political leadership, condemning the shameful exhibition of the show of power and wealth which led to loss of lives. Africa needs fundamental electoral reform, and in Nigeria, it is on Yiaga's list, including taking on campaign finance laws. They are going after the money.
The Girl Child: Women bear the brunt of life's challenges in developing nations. Low literacy rates and limited access to education restrain women from seeking the information they need to demand their rights, much less run for political office. As such, educating the girl child has become a priority across Africa. This was especially true in post-conflict Liberia. But as Joyce Banda argues, we must turn with urgency to the rural girl-child, often left from access to quality education and technologies, living a life of low expectations. Yesterday, I said that the activist generation must bridge the urban rural divide, so too must other stakeholders.
Direct elections/diversifying the makeup of appointed and elected office: Quotas for parliamentary seats for previously disenfranchised communities, women, youth and the disabled, should be adopted across the continent, and can be phased out to avoid permanent incumbency. As in the cases of Rwanda and Tanzania, set-aside quotas for women have made governance more inclusive in a short period of time. Further, African states should move towards direct elections, communities should be empowered to decide their mayors and office holders, and states, their governors, winner-take-all politics in Africa must become a relic of the past, along with leaders that stay well past their expiration date.
It's up to you: As students and young people you have a collective voice and power to advocate for change. In my lecture yesterday, I spoke of the "activist generation," who has leveraged the power of social media to effect change. T his is your time to demand the government you want. Your priorities should be included in party manifestos, candidates should compete for your vote, and change their bylaws, to include young people and women. Why not join #MeToo with #NotTooYoungtoRun. You don't have to be a dissatisfied democrat, you can create a new category for Afrobarometer, "demanding democrat", "empowered democrat" or maybe "democrat on the move".
Yesterday, I closed with the story of Bill Rogers, a new friend I met in Liberia.
When Bill was seven, 1992, he was kidnapped in Bong County at the height of the country's civil war. The rebel soldiers, realizing they could get no bounty from the young boy's family, chopped off the toes on his right foot, and left him to bleed out, and die. Through the kindness of others, Bill was saved, reunited with his family, went on to become an acclaimed runner, compete on the Liberia Olympic team, got two degrees from the US and built a foundation to help others.
He has been trying to get to Accra for two days. And he just arrived!
Thank you again for this high honor!
