What unique features could play a role in sustaining and constraining democracy in Africa?

Introduction

In broaching the leitmotif democracy within the Sub-Saharan Africa, the endemic nature of political upheavals ranging from the various forms of human rights abuse, the abuse of incumbency, the monopoly of state media by incumbent government inter alia cannot be overemphasised. The argument here is that the concept of democracy is alien to the African culture (as argued in the article of Uwizeyimana), ipso facto, making its substance run into deficit. From the early 1990s, Africa has experienced a “second liberation” that has opened up new prospects for democratic development on the continent.

After 1990, most of the 48 countries in sub-Saharan Africa legalized opposition parties and held competitive, multiparty elections.  But those elections have often not met the minimal democratic criteria of freeness and fairness. Many incumbent parties have exploited institutional advantages to deny the opposition any chance of winning power in the new multi-party regimes. These regimes are best understood as “pseudodemocracies” or what Richard Joseph (1999) has termed “virtual democracies.”  It is with this backdrop that this paper seeks to respond to the issues which pose a challenge to the democratisation experiment of Africa, and features which could possibly sustain and constrain African democracy following the literatures of Carlos Lopes, E Osaghae, Cyril I. Obi and Dominique E. Uwizeyimana. The paper is divided into four sections; the first three presents us with the challenges which Africa faces in her experiment of democracy, while the fourth provides the features which could play roles in the sustenance of democracy, and the main arguments of the paper is summarised in the conclusion. 

The Role of Outsiders in Processes of Democratization

There are two principal views on the role of outsiders in processes of democratization in Sub-Saharan Africa. The first is that democracy is basically a domestic affair and thus there is very little that outsiders can do about it, one way or the other. The second view is that most weak African countries are the puppets of stronger states in the North; the strong therefore heavily influence, not only the economic and social but also the political structures and processes of the weak. There is some truth in both of these views. But first, a longer historical look at the issue is helpful. What is ‘domestic’ or ‘internal’ as opposed to ‘international’ or ‘external’ is no historical given. Most African countries got their own domestic sphere at the point of independence, of decolonization. Before that, they were part of the domestic spheres of their colonial motherlands. That experience left them with features more or less conducive to the pursuit of democracy. Liberal modernization theory will normally stress the positive legacy: some local industry and infrastructure; an education system; a machinery for the upholding of order; an institutional structure; some basic rule of law; and a constitution which contained democratic values (Latin America, colonized by non-democratic Spain and Portugal, is of course an exception here). Radical dependency theory will stress the destructive elements of the colonial legacy: a distorted economic infrastructure, geared to the demands of the motherland; a hierarchical political system directed at control and surveillance, not at any form of democracy; an institutional structure aimed at order cum repression, not at participation and pluralism. The blend of ‘constructive’ and ‘destructive’ elements in the colonial legacy will of course vary across countries. Robert Pinkney has provided a very helpful overview of these variations in colonial rule as seen from the perspective of democratization (Pinkney 1993:42-3). 

Nationalism: Obstructing Democracy

If nationalism is a bond of loyalty among the people that constitute a nation, then some measure of nationalism is a necessary precondition for democratization. That is because the nationalist bond of loyalty is the glue which ties the group of people inside the state’s territory together; it helps create the minimum of national unity which is at the core of the political community that is the nation. As spelled out in Rustow’s classic model, national unity simply indicates that “the vast majority of citizens in a democracy-to-be, have no doubt or mental reservations as to which political community they belong to” (Rustow 1970:350). There may well be ethnic or other cleavages between groups in the population; it is only when such divisions lead to basic questioning of national unity and political community that the problem must be resolved before a transition to democracy becomes feasible. National unity was an issue in India and Pakistan and is an issue today in the Third World, in particular in Africa

African states were created from the outside by colonial powers; the Declaration of Independence adopted by the UN in 1960 emphasized that “all peoples have the right to self-determination”. But note that “peoples” does not mean communities of people such as nations. It means the territorial entities that were the colonies. Independence meant independence for the colonial territories, upholding colonial borders. The people inside those borders were communities only in the sense that they shared a border drawn by others. Their idea of nationalism was a negative one: get rid of the colonizers. When that project succeeded, there was no positive notion of community left over. Political elites made attempts to construct such a notion, eg. Nyereres Ujamaa socialism, Kenyatta’s Harambee, and Mobutu's authenticité (Laakso and Olukoshi, 1996).

There was some measure of success in a few countries, but in general the project was a huge failure; it was extremely difficult to knit together diverse ethnic groups with different languages, beliefs, and ways of living. The state elites quickly gave up trying. What emerged instead was, in Chris Clapham’s terminology, monopoly states: “Confronted by weak administrative structures, fragile economies, and in some cases dangerous sources of domestic opposition, political leaders sought to entrench themselves in power by using the machinery of state to suppress or coopt any rival organization-be it an opposition party, a trades union, or even a major corporation. Rather than acknowledging the weakness of their position, and accepting the limitations on their power which this imposed, they chose to up the stakes and went for broke” (Clapham 1996a:57). It was abundantly clear that these clientelist systems lacked “the capacity to create any sense of moral community amongst those who participate in them, let alone among those who are excluded” (Clapham 1996a:59). Therefore, political community was not created, neither in the Gesellschaft nor in the Gemeinschaft sense. The communities that prevailed were the different ethnic sub-groups which competed for access to state power and resources, sometimes building frail alliances amongst each other.  

Clientelism cum Patronage: a challenge to Challenge to African Democracy

The major drawback of a democratization which focuses on elections is that there is little change for the better in the economic policies of the new regimes. In line with this claim, Osaghae found that “elections may actually increase the use of patronage. Traditional patron-client relations have often been critical in winning recent elections, indicating that the nature of African politics has not changed despite the new liberalization. Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya have all reported massive overspending as governments sought to reward traditional supporters, notably members of particular ethnic groups and civil servants, to smooth the transition process or gain votes. The particular circumstances of political liberalization in Africa cause leaders’  horizons to be relatively short and therefore induce particular strategies such as clientelism which may be unnecessary where democratic structures are more institutionalized.” (Bienen and Herbst, 1996:38-9). 

What Prospect?

If Africa is going to develop, politically and economically, it will have to do so democratically.  The past three decades have discredited the notion that East-Asian style developmental dictatorships are possible in Africa.  Even in East Asia, economic growth was fostered not by pure authoritarianism but by the rise of more accountable, rule-based institutions that controlled corruption and limited the arbitrary power of government (Root: 1996). In East Asia, disciplined leaders found it necessary to develop these institutions partly to secure their own domestic and international legitimation.  In Africa, the greater depth and complexity of ethnic divisions, the more fragile nature of the postcolonial state, differences in political culture and other factors precluded the emergence of that type of authoritarian rule dedicated to transparent governance with an emphasis on rules, protection for property rights, and limited government.  As a result, corruption, favouritism, and “neo-patrimonial,” ruleless patterns of behaviour became so deeply entrenched that it is now virtually impossible to imagine how political closure can produce anything other than exclusion, violence, corruption, and waste.  In economics and in politics, Africa needs openness and competition, accountability and predictability. 

While the circumstances in Africa today are dire, they are not hopeless (following the presentation on Osaghae in the second article).  In fact, they offer more grounds for hope than at any time in the past three decades.  Against the greed, suspicion, fragmentation, exploitation, violence, and decay that has characterized African politics since independence, counter-trends are now taking shape.  There is among many African elites a growing, if still grudging and partial, acceptance of market mechanisms and democratic principles.  There is a widespread popular weariness with civil war and greater readiness for accommodation, purchased, to be sure, at a dear price.  Public cynicism with government and politics remains dangerously high in many countries, but it is accompanied by growing intolerance of corruption and greater recognition of its costs to society.  Most important, perhaps, is the emergence of a new type of social and political actor, in the form of civic organizations (and mass media) that seek better, more liberal, responsible, and humane governance for the society rather than immediate, material rewards for themselves.  In their dedication to the wider political community and the rule of law, and in their greater transcendance of the ethnic identities that cleave party politics, these new organizations represent the seed of a new African phenomenon: a civic community, built on honesty, trust, tolerance, cooperation, political equality, law abidingness, and public spiritedness (Putam: 1993).

Africa is a very, very long ways from the predominance of cross-cutting cleavages and civic virtue that characterize such a civic community at the national level.  This would entail a transformation of political culture and an enormous accumulation of social capital (in the form of these cross-cutting, civically engaged organizations).  Nevertheless, a potentially historic and profound process of change is underway.  If this trend is nurtured, through the types of institutional reforms and international assistance and conditionality recommended here, it could put a number of African countries firmly on the path to democracy, development, and political stability.  And those success stories would become models for neighboring countries, as they have in Asia and Latin America.

From this perspective, the prevailing mood of Afro-pessimism in the West is both unwarranted and self-defeating.  Much of Africa is ready for a new departure.  But it remains to be seen whether the major international actors have the vision, discipline, and commitment to foster it. 

Concluding Remarks

The process of democratization does not fare well in many African countries as noted in the five articles. We are not facing a sweeping backslide to authoritarianism; the problem is sooner one of democratic consolidation; a very large number of the current transitions remain stuck in the shallow waters of ‘electoral democracy’. The articles have pointed to the lack of political community, the various models of democracy promoted by the West, and to the notion of elitism as underlying elements which help explain the lack of sustained democratic progress. External actors bear some substantial responsibility for this state of affairs. Even if it is true that democracy cannot be taught, only learnt, Western countries would do well to rethink some of the practices in support for democracy. Especially, more support for competent leaders and institutional innovation appears to promise better result in terms of both democracy and development.

  

Reference

Bienen, Henry and Jeffrey Herbst (1996).

“The Relationship between Political and Economic Reform in Africa”, Comparative Politics, October, pp. 23-42.

Hilton L. Root,

Small Countries, Big Lessons:  Governance and the Rise of East Asia (Hong Kong and New York:  Oxford University Press, 1996).

Laakso, Liisa and Adebayo O. Olukoshi (1996).

“The Crisis of the Post-Colonial Nation-State Project in Africa”, in Laakso and Olukoshi (eds.), Challenges to the Nation-State in Africa, Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute, pp. 7-40.

Robert D. Putnam,

Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 86-91.