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African Politics and the Future of Democracy |
African political systems have a long history that substantially predates the arrival of Europeans in the 1400s or the political boundaries of nation-states found on any current map. The peoples of Africa have organized many different types of political systems and witnessed tremendous political changes over time. And yet one of the most enduring puzzles has been whether African political systems will grow into stable democracies. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the majority of African countries achieved independence from colonial rule, many analysts were hopeful about the prospects for expanding citizenship in newly independent regimes. Debates in the 1960s and 1970s about the political systems most suited for African countries were driven mainly by a desire to fast-track development within the context of the Cold War. During the 1980s, many policy makers blamed Africa’s economic stagnation on corrupt governments and demanded limited (and not necessarily democratic) governance capable of implementing neoliberal economic reform. By the early 1990s, these earlier debates were tempered by the disintegration of the Soviet bloc as well as the unconvincing results of structural adjustment and the hardships they imposed on African populations. Furthermore, beginning with the National Conference in Benin, which drafted a new constitution based on citizen input, and the unbanning of resistance organizations in South Africa in 1990, which constituted the first step in reforming apartheid laws, many peoples around the continent began to rise up and demand the democratization of long-standing authoritarian systems. Much like the independence era decades earlier, the initial jubilation at democratic transition in many cases then gave way to more sober assessments of fragile or hybrid democracies, where former dictators refused in a variety of ways to relinquish their power.
Now, more than two decades after the “third wave of democracy” appeared to sweep across Africa, the debate about the prospects for democracy in Africa has not abated. The emphasis, however, has clearly changed. Scholars have moved beyond a preoccupation with the short term and the formal transition to electoral democracy to focus more deeply on the long term and informal institutions of democratic governance for sustainable development. A close examination of postindependence regimes revealed that while many had constructed various formal constitutional rules, beyond the institutional facades and slogans, most of them were essentially informal, neopatrimonial regimes. In these regimes, political leaders exercised personal power, drawing upon aspects of traditional authority (real or fictive), their legitimacy as leaders of independence movements, or sometimes both. Cliques of subpatrons linked these leaders to sectors of their populations, who served as clients and subjects, and to whom benefits flowed in exchange for political loyalty.
The challenge of African politics well into the future is to transcend neopatrimonial rule and instead develop and institutionalize systems of democratic governance that will support development by unleashing and channeling the creative potential of African peoples as they participate in politics not as subjects or clients but as citizens and leaders. Attaining this goal requires developing different types of civic values as well as different types of formal and informal political rules and arrangements. It also requires patience and some fundamental understanding of the dynamics and trajectories of African political development.
This chapter highlights the state of African politics and identifies emergent trends and challenges. It frames the discussion of electoral democracy by contextualizing the alien origin and relatively recent introduction of these institutions. After reviewing the mixed success of electoral democracy thus far, we consider the everyday politics, beyond elections, that often takes place at the local level. The chapter then considers how gender, ethnicity, and indigeneity shape whether and how Africans are represented through the diversity of central and local political institutions. The next section examines how African politics continue to traverse the boundaries of the nation-state in important ways, highlighting the role of regional organizations within Africa, such as the African Union or the Economic Community of West African States; intergovernmental agencies, such as the UN World Food Program or World Bank; and international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and transnational advocacy networks. The chapter concludes with some reflections on the complexities of evaluating governance and consolidating democracies in Africa.
An appropriate place to begin is with the history of the conception of democracy and democratic systems of governance in Africa and their implications for the future institutionalization of democracy around the continent. Most of the institutions of democracy found in Africa today share an alien origin and were only recently introduced.
Except for the existence of broadly democratic values, the artifacts of democracy crafted in Africa do not have their origins in indigenous African political culture and lack continuity with indigenous African political systems. With respect to the existence of democratic values in precolonial African political systems, Maxwell Owusu reminds us that many indigenous African systems were, indeed, committed to values of tolerance, participatory discourse, and contestation. In many systems, even inherited positions of authority were subject to transparent mechanisms of public accountability. Owusu proposes the “adaptation” of indigenous African political institutions that are built upon these values as a strategy for establishing systems of democratic governance in Africa. But this has not been the approach to the construction of democratic institutions and organizations in Africa.
This is in part because of the experience of colonialism in Africa. The colonial state was not a democratic one, and in the vast majority of cases it did not count Africans as citizens. As Crawford Young reminds us, the colonial state did not destroy traditional institutions in Africa, but instead depended on some of those institutions to carry out its goals. The aim of the state, however, was to extract revenue and labor from the Africans over whom it ruled. According to Peter Ekeh, this system served to radically reshape the political and moral landscape by creating a rift between African citizens and centralized states.
On the eve of independence in the 1950s, diverse social groups in various parts of Africa held varying expectations about the meaning and future of democracy. And yet the formal colonial powers often encouraged, or even required, blueprints of their democratic institutions to be adopted by the new nation-states. For example, the United Kingdom provided heavy-handed “tutelage” to the Gold Coast, now Ghana, on the writing of the First Republic’s constitution and evaluated over a series of elections in the 1950s whether nationalist leader Kwame Nkrumah possessed an acceptably high popular mandate to guide one of the first African nations to independence.
During the Cold War, the restrictive advice tied to the economic support of either the United States or the former Soviet Union induced divisions among political leaders in the government as well as in trade unions, farmers associations, business associations, university teachers organizations, and student unions across Africa. The ideological competition between socialism and capitalism and the bitter recriminations resulting from these cleavages contributed to framing the attitudes and discourse among African leaders late into the twentieth century.
Since the end of the Cold War, external, state-based actors have been joined by a proliferation of new players, including donors, intergovernmental organizations, and NGOs, that have sustained an interest in the promotion of democratic political systems in Africa. As a result, the debate about the development of democratic systems of governance in Africa is driven largely by external actors and is quite frequently reduced to a debate about the successful implantation of Western forms of democratic political arrangements. For example, chieftaincy traditions and systems are treated as residual institutions of diminishing importance, despite the fact that they continue to command enormous legitimacy in many parts of Africa, especially to resolve conflict and/or to mediate property rights to land.
The second important point that cannot be overlooked is that democracy in Africa is only in its early stage of evolution. Formal democratic institutions were introduced for the first time relatively recently. For example, legislative assemblies empowered with decision-making prerogatives and run by Africans were only established by the colonial powers in the 1950s, on the eve of African independence. Along with these assemblies, the position of “leader of government business” was established to assign some executive powers to individuals who were likely to become founding prime ministers. Many African countries then experienced decades of authoritarianism during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s under personal, single-party, and/or military rule, which has been challenged again only since the early 1990s.
Thus while there are good reasons to be concerned about the pace of democratization processes in Africa, particularly when governance failures can be a prime cause of violent conflict, concern must be tempered by the realization that the system of democratic governance that is now being established in Africa was only recently introduced. Democratic governance will require time to take strong roots, as it did in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere in the world.
The preoccupation with institutionalizing Western democratic arrangements in Africa, as in other parts of the world, is focused significantly on the establishment of procedural or electoral democracy. The promotion of electoral democracy is said to call critical attention to the performance of elected leaders, thus generating demands for greater accountability and the exercise of citizens’ prerogatives to replace their elected leaders through further elections. The process of repeated elections, and especially the experience of alternating ruling political parties, is said to entrench democratic values and support the development of civil society organizations and networks that promote civil liberties and political rights.
By the end of the Cold War, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, most of Africa’s political leaders had long ruled as military strongmen, such as Sani Abacha of Nigeria or Gnassingbé Eyadéma of Togo; personal rulers, such as Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) or Yoweri Museveni of Uganda; or heads of de jure single-party states, such as Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Côte d’Ivoire and Daniel arap Moi of Kenya. Each of these authoritarian leaders faced collapsing economies, reduced external assistance, and rising internal demands for change. African strongmen yielded (often not without struggle) to pressures to redefine the terms and conditions of governance and were constrained to accept democratic constitutionalism as the fundamental principle of the political regime. This demand for constitutional reform that overtook Africa in the 1990s led to the convening of sovereign national conferences and other constitutional assemblies in order to craft new constitutional rules. Governance was to be conditioned by the rule of law and not by the caprices of the “big man.” The new formal rules allowed opposition parties to mobilize and organize freely, often for the first time in decades; competitive elections were to take place to select leaders; and presidential term limits were imposed, among other changes. All of these political reforms were designed to undermine neopatrimonial control and lay the foundations for a new era of electoral democracy.
African experiences with electoral democracy show mixed results (Bratton and Van de Walle 1997). There are many cases of progress, but still some backsliding. In Kenya in 2007, elections ended in violence. In Nigeria, elections since 1993 have frequently been annulled by military leaders or heavily rigged by ruling parties; former president Olusegun Obasanjo is reported to have referred to the 2007 elections there as “a matter of do or die,” for with continued access to state resources at stake, to lose the elections would be to lose everything. In South Africa, Angola, Namibia, Botswana, and Mozambique, ruling parties associated with the founding of democratic governments in these countries continue to dominate their electoral processes. In Liberia and Sierra Leone, democratic elections have provided an exit from bloody civil wars. And then there are cases such as Ghana, Mauritius, and Benin, where competitive elections have resulted in the institutionalization of leadership alternation back and forth between opposing political parties.
Figure 12.1. Liberian woman casts her ballot for the presidential election in Monrovia, Liberia.
Corbis.
While no single formula exists for ensuring the successful entrenchment of electoral democracy in African countries, certain factors are known to be associated with the holding of free and fair elections. Among these are the existence of an independent and effective electoral commission and judiciary; autonomous legislatures to check executive power; institutionalized political parties that are not based on the zero-sum politics of personal or ethnic loyalties; and above all, a civil society dedicated to electoral democracy.
In all African countries where elections have resulted in the alternation of political parties, the electoral commissions have been independent and of high integrity. Bodies responsible for conducting elections can exert independence if they are autonomous and not extensions of government ministries (as is the case in some francophone African countries), with officials whose tenures are secure and with budgets guaranteed under law and controlled by themselves (subject to auditing). The success of electoral democracy in Ghana, for example, has been partially attributed to the independence and integrity of the electoral commission there. Funding for the electoral commission, by law, comes from the government’s consolidated account and can be ensured by court order. Commissioners’ tenures are protected, and their status and salaries are pegged to those of judges.
The judiciary’s role in resolving electoral disputes can also be critical to the success of elections. Prompt decisions by courts that are perceived to be independent and impartial can reduce the prospects of election losers finding recourse in street demonstrations and violence. In many African countries, courts are not independent and do not have the capacity to respond swiftly and with credibility. South Africa and Ghana are among the exceptions. The example of Nigeria reveals how the judicial role in elections can be strengthened. Since the passage of electoral reforms in 2010, electoral disputes are now fast-tracked in the courts and are resolved much more quickly than in the past.
Another component for strengthening democracy in Africa is the autonomous legislature, which give true meaning to the principle of checks and balances. Legislatures perform several core functions in a democratic system, including representing their constituencies by articulating their interests at the national level, serving their constituents’ needs for public goods and services, creating and passing laws through processes of debate and negotiation with other legislative members and the executive, and providing oversight of other government branches, particularly the executive wing.
African legislators have always performed functions of representation and constituency service. In systems of neopatrimonial and single-party rule that were widespread in Africa before processes of democratization began in the 1990s, legislators typically articulated local concerns in single-party legislatures and laid the grievances and requests of local constituencies before executive functionaries and presidents. In the same manner, legislators also worked on national budget processes and developed strategies that enabled them to secure material support for schools, clinics, roads, and water projects for their local constituencies. The challenge for African legislatures in multiparty democratizing systems is not to diminish the roles of representing and servicing constituency needs but to go beyond these two functions. Legislatures should participate meaningfully in lawmaking and exercise oversight of executive actions. By so doing, executive leaders are held accountable.
At this point, many African legislatures appear to be improving, but some cause for concern remains (Barkan 2009). Overall, by the end of the 2000s, most African legislatures consisted of representatives from a growing number of opposition parties. Eritrea and Swaziland were among the few with no opposition representatives. However, despite the growing number of multiparty legislatures, many African legislatures remain dominated by ruling parties and manipulated by authoritarian presidents. In Cameroon, for example, President Paul Biya in 2008 pushed constitutional amendments through the parliament in order to eliminate term limits, thereby giving him the option to run for president as many times as he wishes.
Yet there are African legislatures in which the ruling parties have large majorities but do not stifle debate and are not at the beck and call of the president. Ruling parties have huge majorities in the legislatures of Tanzania and South Africa, but both bodies are characterized by robust and unfettered debate.
In order to authoritatively participate in legislating and to provide effective executive oversight, African legislatures require greater capacity in terms of both technical staff support and improvements in physical infrastructures and facilities. South Africa provides a good example of a legislature with both; much of its physical infrastructure was constructed under apartheid rule. Even more vital to stimulate legislators’ substantive participation in lawmaking and successful executive oversight is scrutiny by citizens, the media, and civil society organizations. Monitoring and evaluating the performance of legislators has become an effective way for citizens to exercise oversight of legislatures in a growing number of African countries. But this trend is developing unevenly across Africa.
Another factor that contributes to the success of electoral democracy is the institutionalization of two or more political parties in a competitive party system. It is important to recall that in many African countries the notion of opposition political parties is relatively new. Democratization since the early 1990s has enabled the reorganization of some historically based political parties and the formation of brand-new political parties. With little time and few organizational resources, nascent and incumbent political parties have frequently relied on the strength of a particular leader’s personal appeal to mobilize potential voters. Over time, as incumbent strongmen have been finally turned out or have peacefully withdrawn from elected office, some political parties have begun to institutionalize on the basis of other shared interests.
One of the other primary appeals used by political parties in Africa has been the shared bond of ethnic identity. Although many political parties in Africa still rely on the ethnic factor for their core membership, ethnic ties are fast proving insufficient to mobilize and galvanize partisan support. For example, in Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Namibia, and Mali, among others, the rural-urban cleavage is impacting partisan politics. In postconflict Liberia and in Botswana, among other African countries, generational differences are becoming a driving force defining partisan struggles for power. Thus in some parts of Africa, the strong correlation between ethnic identity and political partisanship is being gradually weakened. Yet there are cases such as Kenya in 2007–8, where, in the face of highly competitive partisan elections, ethnic solidarity was mobilized by political elites to become the most important feature of electoral politics.
Lastly, there are also strong external factors pulling African political parties away from highly personalized and/or ethnic politics. Numerous African political parties are defining themselves in ideological terms and seeking integration into larger global networks. For example, parties such as the New Patriotic Party of Ghana, the Malawi Congress Party, and the Democratic Party of Kenya have become members or affiliates of the Centrist Democrat International (CDI), a right-of-center political party network. A corresponding left-of-center consortium of African political parties that all belong to the Socialist International includes the African National Congress of South Africa, the Alliance for Democracy in Mali, the Socialist Party of Senegal, and the Mauritian Social Democratic Party. Finally, a growing number of African parties are members of the Global Green Federation, including the Mazingira Green Party of Kenya, the Ivorian Ecological Party, and the National Union for Democracy and Development of Madagascar. It remains to be seen to what extent the association of African political parties with global party ideological groups will transform the extent of personalization or ethnic character, or affect their links with various constituencies within African societies.
In the end, the best guardian and promoter of democracy in Africa is civil society, the voluntary groups and organizations outside and independent of the state and market where African peoples get together to express their common interests. Civil society groups do not necessarily share explicitly political objectives; they can also be based on a wide range of social, economic, and cultural goals. Civil society organizations also go well beyond urban-based national and local NGOs to include an array of community-based organizations in a diversity of rural and urban locations, such as trade unions, farmers associations, producer cooperatives, professional organizations, teacher unions, student unions, women’s groups, sports clubs, youth associations, Bible study groups, and savings clubs.
One of the most remarkable developments of the 1980s was the growth of self-organized civil society groups and their pivotal role in collective action at local and national levels. In countries that experienced violent conflicts, civil society groups contributed greatly to the survival strategies and social welfare of local communities as well as to conflict resolution and postconflict reconstruction. For example, in Liberia and Sierra Leone, civil society organizations, especially women’s groups, have been widely recognized as key players in achieving peace settlements. In Nigeria, the pro-democracy movement actively fought against the oppression of military rule, especially during the Abacha regime.
Figure 12.2. News coverage and campaign posters preceding presidential elections in Nigeria.
Corbis.
Many of these groups, especially those involved in advocating for democracy and human rights, are criticized for being funded by international donors and directed by donors’ agendas and priorities rather than the interests of the groups they claim to serve. Some are indeed very minimalist organizations and are sometimes referred to as merely “briefcase organizations” or owe their very existence to opportunistic interactions with foreign funders. Yet a significant number of civil society organizations are homegrown organizations with deep roots in local and national causes and constituencies and have survived over time. For example, Abdoulaye Bathily has shown that pro-democracy youth and student groups have a rich tradition in Africa that predates Samuel P. Huntington’s “third wave” of democracy. There are a number of encouraging developments that suggest that civil society organizations that were focused on building democracy will contribute significantly to the sustaining of electoral democracy and the deepening of democratic governance.
First, these organizations are involved in all aspects of elections and democratic governance and are acquiring the necessary skills and capacities to perform better in years to come. Pro-democracy groups are now involved in every aspect of the electoral process, including voter education, ensuring a level playing field for all political contestants before and during the polls, declaration of results, and resolution of post-balloting disputes. In Ghana and Kenya, for example, election monitoring groups used mobile phone technology and the proliferation of independent radio stations to publicize independently and immediately exit poll information from many contested or remote neighborhoods and communities.
Second, in numerous countries, umbrella civil society federations are being organized and are strengthening capacity and building synergies between the many smaller groups. In numerous cases, civil society organizations have already developed subregional and continent-wide networks and organizations. These networks facilitate civil society organizations’ participation as important actors in policy formulation for their subregion and for Africa as a whole.
Finally, election monitoring groups are building synergies with broader human rights, governance, and socioeconomic empowerment groups. For example, civil society organizations that are involved in election monitoring and human rights advocacy are increasingly cooperating with groups that are concerned with accountability and transparency in public affairs and are engaged in monitoring budget performance and expenditure patterns. In this way, the focus on elections has become part of a wider concern for the quality of political, social, and economic governance.
The exuberance sometimes associated with the strength of the relationship between electoral democracy and the entrenchment of a democratic culture occasionally leads some analysts to treat elections as if they were the only significant element of democratic governance and the only measure of successful processes of democratization. Frequently, election-centered studies of democratization processes hinge their projections of the future of democracy in any given country on an assessment of how “free and fair” that country’s elections are. Such analyses often raise expectations that there should be a smooth progression on a linear course toward what is called democratic consolidation.
While we bring to this discussion a deep appreciation of the critical importance and even the indispensable role of elections in the establishment and consolidation of democracy, we caution against the impression that there is a one-way road to the consolidation of electoral democracy. Political and social processes generally are vulnerable to internal and external shocks, which often send the democratization project on a zigzag course.
The most striking example of the building and erosion of democratic institutions in Africa is Zimbabwe. Despite a strong history of democratic contestation, an independent judiciary, and a strong civil society in the 1980s and 1990s, Zimbabwe has subsequently seen the collapse of its economy, the persistence and escalation of election- and ethnic-related violence, and the violent suppression of many forms of opposition. Although multiple parties contest elections in Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe has remained president of the country since 1980.
The decline of Zimbabwe reveals the important connections between state capacity and democracy (Bates 2008). To build and sustain a democratic regime requires substantial state strength. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where road infrastructure is lacking in many areas, UN helicopters were borrowed to deliver ballots and ballot boxes for the November 2011 election. Whereas Somalia is lamented as both an authoritarian regime and a failed state, the still-unrecognized de facto state of Somaliland is frequently praised for its relatively higher level of state capacity and distinctive system of democratic governance. Since Somaliland declared itself sovereign in 1993, the political system has combined “traditional” clan and Western institutions and now allows limited multiparty competition for some political offices.
These kinds of challenges to democratic consolidation in Africa demand adaptations that often result in the development of hybrid institutions blending elements of authoritarian and neopatrimonial institutions with democratic ones. Some hybrid regimes, such as in Zambia, give the president extensive powers, while others, such as Mozambique’s, have had the same party in power for decades, and still others, such as in Malawi, have sought to silence opposition voices from civil society and media. Léonardo Villalón and Peter VonDoepp remind us that in the fashioning of democratic institutions and processes, hybridity can itself be a longstanding equilibrium. African democratic institutions must not be expected to turn out as facsimiles of Western democratic institutions.
It is also important to emphasize that elections are a necessary but not sufficient condition for the establishment and consolidation of democratic governance. If it were, citizens would have only a seasonal opportunity for meaningful participation in governance, and the ballot would be the only instrument for demanding accountability of leaders. Democratic governance has to do with the conduct of public affairs by citizens of a country through an array of diverse institutional arrangements designed for making and implementing decisions at various levels of governance, local, national, and international (Chabal and Daloz 1999). The holding of elections is a very important part of democratic governance but not the sum total of the processes of democratic governance. This chapter, therefore, has begun with the above discussion of the state of electoral democracy in Africa but now proceeds to examine the future prospects of a range of governance institutions and processes, such as decentralization, the role of local and precolonial political authorities, the politics of representation, regionalism, and globalization.
Elections take place only sporadically—every four to six years in most African countries—and voter registration and voter participation may require substantial effort, such as during the 2012 election in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, when voting often involved long walks to remote polling stations and extended waiting times. But, this peak of participation from voters occurs on one particular day, which is designated from the top-down by the central government (often with support from external election observers). However, democratic governance also involves everyday participation in a variety of other, nonelectoral practices of citizenship.
Figure 12.3. AIDS activists demonstrate outside South Africa’s parliament.
Corbis.
Public opinion polling conducted by the Afrobarometer Project in eighteen African countries between 2000 and 2012 confirms that African peoples are actively engaged in various forms of political participation besides elections. The least frequent type of non-electoral participation among Africans was protesting or demonstrating. While some Africans did take their demands to the streets—for example, the repeated protests organized by the Treatment Action Campaign demanding a more aggressive response to HIV/AIDS from the South African government—the more common forms of participation involved less intensely oppositional modes of making claims and seeking accountability. For example, in 2008–9, 68 percent of Africans occasionally or frequently met with others to discuss an issue, and 27 percent contacted their local government councilors to share their views on a problem.
Much everyday political activity in Africa is focused on a variety of state and non-state actors and institutions that are closer, more familiar, and perhaps more legitimate at the local level (Boone 2009). Clearly, the central government is not the only, or even preferred, outlet for Africans to voice their views and preferences.
One recent trend in African politics that has shifted the focus of attention to the local level is the push across the continent to decentralize. Most African governments have, at least officially, adopted decentralization programs that devolve decision making from the center to more local levels of government. The implementation of decentralization, however, has varied considerably on the ground since its initiation in many places in the early 1990s. In Ghana, decentralization was significant and largely positive; administrative reform entailed the creation of new district- and even village-level institutions that were primarily elected by and for local people. In contrast, in Côte d’Ivoire, the administration of Henri Konan Bédié (1993–99) conceived of decentralization as bringing the central government down to the people instead of having it concentrated in a few centers, so local communities gained little new decision-making power. Scholars and practitioners have highlighted the contrasts between the initial, abstract allure of decentralization and its local-level realities in Africa and around the world. On one hand, decentralization offers the potential for more effective provision of services and greater local accountability. On the other, local administration does not eliminate the role of politics and inequality—corruption and domination by political, economic, and social elites can still pose a serious challenge to governance.
A second, parallel trend that reinforces the shift toward decentralization is the tremendous growth in the role played by nonstate actors in the provision of public goods. Central governments are devolving responsibilities not only to local districts and municipalities but also to an exploding number of NGOs, community-based organizations, and private-sector service providers. For example, the number of NGOs in Kenya is growing by four hundred per year, and by 2009, 5,929 were officially registered with the government, according to Kenya’s NGO Coordination Board. At times these nonstate actors subcontract to the state, often receiving partial funding from and/or being subject to regulation and monitoring by state agencies; at others, they bypass the state completely. In many instances, however, the boundaries between state and nonstate actors are blurred. This dramatic increase in the role played by NGOs and other nonstate actors raises important questions about the effects on state capacity as well as citizens’ abilities to gain access to and accountability for public goods and services.
Figure 12.4. Community meeting in rural Kenya.
Getty Images.
It is crucial to note at this point that not all local actors are new. Indeed, we highlight here a third trend in African politics at the local level: the persistence of the importance of precolonial institutions of authority. Even with the ongoing processes of market liberalization and political democratization, many precolonial political institutions of decision making continue to actively mediate local conflicts over land, resources, labor, and local revenues. For example, chieftaincy institutions in South Africa have continued to play traditional roles in the adjudication of conflicts over land but also have taken on new roles in ensuring the free and fair conduct of local elections and distributing the benefits of local development projects. In some cases, such as Ghana, Lesotho, and Namibia, the roles of precolonial authorities have been formally recognized and codified in the constitution. But in many instances, the long histories of these indigenous authorities continue to evolve informally on the ground in novel ways. The Afrobarometer public opinion data also confirm the salience of precolonial or indigenous institutions. More than 55 percent of Africans report that they trust traditional leaders, with 31 percent reporting that they trust traditional authorities to settle local disputes compared with 33 percent saying that this role should go to local government.
Taken together, the above trends in local politics suggest that African peoples are supportive of the future of democracy, but that they may in fact be experiencing and thinking about democracy in distinctive ways. Analysis of survey data showed widespread support for free and fair elections held regularly as a means of choosing political leaders (Bratton, Mattes, and Gyimah-Boadi 2005). In the 2008–9 Afrobarometer survey, close to 70 percent of respondents in a survey of eighteen countries agreed that “democracy is preferable to any other kind of government.” But what did these survey participants mean by democracy? On average, 57 percent of Afrobarometer respondents shared a more material view of democracy, where they emphasized their substantive rights to employment, livelihoods, and well-being whereas 43 percent highlighted a procedural conception of democracy, emphasizing the procedures fostering political competition and civil freedoms (Bratton, Mattes, and Gyimah-Boadi 2005: 88). Indeed, in the period 2008–9, 30 percent of Africans believed that the most important task of their elected officials is to deliver development or jobs.
Figure 12.5. Nelson Mandela votes in the first democratic elections in South Africa.
Corbis.
Afrobarometer notes, however, that a substantial minority of respondents, 22 percent, indicated that they did not care or did not know what form of government was preferable for their country. Equally important is the result showing that only 11 percent of respondents indicated that in certain circumstances, nondemocratic systems (such as a military or other authoritarian regime) would be preferable.
It may not be too great a stretch to conclude from these results that democracy is becoming deeply entrenched as a political value preference within African political cultures. Still, the concept of democracy seems more tightly linked to the lived everyday experiences of authority and service provision at the local level than to an abstract ideal. The challenge for the future of democracy is for African countries to build democratic institutions and state capacity that connect the center and the local authorities.
The above sections of this chapter have revealed how African politics include a wide variety of political institutions and organizations from capital cities to local communities. We turn now to the diversity of African nations and populations in order to highlight the politics of representation in Africa. Most African nation-states cover large geographic areas and include very diverse populations. African governments and other political organizations are tasked with representing the interests of many different linguistic and ethnic groups, as well as people of different genders, economic backgrounds, and living situations.
Representation refers to a relationship between citizens and the people who speak for them in the political system. Borrowing from Hanna Pitkin (1967), political scientists think of four dimensions of representation: (1) the rules that allow certain people to be elected, (2) how closely the demographics of an elected body mirror those of the whole population, (3) how closely governmental officials’ actions mirror the interests of their constituents, and (4) whether constituents feel that they are being represented.
The first aspect of representation has to do with the structure of government. We have already discussed elections and the diversity and vibrancy of institutions of local government in Africa. The last facet of representation, concerning how people view their government, was also discussed above in the section on public opinion in the African context. We turn our attention now to the second and third aspects of representation, sometimes called descriptive and substantive representation, which concern who is elected and how those officials represent the interests of their constituents.
In many parts of Africa, women are holding more and more legislative seats. Whereas in the 1960s approximately 1 percent of parliamentarians were female, as of 2008 more than 18 percent of legislative positions in Africa are held by women. This increase is due, in part, to the adoption of gender quotas and reserves in African parliaments. Quotas in Rwanda, South Africa, Burundi, Mozambique, and Uganda have substantially increased women’s participation in elected and appointed offices (Tripp and Kang 2007).
Evidence suggests that this descriptive representation of women has resulted in a corresponding increase in the substantive representation of women’s interests. For example, in the 2008 parliamentary elections in Rwanda, 56 percent of seats in the legislature were won by women. These elections marked the first time anywhere in the world that a legislature had a majority of women. These legislators, despite continued gender inequality in Rwanda, have managed to pass numerous pieces of legislation that have increased penalties for sexual violence and opened up opportunities for women through banking and land reform. Similar strides have been made in Uganda and South Africa, where women legislators have been instrumental in bringing women’s concerns to the forefront and creating meaningful policy change.
African politics, known sometimes for its dependence on “big men,” has also been shaped by a growing number of powerful female heads of government. Since 1993, five states in Africa have had women serve as prime minister and six states have had female vice or deputy presidents. In addition, in fourteen different African countries, twenty-three women ran in nineteen elections for the office of chief executive (Adams 2008; see also the online African Elections Database). The most prominent among women leaders in Africa today, however, is Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. The Nobel Peace Prize winner and two-term president of Liberia is the first-ever female elected head of state in Africa.
The Maghreb and North Africa present a somewhat different environment for women’s participation in politics. While scholars continue to debate whether the structure of oil-based economies or the cultural influence of Islam hinders gender equality in this region, until recently, relatively authoritarian political regimes have offered few political opportunities for the descriptive or substantive representation of women in politics. It remains to be seen whether the “Arab spring” of 2011 will perhaps produce new democratic spaces for greater female political participation.
In addition to representing people on the basis of gendered interests, political systems in Africa have the task of ruling over people who identify themselves as belonging to many different ethnic groups. Ethnic groups can define themselves in terms of language, region, or narratives of shared history. These groups are not the product of “natural” or biological distinctions between people. In fact, many ethnic identities were socially constructed and politically mobilized by colonial officials; the groups became significant because of the political and material conditions of colonialism, rather than because of any inherent differences between them. Calling ethnic groups social constructions does not mean that they are trivial, however. Indeed, these different groups can be very politically important in modern African states.
Some states, such as Madagascar and Lesotho, have relatively few politically salient ethnically defined groups. In these states, other kinds of divisions, such as religion or socioeconomic class, motivate political conflict. Other countries, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, and Uganda, have a number of different ethnically defined groups that define the political landscape. These ethnically defined groups are often represented by political parties that claim to speak on behalf of the entire group. When elected, these parties also claim to act in the best interests of their particular ethnic group.
Political scientists have long argued that this kind of politicization of ethnic identity undermines democracy, economic development, and the peaceful resolution of conflict (Posner 2005). The problem with ethnic voting is that it has the potential to reduce elections to a census. If people vote based on their identity, then democratic competition is reduced to a question of which group is the largest. Additionally, if ethnically defined political parties serve only the interests of their groups, then people from other, underrepresented ethnic groups are left underserved by their governments, and broad-based economic growth can be stunted. Finally, the overlap of economic inequality and ethnic identity has frequently been seen as the source of conflict in African politics. Violence between ethnically defined communities, as in the genocide in Rwanda and Burundi in 1994 or the protracted conflict in Darfur starting in 2003, are seen by observers of African politics as evidence of how destructive the politics of ethnicity can be. Since the political salience of ethnicity cannot be eliminated, and because it can devolve into violence, African leaders and communities must manage ethnicity as a factor within political systems. They can do so through creative institutional designs and informal rules to ensure inclusion and reduce the potential negative impacts of ethnic politics. Ethnic minority set-asides or allotted seats in parliament are also one way of addressing the ethnic factor through institutional design.
Indigenous or autochthonous groups in Africa present another kind of diversity that the African state is tasked with representing. The very notion of indigeneity in the African context is complex and contested. Some groups in Africa define themselves as indigenous based on distinct livelihood strategies that often conflict with those of the majority and on their claims to have lived and practiced their culture in lands that they have occupied since precolonial times. Historically, these groups tend to be economically and politically marginalized in modern African nation-states but seek to preserve their language, their culture, and access to their “original” lands within those states. Conflicts arise, however, when different groups offer competing historical narratives of origination and migration.
These rival claims to indigeneity have become increasingly visible as a growing number of indigenous populations throughout Africa have begun to articulate demands and seek protections from states and intergovernmental organizations, such as the United Nations. One of the largest groups, spanning several nation-state borders in southern Africa, is a group known as the San, Basarwa, or Bushmen. With populations dispersed throughout Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, and Angola, this diverse assembly of people, who traditionally have practiced hunter-gatherer modes of subsistence, is made up of groups such as the !Kung, /Xam, and ‡Khomani (each of the symbols in these names represents a unique click-based consonant sound). It is estimated that distant relatives of these contemporary groups have lived in the area for tens of thousands of years.
In both Botswana and South Africa, high-profile cases have been brought by representatives of the San to assert ancestral rights to lands; to fight state-mandated relocation, and to seek protections for cultural practices. In Botswana, San organizations have fought since the 1970s against the government’s rezoning of traditional grazing and migration areas in the Kalahari Desert. Similar court struggles in South Africa and Namibia have resulted more recently in the emergence of several transnational activism networks that lobby on behalf of these groups.
The Tuareg people in the Sahara and Sahel have also engaged in struggles with states including Algeria, Niger, and Mali to obtain greater state support for economic development, improve political representation, and safeguard their cultural heritage. Unlike the San, however, some Tuareg have chosen to defend their claims through armed rebellion and insurgency against the central state. Armed resistance to colonial and independent states has a long history among the Tuareg, with the first such unified rebellion occurring in 1916. Insurgencies in Niger and Mali during the first half of the 1990s brought concessions from those governments. Confrontations between Tuareg groups and the Malian state resumed in 2006 when Tuareg soldiers deserted after looting one of the regional army garrisons. National and international Islamist fighters also have become active in the area. The civil war in Libya and the demise of Muammar Qaddafi resulted not only in the return to Mali of Tuaregs who had served Qaddafi but also an influx of sophisticated arms. Militant Tuareg factions and their Islamist allies took advantage of their military superiority and a power vacuum created by a coup in Bamako to establish control of northern Mali, including the cities of Gao and Timbuktu, declaring it the independent state of Azawad in April 2012, but a French invasion expelled the Islamist elements that had taken control of the insurrection. Now the secular Tuareg factions are hoping to negotiate with the recently-elected, post-coup Malian government to attain regional autonomy. This case demonstrates how the grievances of a marginalized group with claims to indigeneity can lead to a complex and volatile situation that becomes difficult to resolve.
While transnational linkages were important sources of mobilization and support for the highly publicized battles for indigenous rights in Saharan and southern Africa, they have also played major roles in organizing women, ethnic groups, and political parties in many regions of the continent. International cooperation among groups such as the Maasai in eastern Africa, the Tuareg in the Sahel, or the San in the south has attempted to expand environmental and land protections for these groups. Consortia of academics and activists from Africa and across the world have sought to effect change in domestic and international politics in Africa. The globalization of communication and information technologies has stimulated these transnational networks, helping citizens and groups in Africa to more effectively lobby for their rights and to draw on common resources to achieve domestic and international policy outcomes. These transnational organizations have played critical roles in diffusing new norms and defining key political concepts, such as which groups can claim to be “indigenous,” what rights can or should be guaranteed by states, and how key environmental resources, including wildlife and water, should be managed.
The importance of transnational and global politics is not new in Africa, however. Indeed, African politics has long crossed the boundaries of political systems, regions, and even continents. Even before the globalization of human rights advocacy, transnational and global networks shaped African elections, humanitarian relief efforts, and efforts at conflict resolution, peacekeeping, and reconstruction. What is notable, however, is that an increasing number of transnational networks are now organized within Africa rather than originating from outside the continent.
African regional and continental organizations that promote electoral democracy have experienced rather impressive growth in experience and clout. Both the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) have become proficient in their elections-related interventions in their regions. For example, ECOWAS has been building the capacity to monitor political activities, especially elections, in member countries. During the 2008 elections in Ghana, ECOWAS initiated constant engagement with the Ghanaian electoral commission and security officials well before the campaign season began and continued it throughout. ECOWAS called the attention of relevant actors to elections-related concerns that included the state of security and the role of security agents, the engagement of political parties by the electoral commission in a transparent elections preparation process, and the behavior of the ruling party and the major opposition parties. ECOWAS’s interventions with civil society went beyond technical support for local elections monitors and involved rallying together diverse groups of civil society organizations in support of a “Ghana must win” campaign.
Figure 12.6. ECOWAS meeting on Mali in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire.
Corbis.
Support for electoral democracy by African regional and continental organizations is also buttressed by external actors. The European Union (EU), the (formerly British) Commonwealth, and the U.S.-based National Democratic Institute (NDI) are among the leading non-African organizations that are very active in promoting electoral democracy in Africa. The EU, for example, has supported considerable scientific research into identifying significant constituencies and electoral zones that are bellwethers for potential conflict during elections and targeting interventions for those areas. Since its founding in 1983, NDI has developed impressive tools for building capacity in partnership with national election monitoring coalitions. Also impressive and auguring well for the future of electoral democracy in Africa is the concerted initiative by African and international partners to ensure the integrity of election results, their acceptance by candidates, and the orderly transfer of power, especially in cases of extremely close results or where the ruling party suffered a defeat. Such was the case with elections in Senegal in 2000, when the Socialist Party and its candidate, President Abdou Diouf, were narrowly defeated, and in Ghana in 2008, when the incumbent New Patriotic Party lost. In both instances, the margin of votes that separated the two contesting parties in the presidential election and the subsequent runoff were less than a percentage point.
In addition to the role played by organizations in promoting democratic elections, one particularly visible form of international influence in Africa is related to global humanitarian responses to natural disasters and conflict. In the past several decades, several natural disasters and armed conflicts in Africa have displaced millions, both internally and internationally. Aid groups such as the international NGO Oxfam, the bilateral donor USAID, and the UN’s World Food Programme have sought to relieve human suffering in these crises through the provision of short-term assistance, such as the distribution of food, water, or medical supplies, or longer-term development projects. Celebrities from the United States, western Europe, and Africa have also lent their names to these causes. For example, music, television, and film stars such as Bono, Oprah, and George Clooney have sought to use their influence to attract political attention or donor money to the places or populations for which they advocate.
Charitable work is also being pursued by some multinational corporations (MNCs) through various initiatives under the rubric of “corporate social responsibility.” In some cases MNCs invest directly in infrastructure projects such as schools, clinics, or roads for the communities where they work. Over the past couple of decades, Chinese MNCs have expanded and now rival Western groups in these kinds of foreign direct investments. In other cases, MNCs have sought to channel some portion of profits from mass-market consumer products toward charitable causes in Africa, such as AIDS or malaria prevention or clean water provision. One example is the Product Red campaign, involving Gap, Apple, and Nike, among others. This strategy, sometimes labeled “ethical consumerism,” has been controversial because of its reliance on the global North’s consumption of scarce resources and the for-profit business models of these corporations.
The third area where transnational, regional, and global linkages have been quite prominent is in the domain of peacekeeping and conflict resolution. For example, in 2011–12 the United Nations spent $5.31 billion (approximately 68 percent of that year’s global peacekeeping budget) for peacekeeping missions in Africa, including in Abyei (between Sudan and South Sudan), Côte d’Ivoire, Darfur, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, South Sudan, and Western Sahara. Between its statutory creation in 2002 and 2011, the International Criminal Court (ICC) had pursued only twenty-six cases, all of which were for war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide allegedly committed in African states. While some advocates have praised ICC prosecutions, others have criticized what is perceived to be a disproportionate focus on Africa.
Here again, while the United States, former colonial powers, and the United Nations continue to exert significant influence, they are not alone. China is a rising power here as well, providing financial and direct military support to some African leaders. More significant, regional and continent-wide organizations, such as ECOWAS, SADC, and the African Union, play increasingly important roles in mediating civil conflicts and promoting peace on the ground. For example, Nigeria spent more than $500 million on peacekeeping in Liberia and Sierra Leone before the UN intervened in those countries. Since its reorganization in 2002, the African Union, which is headquartered in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, has deployed peacekeeping troops in Burundi (2003), Sudan (2003–8), and Somalia, to name a few. The old principle of non-intervention that was a feature of the African Union’s predecessor organization, the Organization of African Unity (established in 1963 and frequently mocked as the “Dictators’ Club”), is now being replaced with a commitment to a new principle of “non-indifference.” Another example of the development within Africa of new accountability mechanisms is the establishment by the African Union in 2002 of the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) process. The APRM is a voluntary association of more than thirty African countries that have agreed to have independent, African assessments of their country’s progress in democratic governance and sustainable economic development. Key issues for self-assessment and peer review include the extent to which the member countries adhere to regional and international conventions and standards on a range of rights, including the rights of women, children, and the disabled. Other issues to be evaluated are the exercise of good corporate citizenship and the fight against corruption. The APR Panel of Eminent Persons, which consists of five to seven members with distinguished careers and “high moral stature,” was set up to oversee these peer review processes. Clearly, Africans are developing new and innovative regional institutions within the continent to continue to build and support internal capacities for democratic governance in the future.
Figure 12.7. Opening ceremony of the African Union Executive Council in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Corbis.
In sum, this chapter highlights the complex and dynamic nature of democracy in Africa. We have argued that building democracy is not a strictly one-way process that can be imposed simply with the transplantation of new, formal electoral rules. Instead, informal institutions critically shape whose voice gets heard and who makes decisions at all levels of African political systems.
Our perspective thus goes beyond an exclusive focus on how elections are organized periodically in capital cities to reveal the importance of everyday politics at the local level. We acknowledge the many continued challenges to democratic governance around the continent, but we reject the pervasive tone of “Afro-pessimism” commonly found in the popular media. Rather, we call for a cautious optimism about the future of democracy in Africa. Many citizens and civil society groups in Africa are strengthening their ability to demand accountability from their political leaders.
Of course, the way democratic governance is constructed or challenged depends crucially on the particular political histories of communities and nations. We must resist the temptation to oversimplify and generalize African politics across the continent, and instead continue to study how democracy is being conceptualized and built in varied ways in different places and at specific moments in time. We can continue to learn how Africans themselves think about democracy, and how they are shaping their own democratic futures.
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