Voting for Democracy

Watershed Elections in Contemporary Anglophone Africa

John Daniel, Roger Southall

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429765773
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

First published in 1999, the essays in this book examine the context and conduct of a series of watershed elections held in Anglophone Africa in the first half of the 1990s. These elections crystallized a wider process of democratization, underway in much of sub-Saharan Africa during the last decade, in which attempts were made to shift from various forms of authoritarian rule (colonial or racial oligarchies, military regimes, one-party states, or presidential rule) to pluralist parliamentary politics.

This volume brings together for the first time, studies of these events in countries sharing a comparable legacy of British colonialism, an acquaintance with the Westminster constitutional tradition and related experiences of decolonization and democratic struggle. Written from a variety of perspectives by contributors with first-hand knowledge and long experience of research in Africa, the papers situate each election in its wider political context, examining the political forces at work and the events which gave rise to reform. All indicate that, despite Western pressure for reform and the influence of the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in Eastern Europe, internal African demands for democracy provided the primary driving force for change.

Not all the elections fulfilled the hopes invested in them. In Nigeria, they were annulled before all the votes had been counted. In Kenya, the disarray of the opposition ensured the return to power of the old order. Even where they produced a successful regime transition, the democratic credentials of the new governments were sometimes seriously flawed. Yet for all these limitations, these watershed elections signalled important progress for African democracy. They brought a formal end to colonial rule in Namibia and to three centuries of racial discrimination in South Africa. They brought changes of government through the ballot box in Zambia and Malawi, among the first instances in Africa of such change being accomplished without the use of force.

Above all, they provided African electorates with an opportunity to pass judgement on long-serving authoritarian regimes – with unequivocal results: in every case, when given the chance to vote, Africans voted for democracy.

1
Political Crisis and Democratic Renewal in Africa

MORRIS SZEFTEL

The papers in this book examine the context and conduct of a series of watershed elections held in Anglophone Africa between 1989 and 1994. These elections crystallized a wider process of democratization, underway during the last decade, in which attempts were made to shift from various forms of authoritarian rule (colonial or racial oligarchies, military regimes, one-party states, or presidential rule) to pluralist parliamentary politics. Such attempts at democratic renewal were not confined to Africa’s former British colonies. Similar efforts were also made dining this period in Francophone Africa and in the war-ravaged states of Ethiopia, Eritrea, Uganda, Angola and Mozambique. Indeed, as Bayart has observed, ‘from 1989 most sub-Saharan African countries experienced an unprecedented wave of demands for democracy, which succeeded in bringing about the downfall of several authoritarian regimes and forced others to accept multi-party politics’ (1993: x). The essays which follow bring together (for the first time) studies of these events in Anglophone countries of the continent, which share a comparable legacy of British colonialism, an acquaintance with the Westminister constitutional tradition, and even some related historical experiences of decolonization and democratic struggle.

The first in the cycle of elections, for a constituent assembly in Namibia in 1989, brought South Africa’s seventy year occupation of that country to an end and so created an independent state out of Africa’s ‘last colony’. The last, South Africa’s ‘liberation election’ of 1994, allowed South Africans of all races to vote in a democratic election for the first time and formally ended three centuries of racial domination and African exclusion. In the years between these two events, a number of other Anglophone countries held elections, not to end colonial rule or settler domination, but to restore competitive, multi-party politics - in some instances twenty or more years after such systems had been abandoned. In the vast majority of these countries the pluralist constitutions established at the end of British colonial rule were progressively undermined by factional conflict and political instability and ultimately abrogated in favour of military rule or one-party regimes. Now, with the restoration of competitive elections and the re-establishment of the right to organize political parties, there was a return to this earlier legacy.

Precisely because they were linked to this wider process of democratization, and gave formal political expression to it, these elections constitute one of the most important political developments in the last quarter-century in Africa (Bratton and van de Walle, 1997: 3). Not all of them produced a successful transition to a democratic order, as the essays that follow demonstrate. Democratic elections and democratic reform proved neither inevitable nor unproblematic. Yet, if anything, in a continent devastated by international debt, war and violence, famine and disease, corruption and political instability, the attempt at reform was all the more significant where it occured and its achievements, however modest, the more noteworthy. Not surprisingly, therefore, it was initially universally welcomed by all but those whose control of office it threatened. Observers from most parts of the ideological spectrum hoped it might open up constitutional space for democratic forces and pressures for equitable development. Radical Africanists emphasised the opportunities that democratic struggles created for greater equality and social justice in Africa (The Review of African Political Economy, numbers 45/46, 1989 and 54, 1992; Gibbon, Bangura and Ofstad, 1992). Mainstream liberals explored the prospects for the development of multi-party systems and liberal institutions, the influence of external actors and the role of civil society (Healey and Robinson, 1992). And African scholars (encouraged by research organizations such as Codesria and OSSREA) focused particularly on questions of development, class, human rights and security (Anyang ‘Nyong’o, 1992; Imam, 1992). Democratization produced a new, if temporary, optimism and a justified pride in achievement among those on the continent who fought so hard for it.

The process was far from even and - by the end of the 1990s - generally incomplete. As the century moved to its end, many difficult struggles still lay ahead and many of the gains made proved temporary or modest in then-impact. Not all these elections successfully established democratic parliamentary systems. In Nigeria, the process was aborted while the votes were still being counted. In Lesotho, the settling of old scores, between the parties and between the military and the parties, undermined the transition. In Kenya, the elections were won by the old order and new democratic forces finished in disarray - as was to happen in subsequent elections five years later. Even where elections did change the government and where political systems based on ideas of freedom of association and electoral competition were successfully introduced, reform often became mired in the problems of economic underdevelopment. Moreover, the circumstances in which democratization occured, of economic and social crisis, and of state instability, remain capable of undermining every gain. Perhaps most worryingly, there was little evidence that the nature of African politics, rooted in clientelism and the manipulation of communal identities, had changed enough to sustain the momentum of democratization. Thus the prospects for democratization raised wider issues than could be resolved by any single election, however important. As Nelson Mandela put it, after the 1994 elections in South Africa: ‘We have not taken the final step of our journey, but the first step on a longer and even more difficult road.’ (1994: 751).

Democratization and its Alternatives

Democratic elections in Anglophone countries were largely confined to the southern and eastern sub-continent, in states occupying a crescent stretching from the south-western Atlantic coast (Namibia and South Africa) to the eastern equatorial coast (Kenya). Anglophone states in West African fared far less well: in Nigeria, elections were aborted; in Ghana, economic liberalization measures were carried out by a decidedly illiberal regime; and in Sierra Leone, the state collapsed into chaos and civil war. Yet, despite these geographic limits, democratization and democratizing elections affected most regimes, even those who most strenuously resisted it: first, by exciting mass hopes for change; and, then, by imposing pressures on regimes to promise (and appear to) change even where they worked to undermine it. Thus, the Nigerian military, after setting aside the presidential election of 1993 and imprisoning its victor, still felt impelled to promise that it would restore democracy. Thus, too, where ‘in 1989, 29 African countries were governed under some kind of single-party constitution, and one-party rule seemed entrenched as the modal form of governance’, by 1994 ‘not a single de jure one-party state remained in Africa’ (Bratton and van de Walle, 1997: 8).

Whether there was a genuine processes of democratization, or whether it was merely a smokescreen behind which the old order continued, depended on the specific nature of the process, the political forces involved in it and the role played by the government and ruling party. In Benin, for instance, students and public sector workers forced the single-party regime to cede power at a national conference of representative groups (Allen, 1992). While, the President remained in office, most of his old powers were transferred to a Prime Minister (chosen by the conference) and an interim government. Subsequently Benin developed a multi-party system, the ruling party was dissolved, and none of its surviving fragments participated in the 1991 elections. The use of a national conference to effect constitutional change was a feature of some Francophone states. A rather different sequence can be seen in the Anglophone countries which are the subject of this volume. In Zambia and Kenya, the conference stage was by-passed by the emergence of a loose coalition (the MMD in Zambia, FORD in Kenya) which quickly came to act as the dominant opposition party. In Zambia, the MMD easily defeated the former ruling party in an election; in Kenya, by contrast, the ruling party retained power after an electoral contest against a fragmented opposition (Ajulu, 1993; Baylies and Szeftel, 1992; chapters 5 and 6, below).

Across the continent, in fact, a full transfer of power to the opposition was rare. Opposition boycotts and divisions often ensured victory for the ruling party by default and, where these were absent, electoral manipulation often did so instead. In the Ivory Coast and Gabon, for example, after demonstrations had forced concessions, elections were called before opposition groups could become fully organized and the state’s legal and financial resources were used to ensure a victory by the ruling party. And finally, where all else failed, there were cases of the military acting to protect its own interests and those of the ruling establishment. In Togo, as in Lesotho and Nigeria, the army sought to force a reversal of elections, restore some or all of the governing party’s powers and legal status, and exclude certain groups from power (Allen, Baylies and Szeftel, 1992: 6–7).

The uneven nature of this process of political transformation makes it possible to group African states in one of four main categories according to their experience of political change in the last quarter century. The first would include those states which underwent some form of liberal democratization process, involving a shift towards a more pluralistic, less authoritarian political order and some overt commitment to increasing human rights and strengthening the rule of law (Allen, Baylies and Szeftel, 1992: 3–10). A second, residual, group would include the dwindling number of states largely untouched by the process, either because long standing multi-party states had previously been established (as in Botswana) or because demands for democratic change were not yet powerful enough to force reform (as in Zimbabwe and Swaziland) or because the process had yet to begin (as in Libya and Morocco).

The third group comprised states where armed rebellions engineered the violent overthrow of corrupt and repressive regimes with the promise to begin building representative institutions and effective government. The group includes Uganda, the most successful so far, and Ethiopia and Eritrea (where significant democratic gains were challenged in the late nineties by territorial conflict between the two states). In Rwanda, Burundi and the former Zaire (renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo) efforts to undertake similar post-bellum reform was blocked by continuing communal violence and the ambitions of predatory elites. These three countries demonstrate some of the characteristics of the fourth group, those states where central institutions disintegrated, or were disintegrating, under the weight of rampant corruption and open looting of public resources, communal violence and civil war. In such cases, the central state either became merely one faction in a murderous struggle for power (as in Sudan, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Congo-Brazzaville) or gave way entirely to the sway of competing warlords (as in Chad and Somalia). The four categories were not entirely exclusive of each other: Rwanda, Burundi and Zaire demonstrated the fine line between renewal through insurrection and collapse into warlordism and communal violence, just as Nigeria teetered between the democratic transition its citizens demanded (and voted for) and violent military repression.

The narrowness of the divide between democratic reform and state ‘collapse’ further underlines the importance of these watershed elections. However limited the democratic reforms to which they gave expression proved to be in some instances, the elections represented a progressive and positive step away from the political crises which affected so much of the continent. That they were undertaken at all, against the tide of crisis and disintegration, made their achievements all the more noteworthy.

The International Dimensions of Crisis and Democratization

Because the democratic reforms which affected Africa in the early nineties coincided with (and were influenced by) wider international events, there was a tendency to perceive them as local manifestations of a ‘global democratic resurgence’ which signalled the historic triumph of liberal democracy. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, after all, preceded by only a few weeks the speech by President De Klerk in February 1990 which signalled the end of apartheid and the beginning of a democratic transition in South Africa. Indeed, De Klerk’s initiative was quite clearly timed to take advantage of the universal optimism about the prospects for reform which flowed from the events in Berlin. Zambia’s 1991 elections, which produced the first change of ruling party and president since independence in 1964, and one of the first occasions in which power changed hands without violence in post-colonial Africa, came less than two months after the collapse of the Soviet Union. For Huntington, these events were part of‘democracy’s third wave’, a democratic tide starting around 1974, comparable to two earlier ‘waves’ (the first running from the 1820s to 1926, the second from 1945 to 1962). The ‘third wave’, argued Huntington (1996: 4), was the result of a number of related factors, including: unprecedented global economic growth in the 1960s which increased wealth, education and the size of the urban middle classes; the ‘anti-authoritarian’ stance of the Catholic Church in the sixties; decreasing support for authoritarianism among the major powers; the loss of legitimacy of authoritarian regimes as a result of performance failures and the increasing universality of democratic values; and the contagion of early democratic transitions which encouraged others to follow. Above all, the changes of the nineties could be seen to represent

the utter ‘self-discrediting’ of communist systems and of such other dictatorial regimes as ‘African socialism’ and ‘bureaucratic authoritarianism’. As a result, antidemocratic forces… have been weakened throughout the world, democracy has been left ‘with no serious geopolitical or ideological rivals’, and democrats have regained their self confidence. In fact, as Plattner argues, liberal democracies today are widely regarded as ‘the only truly and fully modern societies’ (Diamond and Plattner, 1996: ix).

Yet, if a few celebrated liberalism’s triumph as ‘the end of history’ (Fukuyama, 1989), most were less sanguine about its prospects. In 1992, Jowitt, for example, warned of the need to ‘think of a “long march” rather than a simple transition to democracy’ (1996: 35). Similarly, Huntington noted that both the first and second ‘waves’ had each been followed by a ‘reverse wave’ which had reduced the number of functioning democracies. Similarly, he considered that a new reverse wave had begun to check the momentum of democratic reform from 1990 (1996: 8–11). Bratton and van de Walle, too, considered that

the entire wave of regime transition in Africa passed its zenith during 1993, as the emergence of fragile democracies in a few countries began to be offset by a rehardening of political regimes elsewhere (1997: 6).

Political reform, and the problems which confronted it, in turn promoted concern with the needs of the reform process itself, particularly with the kind of institutional changes which might best advance democratization. Some focused on problems of promoting economic development capable of supporting democratic reform (Diamond, 1992). Some were concerned with the impact on democratization of economic liberalization (O’Donnell, 1996). Others debated the relative merits of parliamentary and presidential political systems (see the essays by Linz and Horowitz, in Diamond and Plattner, 1996). Many were concerned with the need to develop the network of associational activity generally regarded as constituting the ‘civil society’ necessary to promote active citizenship and limit state authoritarianism (Diamond, 1996a: 230–4). If there was little unanimity about the specific nature of the measures that needed to be taken, there was, nevertheless, a general underlying sense that it was necessary to support political reform if it was to be consolidated and sustained.

In this respect, academic observers anticipated and then reflected the mood among policy-makers in Western capitals and multilateral financial institutions, particularly the World Bank. Initially, these officials were not always consistent in their support for democratic change in Africa. In some countries, they supported ruling groups (as in Benin, Algeria or Zaire) or pressed them to undertake more or less cosmetic reforms (as in South Africa). In others, they actively promoted or assisted democratic pressures. In Kenya, the US ambassador actually held press conferences condemning the government’s poor democratic record and demanding multi-party elections. In Zambia, donors pressed the incumbent regime to hold elections, and even forced it to implement unpopular economic measures during the election campaign. They then welcomed the new government’s willingness to implement economic restructuring and debt servicing ‘conditionalities’. It is perhaps this identification of economic with political reform that explains greater Western enthusiasm for certain regime changes. Alongside ‘economic conditionalities’, requiring African states to restructure their economies by implementing ‘structural adjustment’, introducing market reforms, and reducing the proportion of national wealth controlled by the state (Szeftel, 1987), there developed, from the mid-eighties, a set of parallel ‘political conditionalities’, requiring democratic reforms to promote ‘good governance’ (Baylies, 1995). These ‘conditionalities’ had, by the mid-nineties, become a major feature of relations between indebted African governments and their creditors, or ‘donor community’ as they had come to be called.

At the same time, academic prescriptions and international interventions to promote liberal democratization attracted criticism from scholars who considered that the undertaking was less concerned to promote African democracy than to further Western interests. The bulk of this radical criticism was concerned with the strategy and socio-economic effects of structural adjustment and economic liberalization (see, for instance, Loxley and Seddon, 1994; Leys, 1994; Bush and Szeftel, 1994; Campbell and Parfitt, 1995; Bromley, 1995). Increasingly it was augmented by a critique of liberal democratic reforms as being inappropriate or inadequate instruments for democratization in developing countries. Some questioned the usefulness of imposing liberal conceptual labels, such as ‘civil society’, on African circumstances (Mamdani, 1996; Allen, 1997). Others questioned the purpose and objectives of the entire project. Contrasting earlier attempts to forge a theory of political development with recent work on democratization, Cammack, for instance, argued that liberal scholars too often abandoned academic detachment in favour of missionary zeal in the 1990s:

where the theorists of the 1960s found themselves in an impasse in which they could formulate a model of stable liberal democracy but felt unable to recommend its implementation, those of today are avid exponents of the dissemination of democracy. The result has been the proliferation of frankly programmatic procedural guides to the installation of pro-Westem liberal democracies in the Third World… (Cammack, 1997: 224).

For Cammack, this doctrine was less a means of supporting local efforts to build democracy than ‘a transitional programme for the installation and consolidation of capitalist regimes in the Third World’ (ibid: 1). In order to promote this liberal model, he wrote, the concept of democracy was reduced to procedural issues, notably periodic competitive elections held under universal adult suffrage; thus, Huntington, for one, rejected ‘the automatic association of democracy with other values such as social justice, equalit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• 1 Political Crisis and Democratic Renewal in Africa
• 2 Electoral Systems and Democratization in Africa
• 3 Electoral Corruption and Manipulation in Africa: the case for international monitoring
• 4 The 1989 Elections and the Decolonization of Namibia
• 5 Democratization and the 1991 Elections in Zambia
• 6 Kenya: The Survival of the Old Order
• 7 Settling Old Scores: from authoritarianism to dependent democracy in Lesotho
• 8 Blocked Transition in Nigeria: democracy and the power of oligarchy
• 9 The Democratic Transition in Malawi: from single-party rule to a multi-party state
• 10 Choosing ‘The Freedom to be Free’: the South African general elections of 1994
• 11 Conclusion: false dawn or democratic opening?
• Bibliography
• Index