Post-Conflict Institutional Design

Peacebuilding and Democracy in Africa

Abu Bakarr Bah

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781786997906
• eBook ISBN: 9781786997876
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Educación superior

Since gaining independence from colonial rule, most African countries have been struggling to build democratic and peaceful states. While African multiparty politics may be viewed as a democratic system of governance, in reality it is plagued by ethnic and regional political grievances that undermine meaningful democracy.

By examining post-conflict institutional reforms in several African countries, this book sheds light on the common causes of violent conflicts and how institutional design can affect the conditions for peace and democracy in Africa. Focussing on conceptual and practical questions of designing ethnically and regionally inclusive state institutions and the way institutions are perceived by the citizenry Post-Conflict Institutional Design addresses political autonomy and control over resources, issues which are often key sources of ethnic and regional grievances. Crucially, it examines the meanings of institutional reforms as well ethnic and regional representation.

1 | INTRODUCTION: INSTITUTIONAL DESIGN, PEACEBUILDING, AND DEMOCRACY

Abu Bakarr Bah

Introduction

Since gaining independence from colonial rule, most African countries have been struggling to build democratic and peaceful states. In most cases, these have not yet been achieved. Too often, African countries are plagued by dictatorships or multiparty politics that generate major political violence, and in worst cases civil war. At independence, African countries struggled with the multiparty political systems that emerged at the end of colonial rule. While those multiparty political system may be viewed as democratic systems of governance, in reality they were beset by ethnic and regional political grievances that made meaningful democracy very problematic. As Claude Ake clearly pointed out, democracy never took hold in Africa. In fact, the seeds of one-party dictatorships, coups, and ethnically driven civil wars were planted right after independence.¹ While it would be simplistic to reduce African political conflicts to ethnicity and regionalism, there is a vivid pattern of political conflicts often revolving around ethnic and regional identities. Indeed, even though ethnicity and regionalism are not the only reasons for political violence, as often pointed out in the greed-grievance literature, they are key instruments for mobilization and organizing political violence in the service of elite interests. In this sense, ethnicity and regionalization have always been at the center of political conflicts in Africa.

In West Africa for example, the early democracies were plagued by ethnic violence and quickly degenerated into one-party or military regimes. In Nigeria, the regional and ethnic political competition for power that pitted northerners against southerners, meshed with intermittent conflicts among Hausas, Igbos, and Yoruba, led to a series of coups and the Biafran War.² In Sierra Leone too, the supporters of the southern-dominated Sierra Leone Peoples Party (SLPP) and the northern-dominated All Peoples Congress (APC) engaged in major political violence and coups, which culminated in the introduction of one-party rule and the political marginalization of Mende people.³ Similar problems emerged in Ghana and Liberia.⁴ Francophone countries also experienced political violence and ethnic marginalization, which resulted in one-party rule. In particular, Guinea was a notorious case of ethnic polarization and brutal dictatorship.⁵ Even relatively well managed Côte d’Ivoire fell victim to the legacies of one-party rule and ethnic marginalization under Félix Houphouët-Boigny.⁶

In Eastern and Central Africa too, the early democracies were beset by political violence in which ethnic and regional groups were pitted against one another. In Kenya for example, ethnic political violence over control of the state and land issues were common especially among major ethnic groups and in the Rift Valley.⁷ Similar problems existed in countries such as Uganda and Burundi. In Sudan and Ethiopia, ethnic and regional politics lead to bitter separatist wars. Even after the secessions of South Sudan and Eritrea, the problems still persist in those countries. In all of these countries, multiparty democracy became plagued by violence paving the way for the cynical imposition of de jure or de facto one-party rule, which led to further political violence in the 1990s. In the case of Rwanda, ethnic politics culminated in a genocide.⁸

Even in countries where major political violence is attributed to much broader national struggles, there are instances of identity politics. In the case of South Africa, where race was the central driver of oppression and political violence, significant levels of violence emerged between the Zulu-dominated Inkatha Freedom Party and the African National Congress (ANC), which was heavily supported by Xhosa people.⁹ In addition, native people in South Africa have been marginalized by both White rule and Black political movements. In Somalia, clan politics degenerated into political violence in ways that are akin to the conflicts in Liberia and South Sudan.¹⁰ In Zimbabwe, the bitter struggle over White rule and Mugabe’s grip on the country masked some of the ethnic political grievances in the country. However, as the Mugabe regime waned, ethnic political grievances became more prominent.¹¹

Given the salience of ethnicity and regionalism in African multiparty politics and the persistence of political violence along ethnic lines, this work raises critical questions about the design of political institutions and the challenges of building peaceful democracies. Too often, African political conflicts have been attributed to poor leadership, greed, corruption, dictatorship, and external interference.¹² A key assumption in these kinds of critiques is that democratic rule can resolve most of the problems by holding leaders accountable to the people through the electoral process and the rule of law. This was a key argument that was advanced during the democratic transitions of the 1990s aimed at ending one-party and military regimes in Africa.¹³ What was often left out in that debate was the fact that multiparty democracy failed to promote peace during the immediate post-independence period. Driven by neoliberal economic and governance policies, the democratic reforms of the 1990s confounded the principles of democracy with the mechanism of democracy. Too often, simple multiparty electoral systems were seen as sufficient to produce peaceful democracies. Roughly two decades after the second wave of democracy, African countries have again been plagued by multiparty political systems that produce political violence. In Côte d’Ivoire, multiparty politics degenerated into a civil war as ethnic and regional identities were manipulated by the elite. In Kenya, multiparty elections produced major violence in 2008 and continue to be marred by violence and stalemates. Similar problems have emerged in countries such as Togo, Gambia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Uganda. A critical issue that still needs to be addressed is whether the mechanism of winner-takes-all neoliberal multiparty democracy contributes to political violence.

Conflict Drivers: Ethnicity, Governance, and Natural Resources

Studies of conflicts and peacebuilding in Africa have identified a variety of causes of conflict rooted in ethnicity, poor governance, and natural resources. The studies in this book also point to these kinds of causes of conflict across Africa. While it is tempting to focus on any one of these factors as the cause of conflicts in Africa, it may be useful to consider each of them as a critical contributor to violent conflicts in Africa and also to trace their interconnections. Though most studies emphasize one factor over the others, collectively the literature on peace and conflict in Africa has addressed all of them. We take the literature a step further by showing the interconnections among these three factors. Indeed, a deeper reading of the literature on these issues shows interconnections in the way ethnicity, poor governance, natural resources all feed into one another to produce violent political conflicts and in the worst cases civil wars.

Ethnicity, which has long been noted in anthropological and historical studies of Africa, is perhaps the most pervasive factor. However, the nature of ethnic conflicts and their effects on African states have evolved along with the states’ transformations. In earlier studies of colonial Africa, ethnicity was simply viewed as an instrument for divide and rule.¹⁴ Anthropological and historical studies dating back to the slave trade often refer to tribes and tribal warfare in Africa.¹⁵ Wars within and between African empires involved people of varying linguistic and cultural identities struggling for territories and political and social advantages. These tribal conflicts intensified with colonialism as European powers often aligned with one group to conquer and pacify other groups that resisted colonial rule. In this earlier period, ethnicity was framed through localized identities as embodied in the notion of tribe.¹⁶ Moreover, the causes and effects of ethnic conflicts were always viewed in relation to colonial intrusions. An important fact of ethnic conflicts during colonial rule is that they had both internal and external forms, which were exploited by colonial power. As Peter Ekeh noted in his critique of the colonial literature:

Ideological distortions also exist in the characterization of political life in pre-colonial Africa. “Tribe against tribe” is the common theme in colonial accounts of African struggles. “Inter-tribal,” rather than “intra-tribal,” struggles are given the accent in interpretations of African political strife … By carefully emphasizing “inter-tribal” disharmonies in pre-colonial Africa, European colonial administrators had two things to gain at once. First, the principle of divide et impera was effectively employed to create disharmony between groups in the colonial situation, a strategy especially apparent in the declining days of colonialism in virtually every African nation; second, it gave the colonial administrators the image of benevolent interveners, who came to Africa because they wanted to establish order.¹⁷

Ethnicity was reimaged in the African discourse during the immediate postcolonial era within the context of problematic multiparty democracy and the degeneration of African states into one-party and military dictatorships.¹⁸ The critical issue was control of the government. Studies point to ethnic marginalization and grievances surrounding elections. In Nigeria for example, studies point to the regional and ethnic divides that resulted in the Biafran War and most of the ongoing political violence.¹⁹ Similar issues emerged in other African countries where multiparty democracy degenerated into ethnically driven dictatorship or violent ethnic conflicts, such as in Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya, and Sierra Leone.²⁰ Stefan Lindemann identified three conceptual categories in the literature on coups and the decline of democracy in Africa: ethnic plurality, ethnic dominance, and ethnic matching.²¹ Each of these shows the relation between the ethnic constellation of state power and the likelihood of violent overthrow of the government. As Lindemann notes, “The link between ethnicity and African military coups is a long-standing theme in the literature. The main reason for this is that ethnic cleavages are generally known to provide leaders with a particularly effective basis for organising collective action.”²²

One of the interesting debates on the politicization of ethnicity is whether ethnicity is linked to class issues in African politics. Lindemann sees the link between ethnic grievances and coups as further strengthened when ethnic grievances “coincide with political and economic inequalities.”²³ In his study of Nigerian politics, Larry Diamond also points to the intersection of ethnicity and economic interest. As he notes, ethnicity is also “a class phenomenon, in that dominant social classes may deliberately stimulate and manipulate ethnic consciousness and conflict to mask their class action and advance their class interest.”²⁴ It is interesting to note that the African debate about ethnicity and class is more centered on elite manipulation of the masses rather the existence of a broad-based class structure that generates an authentic class identity. Class is largely an elaboration of the ethnic economic grievances and their political instrumentalization in the elite struggle for power. In some ways, this elite manipulation of ethnicity is akin to colonial divide-and-rule instrumentalization of ethnicit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Institutional Design, Peacebuilding, and Democracy
• 2 The African Human Rights System and the Right to Autonomy
• 3 Democracy, Postwar Transition, and Peacebuilding in Music Videos from Uganda
• 4 Harnessing Memory Institutions for Peace and Justice: The Case of South Africa
• 5 Natural Resource Reforms in Postwar Liberia and Sierra Leone: Contradictions and Tensions
• 6 Devolution and Electoral Violence in Kenya
• 7 Institutional Design, Democracy, and Peacebuilding in Africa
• Index