“…an African form of democracy.”

In his essay “An Alien Inheritance”, Richard Dowden makes a strong case for completely overhauling African government. His claim is that democracy was forced on many of these nations impractically by the West and that in order for them to be more productive, they need to ‘be more African’. I’m inclined to disagree, as the alternative to democracy in many nations has often been even more disastrous. That doesn’t mean new forms of democracy can’t arise, just that those new forms may be no better than what already exists. I do agree on other points, the nation-state is not effective. Governments are often completely ineffective because most branches of the administration aren’t given the powers for operating outside the ‘chain of command’. This separation of powers is essential to effective democracy…

Can electoral democracy work in Africa? After catastrophically bad elections in Nigeria, Kenya and Zimbabwe, many people, both inside and outside the continent, are starting to have doubts. There is certainly no lack of elections—almost all the continent’s 53 countries are multi-party democracies and since the beginning of 2007 they have held 35 presidential or parliamentary elections—just not very much real democracy. Since multi-party democracy swept across the world after the end of the cold war, only three sitting African presidents have run for re-election, lost and retired gracefully: Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia, Mathieu Kérékou in Benin (both 1991) and Abdou Diouf in Senegal (2000).

Western governments point to the rising number of elections in Africa and claim that their flaws are merely teething problems. The assumption is that electorates will force governments to behave better and deliver development for their citizens. But this is not the case. Many African rulers have neither the will nor the capacity to improve the lives of their people, and the people do not, at this stage, have the political power to force change through democratic mechanisms. Vote-rigging and election-related violence are getting worse, not better.

The core of the problem is not inexperience in electoral procedure; it is the nature of the African nation state. Successful democratic systems depend upon a group of people—judges, civil servants, election officials—who stand outside party politics and serve the state and people as a whole, irrespective of who is in power. In Africa this class barely exists. Only a few countries maintain a distinction between the ruling party and the state. In Kenya, the police—and in Zimbabwe and Nigeria the army as well—were part of the ruling party’s election machine and the majority of judges and all the senior civil servants had been recently appointed by the president. In Nigeria, the election supervisor was beholden to the ruling party and constantly ruled in its favour. The election organisers did not prevent and may even have helped stuff the ballot boxes.

Read on at Prospect Magazine