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DPMF Publications: |
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Who Killed Democracy in Africa? Clues of the Past, Concerns of the
Future (Ali A. Mazrui) |
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In analyzing the prospects of democracy in Africa, it may be necessary to distinguish between ultimate goals and the necessary instruments for achieving them. It would make sense for Africa to distinguish between fundamental rights and instrumental rights. The right to vote, for example, is an instrumental right designed to help us achieve the fundamental right of government by consent. The right to a free press is an instrumental right designed to help us achieve an open society and freedom of information.1
By the same token, we can
distinguish between democracy as means and democracy as goals. The most fundamental of the goals of
democracy are probably four in number.
Firstly, to make the rulers accountable and answerable for their actions
and policies. Secondly, to make the
citizens effective participants in choosing those rulers and in regulating
their actions. Thirdly, to make the
society as open and the economy as transparent as possible; and fourthly, to
make the social order fundamentally just and equitable to the greatest number
possible. Accountable rulers, actively
participating citizens, an open society and social justice: those are the four
fundamental ends of democracy.2
How to achieve these goals has elicited different means. In making the rulers more accountable some democracies (like the United States) have chosen separation of powers and checks and balances, while other democracies (like the United Kingdom) have chosen the more concentrated notion of sovereignty of parliament. These are different means towards making the executive branch more accountable and answerable in its use of power.
On the open society, freedom of the press and speech, there is also a difference in how the United States and Great Britain regulate it. The United States has a highly permissive legal system on freedom of speech, but a more restrictive public opinion. The United Kingdom has a more restrictive legal system on freedom of the press, but a more tolerant public opinion.3
Looking back after the initial burst of patriotism, op-ed columnist and Slate editor Michael Kinsley has expressed a similar view in a Washington Post article:
The United States political system protects freedom of speech from formal suppression better than any other nation on earth. But American culture is less tolerant of aberrant views and behavior than many others, and that tolerance has eroded further since Sept.11.And as conservative culture warriors like to point out—or, indeed, complain (as in the political correctness debate)—a society’s norms are set by the culture as much as by the political system. In a country such as Great Britain, the legal protections for free speech are weaker than ours, but the social protections are stronger. They lack a First Amendment, but they have thicker skin and a greater acceptance of eccentricity of all sorts.4
When in my television series The Africans: A Triple Heritage I accused Kaiser Aluminum of having exploited Ghana, the multinational corporation threatened legal action unless the accusation was deleted from the TV series. We consulted the lawyers of my television producers and my own lawyers in the United States as to whether Kaiser Aluminum could stop me accusing them of the exploitation of Ghana. All the American lawyers were unanimous. Kaiser Aluminum did not stand a chance under U.S. law. We therefore went ahead and showed the TV series in the United States without deleting my accusation. Kaiser decided discretion was the better part of valour. They did not take legal action. In the United States, the law was on the side of the open society.5 In Africa, on the other hand, the law of libel can be used to stop the flow of information, rather than facilitate it. Libel law in Africa can be an ally of censorship rather than a partner of an open society.
In a single week in August 2001 the courts of Kenya, for example, intervened twice on the side of interrupting the flow of information: during the case of allegations against President Moi’s son and the serialisation of Smith Hempstone’s memoirs. Smith Hempstone was a former U.S. Ambassador to Kenya who was critical of the Moi regime.6 Does the future Constitution of Kenya need a Freedom of Information Clause? Or are there alternative democratic means of promoting the democratic goal of the open society?
If the goals of democracy are the same while the means for achieving them differ, are there African means of achieving those same four goals of accountability of rulers, participation of the citizens, openness of the society and greater social justice? That is the challenge facing constitution makers in Africa: how to keep the democratic goals constant while looking for democratic means more appropriate to Africa.
The second big issue about democracy in Africa concerns its relationship to development. On this relationship between democracy and development in Africa, one crucial question has persisted. Is Africa underdeveloped because it is primarily undemocratic? Or is Africa undemocratic because it is primarily underdeveloped? Which is cause and which is effect?
There is a third dimension which is often treated either as part of the package of development or as part of the package of democracy, when in fact it should be treated as a kind of independent variable. The third dimension is stability: a social-political precondition for both sustainable development and durable democracy. Africa’s three greatest needs are development, democracy and stability. But not necessarily in that order. Alleviation of poverty is one of the fruits of democratised development. Alleviation of poverty is one of the gains when democracy and development are jointly stabilised and truly humanised.
How has Africa been faring in these areas of development: democratisation, stabilisation and the fruit of alleviation of poverty? First, let us explore what these words mean. What does “development” mean, for example? Economists naturally focus on issues like resource flows, levels of economic diversification, domestic mobilisation of savings and investment, national productivity and per capita income.7
And yet high levels of performance in those areas are achieved only after other measurements of development have already taken place. The most crucial may be partly cultural rather than purely economic. Development in promoting performance and mobilisation of domestic savings and investment capital may need to be preceded by development in the following areas:
I. Enhancement of managerial skills.
II. Transformation of gender-relations between men and women as producers.
III. A redefinition of the work ethic as a discipline of the education system. Colonialism damaged the work ethic among African males much more than among African females.8
IV. A redefinition of the laws and rules about corruption to make them more culturally viable. For example, certain forms of ethnic nepotism should be treated with greater understanding than certain forms of bribery. Lighter penalties for nepotism and tougher penalties for bribery may be needed. Ethnic favouritism should be regulated rather than outlawed.9
V. Reforms of Africa’s schools and universities to make them more skill relevant, and more culturally relevant.10
The primary economic problem in Africa has never been structural adjustment. The problem has always been how to carry out cultural re-adjustment. This re-adjustment would not be a demotion of African culture.
The re-adjustment that is needed in culture is a better balance between the continuities of African culture and Africa’s borrowing from Western culture. Until now, Africa has borrowed Western tastes without Western skills, Western consumption patterns without Western production techniques, urbanisation without industrialisation, secularisation (the erosion of religion) without scientification. Would Africa have been better off if it had retained its own tastes while borrowing Western skills, instead of absorbing Western tastes and retaining its own lower levels of skills? Would Africa have been better off with African consumption patterns and Western production techniques, instead of the other way around?
The Japanese after the Meiji
Restoration in 1868 asked themselves, “Can we economically modernise without
culturally Westernising?” The Japanese
said, “Yes! We shall seek Western
techniques and maintain the Japanese spirit.” They retained Japanese tastes,
and expanded their Western skills. Following the Second World
War, they economically interlocked specifically with the American economy, even
displacing American dominance in areas like the automobile industry without,
however, giving up their Japanese spirit.11
The Turks abolished the fez, replaced the Arabic alphabet, discouraged the hijab, and attempted to become European. They have tried to combine Western tastes with Western skills.
Unlike both the Japanese and the Turks, post-colonial Africans decided to culturally Westernise without economically modernising. Ours has been the worst of both worlds. That is why Africa needs a cultural rather than a structural adjustment, in order to create a new equilibrium between tastes, values and skills.
Let us now return to the fate of democracy in Africa. Who killed democracy in Africa? This has been the supreme political “Who-done it” of the first 50 years of Africa’s postcolonial era.
Democra-cide: The Murder of
Democracy
A string of suspects have emerged from history. Let me personify the forces at work.
The magician who came in from
the North. This suspect symbolises
the first phase of democratisation when we brought into Africa from the temperate
zone of the Northern hemisphere magic models of governance. In former British Africa, this meant the
adoption in Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya and elsewhere the Westminster magic
model of parliamentary government.12
The magic which came in from the North was the fascination, the spell cast by Western ways. We were mesmerised into uncritical importation of an alien paradigm. This was the phase of high political imitativeness as Africans imitated Western forms but not Western democratic substance. There was a major disconnect between the imported institutions and the cultural realities of Africa.
While former British Africa tried to imitate the Westminster model, French Africa actually voted in 1958 for continuing colonisation by France of their territories. The 1958 referendum gave birth to the Fifth Republic of France, which attracted some imitation from the former colonies.
The imported paradigm did not work. The drift started towards either anarchy or tyranny. Anarchy was too little control; tyranny was too much. Did the magician who came in from the North turn out to be not an instructor of democracy for Africa, but perhaps a suspect in the murder of African democracy?
But there were other suspects behind the mystery of, Who killed African democracy?
The soldier who came in from
the barracks. On the eve of
independence, African soldiers had been grossly underestimated as a political
force. Even after military mutinies had
occurred in 1960 in the former Belgian Congo, African elites were slow to
recognise the short distance from an army mutiny to an army coup. By 1963, Togo had not only a coup but also
Africa’s first presidential assassination: the murder of Sylvanus Olympio. It was the year of the birth of the
Organisation of African Unity and the charter condemned “political
assassination in all its forms.” Yet by January 1966 Nigeria, African’s giant,
also had its first coup. A month later
Kwame Nkrumah, the icon of Pan-Africanism, was overthrown in Ghana. A string of other coups followed.13
Who killed African democracy? The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. This was the period when Western powers and Western business permitted their African favourites to be corrupt and repressive for as long as they were anti-communist. The litmus test of legitimacy was taking the right side in the Cold War between the Atlantic Alliance and the Warsaw Pact.14 Dictators like Mobutu Sese Seko lasted from the 1960s to the 1990s. Mobutu was defended by the West even as against internal civil disobedience.
The Soviet side also played its
part in the ideological spying and subversion that helped to kill democracy in
countries which ranged from Ethiopia to Mozambique, from Somalia to
Angola. There were echoes from John Le
Carre’s novel of the above title.15
Who killed African democracy? The cultural half-caste who came in from Western schools and did not adequately respect African ancestors. Institutions were inaugurated without reference to cultural compatibilities, and new processes were introduced without respect for continuities. Ancestral standards of property, propriety and legitimacy were ignored.
When writing up a new constitution for Africa these elites would ask themselves, “How does the House of Representatives in the United States structure its agenda? How do the Swiss cantons handle their referendum? I wonder how the Canadian federation would handle such an issue?”16 On the other hand, these African elites almost never asked, “How did the Banyoro, the Wolof, the Igbo or the Kikuyu govern themselves before colonisation?” In the words of the Western philosopher Edmund Burke, “People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.”17
Who killed African democracy? Perhaps the angry spirits of the ancestors themselves. Have the ancestors cursed the first two or three generations of postcolonial Africans because of our apparent contempt for the legacy of our ancestors? Many Africans are ashamed of indigenous religions. For example, they have no public space in the curriculum of schools; nor are there celebrations of special indigenous sacred days. Africa celebrates festivals like Christmas and Eid el Fitr every year, but almost no African country has set aside a special holiday to celebrate traditional indigenous religions.
Have the ancestors responded with an all-powering curse upon our generations? “Your roads will decay, your railways will rust, your factories will grind to a standstill, your schools will stink with overcrowding and crumble with incompetence, your soil will fight so-called desertification and your economies suffocate under your new globalisation. Your democracy will smoulder like a dying bush fire, after a drizzle of hate.”
In this murder story, who is truly guilty of the assassination of African democracy? As in the case of Agatha Christie’s famous novel Murder on the Orient Express, there was not just one murderer. Every suspect on the Orient Express did have a hand in the murder after all. Similarly, all the suspects in Africa’s democracide (as in genocide or homicide) did indeed contribute to the death of democracy:
• The magician who came in from the North [false foreign starts in democratisation].
• The soldier who came in from the barracks [power from the means of destruction].
• The subversive spy who came in from the cold [Africa’s ideological perversion under Cold War conditions].
• The cultural half-caste educated in Western schools [the Westernised elites].
• And the angry spirits of the ancestors [the curse of our ancestors].
But democracy can have a kiss of life, a kind of Prince Charming who brings it back to life. Democracy needs miracle workers of resuscitation. Indeed, is African democracy really dead? There are signs of life already in evidence. Is African democracy capable of first-aid resuscitation? If so, who is the miracle worker who is to do it? Who is the Prince Charming with the kiss of life?
Who was the Prince Charming who had been trying to resuscitate African democracy? Who are the miracle workers?
I. Firstly, let us recognise Africa’s pro-democracy movements from the 1980s, which have demanded of African dictators greater and greater accountability and insisted on better governance.18
II. Who is resuscitating African democracy? Westernised African cultural half-castes who have seen the light:
a. Leopold Senghor retired voluntarily in 1980.
b. So did Mwalimu Julius K. Nyerere in 1985.
c. So did Nelson Mandela in 1998.
d. Founding fathers who permitted themselves to be defeated at the polls, such as:
§ Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda.
§ Malawi’s Hastings Banda.
e. Second Generation leaders who let themselves to be defeated at the polls:
§ Diouf out after 20 years in power.
§ His party out after 40 years in power.
III. Who is resuscitating African democracy? Soldiers formerly from the barracks who have seen the light:
a. Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria: military ruler 1976-1979; elected president 1999.
b. Jerry Rawlings: transformed from brutal dictator to new democrat of Ghana: 2 coups initially brought him to power; 2 electoral successes reconfirmed his reformed status.
IV. Who is resuscitating African democracy? Western Cold War warriors who have seen the light and who no longer perpetuate African dictators as part of a struggle against communism:
a. Mobutu Sese Seko could no longer depend on his Western allies to save him in 1996.
b. President Daniel arap Moi has been under pressure for greater accountability on issues of corruption.
c. The World Bank and the IMF now concede the economic relevance of good governance when in fact they once resisted political conditionality. 19
d. Smaller European countries more clearly tie their foreign aid to democratic performance in Africa.
e. Political apartheid has at last been permitted to collapse without invoking the fear of a communist take-over of South Africa.
V. Who is resuscitating African democracy? The demonstrative impact of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the discrediting of the one-party state, and the decline of Leninist radicalism in the politics of the Third World. Marxist-Leninist regimes in Portuguese-speaking Africa have disappeared outright. Ethiopia has been experimenting with a federation of cultures rather than a vanguard party or a Leninist junta. Pluralism has become respectable in a wide range of African countries, from racial pluralism in South Africa to multiparty systems in Eastern Africa.
Democracy was killed in African by multiple assassins. And the multiple miracle workers have been in the process of resuscitating democracy. Prospects have looked promising—until September 11, 2001.
Counter-Terrorism vs. Democracy
The aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon has affected not only the issue of war and peace in Afghanistan but also civil liberties in the United States. In addition, the aftermath has interrupted the democratic revival in Africa.
With the United States it has
been demonstrated that even a democracy which is about two hundred years old
can be very fragile. One day of
terrorist attacks in the United States has demonstrated the following threats
to civil rights in the United States:
• Hundreds of people are held in detention in the United States without trial.20
• Most of them are detained without their names being made public.
• The Bush Administration is considering secret military trials for people suspected of terrorism.21 Even the Nazi leaders after World War II had public trials in Nuremberg with access to their own lawyers. Some of the Nazi leaders had killed millions of people, not just two or four thousand.
• Attorney General John Ashcroft wants people to betray their friends in the hope of getting the US Green Card or US Citizenship. In the McCarthy era in America, members of families reported on each other’s alleged communist connections. Now it is alleged terrorist connections which are sought.
With regard to the impact of September 11, 2001, on the resuscitation of democracy in Africa, the result so far has been anti-democratic. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been busy in Kenya and Tanzania with a variety of Muslim names. In Tanzania they arrived with sixty names.
In Kenya, the government is sometimes way ahead of what the FBI wants it to do in the fight against terrorism. There have been attempts to try and extradite Kenyan citizens to the United States. Not to be outdone in the anthrax debate, Kenya in October claimed to be the second country after the United States to be targeted with anthrax by unknown terrorists. Not even the US Embassy in Nairobi was impressed by Kenya’s claims.
A number of African governments under pressure from the politics of the war against terrorism have been getting ready to enact new legislation ostensibly against terrorist threats. The legislation is more likely to be used against either ethnic minorities or political opponents to the regime in Africa. In Uganda, there is evidence to suggest that the Minister of Internal Affairs will be given additional powers to harass organisations, ostensibly because of suspected terrorist leanings. Uganda is a country that is already suspicious of ordinary political parties as potentially divisive and has been trying to move toward a “no-party democracy.”22 Uganda also faces ethnic conflicts in the North, conflicts that should be solved by a political process rather than by the heavy hand of anti-terrorist measures.
South Africa, which has one of the most liberal constitutions in the world, is under pressure to reduce civil liberties and return to some of the old anti-terrorist tactics of the apartheid years. And Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe is already learning to use the term “terrorist” as a term of political denunciation. In November 2001, President Mugabe threatened to take action against journalists and reporters, describing them as “agents of terrorism.”23
At the height of the Cold War, democracy in Africa suffered because African governments were allowed to sacrifice civil liberties in the name of fighting communism. Will democracy now suffer because African governments are encouraged to sacrifice civil liberties in the name of combating terrorism?
On the Orient Express of history, African democracy had once been murdered by multiple assassins. And then at a first aid railway station, multiple miracle workers and Princes Charming started resuscitating African democracy.
There are more political parties in Africa legalised than ever before, far fewer military regimes than in the 1980s, greater freedom of the press and more open debate about corruption and mismanagement than was conceivable fifteen years ago. Some of the new constitutions, such as Ethiopia’s regionalist idea of a federation of cultures,24 even respected ethnic ancestors in a new way. African democracy was slowly getting resuscitated.
And then came September 11, 2001. Thousands of people died at the World Trade Center. I suspect thousands of Afghanis of different parties have since also been killed. September 11 has had many horrendous casualties. African democracy is in intensive care. Must it also die because of September 11? The African patient was beginning to breathe again. Must the plug be pulled?
Let us hope the worst will be averted, resuscitation will be resumed, and a new equilibrium will be found between democracy as a means and democracy as an ultimate goal in Africa’s political experience.
Notes
1 A recent discussion on fundamental rights may be found in Milton R. Konvitz, Fundamental Rights: History of a Constitutional Doctrine (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers/Rutgers University, 2001).
2 For a historical overview of democracy, consult Roland N. Stromberg, Democracy: A Short, Analytical History (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1996); and for a contemporary view, see Anthony H. Birch, Concepts and Theories of Modern Democracy, 2nd ed. (London; New York: Routledge, 2001 edition,). Specific treatments of African democracy may be found in Obioma M. Iheduru, ed., Contending Issues in African Development: Advances, Challenges, and The Future (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), and Teodros Kiros; with a preface by K. Anthony Appiah, Explorations in African Political Thought: Identity, Community, Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2001); and for a cultural approach, see Daniel T. Osabu-Kle, Compatible Cultural Democracy: The Key to Development in Africa (Peterborough, Ont.; Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 2000).
3 For discussions on the American and British scene, see Thomas R. Hensley, ed., The Boundaries of Freedom Of Expression & Order in American Democracy (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2001), and Part IV of David Feldman, Civil Liberties And Human Rights In England And Wales (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
4 Michael Kinsley, “Listening to Our Inner Ashcrofts,” Washington Post (January 4, 2002). p. 27.
5 Libel suits and other legal actions can endanger freedom of expression even in the land of the First Amendment; see, for instance, Lois G. Forer, A Chilling Effect: The Mounting Threat of Libel and Invasion of Privacy Actions to the Fi