Democracy suffers as Africa’s strongmen learn to fly without perching

More African countries are holding elections but democracy and freedoms are in retreat as incumbents manipulate processes and control the institutions meant to check their power.

In 2006, during Uganda’s first multiparty General Election, leading opposition candidate Kizza Besigye was nominated while in prison. A court later ruled the rape and treason charges against him were trumped-up. At the next two elections, in 2011 and 2016, he was nominated without incident, but by the time the results were announced, he was, on both occasions, under “preventive” arrest.

Dr Besigye did not run in the 2021 election. But the man who emerged as the leading contender, Robert Kyagulanyi Sentamu, better known by his music stage name Bobi Wine, merely inherited the obstacle course. As soon as he finished voting he was arrested and confined to his house for 12 days before being released without charge.

Uganda is the latest, but it is not the first or the last. By the time the final results were totalled in Tanzania in 2020, leading opposition presidential candidate Tundu Lissu was holed up in the German ambassador’s residence in Dar es Salaam, fearing for his life. He had reason to be afraid; in 2017 he was shot 16 times in an assassination attempt but survived.

In Ivory Coast in 2020, there was no leading contender to arrest because the opposition had boycotted the race. In Eritrea it was because there was no leading contender – no election, in fact.

The promise of a new era of competitive pluralist democracy in Africa two decades ago has been replaced by elections that often merely reproduce and legitimise incumbency. African elections are notoriously chaotic. Vote-stealing is high, civic education low, bribery widespread and violence common. But expectations that these were teething problems that would clear through the rinse cycle, and that each vote would bring incremental change, are beginning to disappear.

Most outcomes are contested, in the courts of law and public opinion. In 2017, Kenya’s Supreme Court annulled the country’s presidential election, sparking hope about judicial independence and the willingness of judges to set a higher bar on the quality of electoral processes, not merely outcomes.

Judicial independence
Two years later, the judiciary in Malawi annulled President Peter Mutharika’s re-election and called for new elections, which the incumbent lost. But these glimpses of judicial independence are exceptions to the rule, which is that most courts limit themselves to ascertaining the contents of the ballot box, not examining the contest that produced them.
An incumbent who controls the army, appoints crony judges, packs allies in Parliament to make favourable laws can rule for life while jailing and killing political opponents and their supporters. It helps if they can ensure peaceful voting on Election Day to satisfy foreign diplomats and the international press parachuted in a few weeks before. The continent’s strongmen have learnt to fly without perching.

Africa’s dalliance with western-style democracy is in danger of being hijacked by a new ‘enlightened’ authoritarianism that serves at the altar of dictatorship while performing the rituals of electoral politics.

When opposition candidates contesting under new multiparty electoral landscapes upset favourites from the ruling and previously omnipotent ‘one-party’ or national party, as for instance Frederick Chiluba did to Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia in 1991, it looked like the dawn of a new wave of democracy on the continent.
The two decades that followed saw the end of many civil wars and demilitarisation of internal contests on the one hand and on the other, political and electoral reforms meant to cement the peaceful handover of power between elected leaders.
Long-running conflicts came to an end or petered out in Angola, Burundi, Mozambique, northern Uganda, DR Congo and elsewhere, as did newer ones in places like Sierra Leone, Liberia and even, temporarily, in South Sudan.
The plan was to shift power from strong men to strong institutions. Of 98 presidential-system constitutions in Africa between 1960 and 1990, only five – Liberia, Tunisia, Comoros, South Africa, Tanzania – limited presidential terms. Just over a decade later, the number was 30.
One of those countries was Uganda, which in 1995 enacted a new constitution with a two-term limit, and a 75-year-age bar on the presidency. Yet last month, President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, the country’s ruler since 1986, was re-elected for a sixth term in office. The 76-year-old who once argued, in a book – What is Africa’s Problem? – that it was leaders who overstayed in power, has twice changed the constitution to extend his rule.

The list of reverse reformers is growing longer. According to the African Centre for Strategic Studies, a US think-tank, at least 13 African countries have removed term limits, including Togo and Gabon, or adjusted them to allow incumbents to stay on, as in Rwanda.

Corruption
Even leaders who rise on reformist agendas find power corrupting. Take Ivory Coast’s Alassane Ouattara. After winning the election in 2010, incumbent Laurent Gbagbo refused to leave office, sparking a year of violence in which about 3,000 Ivorians were killed before Mr Ouattara forced his predecessor out of office.

Yet last October, Mr Ouattara, who had served two terms and publicly vowed to respect the rules, was re-elected for a third term in office in an election boycotted by the opposition, and in which at least 87 people were killed.
The regression goes beyond the removal of term limits. Elections in some countries have become mere rituals – the Holy Communion before the sin. Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Ben Ali in Tunisia and Omar al-Bashir in Sudan all enjoyed “popular” electoral mandates from their people just before they turned against them.
Last March Mali held a largely peaceful election, only for the military — anxious about the threat of jihadist insurgents — to carry out a coup five months later. If anything, elections can undermine belief in and outcomes of democratic processes, as seen by delays in holding elections in Nigeria, or attempts to disenfranchise opposition supporters and prominent opposition candidates in Senegal, Benin, Tanzania and elsewhere.

A 2019 research note from Afrobarometer noted that across 30 African countries, people felt that the quality of electoral process was important but outcomes were more important: elections were only useful if they could bring about change. It doesn’t matter how peaceful elections are if they merely reproduce the outcomes.
This calls for more reforms, not less, say in internal party politics, in greater freedoms, in more civic education, and in restrictive clauses, such as term limits, that are guaranteed to produce new leaders.
Yet most of the on-going reforms are walking back these progressive gains. The Freedom in the World report produced last year by Freedom House, a civil society organisation, highlighted the 14th year of declining democratic governance and respect for human rights, with Sub-Saharan Africa suffering the most reversals.
After moving forward for a decade and a half, many countries have spent the last 15 years undoing those reforms. Only seven countries in Sub-Saharan Africa are now classified as “free” in the Freedom House rankings, the lowest figure since 1991.