ELECTIONS and ELECTORAL POLITICS in AFRICA Tom Young
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Africa 63 (3), 1993 ELECTIONS AND ELECTORAL POLITICS IN AFRICA Tom Young The new British ambassador to Maputo, Richard Edis, recently travelled to the Renamo base at Maringue to meet its leader Alfonso Dhlakama. He carried with him a letter from Overseas Development Minister Baroness Lynda Chalker, two footballs and a pile of books on 'democracy' for Dhlakama's library.' Warning: We don't want it The people of Yardaji Have No Regard For Any Political Party Whatsoever: We Are Tired of Hearing Idle Talk. Whoever Ignores This Advice Will Regret It. Listen Well: Don't Come Here. This is Not a Matter Of One Person Alone. We Don't Want It.2 Until very recently it could have been said that despite there having been many elections in Africa not one had brought about a change of govern- ment, with the exception of Mauritius.3 In 1991 there were elections in Zam- bia, Cape Verde and Benin which did precisely that. Thus what has especially attracted the renewed attention of Western observers to these developments is that elections in Africa have apparently resumed their function of changing governments. Beyond this simple point elections appear to have been revived within a broader process of 'democratisation' (not merely of African societies but of the Soviet Bloc countries) that has produced startling changes. In Africa hitherto impregnable figures (often 'fathers' of their 'nations') have been toppled by mass demonstrations, previously sacrosanct ideological positions have been abandoned and political elites have rushed to embrace the virtues of multi-party democracy—in the words of one observer, 'the political atmosphere in Africa today is radically different: exhilarating, ebullient, optimistic' (Decalo, 1992: 9).4 These waves of 'democratisation' have, however, produced a rather shal- low public and academic debate in which not only are such notions as 'democracy', 'human rights' and 'freedom' construed as wholly unproble- matic but the picture presented of their operation in the Western world, either implicitly or explicitly, is usually absurdly flattering and not infre- quently wholly fanciful.5 The reasons are surely not difficult to discern. Although no doubt we require a fuller historical distance to reach a proper assessment, the recent wave of democratisation is largely externally engi- neered.6 This needs to be understood in several senses. Two obvious points are common currency (others I will touch on below). The end of the Cold War has removed the possibilities previously available of exploiting the con- flict between the super-powers and has made it possible for the West to aban- don clients it hitherto protected. Secondly the desperate economic weakness of most African states and the failure or apparent failure of previous eco- nomic policies have made them vulnerable to new thinking inside multi- lateral Western agencies that sees economic growth as intimately linked with issues of 'governance'. Thus a post-Cold War triumphalist West is now Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.35.93, on 01 Oct 2021 at 22:58:59, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.2307/1161424 300 ELECTIONS IN AFRICA confidently preaching a new doctrine (though constructed of old elements) which links 'good governance' with 'the market' (and, in the more sophisti- cated versions, 'civil society').7 New also is the determination to impose that doctrine on those who have not as yet seen the light. THE PURPOSES AND MEANINGS OF ELECTIONS So we should not allow the recent and largely self-interested frisson of Western interest in elections to obscure the fact which Chazan (1979) pointed out a long time ago that there has always been a great deal of elec- toral behaviour in Africa. This in itself is hardly surprising, for at least two sets of reasons. Elections are, of course, a virtually unavoidable part of any 'modern' polity, faced as it is with the twin imperatives of large size and prevailing egalitarian doctrines.8 The first apparently precludes the effec- tive conduct of public business at open meetings, while the second renders virtually inconceivable any notion in which the characteristics of persons may in themselves provide entitlement to rule. Thus are excluded not merely, for example, divine or hereditary claims but an older European tradition of claims of excellence, as well of course as all such traditions in non-European societies, as Charlton points out for the Tswana chiefdoms (p. 330 below). Beyond such 'practical' considerations the vote has always been a central part of the wider liberal promise of liberation—'all along, it has been a matter of emancipating selves from the constraints imposed by pre-established values and identities' (Bruce Douglass and Mara, 1990: 259). Possession of the vote ensures that the citizen/voter will no longer be beholden to sinister ideologies or interests that might constrain his autonomy. The extension of the suffrage has been an integral part of the project to create a civil society of contractual relationships appropriate to individuals characterised by reason and freedom. There is no evidence that African elites have done other than take on board these assumptions at least as far as the public parts of their consti- tutional and institutional structures are concerned. Chiefs and chieftaincy, to mention only the most obvious indigenous African political form, when not actually abolished or proscribed as 'enemies of the people' (as in Sankara's Burkina or Machel's Mozambique), have been relegated to a marginal role as incompatible with the modern state, even where, as in Botswana (Charlton, p. 335), this has been done with some sensitivity. Elec- tions have been adopted as part of a modern package no more questioned than economic growth or science and technology (Shils, 1981: chapter 8). It is doubtless true that there were practical imperatives to do with statehood and international recognition and possibly even material aid and assistance that also contributed to the adoption of Western political institutions but the overwhelmingly important reason for their adoption was that they were thought to be right. Where elections have been suspended in Africa it has rarely, if ever, been because of coherent objections to their legitimacy as such but because of arguments, rhetorically at least, as to the appropriate form of elections, and much of this has, as is well known, turned on the appropriateness of multi-party elections. Such arguments have tended to take two forms. The Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.35.93, on 01 Oct 2021 at 22:58:59, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.2307/1161424 ELECTIONS IN AFRICA 301 first suggests that there are indigenous political practices ('palaver', various forms of consensus decision-making, etc.) that are equivalent to or indeed superior to those of the West. It has been all too easy for Western observers loftily to dismiss such references to local political ways as at worst little more than (rather thin) veils for political gangsterism, or at best hopelessly roman- tic illusions. It may well be that there is more to be said on the subject, not least that much of the discredited communalism a la Senghor and Nyerere seems to have been dressed up to suit liberal prejudice rather than to consti- tute any kind of serious political thinking. But, that point made, there seems as yet little evidence of systematic African reflection on the value and poten- tialities of indigenous political resources and practices. Secondly and more saliently there have been doubts whether multi-party systems are appropriate to highly divided and underdeveloped societies. The sociological innocence and historical amnesia of much contemporary liberal theory (and all contemporary liberal dogma) ensure that these points are continually forgotten or at least have to be continually recalled—particu- larly in the face of casual assertions that they are no more than rationalisa- tions of African tyrants. The post-colonial elites were boxed in both by the institutional shape of the states bequeathed to them at independence and by the almost unquestioned commitment to state-led models of growth which were virtually unanimously agreed on at that time and indeed for a long time subsequently. With reference to the first, as Kunz puts it: The pivotal office of the Governor, as a role model for the executive presidency; the delegation of power through a command structure of functional as well as field administrators; at most decentralising but not de-concentrating authority; and the exercise of 'political justice', running the whole gamut of arbitrary powers from emergency to expulsion, all provided for a pattern which only had to be Afri- canised to be usable for state-centric purposes after Independence. [1991: 266] As to the second, it ought not to be necessary (but in fact it is) to remind ourselves that 'viewing the African case in a comparative framework, one quickly learns that the policy choices made by African governments resem- ble those made by governments in other agrarian societies' (Bates, 1991: 125)—indeed, it could hardly be otherwise, given the wholly uncritical adop- tion of Western modernity by African ruling elites.9 These two factors worked together to preclude, almost completely, consid- eration of forms of decentralised polity of which arguably Africa has some considerable historical experience—African leaders and elites were in a hurry to become modern, and everything else was secondary.10 Thus the doubts expressed about multi-party elections by African elites suggest a rather better grasp of the imperatives and periodicities of modernisation than is evinced by their recently self-appointed ideological mentors and were little different from those expressed by nineteenth-century European elites, and for much the same reasons.