The threats to democracy in Africa vary from relationships with outsiders who are more interested in short-term profits, including revenue derived from minerals and oil, than in helping develop the institutions of governance, to deep-rooted problems of weak institutions, faltering nationalism and enduring poverty, which can result in votes being bought for a meal or a T-shirt.9 Democratic institutions (i.e. parliaments, courts and public prosecutors) have often been nascent and weak, simply because it is very hard to create such resilient structures. Financial probity and transparency invariably improve, too, with such institutions, as is suggested by the growth rate differential indicated in the next section, though the relationship between governance and democracy is not linear. Electoral threats manifest in various ways. The 2002 African Union (AU) Declaration on the Principles Governing Democratic Elections in Africa highlights some of the challenges in calling for elections to be organised by ‘impartial, all-inclusive, competent, and accountable national electoral bodies’. It also calls on member states to prevent fraud, rigging and other illegal practices.10
Compounding these challenges has been an apparent change in the engagement of the international community in its role in promoting democracy. Since the early 2000s, the focus appears to have shifted to preventing the spread of radicalisation and terrorism across the continent. The response of the US to the 2016 elections in Uganda was to temper its criticism because of the need to maintain Ugandan troops in the AU Mission in Somalia. Acknowledging the difficulties faced by the Ugandan opposition in the face of evidence of government rigging, harassment and lack of transparency in the East African nation’s February 2016 election, Zambia’s 2016 presidential candidate Hakainde Hichilema remarked, ‘We can only help ourselves.’11 Or, as Raila Odinga, the Kenyan opposition leader and former prime minister, put it in 2016, ‘There is an assault on democracy on the continent. Elections are now held as rituals designed to perpetuate the rule of the incumbent, a predetermined constitutional requirement.’ Odinga says this is down to ‘the emergence of China as a dominant economic player. The US was once the defender of democracy on the continent, but now it is reluctant to play this role. Perhaps,’ he suggest, ‘it is operating in its strategic self-interest, out of fear of being dislodged by China.’12
Partially as a result of these changes in the international appetite for democracy, Kofi Annan, the former UN Secretary General, has observed that ‘after an initial period of genuine change, rulers learned that elections did not necessarily have to mean democracy: elections could be gamed to remain in power, sometimes indefinitely.’ The result, he says, is that ‘some elections are merely the lip service that undemocratic leaders pay to democracy’, in the process confusing ‘legality with legitimacy’ even if courts certify the results. The consequence of ‘repression with stability’, particularly in the long run, and of ‘an electoral mandate with a blank cheque’ is the closing of the political space. ‘Healthy societies rest on three pillars: peace and security; sustainable development; and human rights and the rule of law,’ Annan writes. ‘Many states today believe they can have the first two without the third, which includes elections with integrity. They are wrong.’13
What emerged from both the 2016 Ugandan and Zambian elections, as will be seen below, is a template for incumbents to manage an election process in their favour: close down the democratic space, run interference, misuse state resources, control the diet of information and, if necessary, alter the numbers.
These events demonstrate that holding elections is in itself insufficient to claim a democracy. Indeed, they may even reinforce authoritarianism if they permit the subversion of democratic process through electoral malpractice.
In recent years this has been shown by numerous ‘constitutional coups’, whereby leaders consolidate their power by means of elections. For instance, Sam Nujoma, Namibia’s founding president, introduced in 1998 a bill allowing him to serve a third term despite a constitutionally mandated two-term limit.14 Zambia and Malawi followed suit in 2001 and 2003, respectively, though the incumbents, Frederick Chiluba and Bakili Muluzi, failed to secure their bids. Referenda changed the constitutions in Chad, Guinea and Niger. Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni combined the scrapping of term limits with the promise of a return to multi-party democracy in 2005.15 In December 2015 the Rwandan constitution was changed, by a referendum, to allow Paul Kagame to extend his rule. He had already effectively ruled since 1994. Until that amendment, Kagame was ineligible to run for the office of president in 2017 because the Rwandan constitution limited the president to two terms. A referendum approved the change with a majority of 98.3 per cent, thus freeing Kagame to run for an additional seven-year term and then two further five-year terms, potentially until 2034, by which time he would have spent 40 years in office.
It is habitually the practice of authoritarian rulers to make themselves indispensable. Kagame’s answer to the question, ‘Why pursue a third term?’ – asked by former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair in 2016 – elicited the response that he was simply respecting the wish of the Rwandan people. ‘I didn’t ask for this thing,’ Kagame said. ‘I said, maybe you need to take a risk with someone else. But they kept saying, no, we want you to stay.’16
Yet, by comparison, the average tenure of the CEOs of America’s largest 500 companies is 4.9 years, about the length of a single presidential term. The average duration of all CEOs is 8.1 years.17 Although there are exceptions to this, companies tend to fear the role of the ‘imperial’ CEO.
A democracy that helps with the economic empowerment of the citizenry must, therefore, be more than just an electoral moment. It is about ensuring a separation of powers between the judiciary, legislature and executive. It is about guaranteeing meritocratic appointments across government, but especially in key governance watchdog institutions; it is about the need for procurement reform to ensure contracts are clean; and, within all of this, a free and vigorous media. It requires politicians to focus on policy choices, not identity politics. Where institutions lack teeth or independence, and governance is weak, the stage is set for the ‘capture’ of state institutions and the resultant redistribution of favours, jobs and contracts.18
Sub-Saharan Africa’s capital cities can in this regard be expected to become larger than those in other countries due to the need for the appropriation of government largesse, or rents, stemming from such resources. By contrast, non-capital cities in Africa exhibit not only reduced population concentration, but higher rates of growth.19 The nature of the political system can also influence urbanisation. One study published in the 1990s found that dictatorships had 50 per cent larger cities than those found in democracies.20 The reasons for this relative level of concentration were given as high external tariffs, high costs of internal trade and low levels of international trade. Even more clearly, the study notes that politics, such as the degree of instability, ‘determines urban primacy’.
The strength of a democracy is not just about the nature of the public institutions but also extends to the manner in which government engages with those institutions and with political opposition.
Three reasons why democracy is important to Africa’s economic future
The first reason for supporting democracy in Africa is that the continent’s democracies have typically posted economic growth rates that are one-third faster than its autocracies. They are, therefore, better equipped to create the numbers of jobs required as their populations expand.
This matches what has been seen globally and over a longer time frame. For example, as the work by Joseph Siegle and colleagues illustrates,21 since the end of the Cold War, only nine out of 85 autocracies worldwide have realised sustained economic growth. Moreover, 48 of these autocracies had at least one episode of disastrous economic experience (defined as an annual contraction in per capita GDP of at least 10 per cent) during this period. There is a link between democratic and economic performance in this regard. Of the top 47 countries in the UN’s Human Development Index – i.e. those classified as having ‘very high human development’ – 41 are deemed as ‘free’; two (Singapore and Seychelles) as ‘partly free’; and just four (Brunei, Hong Kong,22 UAE and Qatar) as ‘not free’.