http://www.news24.com/Africa/News/how-africas-1990s-poster-boys-use-security-fears-to-roll-back-democracy-20160628-2
How Africa’s 1990s ‘poster boys’ use security fears to roll back democracy
2016-06-28 18:30
Keith Somerville, University of Kent
Hopes of progression along a reformist democratic path in some key
sub-Saharan African states appear to be receding. Greater democracy,
enhanced freedom of speech and the media have all suffered setbacks in
some countries where hopes of long-term change were high.
A number of African political systems have appeared to slip back from
the promise of the 1990s. Hopes of more democratic and accountable
systems in which the people would be empowered and able to hold
leaders to account have begun to fade.
That is what has become of the three 1990s poster boys of the new
politics in Africa – Uganda, Rwanda and Ethiopia. For a period they
were held up as the stars of the now increasingly discredited “Africa
Rising” narrative. They became repositories of hope that decades of
conflict and, in Rwanda’s case genocide, would be replaced by
accountable governments and systems of rule. But today their political
trajectories are clearly blocking the path to meaningful popular
empowerment.
Over time their leaders have strengthened their hold on power,
entrenched themselves and reduced accountability. In doing this, they
have been able to play on Western security concerns in eastern and
central Africa. This has replaced the earlier good governance mantras.
The “War on Terror” and fear of instability are greater drivers of
Western policy than encouraging the rule of law and democratic
freedoms.
This trend is set out well in a new study of the links between
insurgent authoritarianism and Western aid in Africa, and is captured
well in the very interesting collection, “Aid and Authoritarianism in
Africa”.
But the contributors also observe that it’s not all gloom and doom.
There has been progress in empowerment and accountability in some
areas.
Playing the security card
Take Uganda. Echoes of the good governance mantras of the late 1980s
and 1990s can still be heard periodically in Western statements on aid
to African states. But, in fact, the country’s President Yoweri
Museveni and his supporters have militarised, centralised and
personalised power. They have created a repressive system of
government in which elections are held, fixed and used as just another
way of entrenching power. State and informal coercive instruments have
been used to
intimidate, harass and terrorise perceived opponents of the state [page 67].
David Anderson and Jonathan Fisher’s well-focused contribution sets
out the success with which Museveni has deployed these various
weapons. They explain how he has been able to play on Western fears of
regional instability to retain budgetary and military aid that
bolsters his ability to hold on to power. His latest comments on
withdrawing Ugandan troops from Somalia by the end of 2017 may be part
of a new attempt to put pressure on the West to maintain support for
him, despite misgivings about the election and moves against opponents
and the free press.
He wasn’t alone in doing this. The volume highlights the strategies
that regimes in Rwanda and Ethiopia have also developed to deal with
donors to ensure a range of favourable outcomes. These include:
that conditionality is on paper only;
that the contribution of those countries to ensuring stability in a
volatile region stretching from Congo to Eritrea to Somalia is
paramount; and
in presenting an image of planned and controlled development the
regimes can demonstrate – in technical terms – efficient use of some
of the aid.
The chapters on the three countries, along with Nicolas van der
Walle’s well-argued conclusion, show how the good governance slogans
and conditionality clauses were just paper tigers. They never had real
bite, especially in the face of skilled and single-minded politicians
like Museveni, Rwanda’s Paul Kagame and former Ethiopian Prime
Minister Meles Zenawi.
They cottoned on from the start that lip-service was all that was
really required. This was especially as they were restoring stability
and security in their own states, and contributing to Western
strategies for ending or limiting conflict in what had been a volatile
region. They were able to argue that their non-party or ethnically
inclusive approaches were long-term strategies for developing internal
stability and indigenous democratic forms.
In fact they were using their political experiments to consolidate
power. If this didn’t work, they would confront donors and in effect
dare them to withdraw aid and see how far that got them.
Their ability to resist conditionality and continue to garner
substantial budgetary and military support was bolstered by 9/11 and
the launch of the War on Terror. They were able to argue that they
were sources of stability and key military allies in a region that
could provide a foothold for Islamist movements antagonistic towards
Western interests.
The support they garnered enabled them to entrench power at home while
being key links in the security chains the West wanted in place to
shackle Islamist or other movements perceived as threats to regional
stability. And to Western security.
Not all doom and gloom
But the book is not one bewailing the demise of democratic hopes in
Africa or seeing all as gloom and doom. Van de Walle, as well as Nic
Cheeseman in his nuanced look at democratisation in Africa, stress
that there is no gainsaying that the region today enjoys a higher
level of political competition and popular participation than at any
time since independence.
This has coincided with a general reduction in the number of violent
conflicts in Africa.
In “Democracy in Africa. Successes, Failures, and the Struggle for
Political Reform” Cheeseman observes:
In the 2000s, elections and term limits replaced death and coup d'état
as the most common ways in which African presidents and prime
ministers left office.
This is important given that commentators and journalists writing
about Africa are inclined to see all as gloom and doom.
What the volume and Cheeseman’s book do is once again emphasise that
there is not a one-size-fits-all model. There is also no timeline for
political change in Africa. Each state develops according to its own
historical, political, economic and social factors, and not to one
Western-ordained pattern and speed.
It should also be remembered, when there are comparisons of political
systems in Africa with those in Europe or North America, that it took
from Magna Carta in 1215 to the passing of the Representation of the
People (Equal Franchise Act) of 1928 for Britain to move from the
absolute power of a monarch to a fully inclusive system of electoral
representation.
Too often commentators have a very ahistorical view of political
development and try to apply timescales and models that are not
appropriate. There is a tendency always to demonstrate some failing on
the part of people or states in Africa. The books referred to in this
article do not and are valuable additions to the literature on
political evolution in Africa and the relationship to aid and
donor-based development.
Keith Somerville, Visiting Professor, University of Kent
Received on Wed Jun 29 2016 - 16:30:27 EDT