From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Mon Jun 21 2010 - 09:44:00 EDT
Why Democracy Isn’t Working
Despite an economic renaissance, much of Africa is drifting toward a new age
of authoritarianism.
21/06/2010
To a casual observer, the tens of thousands of people who poured into the
central square of Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa on May 25 to peacefully
celebrate the country’s elections might have been mistaken for a massive
symbol of democratic progress in a poor and troubled part of the world. In
fact it was quite the opposite.
The demonstrators were there to denounce Human Rights Watch for criticizing
the victory of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s ruling Ethiopian People’s
Revolutionary Democratic Front and its allies, who claimed 545 out of 547
seats in Parliament following a massive campaign of intimidation against
opposition supporters. Many of the protesters were paid the equivalent of a
day’s wage for a few hours of shouting against Human Rights Watch. They were
emblematic not only of Ethiopia’s return to a one-party state, 19 years
after the fall of a communist regime, but also of a growing trend away from
democracy in wide swaths of Africa. The trend includes not only pariah
states such as Eritrea and Sudan, but key Western allies and major
recipients of foreign aid such as Ethiopia, Uganda, and Kenya. The Mo
Ibrahim Foundation, which offers the world’s richest prize package to
African leaders who both help their countries and peacefully leave office,
decided not to offer an award each of the last two years.
In Rwanda, President Paul Kagame has become a darling of the West for
leading an economic renaissance in a nation traumatized by the 1990s
genocide. But in upcoming August elections, Kagame looks set to duplicate
his implausibly high 95 percent victory in the last vote and is pressing
charges against an opposition leader for “divisionism,” namely downplaying
the genocide. In Uganda, President Yoweri Museveni, who denounced
dictatorship in Africa when he took power in 1986 and was seen as another
great democratic hope, has said he’ll try to extend his 24-year tenure in
presidential elections next year. In Gabon and Togo, the deaths of
long-serving autocrats Omar Bongo and Gnassingbé Eyadéma has meant elections
in which power was smoothly transferred—to their sons. Disastrous polls in
Nigeria and Kenya in 2007 were worse than those countries’ previous
elections, and current trends show little hope for improvement. Mauritania,
Guinea, Madagascar, and Niger have all had coups since 2008, while
Guinea-Bissau has been effectively taken over by drug cartels.
Africa’s own institutions have been unable to halt the trend, which has
gained speed since a period of openness following the end of the Cold War.
“The democratization process on the continent is not faring very well,” says
Jean Ping, the Gabonese chairman of the African Union Commission, which has
overseen a host of Pan-African agreements on democracy and human rights that
many member states have either ignored or failed to ratify. “The measures
that we take here are taken in a bid to make sure that we move forward. The
crises, they are repeating themselves.” In country after country, the recipe
for the new age of authoritarianism is the same: demonization and criminal
prosecution of opposition leaders, dire warnings of ethnic conflict and
chaos should the ruling party be toppled, stacking of electoral commissions,
and the mammoth mobilization of security forces and government resources on
behalf of the party in power. “The really powerful governments learned how
to do elections,” says Richard Dowden, director of the London-based Royal
African Society. That’s not to say the continent doesn’t retain some bright
spots. In Ghana, presidents have twice stepped down to make way for leaders
from the opposition. Democracy has flourished in Botswana and Benin, while
regional giant South Africa continues to have a vibrant opposition and free
press despite the African National Congress’s dominance of post-apartheid
politics.
But backsliders have them outnumbered, a shift that hasn’t gone unnoticed in
the West. Political freedoms declined in 10 countries on the continent in
2009, while they improved in just four, according to an annual report by
Washington, D.C.–based Freedom House, which dropped three African countries
from its list of “electoral democracies” last year. “Repression can take
many forms, and too many nations, even those that have elections, are
plagued by problems that condemn their people to poverty,” President Obama
told Ghana’s Parliament last year. His top diplomat for Africa, Johnnie
Carson, took office last year listing the continent’s democratization as his
top priority.
Yet despite the rhetoric, the Obama administration and its European allies,
which spent $27 billion on African development aid in 2009, according to the
OECD, have largely acquiesced to the shift away from open politics on the
continent. In some cases the rise of China means oil exporters such as
Nigeria and Gabon have alternative markets for their production, thus
reducing Western leverage to push for political reforms. In others, the
refusal to challenge autocratic regimes has been driven by security—Ugandan,
Burundian, and Ethiopian troops have functioned as de facto Western proxies
in battling radical Somali Islamists in Mogadishu.
“The expectation was that this administration would give greater weight to
issues of democracy and governance,” says Jennifer Cooke, an Africa analyst
at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But this tepid
response to Ethiopia’s ruling party’s 99.6 percent victory and the
pre-cooking of the upcoming polls in Rwanda and Uganda show the boundaries
of its willingness to push key allies.
Beyond security and the scramble for resources, a third factor in the West’s
acceptance of Africa’s political retrenchment is the increasing influence of
aid groups like the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.K.’s
Department for International Development over their countries’ foreign
policies. International pressure to get closer to the U.N. goal of giving
0.7 percent of their gross national income to development has led to
steadily increasing aid budgets—even if there is evidence that aid is easily
manipulated by authoritarian governments to suit their own ends.
“The aid departments are saying, ‘Don’t upset the politics of these
countries because we’ve got all this aid to push out,’?” says Dowden of the
Royal African Society. “But I would say these states need development work
because the governance is so bad. You’ve got to put the politics first.”
Take Inderaw Mohammed Siraj, a 60-year-old Ethiopian opposition candidate
who lost a finger after being beaten by ruling-party cadres in 2008. Last
year, he says, he was kicked out of a food-aid program funded by the U.S.,
the World Bank, and the European Union when a local official from his
village in a remote corner of northeast Ethiopia told him: “We will not feed
opposition members.”
With virtually no opposition representation in Parliament, the independent
press and local human-rights groups now closed or under attack, and the
prospect of his children begging for food, he has realized life would be
easier if he gave up politics. “I decided to stop being part of the
opposition,” he says. “The party couldn’t help me. Foreigners didn’t do
anything. Democracy isn’t working here.”
But cutting aid to authoritarian states like Ethiopia means not only halting
some programs that help the poor but also losing influence in the region, a
move that could haunt Western policymakers in future crises. “In Pakistan we
cut the ties for the military in the 1990s,” says J. Peter Pham, a professor
at James Madison University who was an Africa adviser to Sen. John McCain’s
2008 presidential campaign. “As a result, today the officers coming up to
flag rank weren’t trained in U.S. institutions. We don’t have their
mobile-phone numbers. Our diplomats rue not having that influence.”
Similarly with the U.S. and its European allies reluctant to send their own
forces to halt African crises in Darfur, Somalia, and the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, good relations with local strongmen like Museveni,
Kagame, and Meles is a must. Today’s dictators may not be as cruel as
Zaire’s Mobutu or other Cold War despots, nor Western aid so overt. But the
strategy of backing nasty allies to influence events in a tough part of the
world remains the same. That just means Obama’s next African speech on
democracy may be greeted with more skepticism on the continent than last
year’s delivery in Accra. “If this is their representation of democracy and
human rights, they shouldn’t talk about it anymore,” says Hailu Shawel, an
Ethiopian opposition leader. “They should shut up.”
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