By Abdul Tejan-Cole
2020! What a year it has been! For most on the continent, it was another annus horribilis. Although the same may be true for all other continents due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the year was particularly challenging in Africa because of significant governance challenges. Many countries on the continent took not just one but several steps backwards in terms of democratic governance. Instead of consolidating and building on the progress made in recent years, things took a reverse trajectory.
Guinea and Cote d'Ivoire amended their constitutions and allowed the incumbent presidents, Alpha Conde and Alhassane Dramane Ouattara, to run for a third term. In Guinea, against his better judgment, long-term opposition leader Cellou Dalein Diallo and his Union des Forces Démocratiques de Guinée (UFDG) party decided to contest the October presidential election having boycotted the referendum earlier in the year that amended the constitution and allowed Conde to run for a third term.
Cellou claimed he won the elections, but a pro-Conde National Independent Electoral Commission (CENI) would hear none of it. They declared Conde the winner. This prompted protests that led to the death of at least nine people and the arrest of several leading opposition leaders. The violence prompted the International Criminal Court to issue a statement to express its deep concern about the mounting tensions.
In Cote d'Ivoire when his hand-picked successor, Prime Minister Amadou Gon Coulibaly collapsed and died, Alassane Ouattara trusted no one else but himself to jump into the ring again and contest for a third term. The major opposition parties boycotted the elections. Ouattara won a resounding 94.3% of the votes cast although only 53.9% of the electorate bothered to vote based on the official turnout. The façade led former South African President Thabo Mbeki to pen a stinker to the African Union Commission Chair, Moussa Faki Mahamat calling the AU's decision to deploy observers for the elections "ill-advised."
Like Conde, Ouattara had to manipulate the constitution to allow him to run for a third term. For the best part, in most countries of the continent, constitutions are no longer worth the papers they are written on. With ease and regularity, our leaders have found a way to change constitutions to advance selfish interests. They manipulate the process, so it is no longer difficult to amend constitutions. Kenyans thought a new constitution that came into force in 2010 was the panacea to all their problems. Every day, they see the new constitution slowly shredded in front of their eyes in the name of "strengthening" it. The Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) Constitutional Instrument Bill seeks to amend the 2010 Constitution by changing the structure of the executive and the legislature, with the creation of a Premier and two Deputies from the majority party in parliament and creating an independent judiciary ombudsman, meant to investigate and prosecute complaints against judicial officers. Former Chief Justice Willy Mutunga tweeted "...BBI is a political coup against Article 3 (2) of the 2010 Constitution. We must respect, uphold and protect the Constitution by any means necessary."
Manipulating the constitution to suit one's interest and then claiming to adhere to the constitution is a subversion of the principles of constitutionalism. In addition to manipulating our constitutions, we have perfected the art of rigging elections. For the most part, many of our elections are a farce. Sham elections were routinely held primarily to tick the democratic box. Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, who became President of Uganda in 1986, restored multiparty "democracy" in 2005. Since 2006, Uganda has held presidential elections ritualistically every five years. He has 'won' all. To do this, he has mutilated the constitution on multiple occasions. Once, to remove the two-term limit, and on another occasion to remove the age limit of 75. He is no doubt going to 'win' next January's elections. At least 54 people have been killed during the campaign so far, and musician-turned-politician, Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu (aka Bobi Wine) has been shot at on at least one occasion. His supporters have been beaten, teargassed and arrested by Ugandan security agents.
Like Bobi Wine, in 2017 an attempt was made on the life of Tanzanian opposition leader, Tindu Lissu. He had the gall and audacity to return to contest another presidential election. This time, he won 12.8% of the electoral vote against incumbent President John Magufuli's 84%. Very few recognized the rigged elections, which were considered to be the least free elections in Tanzania since multiparty democracy was introduced in 1995. It was marred by the refusal to allow many opposition candidates to be nominated, the arrest of opposition party members, police violence, internet and mobile phone communication censorship and a captured electoral commission. The fraudulent election could not be challenged in court as the decision of the National Electoral Commission was final. When the opposition attempted to protest the election outcome, some of them including former Member of Parliament for Arusha, Godbless Lema, were arrested on terrorism charges. Lema and Lissu subsequently fled the country for their safety, leaving Magufuli firmly in control.
In most undemocratic contexts there has been a clampdown on freedom of expression, freedom of association and the right to peaceful protest. All three are critical for democracy to function. In 2020, we witnessed brutal government crackdown on journalists, the arrest of opposition candidates, and the use of excessive force against peaceful protestors. Zimbabwean journalist and anti-corruption campaigner Hopewell Chin'ono was also a frequent visitor to the Chikurubi high-security prison for publishing a series of investigations into corruption by senior public officials in Zimbabwe. Liberian journalist Henry Costa fled for his life after his Council of Patriots tried to exercise their constitutional right to protest. Paul Rusesabagina, once portrayed as a hero in the 2004 Hollywood movie Hotel Rwanda, is now facing terrorism charges in Rwanda. In Benin, a country once the poster child for democracy in West Africa, two of the top politicians, Lionel Zinsou and Sébastien Ajavon, who contested the 2016 presidential elections against President Patrice Guillaume Athanase Talon are now in exile in France unable to return home.
The COVID pandemic provided an excellent excuse to crush the human rights and fundamental freedoms of citizens. There were several instances of security forces across the continent turning their guns on innocent civilians in the name of containing the pandemic. As all this happened, the leading regional bodies were dead silent. Norms that they had hailed and established and set as standards were raped with their complacence. ECOWAS, once the leader on the continent, was mostly dead silent. Even when the African Court of Human and Peoples' Rights was bold to take a stance such as ordering the suspension of the Ivorian warrant for the arrest of one time Ouattara ally, Guillaume Kigbafori Soro, the Ivorian government ignored it and decided to withdraw their acceptance of the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights’ jurisdiction over human rights complaints by individuals and non-governmental organizations.
True, there were some bright spots. Ghana recently held mostly peaceful and credible elections. Malians finally got rid of the clueless and corrupt Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta though the army remains firmly in control. The Central African Republic President Faustin-Archange Touadéra failed in his effort to change the constitution so that he could stay in office. Malawi's Supreme Court in the case of Peter Mutharika v Lazarus Chakwera and Saulos Chilima nullified the results of a presidential election, becoming the second court on the continent to find the testicular fortitude to stand up the massive power of the Executive.
These positives were but a flicker of hope amid the gloom. Across the continent, many are losing faith in the illiberal democracies that currently prevail on the continent. These illegitimate governments have failed to deliver any dividends for the people. The plight of the ordinary citizen remains in abject poverty and has gotten far worse than it was just after independence: alarming unemployment, no electricity, no pipe-borne water or other basic amenities. True, these retrogressive steps were not limited to Africa. Several countries, including the USA, Brazil, Hungary, had right-wing populist authoritarian governments. The difference, however, is that the USA had some strong institutions, like the courts, that pushed back. In many African countries, those checks crumbled under Executive power.
Many have erroneously stated that democracy has failed Africa. It has not. What we have been practising is not democracy or constitutionalism. Calls for benevolent dictatorships and authoritarian rule are in my humble view gravely misplaced. The answer is not a further slide back into dictatorship and one-partyism. We have forgotten too soon the damage caused by one-party states in the 70s and 80s. We need to halt the backward slide and move towards genuine democracy. One that is based on the rule of law, open societies, free and fair elections, greater transparency and accountability and constitutions that are respected and not changed at the whim and caprice of a president (for life). True democracy entails not only building and earning the trust of the people but in building their capacity so that they could make informed choices.
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