On the State of Electoral Democracy in Africa
Despite the “president for life” syndrome in some countries, electoral democracy in Africa is flourishing.
Electoral democracy - by which I mean “a system in which citizens, through universal suffrage, can choose and replace their leaders in regular, free, fair, and meaningful elections” - really began to take hold in Africa during the last decade of the twentieth century. And although the so-called president for life syndrome is gaining traction in some countries, each year, more and more African countries elect new leaders and retire old ones. Nigeria, Tanzania, Benin, Ghana, and Gambia are five most recent examples which come to mind.
Yet, as one observer calls it, the “Africa’s leaders for life syndrome” is evading and, most often, squashing constitutional constraint on term-limits, leading notable scholars to conclude that democracy is in retreat or, at least as Larry Diamond of Stanford University puts it, in recession. The African Center for Strategic Studies (ACSS), a think-tank at the National Defense University, points out that “While a number of African countries have succeeded in upholding term limits over the past two decades, leaders in more than 20 countries effectively do not face restrictions on their time in power.” For example, heads of state in Equatorial Guinea, Angola, Zimbabwe, Cameroon, and Uganda have either evaded or squashed their countries constitutional term limits, hence, extending their stay in power for more than three decades (See Figure 1 below).
As Figure 1 above shows, about ten African leaders have either evaded or squashed their term-limit restrictions, staying in power for 21 years on average. In addition, Figure 1 also reveals that eight of the ten countries where term limits have been squashed are in Central Africa, and Southern Africa is the “sub-region with the strongest adherence to term limits” follow by the West Africa sub-region, and, finally, “term limits for leaders in North and East Africa largely remain weak or absent,” according to the ACSS.
But, despite the bleak democratic outlook in Central, Eastern and Northern Africa, the trend in majority of the continent’s 54 sovereign countries (especially in Southern and Western Africa) is flourishing, as the map of Africa showing constitutional term limits for African leaders above shows.
Democratic governance, and transitions, in Southern Africa has over the decades been peaceful and stable, not so much as in Western Africa. But the successful conduct of relatively free, fair, and meaningful elections in 2015 and 2016 is reversing the West Africa trend for the better. In 2015, for example, the election of President Buhari ended Nigeria’s People Democratic Party 14-year rule. Also, 2016 witnessed important democratic transitions in Ghana and The Gambia. Whereas in the former, a sitting president lost his reelection quest to a third-time presidential contender, in the latter a dictator who had been in power for over two decades and vowed to rule for a “billion years” lost a reelection to a business man.
Moreover, four countries on the continent will host elections in late 2017: Rwanda on August 4, follow by Kenya on August 8, in late August by Angola where long-time President Eduardo dos Santos is not seeking reelection, and Liberia on October 10.
The election in Liberia on October 10 will be the country most significant and consequential election in over 70 years. This is because President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Liberia’s internationally celebrated Nobel Peace Prize laureate president, is constitutionally not eligible to seek a third term and has vowed to turn over the reign of authority to a democratically elected president in January 2018, which, as is expected to take place, will consolidate Liberia’s nascent electoral democracy. (The last time a sort of peaceful and democratic transition took place was in 1944 when President Edwin Barclay was succeeded by President William V.S. Tubman who would go on to rule the west African nation for 27 years.)
In Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom, an important and insightful new book, Condoleezza Rice, U.S. former Sectary of State and, now, Professor at Stanford University, notes of the disruptive enterprise that is democracy, writing that “it can be terrifying and disruptive and chaotic” once consolidated. But the “equilibrium between disruption and stability is [an intrinsic] characteristics of democracy.” The challenge, though, is for nascent African democracies such as Liberia and others to recognize this disruptive enterprise and cherished and harnessed it.