Democracy without democrats

Tajudeen reports back from a conference in South Africa on sustaing Africa's democratic movement. The conference was an opportunity to audit the state of democracy, not only in Africa, but compared with other regions of the world. It brought together the electoral commissioners of most African countries, democracy activists, scholars, representatives from the private sector, multilateral institutions and agencies, and politicians of all hues and colour.

Where did you spend 6 March 2007, Ghana’s 50th anniversary? If you were not at a celebration party, you would have joined in the national celebrations in Accra remotely through the television, radio and other media. So powerful is Ghana a metaphor of Africa’s self-confidence and indomitable desire to be free. Everywhere globally, Ghana’s anniversary of independence was a reaffirmation of the possibilities of Africa taking responsibility for its own destiny.

I would have loved to be in Accra that day, but a previous commitment to participate in a conference ‘Sustaining Africa’s Democratic Momentum’ in Johannesburg, organised by the Electoral Commission of South Africa, the African Union and the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, meant I would be in the rainbow nation. But Ghana’s milestone was not far from the minds of all the conference participants. South African vice preseident, Phumile-Ngcuka, led the tributes to Ghana by appearing at the conference in a splendid Kente dress.

The anti-colonial struggles represent an historic opportunity for popular mass movement for liberty and democracy across the African continent, and among all colonised peoples, including in Asia and Latin America. The movement united in a shared quest for freedom priests and peasants, leaders and proletariat, the elite and the masses.

After independence, many countries faced the challenge of building nations out of the artificial colonial states they inherited. The alliance between the masses and the leaders fell apart, giving way to military dictatorships, one party states and other forms of authoritarian rule which provoked protests, rebellions and even revolutions.

The challenges were not only internal. Externally the Cold War, neo-colonialist policies, and the new bourgeois elite and militated against the new states. Sometimes states tried to play the powers off against one another, but mostly they became proxies and agents for the wars and agenda of others: in the looting of their countries and the degradation of their peoples.

However, African people did not remain helpless victims, continuing to struggle against dictatorship in many forms, directly and indirectly. In the past two decades Africa has seen renewal, in spite of all kinds of people (African and non African) bad mouthing the continent, paid to derive huge sums of money from Afro-pessimism.

The Jo'burg conference could not have come at a better time, coinciding with Ghana’s 50th anniversary. Ghana was the first independent black African country. South Africa was the last country on the continent to be liberated from racist minority rule. Ghana was inspiring to African nationalist struggles. Today, South Africa represents the spirit of Afro-optimism, African responsibility and leadership, despite the challenges of giving real power and prosperity to its majority population.

The conference was an opportunity to audit the state of democracy, not only in Africa, but compared with other regions of the world. It brought together the electoral commissioners of most African countries, democracy activists, scholars, representatives from the private sector, multilateral institutions and agencies, and politicians of all hues and colour. The topics discussed included: representation and participation; the role of electoral systems in enhancing or limiting participation; the role of political parties; constitutional frameworks and constitutionalism; the nexus between democracy and development; the capacity, integrity and legitimacy of electoral management bodies as umpires of the democratic space; and the role of civil society and other stakeholders, both national and international, in deepening, expanding or limiting democratic spaces.

Political parties in Africa The session that interested me the most was ‘enhancing the capacity of political parties as agents of democratisation: towards creating political parties that are democratic, representative and trusted by voters'.

Political parties are vehicles for putting forward alternative public policies in dynamic confrontation, and in competition for citizens' votes. No competitive democratic political system can endure without a viable party system. The independence struggles were led by political parties with various strategies and tactics for getting rid of colonialism. They mobilised the public who voluntarily funded, supported and voted for them. In many countries, the colonialists intervened directly or indirectly, to control, manipulate, compromise and subvert those processes. But still the nationalists won - and without writing proposals for funding to any foreign power. The masses supported and funded the struggles, and actively participated in political parties.

Today we have no political parties that present alternative policies, values, or ideologies. Instead, they resort to taking issues of the lowest common denominator such as ethnicity, region, religion or race to mobilise support. Many parties are nothing more than family businesses, or machines for rolling out voters, who can be easily discarded after the election. For instance, in Kenya, `almost no MPs are members of the party or alliance, the platform on which they ‘won’ their seats. If parties mattered, how would it be so simple to cross the carpet without apparent sanctions? If elected members can change their allegiances so capriciously, why should people vote for parties at all?

It is the ultimate privatisation of politics to have MPs who are neither accountable to a party, nor to the people who voted them. Multi-party Kenya today is closer to neighbouring Uganda’s ‘no party democracy'. Uganda is struggling to evolve into a viable multi-party democracy with a reluctant president and ruling political clique. Even in some of our much vaunted stable democracies, such as Botswana, one must question whether such stability does not derive from an environment where one party dominates? What would happen, for instance, if the ANC lost power in South Africa? At the other extreme, what would be the political implications are if Museveni were no longer President in Uganda? Would their fate not be similar to that of Ghana, once Jerry Rawlings was no longer president or presidential candidate?

Different again is a country like Nigeria with more than 40 political parties, yet no where near being truly a democratic state. Nigeria basically is a two-party country. And the irony is that neither the ruling party nor the many opposition parties make any pretense of democracy.

Hence one of the biggest challenges to democracy in Africa is trying to develop a democratic society without democrats, whether in government or opposition, at home or in the work place. Democracy is always work in progress renewed from one generation to the next. But the main engine remains political parties. Therefore citizens have a duty to form them, join them, and be active in them in order to produce leaders that will serve their interests.

Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, is Deputy Director, Africa, UN millennium Campaign and more recently General-Secretary of the Global Pan-African Movement.

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