Is Laurent Gbagbo ‘pulling a Kibaki’?

In 2008, when the fever of Kenya’s post-election violence was running at its highest, an interesting story made its way across the Kenyan blogosphere. The story was that Malawian President Bingu wa Mutharika had allegedly during his new year’s party been overhead promising to apply ‘Kibaki tactics’ during the 2009 elections in Malawi. Anonymous sources on the blogosphere claimed that Mutharika felt ‘resigned to do a Kibaki’ in order to hold on to power. It is impossible to test the veracity of these claims, especially because the information was allegedly given anonymously and Malawi, unlike Kenya, managed to avoid a descent into post-election chaos and conflict. Still, given the increasing prevalence of post-election instability, as in Côte d’Ivoire, it would be interesting to interrogate the notion of ‘pulling a Kibaki’ and what this would mean for the future of Africa’s younger democracies.

‘Pulling a Kibaki’ as understood by this author would involve the following process. Firstly, an incumbent leader with a dubious democratic pedigree would dutifully agree to elections in the territory in question, assuming that the power of incumbency, coupled with his control over the instruments of the electoral process, not to mention a dollop of good old-fashioned rigging, would be enough to secure the presidency. Unfortunately for said leader, the people of the country in question at this point have generally received enough of an education or exposure to electioneering locally, regionally or internationally to vote for the opposition in significant numbers. At the same time, as in situations like those in Kenya, the opposition itself usually has enough ways and means to organise its own elaborate rigging machine, thereby nullifying any of the incumbent’s advantages. In the final act, surprised by the vehemence of the people’s rejection of him, the leader then refuses to hand over power to the opposition, and the opposition promptly resorts to violence in order to force his hand. In the resulting stand-off, thousands are killed, thousands more displaced and the international community marshalled in order to negotiate the next round of compromises in the name of peace.

The pattern remains fresh enough in many Kenyan minds to cause concern for our brothers and sisters, first in Zimbabwe and now in Côte d’Ivoire. From his statements and the violence of his reaction, Laurent Gbagbo seems genuinely surprised at the number of people who opted to vote for Alassane Ouattara, in spite of the latter’s falling foul of the poisonous ‘Ivorité’ doctrine. The election broadly deemed free and fair, Gbagbo has resorted to extrajudicial means to hold on to power, including most recently shelling neighbourhoods in Abidjan closely allied to Ouattara, and forcing the latter and his parallel government to seek UN protection in a hotel. In terms of ‘pulling a Kibaki’ however, the most telling moment was Gbagbo’s rejection of Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga as a mediator, insisting that he would only speak to President Kibaki himself. How long do we have to wait before Gbagbo calls for a power-sharing arrangement?

Is ‘pulling a Kibaki’ the next phase of the African democratic project, and if so, what can we expect? Well for one, there’ll be more unresolved elections and more power-sharing agreements. Elections are an opaque and unsatisfactory process the world over – just ask Al Gore or Nick Clegg – but whereas in many other regions this has meant protracted courtroom battles and ideological pushing and pulling in the popular press, it seems that when one is ‘pulling a Kibaki’ violence is a first rather than a last resort. After all, ‘pulling a Kibaki’ knows neither right nor wrong – only power – and as the people of Côte d’Ivoire are learning, the fallout from the power struggle is always messy. No nation has ever run the perfect election, and with this knowledge and the prospect for violence, we should expect that more and more elections will end in the kind of violent stalemate that we are witnessing in Zimbabwe or in Côte d’Ivoire. Similarly, as the stakes of losing the leadership become higher and higher due to the threat of domestic or international legal action, we can expect leaders to do more to remain in power until death.

This is hardly inevitable. In fact, it is a product of the manner in which African and international societies deal with the African leader. One of the most fatal assumptions we make when dealing with them, especially leaders of the more villainous variety, is to assume that they are stupid. We ridicule them and talk down at them, forgetting that these are usually highly educated men – check out Mugabe’s degrees – whose decision-making matrix is simply underpinned by different considerations than ours. Wrong, definitely, but certainly not as irrational as we would like to believe. Secondly, we seem to forget that these leaders may be relatively insulated from the excesses of violence or inequality in their own countries, but this doesn’t mean that leaders don’t communicate with each other. Between all the African Union talk-shops, international organisations and bilateral forums, it is inevitable that some kind of network has certainly emerged. The implications are that when we come to the table to talk elections, we routinely underestimate the extent of their personal and economic interests, the extent of their influence over power structures in their countries of origin and their ability to wreak havoc on their societies.

It follows that if leaders are trading notes on ‘pulling a Kibaki’, they could equally be trading notes on doing the opposite, and privileging peaceful transition over a resort to violence. The extent to which this presidential network can be harnessed to do this depends to a great extent on the ability of local populations and figureheads to stop spewing empty platitudes and start keeping our leaders truly accountable.

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