How long will elections remain the only measure of African 'democracy'?

People queue at Mtupepo Primary School polling station in Mtoni, Zanzibar, on October 28, 2020.

Photo credit: Patrick Meinhardt | AFP

When election observers from outside Africa predict that elections in this or that country would either result in violence or would get rigged in favour of the incumbent, Africans protest the impugning of their capacity to be civil. Africans have a point and they need to raise their voices when Western election observers quickly issue judgements that have very little or nothing to do with the polls themselves but have more to do with a supposed absence of a culture of fair competition for public office.

I don’t make this generalisation lightly. Such attitudes are visible across the continent, despite cultural and historical differences.  It seems that foreign election observers come to Africa with their minds already made about the quality of elections and they only come to confirm the worse.

This manifests itself in what sounds like a chastising of the electorate for voting a certain way, condemnation of the government for allegedly stealing the vote, or the rights activists urging the opposition to contest the results, often without investigating the not-so-obvious processes that are truly at the root of why one party loses and another clinches victory.

Apart from the sense of superiority that comes with global northern election observers, their willingness to quickly focus on the conduct and results of the elections, some of us, the hopeless lovers of the idea that Africans do not need to be told what a good or bad elections is, think that Western observers of African elections truly miss the experiential nuances of why Africans behave the way that they do with regards to elections.

Elections in Africa have come a long way since the wind of change that swept across the continent following the demise of communism and the end of the cold war. Africa has since broken free of the machinations and manipulations of the competing super powers of the post WW II order, and elections, despite the false sense that they are the panaceas for Africa’s governance woes, have become Africa’s own way of doing the business of competition for public office, but done the African way.

If the Western election observers insist on the right to observe and judge the behaviour of Africans around elections, it is probably also time for Africans to send observers to the United States, to bear witness to democracy in action and earn themselves the right to judge Americans on their abundant civility and compare it to supposed absence of civility in Africa.

No moment can be more appropriate than the mess that is the current divisive US elections and the potential for violence or legal contest over elections. In that way, judging the other will become an equal opportunity process. After all, it is all about conflicting value systems and not so much about this region being more advance in fairness than that region.

As a young boy in Sudan, I remember Ja’afar Nimeiri and his elections in which he was the only contestant for the presidency and yet Nimeiri was the darling of the United States. No more such buffoonery is happening on the continent today. At least none that would warrant the judgement from the West.

Yet, African elections remain an animal whose shape has eluded description. Just as there are millions of hopeful Africans who go to the polls every election cycle believing that there is nothing better out there as a means for changing government, further millions are unconvinced these elections serve any purpose at all.

Those who continue to invest time and emotion to participate in elections do so because the holding of elections in a given country signals hope that there is a positive move towards a more civic means of political transition. But as the examples of the recent attempts by Alassane Ouattara to illegally install himself once more in Cote d’Ivoire, Alpha Conde’s failed efforts to breach the presidential term limits in Guinea, not to say much about our own East African neighbourhood, where John Magufuli has just bulldozed his way into being re-elected in Tanzania and Yoweri Museveni thrusting himself into his fourth decade of rule in Uganda next year, African elections almost always depicted as being everything but a legitimate means to change government.

The operative word here is legitimate. The magic of African elections is not in the neatness of the process nor in the predictability of the incumbent winning, nor even in the occasionally surprising and delightful results. It particularly resides in who declares them legitimate or not, and what value systems are used in this determination?

What foreign election monitoring groups and the Western media have done to African elections is that they have created a narrative that is a far cry from the realities of how Africans deal with elections. They have made concrete in the minds of election sceptics in Africa that elections only function to legitimise failed and undesirable governments, given that the incumbent almost always steals the vote. 

Either that or elections result in prolonged and costly court battles over the legitimacy of the results. Or worse yet, turn into violence, or lead to a civil war. Exceptions are few and far in-between. But would you rather have elections that might be stolen and live with the same mess that is autocracy until next term, or hold no elections and risk the opposition choosing to wrestle for the state house by violence?

The current picture about African elections is that all these scenarios have happened so many times in Africa since the end of colonialism that a sceptic who sees no point in holding these elections can almost be excused. But Africans still vote with larger voter turnout than in many democracies in the West. Why? It is because the African post-colonial state was set up in a way that would subject it to being judged as a failed one or a successful one with a yardstick of the former coloniser, and the African leaders who have tried to break away from this judgement and control are the ones who will inspire a lot of voters to turn up and whose elections might be declared dirty.

Other influential leaders are those who have nearly ended war in their countries since they waged armed rebellion to change dictatorships. Many ordinary voters in Uganda choose Museveni for the simple reason that it has been 34 years of stability in most of Uganda. Vast numbers of Ugandan women are single-issue voters and they choose Museveni on account of peace. They have achieved enough stability to focus on their livelihoods. One of them told me “To grow your matoke (banana) and stay in peace to harvest and eat it is big deal.”

The same can be said about Rwanda’s Paul Kagame. Western diplomats in East Africa will spend endless hours wondering, talking and scheming about how East Africa’s long-serving leaders will exit from power and nearly no time at all considering that a Rwandan is more likely to give up democracy and civic liberties any day in exchange for security, peace, stability and economic progress that Kagame has been able to achieve in a single generation in a country that was ravaged by genocide. It might be time that Africans focus on self-reflection and forgo the Western judgement.

This is not to say these leaders are clean and should not be criticized. Far from it. The point is instead, it might be time for Africa to rethink democracy as a historically contingent and geographically specific value system, one that cannot be applied uniformly, not even within the continent, and elections are a far cry from being the best way to govern.