COLUMN ONE : Ferment at Ballot Box in Africa : Multi-party elections offer some hope. But real democracy won’t come soon as leaders cling to power through manipulation and strong-arm tactics.

It could have been the face of a presidential candidate anywhere.

Laurent Gbagbo sat with a frozen smile, equal parts boredom and fatigue, listening to a speech on a day when he had heard a half dozen already. Before sundown he would have just as many more to hear and a few yet to deliver himself.

But this was no normal campaign whistle-stop. His seat was on a hard bench outdoors under a spreading acacia tree, and an interpreter at his shoulder was translating the speaker’s words out of one of Ivory Coast’s 60 languages into a French that the candidate could comprehend.

Watching the speaker go through a complicated ritual involving the raising of a shot glass of orange spirits, the spilling of drops on the ground, he understood that the village chief was calling down the gods and the ancestors to bring him luck in his campaign.

One other thing made this event special: Gbagbo, a 45-year-old history teacher, is the first man in Ivory Coast’s 30 years of independence to run a campaign against the only president the country has known, the aging Felix Houphouet-Boigny.

After three decades of political monopoly by his Ivory Coast Democratic Party, Houphouet-Boigny last April responded to social and political unrest in his once-affluent country by decreeing a new era of multi-party democracy.

With his sixth five-year term ending this month, that makes the presidential election taking place Sunday the first democratic presidential election Ivory Coast has ever had.

Nor is it alone in Africa, a continent until now dominated by one-party states and military governments. Since this summer, unprecedented multi-party elections have been held, scheduled, or proposed in Gabon, Benin, Zambia and Cameroon. Grass-root agitation for democratic elections has arisen in Kenya and Tanzania.

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, whose military has ruled for all but nine of its 30 years of independence, is working toward open civilian elections in 1992. And this past weekend, the National Assembly of Mozambique approved a new constitution setting up a multi-party system that would end the Frelimo Party’s 15-year monopoly of power.

But the signals are not at all clear that the winds of real democracy are blowing through Africa as they did in Eastern Europe last year.

Some African leaders seem to be simply taking advantage of Western pressure for American and British-style “democracy” by decreeing multi-partyism in the knowledge that they can continue to manipulate elections and strong-arm whatever weak, disorganized opposition parties arise.

“I tell people in Africa that if they think multiple parties are all they need, they should come see how it works in our country,” says Senegal’s Babacar Toure, publisher of “Sud-Hebdo,” his country’s leading independent newspaper.

Senegal has 16 opposition parties, a tradition of exceptionally frank public debate and a world reputation as one of Africa’s very few genuine democracies. But its dominant Socialist Party has never lost an election since the opposition was legalized in 1974.

“Multiple parties are a necessary condition of democracy, but they are not sufficient,” Toure said. “You need a democratic culture, which you can only get through education, literacy and economic growth.”

Impassable roads, literacy rates as low as 10% in some regions and nomadic voters are among the factors bound to make progress toward true democracy in Africa slow and difficult, even in the few countries where the authorities have openly accommodated new parties.

Because of these factors and others, Africa’s recent experience with pluralistic elections has not been a happy one. Multi-party elections have tended to unfold in chaos.

That was the case in 1988 in Senegal, where the backdrop to the last presidential election was widespread student unrest, campaign violence and charges of electoral cheating. To this day, the apparent loser in that election, lawyer Abdoulaye Wade, refers to himself as the rightful president of Senegal. Independent observers say there probably was cheating by the ruling Socialists but that President Abdou Diouf would have won anyway.

Without the tradition and experience of peaceful polling--and the necessary trust in a disinterested account--Africa voters have tended to react suspiciously to foul-ups in voting procedures.

That happened during Gabon’s multi-party legislative elections Sept. 16, the former French colony’s first such balloting in nearly 30 years.

The Gabonese initiated their multi-party era with plenty of enthusiasm. After President Omar Bongo ended one-party rule early this year, 36 opposition parties sprang up--possibly because each one was to get a donation from the state. For 120 legislative seats, there were 550 candidates--all this in a country with about 300,000 registered voters but scarcely any decent roads and a punishing rainy season that largely cuts off the vast countryside from the coastal capital, Libreville, for eight months of the year.

Election day was a mess. Voting crowds were so unruly that the Bongo government tried to cancel voting in scores of districts even before the day was out, inspiring accusations that it feared it was losing the election.

When this happened at two polling stations in Libreville, outraged voters smashed furniture and overturned ballot boxes, only to discover, reportedly, that they had already been stuffed with Bongo ballots.

“Disorder, attempted fraud, intimidation, psychological pressure, violence, destruction” was how the official newspaper, L’Union, described the day.

A local diplomat gave a more laconic summary to a correspondent for the British news agency Reuters: “People forget that organizing anything in Africa is difficult, and elections are no exception.”

Voting is to be repeated this month in 60 of the 120 legislative districts.

Africa’s culture and single-party tradition interfere with democratic developments in many other ways. Most of these are on view in Ivory Coast’s presidential campaign.

The campaign is being closely watched inside and outside Africa for several reasons. One is its value as a sign of freshening political winds in a relatively affluent and well educated country.

“If any place (in Africa) can go down the road to democracy, it is here,” says one Western diplomat.

The second is that it will mark, one way or another, the last campaign of one of Africa’s enduring political giants, Felix Houphouet-Boigny. Now nearing 90, Houphouet-Boigny has dominated Ivory Coast politics--and Africa’s--since well before independence, when he served in the French Cabinet in Paris while fighting the colonial practice of paying French farmers in Africa more than African farmers for the same crops.

Houphouet-Boigny’s value as the glue holding together the ruling party, as well as its principal claim to legitimacy, is widely acknowledged.

“That party has two things,” says Gbagbo. “Money, and Houphouet.”

Houphouet-Boigny has said this will be his last presidential term. His departure from the scene could leave the party a contentious and shattered organization ripe to be unseated. But that could happen peacefully only if the principle of pluralistic democracy is established before the post-Houphouet-Boigny era begins. To a great extent, that may be what Gbagbo is fighting for in the coming election.

Gbagbo insists that he is in the race to win, for the same reason that no American football coach would ever admit to be playing for a tie in a big game. But he does acknowledge that there is more to his campaign than simply unseating an aging president.

“We are in the process of fighting in order that democracy exists,” he says. “Because in democracy you don’t have a single candidate for president.”

Gbagbo is a burly, voluble man of 45 who spent six years in Parisian exile after being forcibly inducted into the Ivorian army for organizing opposition meetings as a history professor in Abidjan, the capital. He returned in 1988, and when the government last spring legalized the opposition, his organization was the first to register as a new party.

Since then he has been accused of everything from being ill-equipped to run a country to insulting the president. This last accusation reflects the reverence Houphouet-Boigny’s supporters believe the leader is due. And that attitude in turn echoes the argument that Africa nurtures so many monolithic states because its tribes were traditionally single-handedly run by venerated chiefs. It is a theory that Gbagbo dismisses.

“There is not one Africa, but many Africas,” he says. “In my tribe, we don’t have a chief. Everyone sits around in a big circle, and everything is decided communally. Everyone is equal.”

Gbagbo’s chances of success rest in part upon the unhappiness stirred here by the decline of the Ivorian economy, whose mainstays of coffee and cocoa suffered unprecedented price collapses in the last three years. The economic crisis makes voters much more sensitive to long-overlooked corruption and favoritism in the Houphouet-Boigny regime.

“They are a band of thieves,” says Ernest Koffi Kakou, 70, a coconut planter, as he listens to Gbagbo hint about the government from the edge of a crowd at a rally in Bonuoa. “They stuff themselves while the people cry.”

Among his complaints are that cash-strapped farmers have to buy new school books for their children every year because of curriculum changes ordered by the minister of education, who owns a textbook concession.

But popular discontent is not enough to win in a country where the national media are firmly in the hands of the ruling party. The party newspaper of Gbagbo’s Ivorian Popular Front prints only 30,000 copies a week because the sole printer in the country capable of printing more is owned by Fraternite-Matin, the ruling party’s newspaper and the only national daily.

The opposition had suffered a near-total blackout in the so-called Frat-Mat as well as the government radio and television network. Gbagbo himself was not mentioned at all in the newspaper in the month after the convention at which his party nominated him for president.

By contrast, every day the television news and “Frat-Mat” are replete with reports of impromptu village meetings called to support Houphouet-Boigny and the ruling party.

“Of course the Fraternite-Matin is not a government newspaper, it is a party organ,” says Camille Alliali, minister of state in Houphouet-Boigny’s government. “And we don’t tell the radio and television stations how to cover the opposition. It is their decision.”

Opposition leaders also complain that the government has consistently manipulated the electoral rules to confound the incipient opposition.

Less than three weeks before the elections, for instance, the government ruled that all candidates for president would have to pay a deposit of roughly $100,000, with the money to be forfeited by any candidate who fails to win at least 10% of the national vote. It set a deadline of 15 days before the Oct. 28 election to make the deposit.

Beyond implying to opposition leaders that the ruling party will cheat to deprive Gbagbo of any more than 9% of the vote, the ruling’s timing gave the candidate only one business day to scrape together the deposit. (Gbagbo says he was forewarned by “friends” inside the government, and had the money ready in time.)

Maneuvers like that disturb opposition figures who concede that Houphouet-Boigny is almost certain to win even without cheating.

“We know most people would freely vote for Houphouet,” says Francis Wodie, head of the Ivorian Workers Party, an ally of Gbagbo’s group which recently announced that it would boycott the upcoming election. “But the PDCI (ruling party) is acting like it is the only party, just like before. If Houphouet-Boigny says he wants 95% of the vote, he will get it. But if we participate, it will make us part of the cheating.”

Other observers maintain that the advent of real democracy here, as well as all across Africa, may have to await the final departure of the current generation of strongman leaders, among whom many, like Houphouet-Boigny, are identified with the independence struggle of the 1960s. The new generation, they argue, will have to prove its legitimacy in the polling booth.

“The next president of Ivory will face many challengers,” says one top government official. “He will be a man just like anyone, rather than someone who is the father of Ivory Coast.”