The Dream of Democracy in Africa May Not Survive the Daily Realities

When rival soldiers overthrew the military regime led by 30-year-old Capt. Valentine Strasser in January, few believed the new junta’s promise to allow democratic elections.

But fed up with nearly three decades of corrupt dictatorships, five years of bloody civil war and growing anarchy in one of the world’s poorest nations, citizens insisted.

Against all odds and expectations, a heavy turnout of voters braved gunfire and intimidation to cast ballots Feb. 26.

“The people came into the streets chanting: ‘We must vote! We must vote!’ ” recalled Kadi Sesay, head of the National Commission for Democracy. “They said, ‘Shoot us, we will still vote.’ There were so many voters that the gunmen had to withdraw.”

When an extra voting day was added, “people slept in polling stations with the ballot boxes to protect them,” she said. “It was wonderful to see.”

After a March 15 runoff, the military handed over power to civilians. Rebel forces agreed to a cease-fire.

Today, the tiny West African country has a parliament, a free press and, most important, a sense of hope after decades of despair.

“Sometimes I still wonder if it really happened,” said Amy Smythe, a former teacher who is now a government minister. “It seems like a dream.”

That dream may not survive.

Sierra Leone’s “people power” revolution was a stunning start to a year in which 18 African nations have held or plan elections, the most since Africa began to emerge from European colonialism nearly 40 years ago.

Unfortunately, the unlikely triumph defies the trend on a continent where democracy is struggling to gain ground against grinding poverty, ethnic divisions and grotesque misrule.

“If anything, democracy is being rolled back in Africa rather than pushing forward,” said Sarah Pienaar, director of the independent South African Institute of International Affairs in Johannesburg.

Some of this year’s elections are notable.

The vast desert nation of Chad, for example, went to the polls for the first time June 2. Actually, polls went to the voters in some areas: Ballot boxes were driven to remote nomad camps in all-terrain vehicles.

Most other elections this year will render verdicts on governments formed since 1990, when a post-Cold War wave of multi-party elections swept at least half the 48 nations south of the Sahara. From Mali to Malawi, first-time voters discarded dictatorial “big men” and toppled one-party regimes.

Results of what was dubbed Africa’s second independence movement varied widely in an area so vast. But this much is clear: The elections produced few truly representative or accountable governments.

Some polls were rigged or hijacked, leaving tyrants in control of Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Gabon and Togo. Another sham election was held in Equatorial Guinea in March. Brig. Gen. Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo extended his 16-year reign of terror by winning 99% of the vote.

Civil wars derailed poll results in Angola and Burundi. Repressive military regimes overthrew civilian governments in Gambia and Niger and voided election results in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country.

The Central African Republic has fended off two coup attempts so far this year.

Other supposedly democratic countries, including Kenya, Ivory Coast and Zimbabwe, have become de facto one-party states, led by autocratic rulers who muzzle the media and jail or harass their opponents.

After nearly 15 years in power, Ghana’s authoritarian president, Jerry J. Rawlings, is expected to win another term as well.

The reasons for democracy’s apparent retreat are complex. Perhaps most important, in many cases elections were held only to appease Western donor nations or to gain a facade of legitimacy for rulers who made sure they kept a firm grip on the army and central bank.

But democratic growth is also stunted by other conditions.

Many Africans vote based on ethnic, regional or religious loyalties, not policy. Rival political parties are often denied access to state-run media or prevented from raising funds or holding rallies.

Institutions crucial to building a democratic culture--a free press, independent judiciary and trade unions--are usually weak and harassed. And pervasive corruption, ruinous economic policies and debilitating poverty subvert reforms, leaving voters more concerned with survival than politics.

The result is that democracy appears to be taking root in only eight nations in sub-Saharan Africa--Benin, Botswana, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritius, Namibia and, most prominently, South Africa. A decade ago, there were four: Botswana, Gambia, Mauritius and Senegal.

Progress is often difficult to measure even in some of those countries.

Benin, for example, was hailed when multi-party elections overturned a Marxist-Leninist military regime in 1991. The nearby nations of Mali, Niger, Congo and Central African Republic soon followed, toppling entrenched rulers for civilian governments.

Benin held its second free election in March. President Nicephore Soglo lost to the dictator he had replaced five years ago, Lt. Col. Mathieu Kerekou. Voters blamed Soglo for high unemployment and his family’s role in government.

Zambia’s president, Frederick Chiluba, clearly wants to avoid that fate. In May, his government passed constitutional amendments effectively barring the autocratic president he replaced five years ago, Kenneth D. Kaunda, from contesting elections scheduled for October.

Kaunda ruled for 27 years before he lost Zambia’s first free elections in 1991, a race he accepted only after the West threatened to freeze foreign aid.

Ironically, the U.S. State Department is again considering cutting aid, complaining that the new amendments limit “the rights of Zambians to choose their presidents freely.”

Zimbabwe also held elections in March. It was no surprise that President Robert Mugabe, ruler since independence in 1980, won another term. Both opponents dropped out, one after being arrested, leaving Mugabe unopposed.

Zimbabwe is a stable country with clean streets, low crime and a laudable human rights record.

But public campaign funds go only to the ruling party, and the state controls all radio, TV and daily newspapers. The result is de facto one-party rule: Mugabe’s party has 147 of 150 seats in parliament.

“The playing field is not level,” complained opposition leader Margaret Dongo, who won her legislative seat only after convincing a court that Mugabe’s party had stuffed ballot boxes in her district. “Mugabe calls it a democracy to please the international community. But the system doesn’t allow democracy to prevail.”

Uganda is using a different approach. Yoweri Museveni was elected president in May, 10 years after he won a gruesome civil war.

Since then, the Marxist-turned-free-marketeer has brought stability and a fast-growing economy.

What Museveni did not bring was full democracy: He banned political parties from organizing or campaigning in the election, arguing they would exploit ethnic tensions and rekindle bloodshed.

“We thought if we allow these parties, we’ll tear the country to pieces,” Deputy Prime Minister Eryra Kategaya said. “Slipping back is very, very easy. . . . Unfortunately, in Africa, the idea of nationhood is very thin. Very thin. People look at religion, tribe, tradition before they look at nation.”

Michael Southwick, the U.S. ambassador to Uganda, said Museveni’s election was only acceptable as a transition. But to what remains unclear.

“The question is, how do you frame a system that embraces pluralism in Africa?” he mused. “That is the dilemma that we all grapple with.”

Some leaders don’t try. Since his election in 1992, Kenya’s autocratic president, Daniel Arap Moi, has “deliberately manipulated and instigated” violent conflict between ethnic groups “in order to undermine . . . political pluralism,” according to the independent human rights group Africa Watch.

Even Nelson Mandela’s South Africa, a model of constitutional government since apartheid gave way to majority rule in the first all-race election two years ago, struggles to balance the legacy of the past with the competing demands of a modern democracy.

“It is an illusion to believe our society has been democratized,” Justice Minister Dullah Omar warned. “We have taken the first steps toward democracy. That is all. We have a society and a people who are brutalized and dehumanized. That doesn’t end with a vote.”

The key to South Africa’s transition has been power-sharing. Instead of the winner-take-all system used in many other African countries, the 1994 election gave losers a role in government and a stake in the future.

Nigeria’s future remains dubious. Under heavy pressure from the West, junta leader Gen. Sani Abacha last year pledged a three-year transition to civilian rule. The first round, elections for 593 local councils, took place in March.

But they had no effect on the venality, mismanagement and human rights abuses that have turned Abacha’s government into a global pariah. The apparent winner of nullified 1993 elections, Moshood K.O. Abiola, sits in prison. His wife, who had campaigned for his release, was killed June 4 in an apparent assassination. Most other opposition figures are dead, in jail or in exile.

“Abacha will continue to kill, torture, maim, fabricate, do anything at all to stay in power,” Wole Soyinka, the exiled Nigerian playwright and Nobel Prize winner in literature, warned recently in Johannesburg.

Similarly, Zairian President Mobutu Sese Seko, who has been in power for 31 years, promised political reforms in 1990 to appease the West. After repeated delays, the most recent timetable calls for presidential and parliamentary elections in 1997.

Mobutu’s kleptocratic economic policies have left one of Africa’s potentially richest nations a shambles. The army and police prey on the populace, the currency is worthless and malnutrition is growing. Zaire is steadily disintegrating.

Headlines, of course, focus on Africa’s catastrophes, from the aborted U.N. mission to bring peace to chaotic Somalia in 1993 to the genocide in Rwanda in 1994.

Burundi threatens to explode into ethnic slaughter. Liberia, Africa’s first independent republic, is under siege by vicious warlords.

Other countries are wards of the international community, their economies propped up by steadily shrinking infusions of foreign aid. Crippling foreign debt, the AIDS pandemic, widespread illiteracy and rocketing population growth erode progress at all levels.

Africa’s boosters in the West, including Brian Atwood, director of the U.S. Agency for International Development, insist that political and economic reforms are gaining momentum despite the obvious setbacks.

“We’ve erased the East-West conflict from Africa,” he said during a recent visit to Burundi and Rwanda. “We’ve basically sold them on the notion of democracy and free-market economies, or at least [that they] are the future.”

The new politics clearly has led to new freedoms.

Independent groups that monitor human rights have proliferated. And many more independent newspapers are published. Nigeria, one of the most repressive states, probably has Africa’s best newspapers.

There is other good news. The World Bank reported in May that after more than a decade in which living standards actually fell--most Africans are poorer today than they were in 1970--income is rising again. About 30 nations saw more than 3% growth in gross domestic product last year, the bank said.

In addition, major wars have ended in southern Africa as well as in Ethiopia and Eritrea. New cross-border wars in West Africa have not materialized.

“The chances of Africa emerging from its development crisis are better now than in many years,” U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali said in March at the launch of a joint African initiative by the United Nations, International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

The goal is to raise $25 billion over the next decade to coordinate and promote education, health care, crisis prevention and better governance across the continent. What that governance should be is the question.

Many analysts say Africa is ill suited for democracy. It is arrogant, they say, to import political models, such as the parliamentary system, and hope that they will adapt to local conditions. Africa is too poor, they say, too illiterate, too saddled with ethnic animosities and tribal traditions.

“Until they can translate the new democracy into economic well-being, the democracies will be short-lived,” said Eugene Nyati, former head of South Africa’s Center for African Studies. “Because what democracies don’t provide is stability. A benign dictatorship may be the best way for some of these countries right now.”

Sierra Leone’s dictators were hardly benign.

Siaka Stevens, who led the country from 1968 to 1985, systematically looted the treasury, dismantled the civil service, destroyed government services and ran an oppressive one-party state.

The economy collapsed under the next leader, Maj. Gen. Joseph Momoh. But anarchy resulted when Strasser led a coup in April 1992. A ragtag rebel movement began terrorizing the countryside, and rather than fight, the poorly paid, ill-trained army joined the pillaging.

“It wasn’t really a civil war,” said Joseph Opala, an American anthropologist and longtime resident. “It was competitive looting.”

The junta then hired Executive Outcomes, a military training and mercenary group based in South Africa. The foreign troops quickly secured diamond fields for the government and helped push the rebels back from outside Freetown, the capital.

But pressure for elections began mounting from British and U.S. diplomats, U.N. officials and, most important, newly formed human rights, civic and women’s groups. The army finally relented, and voters chose a retired U.N. official, Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, as president.

No one doubts that the transition is fragile. The military may not stay in its barracks. Street protests are already growing over reported corruption in the new government. Peace talks could collapse.

“Democracy doesn’t come just because we had an election,” warned Lucinda Amal, head of a women’s group. “Maybe we are on the verge of it. But we are not there now.”

“We’re at a very critical point in our history,” agreed playwright and author Julius Spencer. “We’ve gone through elections. We’ve replaced a military regime with a civilian government. But whether we’re going to have a real democratic system is another matter. Old habits die hard.”

And Sierra Leone’s problems are staggering. According to the United Nations, it has the world’s lowest life expectancy--age 39 for men, 43 for women--and ranks at or near the bottom of virtually every other index of human misery. Nearly half the population of 4.5 million people are refugees from the fighting.

Still, optimism and hope are palpable in the shantytowns, street markets and offices of Freetown, where steep hills and winding roads overlook one of Africa’s most beautiful harbors. Perhaps most telling of all, the man who lost the election has accepted the results and joined the political fray.

“All the elements are in place for a democracy,” said John Karefa-Smart, who now leads minority parties in parliament. “I think it will work if we give it enough time. At least I hope so.”