Southern Africa Has Trappings of Democracy, but Substance Lacking

As many here see it, President Sam Nujoma should be former President Sam Nujoma. In November, the founding father of this young African democracy finished his second five-year term, the limit under the constitution.

But Nujoma didn’t budge; the constitution did. Nujoma’s ruling South-West Africa People’s Organization voted to exempt him from the restriction. Nujoma was reelected to a third term in December.

“This is not what is meant by majority rules,” said Phil ya Nangoloh, a former SWAPO member who heads the National Society for Human Rights, a political watchdog group. “It is the life of dictators.”

In the last year, five southern African democracies have held national elections that were judged by outside monitors to be largely free and fair. A sixth election, in Zimbabwe, is due in April. The succession of democratic tallies in the region--which had been one of the continent’s most volatile little more than a decade ago--is widely hailed as evidence of Africa’s break with its despotic past.

“A new generation of Africans . . . is emerging that is committed to market reforms and inclusive political systems,” Susan E. Rice, assistant secretary of State for African affairs, said in a November speech. “Democratic institutions, however fragile or flawed, now form the basis for government in the majority of African nations.”

But the nature of democracy in southern Africa has some analysts and political outsiders worried. As the region’s young democracies hold their second and third national elections, there is growing concern that the emerging democratic culture is largely superficial and, in some instances, dangerously manipulative.

“Some regimes have found democracy to be an easy way out of their problems,” said Gloria Somolekae, who heads the democracy research project at the University of Botswana. “They are not committed to democracy, but they have found this is the new thing donors and Western countries are pushing. So they have found a way to have a mock democracy that involves elections every few years.”

Economy, Democracy Share a Bond

The worries are not just the stuff of academic discussion. Free-market reforms, regarded as crucial to attracting international investment and reducing widespread poverty, are closely linked to democratic development.

If democracy falters in southern Africa, analysts say, the economic rebuilding could collapse as well--casting a long shadow across a troubled continent that is looking to the south for much of its political and economic inspiration.

“U.S. companies realize there is an inseparable bond between a competitive business environment and democracy, since both depend on predictability, accountability and the rule of law,” Deputy Secretary of Commerce Robert L. Mallett said during a tour of Africa last year.

Most countries in southern Africa have acquired the trappings of Western-style governance, but they have been adapted to suit the narrow interests of a dominant political force. The constitutional manipulation by Nujoma’s ruling party is the most glaring example.

Even in South Africa, where many democratic institutions existed before the rise of the black-majority government in 1994, the ruling African National Congress, or ANC, recently passed a series of laws that extend the powers of the state. One of the statutes allows the government to demand confidential information from private citizens while exempting top government officials from responding to public inquiries about their activities.

New rules contemplated by Parliament would dramatically reduce the ability of opposition parties to query President Thabo Mbeki by reserving for ANC members the bulk of question time during his appearance before the body. Some critics refer to Mbeki’s rule as the “imperial presidency,” a term associated with the white-minority government of former President Pieter W. Botha.

“We had a breeze of democracy going through southern Africa, but democracy, to a large extent, has come to mean regular elections,” said Theunis Keulder, executive director of the Namibia Institute for Democracy, a think tank funded by European donors. “But it should also be about what happens in between. We are trying to teach that democracy is consultative and transparent, but people feel governments can do what they want.”

In Zimbabwe, voters last month rejected a draft constitution that would have entitled President Robert Mugabe to serve two additional terms. Mbeki praised Mugabe’s acceptance of the referendum’s defeat as proof of the country’s healthy democracy.

The truth of the matter, however, is that the Zimbabwean vote was an anomaly and no one was certain how Mugabe--who has ruled in an increasingly autocratic manner for 20 years--would respond. Mbeki’s remarks, and those by other prominent outsiders, were as much a prodding reminder to Mugabe to stay the democratic course as they were a pronouncement on Zimbabwe’s democratic culture.

“Zimbabwe now stands at a turning point,” Peter Hain, the British minister for Africa, wrote in an appeal to Mugabe in British and South African newspapers. “Following years of deterioration, both democratically and economically, Mr. Mugabe has the opportunity to unite the country around a program of reform and recovery.”

The Zimbabwean referendum and its fallout highlight what many analysts consider the greatest shortcoming of democracy in the region: There are virtually no credible alternatives to the powers-that-be, and when other voices are heard in fits and spurts, they engender as much fear as hope.

The nonbinding tally in Zimbabwe was the first time since the continent’s new wave of democratic elections began a decade ago that a ruling party in southern Africa lost a national vote.

Incumbents Enjoy Huge Advantage

In last year’s elections--in South Africa, Botswana, Mozambique, Malawi and Namibia--incumbents prevailed. In cases where the top leadership changed, as with the retirement of presidents Nelson Mandela in South Africa and Ketumile Masire in Botswana, handpicked successors stepped in. The ruling Botswana Democratic Party has been in power since independence from Britain in 1966.

“Democracy means there should be a real possibility that power can change hands,” said Somolekae of the University of Botswana. “When the results are a foregone conclusion before you even have gone to the polls, something is wrong.”

A study of African elections by Michael Bratton, a professor of political science at Michigan State University, concludes that “second” elections--those that have followed the arrival of newly democratic governments in the early 1990s--have not served to deepen democracy. Democratic gains were eroded in 11 of the 23 elections between 1995 and 1997, he argues, citing everything from vote-rigging to the restoration of former strongmen.

Zambia, Bratton said, is the clearest example of the problem. Zambia held what observers described as a model election in 1991, when multi-party elections were introduced and trade unionist Frederick Chiluba defeated incumbent President Kenneth D. Kaunda by a landslide. But by the 1996 elections, things had already unraveled, and a year later Chiluba declared a state of emergency after an attempted coup he blamed on Kaunda.

“The Zambian case encapsulates many of the trends evidenced in other new African multi-party regimes, including the disqualification of leading candidates, the spotty coverage of voter registration, the lack of internal democracy in ruling parties, the abuse of government resources during the campaign and the growing hostility of governments toward watchdog groups,” Bratton wrote in the Journal of Democracy.

Even with the setbacks, Bratton and others suggest that it is far too early to write off Africa’s new democracies. Most of the ruling parties in southern Africa have roots in the liberation struggles against colonialism, meaning many voters may favor them out of simple gratitude or habit. Those attitudes are bound to change, especially as the major liberation heroes grow old and die. And unlike their predecessors, who were largely educated in the former East Bloc, the next generation of leaders will include Western-educated technocrats with a greater tolerance of democracy’s annoyances.

Most southern African democracies, moreover, are still trying to adapt what is a essentially a Western form of governance to African circumstances. Many analysts say the do-or-die test will be democracy’s ability to cope with the continent’s most pressing social and economic problems, which until now have baffled governments democratic and otherwise.

“In southern Africa, the demands of human security and sustainable development take precedence over everything else,” said Anthoni van Nieuwkerk of the Center for Defense and Security Management at South Africa’s University of Witwatersrand. “For me, it is the wrong entry point to ask if southern Africa is democratizing. If you put it the other way around--are the key challenges being addressed by these democracies--you will get deeper answers, and some of them look bleak.”

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Southern Africa’s Democracies

Politics in the seven largest democracies of southern Africa have been dominated for years by the ruling parties. South African President Thabo Mbeki, left, and National Assembly Speaker Frene Ginwala of the ruling African National Congress arrive at the recent opening of Parliament.