Are elections in Africa just a waste of time?

The recent polls have been roundly condemned by election-monitoring

bodies. Observers from the European Union said that the whole process was

not credible and the report they issued on the exercise was the most

damning it had ever issued anywhere in the world.

 As Kenyans and the international community grapple with the crisis,

the question they should now be asking themselves with some urgency is:

What now?

The elections represented a big step backwards in the Government’s

ostensible efforts to match economic reforms with democratic openness and

respect for basic rights.

Kenya’s Western partners should not be idle bystanders. Instead they

should be willing to condition non-humanitarian aid and security

co-operation on clear evidence of reform, including the impartial

investigation and prosecution of politicians suspected of subsidising recent

election and post-election violence, and committed serious electoral

malpractices.

From the polls, we now know that democracy is not a panacea. Some

elements of the deficit of democracy  should have been put to the test long

ago.

 Democracy is just a governing system. It might be one of the best, but

it does not automatically solve all problems. In fact it probably does the

opposite; most major problems must be solved before democracy can work.

From the polls, we have learnt that there is yet to be fair, free and

transparent elections in Africa; it is just a waste of money and other

resources.

African leaders hate to be called former head of state, and once

they taste power, they think the country belongs to them. Then arrogance,

disdain and authoritarianism take their course as the means to hanging on to

power.

 But what is the root cause of the problem? Prof Donald Kagan in

Pericles of Athens and The Birth of Democracy, says that a successful

democracy is based on more than elections.

 He maintains that an examination of the few successful democracies in

history suggests that they need to meet three conditions if they are to

flourish.

The first is to have a good set of institutions.

 The second is to have a body of citizens who possess a good

understanding of the principles of democracy, and who have developed a

character consistent with the democratic way of life.

The third is to have a high quality of leadership, at least in

critical moments. Until the above has been fulfilled, the struggle for

democracy will continue.

TWENTIETH CENTURY HISTORY IS  littered with the remains of elections

that brought forth neither democracy nor the rule of law.

The entire Soviet empire was enamoured of show elections in which

every citizen was given the privilege of voting for the winner — and only

the winner.

Fascist and corporatist regimes would routinely invoke the plebiscite

to crown the claimed rule of the people, a tool used by Hitler to

consolidate power in the 1930s.

 Post-colonial regimes in countries such as the Central African

Republic, or more recently, Zimbabwe, would hold elections only to see the

victors proclaim themselves rulers for life.

 Before any election is held, there must be ground rules that determine

what elections are for, and formal institutional structures that will be

filled by the elections.

 But what justifies those rules? The answer can only be given

retrospectively, based on the success of the democratic experiment itself.

All democracies enter this world with this so-called democratic

deficit — a system preordained by no particular democratic process.

 British philosopher John Stuart Mill may have had a case like Kenya in

mind when he wrote that political liberalism was impossible in a country

with ethnic or national divisions.

He wrote: Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they

read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to

the working of representative government, cannot exist.

 Over the past years, the need to secure democratic order in countries

fractured by racial, ethnic or religious cleavages like Kenya has robbed us

of the easy assumption that democracy can take hold in raven societies.

 Democracy, then, is ultimately not about the ability to elect rulers;

it is about the ability to send them packing. The political tragedy of

post-colonial Africa is not the absence of elections; it is the inability to

vote rulers out of office.

Whether an election is a harbinger of democracy is best addressed in

hindsight once the security of the minorities is  assessed and once the

first elected rulers face retrospective accountability before the

electorate.

  Mr Otieno is a journalist based in the US.  The regular Friday

columnist, Lucy Oriang’, will be back next week.