Africa struggles with democracy

By Edmund Sanders

July 20, 2008

NAIROBI, Kenya - Election-related meltdowns in Zimbabwe and Kenya are stark reminders of democracy's fragile foothold in Africa, experts say, despite years of financial and diplomatic investment by the United States and other Western nations.

A combination of challenges unique to the continent, including worsening poverty and inconsistent international engagement, is blamed for fueling a string of setbacks. After some progress in the early 1990s, once-promising governments have regressed, particularly around election time.

"Overall, the continent has had a deflation of strong democratic leadership in recent years," said J. Stephen Morrison, Africa director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "In some places we are seeing that autocratic pseudo-democracies have formed."

In addition to disputed presidential elections in Zimbabwe and Kenya, where longtime incumbents refused to cede power after their opponents declared victory at the polls, last year's ruling party victory in Nigeria was condemned widely as flawed. Uganda's president changed the country's constitution to stay in power. Ethiopian government forces killed about 200 opposition supporters after a 2005 vote.

Although there have been democratic success stories, such as Ghana and Sierra Leone, some observers see the coming years as a crucial period in determining whether much of Africa will move forward in embracing democracy.

"The continent right now seems caught in the middle between the good cases and bad cases," said Chris Fomunyoh, senior associate for Africa at the National Democratic Institute, which promotes democratic reform around the world.

The Bush administration has been praised for sharply stepping up spending to combat diseases in Africa, including about $19 billion on HIV/AIDS and $1.2 billion on malaria. But it has been less vigilant when it comes to bolstering democratic institutions, analysts say.

Efforts to promote democracy in Africa largely have been confined to Sudan, which is torn by a north-south war and a conflict in the Darfur region, in which more than 200,000 people have died.

Indeed, after a flurry of support in the early 1990s, which helped usher in multiparty systems and stronger institutions, the United States and other Western powers have diverted their attention to the Middle East and Asia.

Zimbabwe's crisis is a prime example, critics say. President Robert G. Mugabe long ago began leading his southern African nation toward economic ruin and violent autocracy.

"We should have stopped Mugabe in his tracks years ago," said Johann Kriegler, who led a panel that oversaw South Africa's first all-race election in 1994 and is leading a commission to investigate Kenya's electoral breakdown.

African leaders have long been reluctant to criticize each other lest their own records be judged. But the presidents of Senegal and Zambia, along with former South African President Nelson Mandela, recently have criticized Zimbabwe's leadership.

Yet South Africa's Thabo Mbeki refuses to condemn Mugabe. And at an African Union summit in Egypt this summer, Mugabe was met with only muted protest.

Limited international outcry after disputed polls in places like Nigeria might have emboldened other African leaders, such as Mugabe and Kenya's President Mwai Kibaki, experts said.

"There's been a certain amount of serial learning that has gone on," Morrison said. "Incumbents realize that some pretense to a democratic process is all you need, combined with heavy-handed intimidation of the opposition."

After the 2001 al-Qaida attacks on New York and Washington, U.S. priorities around the globe changed, with a greater emphasis on cultivating partners in the Bush administration's war on terrorism. Such shifts in priorities might explain why the United States took a softer approach in dealing with Ethiopia's crackdown in 2005, according to Fomunyoh. A year later, Ethiopia, with U.S. support, entered neighboring Somalia to crush a fledgling Islamic regime that U.S. officials said was linked to al-Qaida.

"The U.S. should not get blinded by the global war on terror to the point of overlooking other shortcomings," Fomunyoh said.

China's growing influence through investment in Africa has created another roadblock to democracy, analysts say, providing an alternative to governments not interested in political reform. In addition to buying billions of dollars in oil and other natural resources, China is building roads, bridges and other infrastructure in nearly every major African nation without attaching Western-style conditions.

The Chinese have openly sold weapons to some of Africa's most controversial governments, including Sudan. Early this year, a pro-government Chinese newspaper said the violence in Kenya, in which nearly 1,000 people were killed, was proof that Western-style democracy "isn't suited to African conditions, but rather carries with it the root of disaster."

"China's role is giving a certain confidence to those who want to pursue a model of a strong, central, non-democratic state," Morrison said.