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Institute for Security Studies, Pretoria
Guest Editor
But the violence that ensued the proclamation of an apparently peaceful presidential poll in Kenya in December 2007 and the circumstances that surrounded the 2008 presidential election in Zimbabwe seem to overshadow the view of many observers about the democratic process in Africa. Many saw in what happened in Kenya a regress of the democratisation process on the continent and questioned whether or not Africa was ready for democracy. The media particularly echoed this sentiment, reinforced by the view of certain researchers and ‘experts’ on democratisation in Africa. Indeed, the much renowned Journal of Democracy (JoD) devoted the main theme of its April 2008 issue to analysing the ‘Progress and Retreat [of democracy] in Africa’ in light of what happened in Kenya.
Having more or less echoed this sentiment in his contribution to this issue of JoD, using Kenya as an example, Richard Joseph (2008) sought to moderate his view but could not help to conclude that the reassuring factor was that democracy was not ‘in full retreat’ on the continent.
It is in this debate and these observations that the present issue of African Renaissance found its raison d’être with a view to providing a critical analysis of electoral violence and its impact on the state of democracy in Africa. It does so with special reference – but not exclusively limited – to Kenya. As the violent dispute that arose from the Kenyan elections was solved through a power-sharing agreement between the main protagonists and a similar deal was being devised – and later materialised – in Zimbabwe, many saw in this a dangerous trend developing in Africa and asked whether the continent was moving towards governments of national unity – as one party systems were fashionable in the 1960s and 70s – in blatant disregard of election results.
But it would seem that most of these analyses were made without a proper contextualisation of the issue at hand. First, the view that what happened in Kenya constitutes a retreat of the democratic process ‘in Africa’ overlooks two important facts: that Kenya was still in the phase of ‘democratic transition’ and that the violence was the consequence of certain structural deficiencies in the Kenyan social-political fabric and not of the election. The second observation is that the arguments that post-election power-sharing agreements have become or are becoming a trend in Africa, solely based on these two examples, are rather premature because there is no sufficient empirical evidence to substantiate them. All the previous power-sharing agreements that have been devised on the continent came after armed conflicts and not multi-party elections. Two examples do not constitute a trend!
With regard to the first observation, it is worth noting that theorists of democratisation (from authoritarian regimes) identify three main phases or sequences of the process. These are: a) the phase of liberalisation and ‘political opening’; b) the transitional phase; and c) the phase of consolidation. While these are not clear-cut or well distinguishable phases, they are a useful guidance in analysing the level of progress of the democratic process in a given country or region. The first phase begins by the launching of the process of dissolution of an authoritarian regime (O’Donnel & Schmitter, 1986; Bratton & Van de Walle, 1992), and what Bratton and Van de Walle (1997:157) call ‘political opening’ – that is the opening up of the political space to allow some degree of freedom of expression and opposition parties to be formed or legalised. All this happens under the auspices of the authoritarian regime. The organisation of a reasonably free and fair ‘founding election’ is generally a sign of the completion of this phase (O’Donnel & Schmitter, 1986:6, Bratton & Van de Walle, 1997).
The transition period starts where the previous one ends, that is when the authoritarian regime – owing to a multitude of factors – hands over the reins of power to a more representative regime having repelled and disbanded most of the repressive legal and institutional instruments that were the currency of the past and the symbols of the authoritarian order. While the transition is characterised by a genuine change in the political system and more progressive developments towards attaining the democratic ideal (Kaiser & Okumu, 2004:3), this change also happens alongside some residues of the authoritarian order.
A critical reading of the contemporary history of Kenya and that of many other African states leads to the conclusion that it is in this phase of democratisation that they belong. In other words, 2007 Kenya was a country in transition as far as the democratic process is concerned. As recently as 2004, in their introduction to their well-researched co-edited volume on Democratic Transitions in East Africa, Kaiser and Okumu (2004:1-2) note:
"After over twenty years of authoritarian rule by the country’s first President, Jomo Kenyatta, Vice President Daniel arap Moi assumed the presidency and he remained in power until December 2002. The country experienced relative stability until 1992, when multi-partyism was introduced [...]. President Moi’s Kenya African National Union (KANU) government successfully manipulated this transition for a decade… The December 2002 election of . . . Mwai Kibaki heralds a new chapter in Kenya’s protracted transition. However, it remains to be seen if this alternation of power will ultimately lead to a stable and predictable democratic environment (emphasis added)".[1]
This is what most of the aforementioned analyses seem to have overlooked in the story of Kenya. And even if Kenya had regressed, how can this amount to a general regress of democratisation in Africa when we know that the indicators of most characteristics of and factors that contribute to democracy are, generally, stable if not improving in much of the continent. These indicators or factors include freedom of expression and the emergence of active civil society organisations, as indicated by recent figures of Freedom House and Reporters without Borders. While there are still many African countries – including Cameroon, Guinea, Togo, Uganda, Gabon and Swaziland – that are still lagging behind in the process, countries such as Benin, Botswana, Cape Verb, Ghana, Mali, Mauritius, Seychelles, South Africa, and Tanzania are either completing their transition or have begun their journey on the consolidation trail.
In fact, whereas democratic systems were rare in Africa prior to 1990, in 2007, Freedom House classified fully half the 48 or so Sub-Saharan African states as democracies – that is regimes under which citizens can choose and replace their leaders in reasonably free and fair elections (Diamond, 2007). And although some leaders have manipulated their countries’ constitutions – particularly with regard to term limitation of presidential mandates – to elongate their stay in power, others – like in Malawi and Nigeria – failed to do so and those that succeeded did so in a context of more societal resistance (Posner & Young, 2007).
Moreover, the post-election violence in Kenya was not really ‘post’, but the culmination of protracted structural violence in the country. And it is this that most of the contributors to this volume – and a few informed researchers elsewhere (e.g. Anderson & Lochery, 2008; Cithongo 2008)– underscore.
In his contribution to this volume, Tim Murithi argues that the elections were a mere trigger of a deep-seated structural violence in Kenya. In fact, he contends that contrary to what can be surmised from some of the aforementioned claims, the election in this context followed what he calls the ideology of ‘electionism’ and that this ideology makes elections a destructive and deceptive instrument that perpetuates this structural violence. He therefore concludes that ‘in order to avoid such upheavals in the future, there must be inclusive and representative governments that uphold the principles of social justice and equitable sharing of power between the various ethnic groups of the country’.
By the same token, Solomon A. Dersso opines thatthe vote rigging that has been blamed by some for the post-electoral violence in was not any more than a triggering factor. The roots of the crisis, he argues, were several and lie elsewhere in the contemporary political history of Kenya. The most important ones include the legacy of colonial rule, unequal patterns of control of political power and distribution of resources among members of different communities as well as the question of ownership and access to land. In sum, he argues that the conflict in Kenya is attributable to institutional problems of the Kenyan state.
Berouk Mesfin’s paper on the experience and challenges of ‘Electoral Dispute Resolution’ in Ethiopia complements these two articles and widens the debate, taking it from Kenya to the whole continent, which we aimed to do in this volume – to look at the theme of post-election violence in Africa, albeit with a special reference to Kenya.
Against this backdrop of structural violence in Kenya and given the crimes committed in the violence that erupted after the proclamation of the results of the December 2007 presidential election, it is natural that people talk about issues of justice and reconciliation. Analysing this thorny issue in the Kenyan context is the thrust of the papers by Godfrey Musila and Emmanual Kisiangani. Both use their legal background, personal involvement (in the case of the former) in some endeavours at achieving this and previous work on this issue to shed much-needed light on the subject, looking specifically at the 2008 Kenyan Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission Bill (Musila), and making a comparison between this and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Kisiangani).
As noted above, the post-electoral violence in Kenya has attracted a lot of attention in both the policy-making and academic circles. As we were planning this volume, unbeknown to us, but not at all surprising, was the fact that publishers and editors of other journals were booking their tickets on the same bus. One of the journals that got on the bus before us is the Journal of Eastern African Studies (JEAS), whose editors decided to devout their July 2008 issue to the theme of post-electoral violence in Kenya. Fortunately for scholarship, there is no duplication. Rather, papers published there are complementary to those that are contained in this volume of African Renaissance. Our readership might also be different.
But we have at least two pluses on JEAS in this regard. First, by the admission of the two guest-editors of our sister journal, although their edition came out in July 2008, the papers were submitted as early as February 2008, and some were even written prior to the election and were not updated (i.e. Ghai, 2008:211-26). While this is a clear shortcoming in the part of our colleagues, we do not claim any perfection here. All that we would like to point out is the fact that coming out later and most of our contributors having observed the developments that unfolded, including the formation of the power-sharing government of national unity before submitting their papers, we had the benefit of retrospective look. But both of us leave many uncultivated farms that should be explored by ourselves and/or other researchers. These uncovered subjects include a thorough analysis of the report of the African Peer Review Mechanism on Kenya as well as that of the Kriegler Commission.
But the undisputed plus that we have over our sister journal is the fact that their readers will need to read ours while we provide our readers with a general review of the papers they published. This is what Leruo Moremong does in his review essay in this volume, looking specifically at five articles of the special volume of JEAS that deal with the campaign, voting and violence in the 2007 Kenyan elections.
The volume is complemented by other articles dealing with other issues, ranging from an empirical analysis of former South African President Thabo Mbeki’s mediation in Zimbabwe to the role of African media in promoting the New Partnership of Africa’s Development (NEPAD).
Anderson, David and Emma Lochery (July 2008), ‘Violence and Exodus in Kenya’s Rift Valley, 2008:Predictable and Preventable?’ Journal of Eastern African Studies, 2(2): 328-343.
Beetham, David (June 1994), ‘Conditions for Democratic Consolidation,’ Review of African Political Economy, 21(60): 157-172.
Bratton, Michael and Nicolas Van de Walle (1997), Democratic Experiments in Africa, Regime Transitions in Comparative Perspective, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
-------(1992), ‘Popular Protest and Political Reform in Africa,’ Comparative Politics, 24(4): 419-442.
Diamond, Larry (2007), ‘The State of Democracy in Africa,’ Paper presented at a conference on Democratization in Africa: What Progress toward Institutionalization? Ghana Centre for Democratic Development, Accra, 4-6 October.
Eisenstadt, Todd (Autumn 2000), ‘Eddies in the Third Wave: Protracted Transitions and Theories of Democratization,’ Democratization, 7 (3): 3-24.
Ghai, Yash (July 2008), ‘Devolution: Restructuring the Kenyan State,’ Journal of Eastern African Studies, 2(2): 211-226.
Githongo, John (July 2008), ‘Kenya – Riding the Tiger,’ Journal of Eastern African Studies, 2(2): 359-367.
Joseph, Richard (April 2008), ‘Challenges of a “frontier’ Region,’ in Progress and Retreat in Africa, Journal of Democracy, 19(2):94-108.Kaiser, Paul J. & F. Wafula Okumu (1994), ‘The Challenges of Democratic Transition in East Africa,’ in Paul J. Kaiser and F. Wafula Okumu (eds.), Democratic Transitions in East Africa, Aldershot, Ashgate, pp. 1-12.
Linz, Juan and Alfred Stephan (1996), Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation, Baltimore, MD.: John Hopkins University Press.
O’Donnel, Guillermo and Philippe Schmitter (1986), Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions About Uncertain Democracies, Baltimore, MD. : JHUP.Posner, Daniel N. and Daniel J. Young (July 2007), ‘The Institutionalization of Political Power in Africa,’ Journal of Democracy, 18(3): 126-140.