Steven Friedman
worm’s eye view
Right now, this is not an easy neighbourhood for democrats with short memories and long expectations. Events in several of the region’s states have seemed to make optimism about democracy here bizarre and yet we may look back on this period as one in which, for the first time, democrats have cause for cheer.
The bleak evidence is familiar: here, the minister of safety and security tries to brand political competition conspiracy; in Zambia, the president expels half his Cabinet from his party when they resist his attempt to change the Constitution to award himself a third term. In Zimbabwe, the leader of the opposition is charged with terrorism while thugs enforce their will without sanction from the police.
The signs seem overwhelming: the region is stumbling into an authoritarian abyss. Surely only the praise singer or the fool could find cause for hope? Well, no. While there is a danger that today’s turmoil will take us backwards, there are also grounds for believing it might move us forward.
Firstly, the claim that democracy is now being threatened assumes that it was in healthy shape at the outset. But in two of the cases, that ignores recent history.
Both Zambia (for a few years) and Zimbabwe (for two decades) have been democracies, but in form rather than substance. President Frederick Chiluba invented reasons to bar former president Kenneth Kaunda from running for president while, in the early days of post-independence Zimbabwe, extreme force was used to quell opposition in Matabeleland. These are merely well-known examples of a restricted democracy in which the freedom to challenge the ruling party has been sharply limited, in practice if not in law. Current events are simply a more extreme form of features which have been visible for years.
In our case, political and civil freedoms have been respected. But again, the innuendo that competing for office is treachery does not emerge out of thin air. The attempt by the ANC leadership to impose uniformity on the movement and to control independent sources of power by, for example, making sure that it appoints candidates for premier or mayor has been afoot for some time now. Again, we are witnessing only a stronger form of that which has been evident for a while.
So are we really witnessing a flight from democracy? If anything, we are beginning to see starkly what some scholars of African politics have been saying for years that the “new wave” of African democracy has often (although not always) been a vehicle for undemocratic leaders to rule through the ballot box.
Often, either former dictators have contrived to get elected or old self-appointed autocrats have been replaced by new, elected, ones. The ability of citizens to hold governments to account did not improve; the only people who most of the new democracies satisfied were their rulers and the donor governments who were happy to regard an election as proof of democracy, no matter what happened between ballots.
This should not be a surprise. History teaches that democracy is rarely handed out from on high; it usually must be won by citizens who demand it. And this may be precisely why current events may be a source of hope.
The three countries are very different. But they may have something important in common: in each, leaders face real limits to their power not from donor countries but from their citizens.
In Zimbabwe, the government’s defeat in the constitutional referendum and the Movement for Democratic Change’s strong showing in the general election raised the real prospect of President Robert Mugabe and ZANU-PF losing an election. In Zambia, Chiluba found many in his party unwilling to allow another term and citizens willing to take to the streets to support them.
Here, matters are murkier: claims of a plot may have been sparked by a crude smear on President Thabo Mbeki and it is unclear whether any of Minister of Safety and Security Steve Tshwete’s targets were planning to challenge for the African National Congress presidency. But it may be significant that all three targets are businessmen and so, unlike the MPs who faithfully followed the party line when the minister appeared before them, outside the control of the ANC leadership.
And, if the purpose of claiming a plot against the president was to silence differing views within the ANC alliance, it has been a singular failure: the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) publicly took issue with Tshwete it was joined, albeit in more veiled terms, by former president Nelson Mandela and other senior ANC figures.
That leaders in these parts should want to entrench themselves in power is hardly new. But that influential forces should be able to stand up to them is and this may yet begin to move us towards a democracy far more substantial than that promised by the proddings of the West.
In similar vein, it is easy to dismiss actions such as the attempt by Mbeki and Botswana President Festus Mogae to lean on Chiluba as expedient, particularly given Mbeki’s apparent unwillingness to do the same in Zimbabwe. But that too may be a sign that the political ground has shifted, that some behaviour is open to challenge now in a way in which it was not a decade ago.
None of this means that current events are necessarily the darkest hour before the dawn.
Leaders may well be facing the toughest-ever challenges from citizens. But that does not mean that, this time around, the leaders are certain to lose.
Optimism may be particularly premature in Zimbabwe and Zambia. In the former, the devastation wrought in the attempt to retain power may condemn the society to a slow recovery, even if democracy comes soon. Zambia may still lack the crucial social base for democracy which has been lacking in much of Africa strong citizens’ organisations with independent power bases able to hold the government to account.
Here, we have the crucial advantage of an economy which, despite its warts, limits the power of political leaders by providing resources and power bases independent of government, not only to business people but also to trade unions; for not the first time, Cosatu’s well-heeled detractors may have cause to reflect on how secure democracy would be here without the union federation. That may explain why these weeks have shown that anyone seeking to control this society from the top will face more formidable obstacles than their counterparts elsewhere on the continent.
That is no cause for complacency current events here could end in a greater power concentration at the top rather than in stronger democracy.
Yet the meaning of the times may be not the old story of leaders seeking a monopoly of power, but the new one of citizens refusing to give it to them.