President Thabo Mbeki’s is a presidency given to deep philosophical reflection, so it’s surprising that a watershed debate he started on African democracy has been so under-reported.
The occasion was a speech he delivered at the opening of the Africa Conference on Elections, Democracy and Governance last month.
The speech is one big tease — and I say that as a compliment and not to denigrate. Delivered with studied deadpan, Mbeki allowed his words to play with his audience. ‘Many of these kinds of gatherings seek to assert the point firmly, that we are democrats,” he began. ‘This leads to the propagation of a series of democratic musts drawn from political science textbooks.”
Mbeki then offered a list, including multiparty political systems, regular elections and limits on the number of times anybody can be elected head of state or government. He also mentioned the ‘musts” of an independent human rights commission and that ‘we must allow international observers to observe and make judgements on our elections”.
Then the mind play and the big tease, with a mischievous dig at the United Kingdom. Keep in mind that this speech was delivered at the height of the Iraq invasion and that relations between South Africa and Britain were not — how shall one put it — as rosy as usual.
‘Great Britain does not limit the period during which a person may hold the position of prime minister, to say nothing about the hereditary position of the head of state. It does not have an independent electoral commission that conducts elections. It does not have an independent human rights commission. I have never heard of international observers verifying whether any British election was free and fair.
Instead, I have heard of observers visiting the UK during election time to learn how democratic elections should be conducted. I presume that we send these students because, correctly, we agree that despite the things she is not called upon to do, as we are, Great Britain is a democratic country.”
Wonderful stuff, though implicit with danger — the danger of nuance. Because, as one of Mbeki’s foreign policy advisers admitted to me, ‘The problem is that when he speaks with such nuance, as he often does, one wonders whether the media and the public have sufficient capacity to grasp the nuance.”
Thus, there are those who will interpret these words as saying ‘To hell with Western democracy, why shouldn’t I have a third term?” when in fact what he actually said was ‘In a sense, the challenge we face is to understand why the rulebook of democratic musts applies unevenly between ourselves and other countries of the North, such as Great Britain.”
This is a common theme in Mbeki’s approach to democratic politics and lies at the core of his own form of pan-Africanism. But it also has a wider resonance, something that Mbeki is never slow to offer. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a more important moment in the history of democracy. Because when Mbeki then speaks of the requirement of understanding the ‘African reality, not for the purpose of abandoning the rulebook of democratic musts, but to answer the question concretely — how shall these rules be translated into practice”, his point is as pointedly valid for Iraq and the Middle East generally as it is for Africa.
I don’t know whether Mbeki had sight of them, but the excellent British intellectual magazine Prospect last month carried an insightful series of essays that engaged with the challenge of Middle Eastern democracy. In one, Ahmad Samih Khalidi argued that ‘The Arabs are hardly unique in the developing world in needing better governance. But in seeking to remedy this situation, those who have suddenly discovered in liberal democracy a panacea for Middle Eastern ills need to look not only at the more nuanced picture but at some of the more complex realities that underpin it.”
Khalidi then says that neither the belief that Arabs are congenitally immune to the contagion of democratic practice nor the idea that they are a ready-made receptacle for Western-style democracy is right.
I think that Mbeki might, in respect of Africans, adopt the same line. In his speech Mbeki cites the case of Uganda and quotes from President Yoweri Museveni’s own 1997 book, Sowing the Mustard Seed, of the failure of the post-independence dispensation to accommodate the reality of a society that was fragmented and divided along sectarian and tribal lines. Implicit is Mbeki’s approval of the Museveni approach to democracy that has been disobedient to some of the ‘musts” of liberal democracy but has delivered a stable polity as a base for economic development.
When I visited Uganda in 1999 I went out of my way to discuss this with Ugandan democracy NGO leaders. Of the nine I spoke with, eight unhesitatingly said they supported the Museveni version of ‘limited democracy”, arguing that it was a necessary prescription to meet the contemporary imperative of the Ugandan reality.
Mbeki argued that in Iraq the proposition that is being proffered is that there can be such a thing as an imported and imposed democracy. ‘Presumably,” he adds, ‘the argument is that whether a person ingests jollof rice voluntarily or does so because he or she is force-fed, the fact remains that they have eaten jollof rice.”
I suspect that beneath this analysis Mbeki doubts as much as the rest of us whether the United States cares one iota about democracy in the Middle East, other than to impose its own warped version — one in which ‘democratic practice” is simply a subservient framework to facilitate the making and protection of new markets for American corporations.
The reference to ‘jollof rice” is especially apt and useful. South Africa’s niche contribution to the philosophy of democracy is its constitutional commitment to participation and the progressive realisation of socio-economic rights.
As its chairperson Jody Kollapen said two weeks ago when defending the South African Human Rights Commission’s annual report on socio-economic rights, it is precisely because we have chosen to define democracy as including such rights as those to clean water, housing and adequate health care that their realisation is so important to democracy here and elsewhere.
In the end, whether you are South African, Ugandan or Iraqi, the simple but powerful question is: do you have the wherewithal to feed your children? If not, then democracy will always remain, as Mbeki hints, a cruel and unreal illusion.
As a new Cold War emerges to contest the US’s unipolar exposition of democracy, it is this question that should inform our alternative democratic vision, as much as it should frame South Africa’s own celebration of a first decade of democracy.
Archive: Previous columns by Richard Calland