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by Young, Crawford

  During the 1980s, the view slowly took root through various pathways that the drift toward state decline and crisis was not merely economic and could only be reversed by major political reform. Academic observers once in thrall to the premise that rapid development required centralized and uninhibited state authority were dismayed to observe it degenerate into predatory patrimonial autocracy. Many felt that the views Richard Sklar expressed in his U.S. African Studies Association 1982 presidential address devoted to democracy in Africa were visionary. In contrast, Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja’s 1988 presidential address issuing a ringing summons to democracy in Africa seemed timely and prophetic. For many in Africa, a remoralization of the public realm and relegitimation of the state required political opening. Many intellectual critics of SAPs rallied to the cry for political opening. Tanzanian scholar Mwesiga Baregu noted that “traditional opponents of the World Bank and the IMF . . . gradually realized that they could not dissuade the government from adopting these policies. . . . Instead, [they] turned their attention to the logical inconsistency in the government’s espousal of economic liberalization and its rejection of political liberalization.”9 Long quiescent opposition voices began to challenge single-party monopolies. In the population at large, a responsiveness to political mobilization drew on what Celestin Monga termed the “anthropology of anger,” long expressed through “insubordination and indocility, notable and noble signs of the desire for democracy.”10

  PORTENTS OF CHANGE

  Another portent of impending change came with the emergence of the “civil society” concept, which first made its appearance in Eastern Europe in the 1980s. This notion, though it had a long historical pedigree stretching from John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Alexis de Tocqueville to Hegel and Gramsci, had disappeared from common usage in the postwar years.11 For East European intellectuals, the Marxist-Leninist Soviet-imposed regimes were an alien excrescence on the body politic, whose authentic identity and virtues were embedded in a society entirely distinct from the state. Their yearning for a “normal” state, comparable to the democratic polities of Western Europe, could be achieved only through accession to power of “civil society.”12 Comparably, in Africa by the 1980s an idea took root holding that the predatory state had become distinct from and alien to society. The vital forces of society, and not the oppressive, derelict state, were the true repositories of legitimacy. To some extent, these intellectual currents also fed on the antistatist perspectives then influential in much of the West, especially Britain and the United States.

  Dramatic transformations in the external environment also had a catalytic effect. The cascade of events beginning with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 that resulted in the collapse of Communist regimes in the Soviet bloc and in 1991 the dissolution of the Soviet Union did not cause the democratization wave in Africa, but its demonstration of the hollow nature of long-standing Soviet bloc autocracies was a potent stimulus, making collective challenge to autocracy thinkable. The spectacle in Romania of perennial dictator Nicolae Ceauscescu overthrown by the street and summarily executed was a chilling spectacle for many in presidential palaces; Ceauscescu had actively cultivated African connections and heads of state, claiming that Romania was a “developing nation” with natural affinities to third-world countries.

  The collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union had another critical consequence: the end of the cold war and the attendant global competition for African clienteles. In the early 1980s, the Soviet Union began rethinking its aid commitments in the third world. The withdrawal of Soviet and Cuban forces from Angola in 1988 to facilitate a Namibian settlement and the warning to the Ethiopian client Mengistu Haile Meriam in 1989 that no further arms would be supplied put the final seal on disengagement. Thus, by the time the 1988 Algerian urban riots sounded the death knell for patrimonial autocracy, the Soviet Union had already virtually withdrawn from the cold war competition in Africa. The security-driven American policy calculus in Africa, justifying backing for even such notoriously corrupt and dictatorial regimes as Mobutu’s Congo-Kinshasa and Samuel Doe’s Liberia, lost its motivating force.

  Within international financial institutions and the Western donor community, the conviction grew that economic reform alone was insufficient to restore the African state to health; structural adjustment was denatured by predatory prebendal politics. Within the World Bank for a time, influential voices called for democratization as a necessary counterpart to economic reform.13 The novel concept of “governance” emerged, given public academic shape in the first instance by Goran Hyden, providing a more antiseptic label for the insertion of political criteria in policy discourse.14 Governance initially appeared in a World Bank document in 1989 and was defined as “the exercise of political power to manage a nation’s affairs,” requiring “a pluralistic institutional structure, a determination to respect the rule of law, and vigorous protection of the freedom of the press and human rights.”15 Major donors such as France, the European Union, and the United States indicated that further assistance was conditioned on political opening.

  The intensity of external pressures for democratization soon relaxed, as spreading civil conflict restored stability to its throne as supreme value. But the sudden evaporation of external indulgence of autocratic rule sent shock waves throughout Africa. When added to the growing protest mobilization of civil society, the twin detonators of the Algerian riots and the Benin national conference could have their formidable diffusion effect.

  I will not add to the millennial theoretical and philosophical debates on the nature of democracy; let me simply endorse the recent thoughtful definitional discussions by Charles Tilly, Staffan Lindberg, and Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle.16 My understanding of democracy incorporates the “governance” notion and adds the crucial procedural standards of accountable and responsive representative institutions, based on regular, free, and fair universal suffrage elections, multiple parties, a real possibility of political alternation, and guarantees of the organizational freedoms and individual liberties to make competition possible. Democracy also hinges on a constitutional, rule-of-law state (état de droit).

  NATIONAL CONFERENCE FORMULA

  The national conference formula played a critical role in this process. This remarkable device became a mechanism for civil society power seizure by constitutional coup. Although the national conferences were in reality limited in number and restricted to francophone Africa, their impact extended far beyond the nine countries (Benin, Chad, Comoros, both Congos, Gabon, Mali, Niger, and Togo) in which such constitutional assemblies convened. In just three of these countries (Benin, Congo-Brazzaville, and Niger) were incumbent rulers directly driven from power. But in the euphoric moment of the democratic wave, the romantic appeal of this resurrection of the French Revolution Etats-Généraux model was potent.17

  The Benin example paved the way. By late 1989, the Mathieu Kérékou regime faced imminent breakdown. The banking system collapsed, undermined by huge unsecured (and naturally “nonperforming”) loans to key ministers and large illicit payments to Kérékou’s occult counselor, marabout Mohammed Cissé.18 Civil servants, after six months of salary arrearages, were on strike; schools had been closed for a year. Street protests multiplied; France and the World Bank refused further credit. With the state paralyzed, a desperate Kérékou summoned political and military leaders to announce the abandonment of Marxism-Leninism and the convening of a national conference at which all sectors of society would be represented to decide on a “democratic renewal” and frame a new constitution. Once assembled, the delegates, de scribing themselves as the forces vives of the nation, declared their sovereignty, in effect constituting the assembly as civil society incarnate. Armed with an asserted sovereignty, the national conference installed a transitional government under Nicéphore Soglo, permitted Kérékou to stay on as a merely ceremonial president, and drafted a new democratic constitution. The newly relegitimated state with the
help of robust external support saw a remarkable economic recovery; salary arrearages came to an end and a small budget surplus appeared by the end of 1991. These accomplishments burnished the early image of the national conference formula.19

  In Chad, Congo-Kinshasa, Gabon, and Togo, incumbent rulers bent before the wind but in the end outmaneuvered the national conferences and blocked any sovereignty claims. Multiparty democratic formal rules and new constitutions were conceded, but the rulers involved managed to retain their life presidencies save for Mobutu in Congo-Kinshasa, driven from power in 1997 by insurgent forces from the periphery. Gnassingbé Eyadéma of Togo and Omar Bongo Ondimba of Gabon died in office in 2005 and 2009, respectively. Though proposals for national conferences emerged elsewhere in Africa, incumbent regimes resisted such demands; the Benin example clearly showed the perils of such an assembly.

  NEW CONSTITUTIONS

  But remarkably widespread was the creation, through more controlled processes, of new constitutions. By my count, there were some thirty-nine across Africa in the early 1990s, and in a half dozen other instances, extensive constitutional revision was undertaken.20 Invariably these ended single-party systems, included provisions for representative national assemblies, and promised freedom of the press and other civil liberties.

  A major innovation was the introduction of term limits for presidents, normally restricted to two. No such provisions were included in the decolonization constitutions; I found no trace of debates on this issue at the time. Partly this reflected the parliamentary nature of the constitutions, which were modeled on the Belgian and British systems, neither of which anticipated executive presidents or single-party systems; even in the French Fifth Republic presidential template used in most francophonic states the risk of the life presidency was not anticipated. By 1990, constitutional assemblies were keenly aware of the dangers of incumbent rulers entrenched in permanent power. By my count, nearly two-thirds of the new constitutions contained provisions designed to prevent life presidencies.21

  These constitutional processes frequently amounted to optimistic and thoughtful engagements with civil society. In Uganda, a vast consultative process took place in the preparation of the 1995 constitution, beginning in 1988. An extraordinary flow of constitutional seminars and public consultation at all levels followed.22 In Eritrea, a distinguished constitutional commission led by eminent scholar Bereket Selassie carried out similar grassroots consultations, examined world experience, and drew on an international advisory commission while reflecting at length on the lessons of the failed decolonization constitutions. The resulting 1996 fundamental charter was an impressive accomplishment, making the more disappointing the subsequent refusal of ruler Isaias Afewerki to implement it.

  OTHER KEY TRANSITIONS: ZAMBIA AND SOUTH AFRICA

  Influential democratic transitions also took place in Zambia and South Africa. The Zambia political liberalization was the first in anglophone Africa, as well as the first to oust a leader of the nationalist founding generation of African independence. Its immediate antecedents, as in Benin, were a deepening economic crisis, punctuated in mid-1990 by serious urban food riots in response to a doubling of the maize price. The president, Kenneth Kaunda, was less a target of public anger than many other autocrats of his generation; though corruption was rife in his entourage, he was far less personally culpable than most of his fellow presidents. The miscalculations of a statist development agenda had taken a heavy toll, however. After an initial decade of seeming prosperity following 1964 independence, the price of the primary Zambian export, copper, plummeted. From 1975 to 1988 the Zambian economy shrank by an average of 2.1% per year, and annual per capita income fell from $540 in 1964 to $290 in 1988.23 Inflation intensified in the 1980s, and the half-hearted implementation of SAPs brought no relief. The economic costs of Zambian support for liberation movements in Zimbabwe and South Africa also played a part. By 1985, public sector unrest intensified; there were frequent strikes, and the powerful mine workers union escaped party tutelage and flexed its muscles. In July 1990, energized by the wave of violent urban protest, the Movement for Multi-Party Democracy (MMD) took form, demanding an end to the ruling United National Independence Party political monopoly and early competitive elections. These took place in October 1991, resulting in a sweeping MMD victory with three-quarters of the vote. Kaunda made no effort to rig the elections, and international observers pronounced them free and fair. To his credit, he also made a gracious exit. The transition in Zambia at the time appeared a model of democratic regime change, and intensified pressures elsewhere for political reform.

  The South African transition from 1990 to 1994 was the most momentous of all in the scope of the societal transformation involved. Beginning in February 1990 with the liberation of Nelson Mandela and the unbanning of the ANC, the constitutional bargaining was arduous, carried out during a period of serious social unrest, ethnic tension, and violence in the eastern Rand. Though the National Party (NP) had ruled since 1948, elaborating and systematizing the racial apartheid doctrines subordinating and excluding nearly 90% of the population, the European minority continued to enjoy multiparty politics and a parliamentary regime. There was thus a constitutional heritage and deeply implanted legal norms, however circumscribed, on which to build.24 The negotiation primarily took place between the NP and ANC, leading to a transitional constitution in 1993 mostly incorporating ANC preferences for an elected executive president and unitary government with some quasi-federal provisions. To broker the transition to full majority rule, implying African political predominance and ANC ascendancy, a government of national unity including the NP was established for an interim period. The first universal suffrage elections took place in February 1994; their successful conduct was an inspirational moment in the democratic transition process. It was also the high-water mark in the political liberalization moment; from that point forward the tides of democratization began to recede.

  At this stage of political opening, most focus was on the transition dynamics, above all the establishment of multiple political parties and competitive elections.25 These were the focus of an array of international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that sprang into place as democracy advocates, as well as the Western donor community. Others saw in the nurture of civil society the way forward. Many called for a shift in focus, demanding that the role of representative bodies be expanded and that institutions assuring the rule of law be fostered. Yet others perceived human rights, freedom of the press, and associational liberties as the key to effective political liberalization. A multiple array of indices arose seeking to identify and measure dimensions of democratic practice sponsored by such organizations as Freedom House, Afrobarometer, Transparency International, and the World Bank. These brought a clearer picture of the complexities of African democratic transitions, highlighting the limitations of a focus on multiparty elections alone. Influential African intellectuals such as Claude Ake argued that “democracy has been reduced to the crude simplicity of multiparty elections to the benefit of some of the world’s most notorious autocrats, such as Daniel arap Moi of Kenya and Paul Biya of Cameroon, who are now able to parade democratic credentials without reforming their corrupt and repressive regimes.”26

  ABORTED TRANSITIONS: ALGERIA AND NIGERIA

  Several seriously aborted transitions that inflicted heavy costs on the affected polities likewise dimmed the luster of African democratization. Algeria had been the detonator, but it was also the first to crash and burn. The 1988 urban rioting was violently repressed by FLN rulers, but the regime was shaken to its roots by the realization that its legitimating ideologies of liberation war and revolutionary socialism were sterile slogans, eviscerated of meaning by a sclerotic, clan-ridden, and self-serving military-led autocracy. A disaffected younger generation—a majority of the population—had no personal memory of the independence struggle. The regime moved quickly in 1989 to create a new constitution and to authorize competing parties and electoral competition,
still confident in the ability of the FLN machine to manage multiparty politics. To their surprise and dismay, the newly formed Front islamique de salut (FIS) made a stunning sweep of local offices in the first competitive elections in 1989. Paradoxically, FIS was a product of FLN policies in the 1980s to control and capture emergent Islamist currents gaining strength in Algeria and elsewhere; a vigorous program of mosque construction was launched, the idea being that by nurturing an official Islam under firm government tutelage the new religious currents could be co-opted and managed. In the event, discourse in the mosque could not be controlled, and an invigorated Islam became a prime alternative identity for a deeply alienated youth that saw little future for itself in the FLN-led Algeria.

  Still, the regime went ahead with plans for parliamentary elections in1991, hopeful that the inability of FIS-ruled communes to bring much improvement to everyday life would undermine the illusion that “Islam is the answer.” But FIS again showed astonishing strength in the first round and seemed headed for a victory that would oust the FLN. Before the second round of voting could take place in early 1992, the military intervened, removed President Chadli Benjedid and installed an overtly military regime. A state of emergency was declared, and FIS was suspended. A civil war soon broke out that during the 1990s produced one hundred thousand deaths by official estimate (twice that in other reports) and tore the country apart. A more militant group, the Groupe islamique armé, broke off from FIS and led a more determined, hydra-headed guerrilla struggle through the remainder of the decade. An even more extreme fragment, the Groupe salafiste de prédication et combat, continued the insurgency, eventually fusing with global terrorism as Al Qaeda in the Islamic Mahgreb (AQIM). Although the army restored the appearance of democracy by holding competitive elections for the presidency in 1995 and generating an amended constitution the following year, the limited competition had circumscribed creditability. The presidential term limits that were inscribed in the revamped constitution were removed in 2008, and the life presidency heritage seems to have been restored under recently reelected Abdelaziz Bouteflika. Still, by 1999 FIS had accepted an amnesty and many of the Islamist fighters had abandoned the struggle.27 A decade later, the original insurgency was all but moribund, and most of its leaders were dead. AQIM, however, persists, in partnership with dissidents in Mauritania, Mali, and Niger, making sporadic attacks, engaging in lucrative kidnappings of foreigners, and smuggling narcotics.