Anne Kidmose interviews Moses Ochonu for Weekendavisen
Are you surprised by the recent coup in Guinea? Are coups making a comeback in Africa?
I would say that the undercurrent and the underlying dynamics have been there for at least two decades. They have been building to this moment. My sense of it is that this is a slow but growing trend of disillusionment and impatience with liberal democracy across Africa. For me, this is the big takeaway from the reemergence of coups.
For quite some time, people in many African countries have felt that the democracy that is practiced in their countries has failed them. It has failed to provide or guarantee any of the benefits that prodemocracy campaigners claimed democracy was going to bestow on Africans in the 1990s and early 2000s when democratization was occurring.
People were told to embrace the principle of "one man, one vote", the liberal democratic model. They were told, embrace the principle of periodic elections that are contested by multiple parties, multi-party democracy. Go out there and make your voice heard, participate in the process, and if you do that, you will have freedom of expression, improved standards of living, accountability, transparency, development will happen, and you can be heard and empowered. Those are the tangible benefits that we were promised. But none of these things materialized.
Africans are beginning to realize that they have been deceived. Political opportunists in the army in places like Mali and Guinea see this trend of disillusionment and they are capitalizing on it, they are pouncing at the right moment because they see that people no longer have any allegiance to democracy; they no longer believe in the incumbent civilian elected governments in their countries.
The trend of disillusionment with democracy, I would say, extends to several other countries on the continent. There is a sense that democracy as it is practiced has failed, and that liberal democracy is too expensive in material terms and in terms of the crisis that it causes. Every time there is an election, everyone is afraid that the country is going to fall apart. That happened in Kenya. Kenya almost came to civil war. It was the same in Zimbabwe and Nigeria; every time there is an election in Nigeria you have people relocating from one end of the country to the other because they fear they will be unsafe. This trend is all over the continent.
In some cases, democracy has led to more poverty and corruption. In Nigeria, democracy is bankrupting the country, and democracy has caused division and ethnic strife and fragmented the country.
Nigerian legislators, for example, are among the wealthiest of the country, and are better paid than the president of the United States. And this is all being done in the name of democracy. I am not even talking about their illicit incomes. I am talking about their legitimate earnings, constitutionally provided earnings. Leave that and talk about the shady deals that these people conduct, the inflated contracts, the bribery that occurs. It is all possible because the political space has expanded, because you have elected officials on multiple levels, and they are all dependent on the state for their upkeep both legally and illegally. That is causing poverty, and infrastructure and social services are neglected. Because liberal democracy requires negotiations between different political actors, you have a lot of bribery and money illicitly changing hands. Ironically, liberal democracy, which was advertised as a system that would install accountability and transparency, has had the opposite effect of encouraging, fertilizing and essentially promoting corruption.
Once you pass a law and sign it, it is binding, even if you award yourself 100 million dollars, which Nigerian legislators have been doing for the past 20 years. You cannot hold them accountable because it is legal and conforms to the procedure of democracy, and then they tell the president to sign it. The president needs them to give him something in return and he signs it. This is a game they are playing. It is all a giant, deceptive game that they are playing and the West, unfortunately, have not caught onto it. Or maybe they have, but nobody wants to ask these tough questions because people have this idea that, let us just double down on liberal democracy, it all takes time. There is a little bit of racism involved as well. It is the soft bigotry of low expectations. A lot of westerners think that these are Africans, they are slow to learn. Let us not hold them to the high standard that we have for accountability, representation, and transparency. Let us just give them time. It is a very patronizing attitude. And the political actors in these African countries know the attitude of the West. They are capitalizing on it and getting away with murder and all sorts of shenanigans under the guise of liberal democracy. That is what is happening and that is what I am trying to call attention to. People should wake up to it.
The overarching point is that liberal democracy hasn't worked out for Africans. It has done more harm than good. Part of the problem of course was that promoters, both local and foreign, saddled liberal democracy with too many expectations. They overpromised as a way to sell it to Africans and African regimes. The most scandalous aspect of this gimmick is the coupling of democracy and development as causally connected phenomena. That has not panned out, and expectant Africans feel deceived.
What went wrong – you were also optimistic yourself?
I am convinced that the premise upon which democratization happened was wrong. We were all young, we were naïve. We believed in some of the talking points, some of the buzzwords, the jargons of the prodemocracy movement. And these prodemocracy jargons did not organically originate from Africa. They were pushed after the Cold War ended. When the Cold War ended, the West no longer had a need for African strongmen, dictators for the Cold War struggle. They switched their rhetoric and dealings with Africa and they started promoting democratization, multiparty elections and so on. They started pressuring governments to open the political space.
That was the impetus for democratization. Democratization was not an African, organic development, it did not come from below. The premise was wrong. At the time, we did not realize it because we were swept up in the moment. Then, the money that supported the African prodemocracy movements came from the West as well, from Canada, France, Britain, Germany, Sweden, Norway, the United States, and other countries. We know the NGOs that were given money, we know the foundations that funded them. It failed because it was built on premises and promises coming from outside, that did not align and accord with the concerns, anxieties, and aspirations of Africans. Even the Africans who participated in the prodemocracy movement are not representative of the African masses, they are elites. I was maybe 20 at the time, I knew some of the people in college. We were not representative; we were college students. How many Nigerians or Africans have a college education?
The majority of Africans on the continent, to be frank with you, do not care too much about the type of government that rules over them. They care about being able to have peace and to have a government that listens and solves their problems, that is strong enough to protect them. Whether that government is labelled a democracy or something else, they really do not care. This is something that we did not realize at the time, because we got swept up in the buzzword and frenzy of the time. It was an exciting time. Everybody was talking about freedom of expression, of association because military rule curtailed those rights for the elite. We were talking in these terms imported from the West, but these were alien terms; human rights, democracy, freedom, they all sounded very nice and appealing to us as college students and elites. But if you had gone to the village where my grandmother lived, you would lose them, nobody would understand any of these things. People did not understand those things. There is a big disconnect between the democratization that occurred and the priorities of the vast majority of Africans, maybe 80-90 percent of Africans. They were simply not invested. They had more pressing existential concerns. Some of us bought into the promise that democratization would improve the socioeconomic lives of our people. We were wrong in two ways. We should have seen that liberal democracy was under strain even in the West. And we should have seen that the West's economic prosperity and development were not the result of liberal democracy but were often achieved through practices that contradict the claims of liberal democracy and its ideas of human rights.
We need to go back to the original moment of democratization to find the signs of where things went wrong. As the Nigerian Chinua Achebe wrote, using an African proverb: "We need to go back to when the rain started beating us". I like that proverb as a historian. We must go back to the origins of the problem.
Was the Western push for democratization also aimed at economic liberalization?
Yes, that was part of it for sure because it was after "the triumph of the West and of Western liberalism". After that moment, the West felt confident enough to try to extend its hegemony to Africa and other parts of the world.
These interconnected ideas of political and economic liberalization were sold to Africa at the same time, because as they were pushing democratization, they were also pressuring African governments to embrace structural adjustment programs and the liberalization of their markets, and to embrace globalization. A lot of these things are connected, and we need to scrutinize that moment, to interrogate it. From the 1990s to the early 2000s the West put a lot of emphasis, money and diplomatic pressure into compelling African governments and elites to embrace these ideas. It all made sense as part of the same package, but there was a subtle blackmail and threat behind it. If you did not embrace these political and economic reforms, we would not support you with aid or with loans. It was not an altruistic outreach by the West, it had conditionalities attached. In the 1990s, most African governments were bankrupt, and they needed the money, they needed loans. Their economies had collapsed.
I am pretty sure that in the West, you had people who were genuinely convinced in their paternalistic thinking, in their altruistic, do-good thinking that Africans would be better off with liberal democracy and economic liberalization, structural adjustment, the free market. At the time, they sincerely pushed these reforms not knowing that they would have the impact that they had. Not knowing that structural reforms would create more economic distress. Not knowing that liberal democracy would fail spectacularly and cause all these problems, disappointment, and disillusionment. For them, the highest form of human economic and political evolution was liberal democracy and a liberalized economy. But in retrospect, they were naïve and mistaken.
What are the alternatives to liberal democracy?
In precolonial Africa, we had democratic cultures. In many parts of Africa there were political cultures that nurtured the tenets of democracy. For me, there are four tenets of democracy, and I am talking about democracy in the generic sense of the word. Those four elements are accountability, representation, transparency – that the rules must be known by everyone – and the fourth one is participation. We had all four elements in precolonial African political systems. In precolonial Africa, we did not have periodic elections but leaders were carefully selected and the rules for selection were known by everyone, and they were enforced. I am not saying that we should go back and bring back those systems, but from the precolonial democratic cultures we can see the ingredients or raw materials that we can use to innovate our way out of this liberal democratic quagmire that we find ourselves in. We need to be nimble and creative and we need to come up with different systems. The solution that each country comes up with is going to be different because Africa is a large continent, and you cannot have a one-size fits-all, but each country needs to engage in an open conversation about alternatives to liberal democracy that are compatible with its realities.
The current liberal democratic model includes some people – the winners – and excludes other people, the losers. And that makes for a very volatile political environment where you have a lot of violent, intense competition for political offices. Electoral politics in Africa sometimes cause war, they cause conflict, and people die. It should not happen that way. We need to go back to a consensual system, whether it involves election or selection or whether it is both. We do not need a situation where we have this cloud of liberal democracy hanging over us and preventing us from developing appropriate alternatives. No, we are Africans, we have a history, we have different political cultures that are democratic in their own ways, whether there are elections or not. If you pick a random kingdom from precolonial or colonial Africa, I can tell you how those four earlier mentioned elements of democracy are present in them. The west is going to have to understand that we have the right as Africans to craft our own unique and culturally appropriate forms of democracy that work in the context of the peculiarities of our societies.
If you imagine a system without elections, you will still need somebody to select who is up for selection – who will select those people?
In many parts of Africa, prior to colonization, we had village squares. We had town meetings, we had councils of elders depending on what part of the continent you are talking about. You had all those political formations where people were represented. In kingdoms, you had kingmakers who selected the king. The kingmakers would come from the different clans and represented the interests of their various towns, clans or villages and vote in their name. Participation does not have to be direct; it can be indirect. Representation does not have to be on the basis of every individual having a vote.
I am an Idoma person. I come from central Nigeria. I would feel perfectly comfortable for the king of my hometown to represent me in my home state because I know that he will do what is right. He has legitimacy because we willingly selected him to be our king.
Obviously, I don't expect the king of my hometown to represent me in any democratic arrangement in the twenty first century. I am merely using this as a way to illustrate my point that legitimacy, representation, and equitable selection is possible without adopting the adversarial and divisive principles of liberal electoral democracy.
In the non-traditional political space, the same logic would apply. Individuals selected by different constituencies at different levels to represent and act on behalf of various peoples and interests would constitute the nucleus of the system I envisage. In the putative African democratic scenarios that are possible, some communities may decide to select their leaders and representatives using long-existing village, town, age-grade, and ethnic associations and assemblies. Others may decide to entrust the task of selecting leaders and representatives to their traditional rulers, especially since, in traditional courts all over Africa, kingmakers and titleholders represent particular cleavages and constituencies that make up the community. Leaders and representatives that emerge from such processes would have legitimacy because they will have been selected by their own people using preexisting or new formulas that work for them and are compatible with their sociopolitical and cultural realities.
I have to say that this is all speculative because every country has to devise its own formulas for leadership selection through an unfettered political conversation that is not hamstrung by the ideological hangovers of liberal democracy and its Western philosophical underpinnings. As long as the outcomes of these national political conversations are guided by the democratic principles I outlined earlier, they will enjoy broad-based support and ensure participation and accountability. There cannot be a continental or global paradigm of democracy.
The first task, I must stress, is to decenter and provincialize liberal democracy as a distinctly Western iteration of democratic practice rather than a universally applicable and replicable formulation.
How do you avoid that it turns into an oligarchy?
It would not because the African systems, the village and town unions, they already have democratic principles built into them where the positions rotate. They are inherently democratic and representative. Therefore, no clan in the village dominates the office. If ten clans make up a village, the office rotates among the clans, and if it is a town union, the office rotates among the villages. But you are right, if those kinds of checks and balances are not part of the process, it could quickly generate into an oligarchy. But it is designed to be inherently representative. Individuals are selected to embody or represent the will of the town or village.
One can also argue that is a racist to say that Africans do not need or do not want rights such as human rights that are part of a liberal democracy?
It is not racist. What is racist is to say that the West has a right to develop and evolve a democratic system suited to its values and history, to claim that this is the archetypal form of democracy, to arrogantly export this system to the non-Western world, and to use a mix of incentives, blackmail, and threats to compel states to accept and implement it but then to turn around and say that African peoples should not have a right to develop their own unique democratic systems.
All over the world, including the West, the discourse of needs precede the discourse of rights. Because of the obvious developmental challenges of Africa, for the vast majority of Africans the discourse of individual rights is a discourse of luxury that is a distraction, at the moment, from their most pressing needs.
In social science, there is Maslow's hierarchy of needs. If you think about Africans, for the most part, who are not part of the elites, their number one need is existential. It is after those primary needs are met that they start to worry about human rights.
Secondly, the question of rights in the African context is not as simple as it is posited in the rubric of Western liberalism. When it comes to the issue of human and civic rights, there are several African scholars working in this area. They are trying to shift attention away from the western framing of human rights to a more African sense of human rights which is rooted in African collectivist, communitarian ethos. What we would like to call Ubuntu or its iterations in other parts of Africa. The notion of rights where the individual is not at the center of it, but rather the community. You don't have rights as a sovereign individual entity, which is the western liberal framing of human rights. In Africa, it is framed in a communitarian way; my right is connected to yours and yours to mine, and you don't have a standalone, independent sovereign right outside the frame of the community.
I concede that there are Africans, mostly educated upper and middleclass Africans, who believe in and crave the individualized civic rights of the liberal democratic frame, but they're not in the majority. Moreover, my sense is that even these Africans would be willing to trade some of their demands for civil liberties and rights for concrete, measurable developmental and infrastructural benefits. If it came to a choice, many Africans who are concerned about human rights in the Western liberal iteration of it would be pragmatic enough to realize that life is a tradeoff and that in the African context wellbeing and development trump the capacious notion of rights embedded in Western liberal thought.
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