the liberal democratic option has become the neoliberal economic curse; the shift from socialism, imperfect and corruptible as anything else, to neoliberalism has accentuated the divide between rich and poor. from senghor and diouf to wade, the fall of concern for the senegalese citizen or poor; ditto in tanzania. socialism has mostly been "socialism," with no real devolution of power to local communities. you and i seem to favor that. the emphasis on consensus you give confuses me; i don't understand how that turns away from ahidjo's all embracing consensus, ultimately grounded in fear. now there is biya's neoliberal corrupt nightmare for most cameroonians.
there are simple concepts in socialism that conform with democratic ideals: you vote and it counts; the interests of nation need to account justly for all, and especially for the power whose economic weakness has seemingly almost always translated into political weakness.
we need alternatives to violence; we need to stop the rule by the gun, whether the soldiers are fighting in the name of left or right. in the end they fight for the power of the bullet to provide what the economy hasn't provided, money. and the rest falls apart.
and at the last conf i attended, i was told corruption siphoned off more than a trillion dollars from africa, much going abroad....
that makes any positive change impossible.
we all know the simple basics. how we move there, i am unsure. mamadou diouf made a wonderful case for senegal, imperfect as it is, in which he argues that the balancing of equally empowered groups, ethnicities in the past, muslim orders today, compelled people to compromise in order to enable governance to occur. if casamance represents an ongoing failure, the rest of the country has avoided violent clashes, has found compromises. your consensus has a meaning there, and people do vote, do have a loud say in newspaper criticisms, are not in fear of criticizing their president--in fact often vilify him in the press. many other countries have a way to go to achieve these accomplishments. senegal--a country will few resources, yet a strong sense of national belonging, and often great pride in community and the past. many good things to praise in the models they've had, despite the many other things we could critique
ken
On 12/10/10 10:47 AM, Moses Ebe Ochonu wrote:
--Ken, I am sorry that my fairly simple point came across convolutedly and seems to have buried the nuance of my position in what could be read as a romantic critique of Western liberal democracy. As you know, I don't romanticize Africa, past or present, and I challenge those who do. My simple point is that although I am not sold on the efficacy, utility, and superiority of Western liberal democracy in Africa (given its tragic track record so far), the fact that there exists a consensus that, imperfect as it may be, Western liberal democracy should be the normative political system means that Africans expect and should expect their clearly expressed electoral choice to stand and that African incumbents should play by the rules of the game they signed up for. No exceptions should be made.
That said, I think you'd agree that the Western liberal democratic model, especially with its emphasis on winner-takes-all elections is a part of the problem. You seem to articulate this in your post. The Western liberal model has several deficits in Africa: unnecessary logjams, excessive financial cost, legitimization and democratization of corruption, etc. There are different kinds of democratic models/templates. Some of them are clearly more African, or closer to precolonial African norms, than is Western liberal democracy. For instance there are democratic models in which elections are not carried out in the one-man-one-vote format but are instead done by simple consensus at multiple levels. Several examples of this exist in many African kingdoms, cultures and histories. Who is to say that this is any less democratic than the Western model of fractious periodic elections? Or that it is any less representative? It fulfills the two democratic conditions of choice and representation without breaking the bank, without trapping states and citizens in an explosive zero-sum proposition. In this more African model, decentralization is embedded in the system, requiring consultation, deliberative gestures, and the avoidance of emphasis on overly centralized and heavily contested centers and spaces of power. This is a broad, crude outline. The mechanics of its implementation have to be worked out in individual countries, taking into account each country's peculiar political and demographic circumstances.
There is nothing utopian or romantic about searching for democratic alternatives that achieve the imperatives of representation, choice, consultation, and deliberation while avoiding the costs (financial, social, and political) associated with an increasingly incendiary African flirtation with Western liberal democracy. I am not suggesting that this model is a foolproof ideal or that it is a direct read-off from precolonial African history. Far from it. There was no monolithic African political tradition that gained normativity across the continent. And there were probably as many monarchical, centralized traditions in precolonial Africa as there were democratic, decentralized, consultative, and consensus-based ones. But consensus building was a fairly common denominator. Consensus building is obviously the anti-thesis of winner-takes all elections and one-man-one-vote propositions.
Which brings me to the irony of this discussion: power sharing arrangements and consensuses may violate the norms of Western liberal democracy but they don't contradict the political traditions of African societies. In many respects, they affirm these traditions. In fact, many (not all!) traditional African political systems are de facto power sharing arrangements and emerge through consensus or through the legitimate will of community representatives or respected kingmakers. The problem I have with these proliferating power-sharing arrangements as default resolutions to post-election disputes (the Ivorian case appears to be happily different) is that you cannot adopt a "foreign" model of democracy and then conveniently refuse to submit to its rules when they don't seem to favor you. I am neither a fanatical advocate of homegrown democracy nor a puritanical critique of Western liberal democracy. As I said, in spite of its costs to Africans Western liberal democracy and its legacy of bloody, periodic elections, democratized and legitimized corruption, and political gridlocks, is infinitely better than dictatorships, military or civilian in that it theoretically gives a voice to citizens to determine who governs them and for how long. If you asked me what I'd prefer for Africa, it would probably be a heavily decentralized state in which the stake in national elections are drastically reduced; expensive and volatile elections are held less frequently; a hybrid in which candidates are chosen by consensus and elections; a parliamentary-like system of part-time legislators that are accountable to constituencies and chosen either by consensus or elections. But I don't mind the Western liberal option. It appears to be the most pragmatic option at this juncture because, as you content, it is probably more suitable to the postcolonial neoliberal and neopatrimonial economic structures of many African states. So, as the Americans would say, I've gotten with the program, but African incumbents who submitted themselves to these norms and professed their commitment to them should get with the program too and stop seeking political longevity outside of the rules of liberal democratic orthodoxy.
On socialism as a condition for reforming or repudiating Western liberal democracy and its norms, I say no. Yes, the global triumph of capital and neoliberal economics unleashed its corollary: political pluralism and liberal democracy. But I am not sure that there is necessarily a correlation, ideological or otherwise, between a socialist leaning state political economy and the rejection of Western liberal democracy/or the search for alternatives to it. Yes, the postcolonial history of Africa tells us that socialist-leaning regimes were/are less likely to reject liberal democracy. But that's no longer the case, and that narrative is neater than the picture it purports to approximate. First, socialist leaning regimes (Angola for instance) have since been sucked into the neolilberal globalist hegemony, erasing or at least blurring previously hard ideological lines. Second, even before the co-optation of socialist power formations and modes of thinking into the new liberal political and neoliberal economic ferment, political pluralism and the clamor for multiparty elections were already in full swing in many African states, including ones that professed socialism as a state creed.
On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 9:59 PM, kenneth harrow <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:
hi moses
i agree that we are not looking for exceptions. i feel that way also about placing blame for the ills of a society, and its bad politics, on outside forces. anyway, you state that basic liberal democratic norms ought to be respected, then you turn around an tell me you aren't sold on the so-called democratic moment, the expensive western liberal democracy.
so, i can't quite figure out what you want.
you allude to african democratic alternatives, that avoid things like regular elections etc, and that you apparently locate in some african past. sounds a bit utopian to me, but that's not so much the point to be debated.
we need a concrete suggestion of what modification of the liberal democratic norm you want....or insist on.
what is it that you see in a precolonial model?
isn't it the case that any political model is tied directly, concretely, inevitably, to the social and especially economic structure of the society? it isn't a coincidence that a political dominant emerges; it is in response to actual pressures, let's say political and economic ones. i resist other historical explanations as tendentious and thin.
moses, to be clear, i don't quite get where the core of western liberal democracy lies. i do understand the idea of a social contract; of a government with limited powers; of a people who express their will in some form, be it direct vote or representative vote, without coercion, without the state becoming a dominant interest, without the wealthy segment of society controlling the processes, as seems to be the case here in the u.s., mostly.
i don't see a clear divorce between liberal democracy and neoliberal economic policies, and those policies have proven to be bitter poison for africa these days.
all of the ideals i list above would be better served by models that are closer to socialism than capitalist democracy; and under present conditions, neoliberal capitalism, global capitalism, free trade controlled by the powerful states and corporations, most africans has come to know untold misery while autocratic governments continue to feed the wealth into the pockets of the few.
give me a new model that addresses those things, or else ivory coast elections will be a minor distraction in comparison to such places as sudan, congo, the great lakes region where the state is a thin veneer over the powerful and rich who continue to run the show....
ken
On 12/9/10 1:07 PM, Moses Ebe Ochonu wrote:Ken,I hear what you're saying. These are not straightforward issues and it is easier for distanced outsiders to advance absolutist, puritanical positions than it is for insiders in these countries to do so. I get all that. What worries me is a pattern of making exceptions for Africa and African rulers when it comes to these basic liberal democratic norms. You see, I am not naive. And am not sold on the so-called democratic moment that swept and is still sweeping Africa. It is a shorthand for expensive Western liberal democracy, which cost too much to operate, cause intractable ethno-religions conflicts and frictions, and result in excessive logjams in governance. I know that there are arguably more African democratic alternatives that do not involve expensive and contentious regular elections that result in winner-takes-all configurations, alternatives that are nonetheless representative of the broad will and political aspirations of citizens in different national constituencies. The facts of precolonial African history supply democratic and representative models that could be less expensive, less volatile, and certainly less open to manipulation than the largely unfamiliar one-man-one-vote, zero-sum democracy of the Western liberal imagination. However, to the extent that there is now a consensus (nurtured abroad and internalized at home by Africans) that African states should practice western liberal democracy, replete with periodic electoral rituals, separate arms of government, etc, those norms should be enforced. The narrative that African countries will implode or explode if an uncompromising attitude is adopted in electoral contests or that Africans are so clannish and ethnically divided that they will disintegrate chaotically along those fissures if a clearly expressed electoral mandate is enforced strikes me as the usual white liberal infantilization of Africans and Africa. It's another way of saying Africans are not ready or matured enough for Western liberal democracy and its winner takes all elections. Or that they are not as advanced and postmodern in their political imagination as us Westerners and should be protected from the potential ills of insisting on the sanctity of elections. The hasty recourse to power sharing formulas as a default settlement in Africa's electoral disputes is the clearest expression of this condescending disposition in my opinion. My question to Western democratic evangelists is: then why market liberal democratic pluralism and its electoral niceties to Africans in the first place? You cannot eat your kwulikwuli and still get to keep it. I am uncomfortable with a Western liberal vocabulary that constructs Africans, their countries, and politics as fragile infants to be allowed to circumvent universal norms that they have themselves embraced. There are several other arenas where this offensive liberal attitude is adopted. Let African leaders play by the rules like everyone else. Africa would be better for it. Insisting on this may cause some short term conflicts but that's the only way democracy will be deepened on the continent and that's the only way to prevent electoral manipulation and the predictable outcome of shared power from becoming the norm across the continent. If Western liberal democracy is too burdensome and too rancorous, let's try something else--a different kind of representative democracy. But once we decide to do democracy the Western way, the least we can do is to insist on respect for electoral verdicts delivered through the sanctity of the ballot box.
On Wed, Dec 8, 2010 at 5:26 PM, kenneth harrow <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:
hi moses
i guess we should take each case on its own, even while seeing parallels.
nothing is worse than mass killings, genocide, violence that destroys everything. there is some discussion around the notion that the pressures on habyarimana to accept a multi-party democracy drove the conflict to a head, resulting in the extremist faction of his party generating the genocide.
democracy means what? that we can vote, that the vote counts, that we have rights that the govt cannot abrogate.
if the price for democracy is mass deaths then we are operating on the logic of those who orchestrated the reign of terror in the french revolution.
it won't come that way. example? rwanda: despite the victory of those who overcame the genocidaires, rwanda has now one of the least democratic states, measured by the elements above, in africa, in the world actually. there was a "vote," but the scare quotes defeat the claim, since indeed it is fear that pervades the country, according to human rights reports.
and to believe our list, nigeria has a way to go before there is an acceptable vote as well, despite a multiparty opposition.
i guess i wouldn't want to decide for others. when patrick henry says, "give me liberty or give me death," well, let him take it on for himself.
will the conditions in kenya and zimbabwe result in a greater number of deaths than would have been the case had the compromise not been reached? would the deaths that gave iraq "democracy" under american rules have been as great had the "great satan" saddam not have been unseated?
and would "democracy" always enable us to vote out unpopular govts?
aren't the answers really messy in each case. and isn't each case different.
i wonder how much fighting the ivorians have a taste for to remedy this bad scene.
our list would profit from their views--we can't tell them to bite the bullet, as it were
ken
At 05:56 PM 12/8/2010, you wrote:
Ken, the tragic examples are piling up across Africa of election winners "forced" by international mediation to share power with incumbents who won't respect the will of the people. Kenya, Zimbabwe, and now Ivory Coast? When will it end? Yeah, it may keep away the dogs of war for a time, but at what cost? Does it not merely buy time before the inevitable implosion/showdown? The problems rocking the power sharing arrangements in Zimbabwe and Kenya are signposts, in my opinion, to what is bound to happen in Ivory Coast if Mr. Gbagbo is allowed to get away with a power sharing contrivance. And what's the value of democracy if the incumbent can use their de facto position to negotiate the continuity of their power even after losing at the ballot box? During the debate on the Kenyan election crisis, I remember critiquing the convergence of international opinion on the "pragmatic" option of crafting a power sharing government through Mr. Annan's mediation instead of insisting that the genuine election results be released and Mr. Odinga sworn in. Sadly, that and a similar arrangement in Zimbabwe may have provided Mr. Gbagbo with a blueprint on how to keep power illegally. This case may be different because of the unusual unanimity (save for Russia) in international and African opinion and the clarity of the international condemnation of Gbagbo's antics.
Democracy is so expensive in Africa (in monetary (ask Nigerians), social, and policy terms). Its redeeming quality, which may offset its cost to Africans, remains the ability of citizens to vote out erring and unpopular governments. Absent this, and with unpopular and defeated incumbents parlaying their incumbency into power sharing arrangements that keep them in power, what's the value of democracy to Africa/Africans?
On Wed, Dec 8, 2010 at 11:58 AM, kenneth harrow <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:
- ken
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