Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - My Interview with Danish Weekly, Weekendavisen

Moses and Ken:

You should ask the Alaafin of Oyo questions around the issues you have raised.

I deliberately choose folks in different segments of society.

Don't miss this opportunity. The King is very cerebral.

TF

 

From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Moses Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com>
Date: Sunday, October 3, 2021 at 8:49 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - My Interview with Danish Weekly, Weekendavisen

Ken,

 

Thanks for your thoughtful engagement. We agree on many things here. I insist that in the African context, indirect participation is neither an anomaly nor a recipe for exclusion or oppression. 

 

In many African cultures young people defer to elders to speak for them and the larger community. The young people may not like it and may grumble, but they take consolation in the fact that they will soon be elders themselves and will soon be speaking for the community and behalf of those younger than them. In many African cultures elected leaders have legitimacy that today's elected leaders do not because the former are seen as embodying and as custodians of the spirit and essence and culture of the group.

 

I don't think this system is unequal in the way that Westerners understand inequality, so your charge of unequal participation does not apply in my opinion. At any rate, even if it is unequal it is legitimately so and the community willfully crafted it to be so. Legitimacy is a sub-criterion of democracy that I forgot to mention. No system moreover is completely equal, including the one person one vote liberal model. You know the flaws of the one person one vote egalitarian rhetoric already, so there's no need to rehash them here.

 

I do not idealize the past in so far as I am not saying we should recreate or reinvent the past. All I am saying is that liberal democracy came out of a Western political, cultural, philosophical, and historical experience. It makes sense for Africans to look into their own cultures, histories, and political institutions and find ingredients, raw materials, and ideas that can help them build alternative to liberal democracy. 

 

They can of course take some elements, electoral and otherwise, from other experiences and systems, including liberal democracy, if they deem those elements useful for the new system they want to build. 

 

The most important point I am making is that Africans in different African countries would be the ones making the decisions and doing the building from the ground up. Whatever results from this constructive process would be more compatible with and responsive to African aspirations and realities than an imposed system. It would also have a lot more purchase that what was imposed from the outside.

 

I have more to say I response to your thought-provoking response, but it's getting late.

 

 

 

Sent from my iPhone

On Oct 3, 2021, at 6:46 PM, Harrow, Kenneth <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:



i enjoyed reading moses's interview on liberal democracy. the first half is a critique of its insertion  into africa; the second part on how an african system of governance would operate.

 

i found myself largely in agreement with the critique. it seems that western colonial powers, that had ruled its empires in the contradiction of advocating democracy at home and imperialism abroad could only resolve that contradiction paternalistically, claiming that africans were not ready to govern themselves. Examples of what governing oneself might mean were laden with statistics concerning education, so the congo would have been cited as having only a small number of educated people in contrast with senegal, and educated was a term that denoted western education, i.e., high schools and universities. all this enabled western imperial powers to continue their rule, and its expropriation of african wealth and labor.

 

moses argues that of course there were african forms of governance prior to the europeans' arrival and conquest, and tht those forms were organic, i.e. rose from below. it would be better to jettison the western forms of liberal democracy and build on indigenous african forms.

 

my response to this takes the form of questions and challenges, because even an argument i agree with 99% has to be amenable to questions for it to be convincing.

 

first, i think of liberal democracy as a mixture of liberal economic principles and democratic ones. i would argue that the democratic ones ought to be universally advocated, whereas the liberal ones are problematic. the liberal side is built on free market capitalism, and that is a system built on private ownership of capital. it has evolved into the neoliberal globalization of today which has developed a pattern of ownership and rule where an enormous gap between rich and poor marks the entire world, both in nations and internationally. it has managed to manipulate democracy so as to subvert all of its principles, most central of which is one person one vote.

 

secondly, democracy in the u.s. is vastly different from the u.k. and from france etc. i don't believe in the principles of organicity. the real reason why is that i don't believe the system of governance is separate from the economic order. if they are not related in a determinisitic fashion, it is relatively determined, as marx or raymond williams would say about the superstructure.

 

that is the principal criticism i have of moses's second section, that which sees an african system developing basic on non-currupted african bases. i don't see any developments occurring apart from our times, that is, the times in which neoliberal capitalism dominates. it is as far from the ideals of socialism as could be, is as unjust or unequal as is possible, and governs the rule and distribution of wealth everywhere. we can't isolate africa today from the economic order in which it is implicated.

 

secondly, it seems to me that moses is idealizing the past, not seeing the systems and orders of rule as also susceptible to unjust, inequal formulations. moses proclaims confidence in his own regional/ethnic ruler since he is answerable to the people, but be that answerability due to a vote, a council voting, etc., it has to come down to some form of democratic one person one vote in order to insure that four principles of moses's order:

accountability, representation, transparency – that the rules must be known by everyone – and the fourth one is participation 

 

i don't disagree that we could arrive at those ideals based on more than one system, but the notion of participation should always be equal participation. if it results in a council electing a ruler, it is indirect democracy, as american democracy initially sought with an electoral college. now that is the source of our unjust, inequal system since it permits people in some states to be represented by senators with many fewer electing them than in others. even the representatives are not elected equally. and of course people living in puerto rico or washington d.c. have no vote for federal officials.

 

more importantly, i can't see how a political system can really function apart from the economic order, and that can't be solved by returning to systems in the past, regardless of their origins.

 

in 1960 all of the rhetoric of independence was linked to african socialism, but it remained largely a rhetorical deadletter, perhaps worse in some countries, better in others. if africans needd to envisage returning to square one in order to arrive at a more just order, free from the pressures to maintain orders that do not provide "

"accountability, representation, transparency – that the rules must be known by everyone – and the fourth one is participation"

i'd argue we face the same needs in the u.s. or europe or russia or china.

moses is right that we need a system based on the ground up. but that's true everywhere, and everywhere today it is powerful and rich ruling oligarchs who largely control the wealth and largely influence governments, often to the detriment of the people on the ground.

 

moses has four major principles. for me, equality is the most important. maybe not absolute equality, but relative equality.

how to enforce any ideals is another question.

 

thanks to moses for opening these questions for us to reflect on. maybe it is easier for us to come to agreement in interpreting the past than in imagining how to arrive at a more just future? i agree that we should let a thousand flowers bloom; not impose one system everywhere; and that we all need to find systems that respond to our local values.

but no local values should enable one group to dominate or oppress another. an example is that if a local environment is built on women having fewer rights than men, it should not prevail over the principle of equal participation and justice.

 

thanks moses

 

ken

 

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

harrow@msu.edu

---

From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, October 2, 2021 4:06 PM
To: USAAfricaDialogue <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - My Interview with Danish Weekly, Weekendavisen

 

Last week, Anne Kidmose, the Tanzania-based Africa correspondent of Danish weekly newspaper, Weekendavisen, interviewed me over Zoom for the paper.

 

She had read my piece on the the failure of liberal democracy in Nigeria and wanted to talk to me in light of the recent coups in Mali and Guinea, which many observers have described as setbacks for democracy and perhaps a signal that coups and military rule are making a comeback.

 

Her story, based on the interview, has been published at the link below. Unfortunately, I do not read Danish. Moreover, aside from the introduction, which is accessible, the story/interview itself is hidden behind a paywall.

 

Thankfully, Ms. Kidmose sent me a rough transcript of the interview, which I have polished up and reproduced below.

 

https://www.weekendavisen.dk/2021-39/samfund/den-demokratiske-loegnehistorie

 

 

 

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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