Power sharing no substitute for reform

The recent Zimbabwe power-sharing agreement, fashioned with the involvement of outgoing South African President Thabo Mbeki, raises familiar questions.

What’s in a name? What do power-sharing accords signify? How much do they accomplish? What does power sharing have to do with democracy, or with the reconstruction of weak or failed states?

In some ways power sharing has become a “flavour of the month,” succeeding another one that gained ascendancy earlier in the era of democratic transitions — “pact making.”

What the terms share is the idea that a bargain between political elites — who may really dislike and feel politically threatened by each other — may preserve political stability and somehow keep democracy alive.

“Pact making” achieved currency as a necessary follow-up to an initial national competitive multiparty election. The idea of power sharing has gained currency as an approach to ending civil wars.

More recently, the idea has been invoked where electoral processes have broken down during and after voting to end the prospect of spiralling instability, as in Kenya and Zimbabwe, or intensified authoritarian rule as in Ethiopia.

Power-sharing deals have varied significantly, both in content and the circumstances they are meant to address. One way they have differed has been in the prior relationships of the political adversaries.

In Kenya, President Kibaki and Prime Minister Odinga were once political allies before they fell out.

By contrast to Zimbabwe, President Robert Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai have known each other almost entirely as opponents.

People who unsuccessfully called for power sharing in Ethiopia confronted the reality that the regime and the leading opposition party fought not only over who should rule, but also over the merits of the ethnic confederal constitution imposed by the EPRDF regime.

The Zimbabwe deal appears, to me at least, to be much more flimsy than the one now in effect in Kenya. In Kenya, at least, the parties came to terms on the sharing of ministries, at the price of a greatly enlarged Cabinet.

Mugabe and Tsvangirai shook hands without agreeing on the division of ministries. Moreover, the agreement seems to split hairs by differentiating the council of ministers from the cabinet in unexplained ways. Mugabe will chair the latter, Tsvangirai the former.

The idea of power sharing has been received with increasing scepticism in academic circles. For example, my late colleague and friend, Donald Rothchild, contended that power sharing is inevitably only a short-term measure.

Fear of deepening political instability, exhaustion from prolonged conflict producing what William Zartman termed a “hurting stalemate” and external pressure on combatants may lead them to come to terms.

But maybe all the combatants are seeking is a breather while they regroup for renewed combat later. After the power-sharing agreements are concluded, maybe the rivals’ circumstances will change significantly so that the accords no longer seem to be even in their short-term interests.

The classic case is Lebanon. Maronite, Sunni and Shia factions agreed 65 years ago to divide the positions of president, prime minister and speaker of parliament on the foundation of a majority Sunni population which has long since disappeared.

More fundamentally, Rothchild and others have observed that maybe the parties to power-sharing deals will have only short-term time horizons. These agreements may be premised on putting off rather than addressing deeper long-term issues that should be in the constitution.

Constitutional differences prevented any kind of power-sharing agreement in Ethiopia after violent protests after the outcome of the 2005 elections. The interesting thing about both the Zimbabwe and the Kenya deals is that they imply fundamental constitutional reforms that haven’t actually been agreed to.

The core constitutional issue in new or reborn African democracies is presidential power. Extraordinary pressures have been exerted on presidents in many countries to adhere to two-term limits, successfully in several cases.

In Kenya and Zimbabwe, externally mediated power-sharing agreements have resulted in the division of the executive power between a president and a prime minister.

In Zimbabwe, the constitutional change came about only with Mbeki’s involvement. In the preceding decades, Mugabe never allowed any constitutional reform process, let alone one that would force him to limit his executive power.

In Kenya, the division of executive authority was proposed, rejected and then that rejection was rejected in a popular referendum, only to be reinstated with the help of former UN chief Kofi Annan’s mediation.

So the Kenya and Zimbabwe power-sharing accords offer an intriguing twist on academic scepticism about their long-term validity.

These deals have indeed incorporated short-term arrangements — like the division of cabinet ministries in Kenya, but fundamental constitutional changes with potentially long-term importance. But the operative word is “potential.”

The key question in these cases is whether Annan in Kenya and Mbeki have been constitutional midwives delivering lasting constitutional reforms or just short-term deal makers.

Will divided executive prove lasting, thanks to the external mediators? Or will these mediated agreements fall apart after, or perhaps before, the next national elections in both countries? We just don’t know.

We will know this if and when there is a constitutional process in Kenya and Zimbabwe in which the people and the political elites have the opportunity to decide this and other constitutional questions.

At a minimum, citizens will need to have the opportunity to vote in referendums on revised constitutions drafted by political elites and lobby groups voting on the proposals of political society in academic parlance.

A better, more durable option is a process such as the Bomas talks in Kenya, in which lobbies get to participate actively in the formulation, followed directly, by the ratification of constitutional changes in referendums.

John Harbeson is a professor of political science, City University of New York