Hail to Africa’s election cheats; they have done us a lot of good

Prime Minister Raila Odinga, the African Union’s mediator on the Côte d’Ivoire crisis, is due to return to Abidjan to try and break the deadlock.

In elections at the end of last year, the Electoral Commission declared opposition leader Alassane Ouattara the winner, but incumbent Laurent Gbagbo refused to hand over power and duly swore himself in as president. In another part of the city, Ouattara did the same.

Everyone recognises Ouattara, and the West African bloc Ecowas has threatened to send in a force to eject Gbagbo. However, apart from the sensible precaution of sending his wife off to Benin for safety, Gbagbo has stayed put.

This situation of a sitting president refusing to leave power when defeated, altering the result brazenly, or having elections that are so botched you can’t tell for sure who won, is now common in Africa.

The problems it causes are often resolved by establishing a coalition government as in Kenya after the disputed December 2007 poll and the bout of murder that followed.

In Zimbabwe, we have had a very tumultuous political cohabitation between President Robert Mugabe and opposition leader and (now) Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai.

Everyone condemns election thieves like Gbagbo, and I would like to add my very loud voice. However, I feel they also unintentionally do a lot of good.

Two weeks ago, the weekly newsmagazine, The Economist, had one of the most insightful and interesting articles it has ever published on Africa. It was on the rise of the Nigerian film industry, Nollywood, and how it is “colonising” Africa.

It observed that the phenomenal popularity of Nollywood films in Africa is not the result of clever marketing by Nigerian movie executives. It is all thanks to criminals — pirates.

Only pirates knew how to bribe border officials and move thousands of bootleg DVDs between countries in West and Central Africa that did not have any decent roads, and sell them in places where there was no normal distribution infrastructure.

So the enemies of Nollywood directors, the pirates who stole their work, have in the end turned them into Naira billionaires whose work is in much demand all over Africa.

Likewise, election cheats have forced the AU and the international community to take action against what is wrong with African politics.

The first problem with our politics is the winner-take-and-eat-all mentality. This makes our politics a life-and-death matter, and has caused violence as in Kenya in 2008, and armed rebellions as in Uganda in 1981.

For decades, many academics and journalists made this criticism of African politics, but they were dismissed as espresso coffee-swigging idlers and self-righteous armchair activists.

However, Mugabe’s brutality against the opposition and his fiddling of elections finally got the Southern African Community (SADC) seriously involved.

In Kenya, everyone from UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, East African Community leaders, the AU, name it, dipped their toes into the crisis.

Zimbabwe has not been as lucky as Kenya where the result has been a new Constitution that deals with the issue of power distribution and far-reaching reforms on how polls are organised.

No political class anywhere in Africa has ever undertaken these reforms out of the goodness of their hearts. It has always taken a crisis.

Kenya, Zimbabwe — and, yes, Somalia — have offered the AU and regional bodies like SADC and Ecowas opportunities to build their profile and international credibility, and also create acceptance for the idea that if a country implodes, external players have a right to go in and try and sort out the mess.

Without Kenya in 2008, and the AU peace-keeping role in Somalia, it’s hard to see how the AU would have so quickly got involved in Côte d’Ivoire, or whether the UN Security Council would have deemed it helpful to recognise Ouattara as the rightfully elected president.

So hail to Africa’s election cheats! The outrage their actions have caused created the momentum for the development of pan-African and international intervention mechanisms, and enabled internal reformists to make gains.

cobbo@ke.nationmedia.com