Rebels using power-sharing as Trojan horse to win power

The recently concluded elections in Uganda and on-going peace processes in Burundi and South Sudan have thrown a spotlight on the impact of power-sharing deals on democracy in Africa.

The greatest legacy of South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy in the 1990s is the preponderance of power sharing deals in post-Cold War Africa. Pretoria’s power-sharing model emerged from the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (Codesa) process, which involved a series of negotiations in the 1990-1993 hiatus between the ruling National Party (NP) and the African National Congress (ANC), other political organisations and social movements.

The Codesa process has bequeathed African peacemakers with a five-step roadmap to democracy, widely invoked to end civil wars and post-election violence:

1) a Government of National Unity (GNU);

2) an interim constitution;

3) power sharing by the rival parties/elite;

4) a final constitution; and

5) multiparty election.

From South Africa to South Sudan, Burundi to Burkina Faso, Congo to Cote d’Ivoire, Kenya to Zimbabwe, this model has been widely embraced as a key to peace.

But there are significant differences on a moral scale between South Africa’s Codesa process and power sharing deals in the rest of Africa. In the case of South Africa, power sharing was a stepping-stone to the emancipation of the black majority from the yoke of apartheid.

In the rest of Africa, the hallmark power sharing pacts, widely pushed by Western powers to resolve conflicts, is to give rebels or insurgents a share of state power to entice them to abandon violent strategies of winning power.

POWER-SHARING DEALS

As democracy gains root in Africa, power-sharing deals have increasingly become more of instruments of gaining a share of power after losing elections than of resolving civil wars and genocides.

In South Sudan, the civil war between the government of President Salva Kiir and rebels led by former Vice- President Riek Machar started in December 2013, just a few months to the first national elections.
The signing of the Agreement on the Resolution of Conflict in South Sudan brokered by the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) in August 2015 marked a significant step in ending the violent conflict.
However, although President Kiir re-appointed Machar as first Vice-President on February 12, 2016, a power sharing deal is unlikely to hold until fighting stops.
Framing the debate on power-sharing in Burundi is a mix of unresolved problems of the 1994-2005 civil war overlaid with a crisis of a stalled democratic transition. The Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement (or the Arusha Accord) in 2000 was pivotal in ending the 11-year civil war.

However, Burundi is back on the brink in the wake of the dispute over the “third-term” re-election of President Pierre Nkrunziza in July 2015. A team of African Union peacemakers appointed in January 2016 will invariably seek to entrench the power sharing logic of the Arusha Accord.

The fragility of democracies is shaping power sharing pacts to end post-election violent disputes in Africa.

In Kenya, President Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga signed a power-sharing deal known as the National Accord and Reconciliation Act (February 2008). However, the deal, which established the office of the Prime Minister, Grand Coalition Government with a power-sharing cabinet, expired in 2013 when Raila Odinga lost the presidential election and the tenure of the Grand Coalition came to a close.

Similarly, the 2008-2009 Zimbabwe political negotiations between the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and the ruling ZANU-PF of President Robert Mugabe were meant to end the violence that followed the disputed 2008 presidential election.

The formal deal was signed in September 2008 and provided for Mugabe as president and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai as Prime Minister. It ended in August 2013 when Tsvangirai lost the election.

REMEDY FOR CHAOS

In the light of this, Uganda’s February 19, 2016 election has occurred in the shadow of a growing clamour for power-sharing arrangements between President Yoweri Museveni’s Government and its opponents.

As early as 2011, senior members of the Inter Party Cooperation said they were willing to share power with President Museveni as “a remedy for chaos” after the 2011 presidential elections. “If he [Museveni] is ready to listen to our demands, then power-sharing is possible,” said Mr Asuman Basalirwa, the president of the Justice Forum Party.

This call for power sharing is likely to grow louder in the wake of the February 2016 election, which critics have described as being marred by chaos and malpractices. Social media is awash with calls for a power sharing deal that will enable the opposition to have a share in state power in Kampala.

Indubitably, power-sharing approaches have helped manage festering conflicts and to save lives. However, pundits point to the perils of power sharing on efforts to consolidate democracy in Africa.

In an article titled “Peace and power sharing in Africa,” scholar Andrea Mehler noted, rather sardonically, that: “Experience with power sharing is mixed and less positive than assumed by outside negotiators.”

Even hard-hitting is the conclusion by Denis Tull in another article, “The hidden costs of power sharing”, where the author concludes that: “Western efforts to resolve conflicts through power sharing agreements … have created incentives for politically ambitious leaders to start insurgent warfare”.

Seen in this light, power-sharing deals may contribute to the cycles of insurgent violence by rival elites, becoming the greatest threat to democratic institutions.

Uganda’s 2016 election, besides the controversy over the Africa-wide phenomenon of sit-tight presidents, has turned the spotlight on the potential dangers that post-election disputes can pose. This is an early warning to Kenya to work for a credible election in 2017 and to avoid like the plague the perils of power sharing.

Prof Kagwanja is the Chief Executive of the Africa Policy Institute.