The world should make Africa safe for democracy

On April 2, 1917, American President Woodrow Wilson went before a joint session of Congress to seek a Declaration of War against Germany in order that the world “be made safe for democracy.”

Peace is a pre-condition for democracy. Yet democracy is becoming the foremost threat to peace in Africa.

This was my thesis during a presentation at the 5th Regional Security Roundtable on Shaping the Regional Peace and Security Architecture: Building Capabilities for the Military and other Security Agencies in the Greater Horn of Africa, convened by the International Peace Support Training Centre (IPSTC) in Karen on Thursday.

Understandably, the idea that democracy is not a handmaiden of peace stoked intense debate among participants.

Democracy is a paradox. One view, identified with Winston Churchill, is that “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”

Democracy is the utopia or end-state of every country.

One of the grittiest defences of democracy as an instrument of peace is the classic liberal argument that “democracies don’t go to war”.

Rather, democracy is a guarantor of “perpetual peace” — to quote Immanuel Kant’s famous treatise.

This is the tenet of the democratic peace theory that posits that democracies are unlikely to engage in armed conflict with other identified democracies.

MUTUAL PACIFISM
This “non-aggression hypothesis” in inter-democracy relations is hoisted on four interrelated arguments.

First, because in a democracy, elected leaders are forced to accept responsibility for war losses to the voters and are thus likely to avoid war.

Second, and related to the above, the imperative of accountability to the voting public forces leaders to be more inclined to promote diplomatic institutions in resolving international tensions.

Moreover, democracies are less likely to view countries with similar policy and governing doctrine as hostile.

Finally, because democracies tend to have more vested interests in preserving public wealth than their authoritarian counterparts, they, therefore, shun war to preserve infrastructure and resources.

The policy end results of this theory are obvious, and ubiquitous.

The idea of “mutual pacifism” among democracies has inspired the post-Cold War aggressive promotion of democracy as a solution to Africa’s endemic conflicts.

To be sure, democracy is still the dreamland for many African countries.

We have no evidence that Africa’s embryonic democracies in the 21st century have gone to war against each other.

What is patently clear, however, is that the onset of democracy has neither secured peace from internal schisms or civil wars nor from such external threats as violent extremism and terrorism.

ELECTION-RELATED VIOLENCE
Sadly, democratisation has effectively dislodged the rogue militaries of the Cold War vintage as the leading source of insecurity on the continent.

Military coups (both successful and failed) in Africa declined from 136 during the Cold War era (1960-1989) to 67 by 2010.

The future of democratic peace in Africa will depend on how innovatively the system is implemented.

Election-related violence — before, during or after elections — has turned the usual electoral cycles in a democracy into moments of intense fear, uncertainty, and even death.

As Tanzania goes to its fifth multi-party elections today, the country is gripped by fear that the polls could be marred by attacks that have occurred during previous votes, especially in the conflict-prone Island of Zanzibar.

Here, the police and the military are on high alert in the run-up to the country’s tightest election contest to date between the ruling CCM party and the four-party coalition known as Ukawa.

Fear of violence also grips the fragile post-conflict state of Cote D’Ivoire, which also goes to residential elections also Sunday.

This will be the first poll since the bloody post-electoral crisis of 2010-2011 that killed at least 3,000 people.

Here, the recent history of election-related violence haunts the polls even as the government is being accused of exploiting the election moment to take away its citizens’ liberty.

Democracy may not be directly responsible for what Mary Kaldor christens as the “New Wars, the internal or civil wars which have ravaged Africa in recent decades.

These wars, she rightly argues, involve a mix of state and non-state networks, use identity politics (clan, ethnic or religion), seek to control populations through fear and terror; and are no longer financed through the state but through other predatory means that seek to profit from the prolongation of violence.

GROWING PRESSURE

But in Africa’s ethnically divided societies the logic of majoritarian or winner-takes-all democracy has stoked the embers of conflict.

Internally, terrorist organisations such as Al-Shabaab and Boko Haram in Nigeria have grown increasingly adept in invoking the language of liberal democracy and manipulating Africa’s new democratic constitutional dispensations to successfully radicalise and use populations in their illiberal agendas.

Internationally, the case of Kenya is revealing that liberal interventions in African post-conflict situations are increasing the threat to sustainable peace and stability.

Far from consolidating peace, liberal institutions such as the Hague-based International Criminal Court (ICC) have played the “politics of victimhood” to ensure its institutional survival and serve the geopolitical ends of its prompters, thus imperiling efforts to consolidate lasting peace in post-conflict African states.

Because of this, the ICC has faced growing pressure to drop all Kenyan cases as public testimonies reveal that the court is relying on “cooked up” evidence and false witnesses who were unethically and criminally procured as part of the inter-elite power games to fix rivals.