Looking at 50 years, scholars find it pays to have president from your tribe

Clever people can be great, but terrible too when they go poking their noses in dark corners and coming out with some uncomfortable truth.

There are these chaps we wrote about at www.mgafrica.com (“Sometimes, voting along tribal lines can be the ‘smartest’ thing for an African voter to do - study says”), who studied ethnicity — we shall call it tribalism to help dramatisation — and how it works in Africa.

They found some surprising things. They looked at data on primary education and infant mortality in 18 countries since the independence decade, using Demographic and Health Surveys. Nothing unusual there.

However, next they compared how those education and health indicators shifted with the changes in the tribe of the presidents in the 18 countries over the past 50 years.

In summary they found that having your tribesman or woman as president accelerated the health and education outcomes of your community by an equivalent of three to four years ahead of the national average. In other words, tribe can be a development steroid.

The research findings should be of particular interest to Kenya, because it found that in some of the 18 countries such as Congo-Brazzaville, Ethiopia, Gabon and Kenya, the effects of ethnic favouritism on education are particularly large, even more than four years.

In other countries, the effects were felt in health. Thus in Burkina Faso, Chad and my own Uganda, children born when their co-ethnic leader was in power benefited considerably with the probability of dying during their first year of life reducing sharply.

And this is why I say smart people can be dangerous, because why study something like that and come up with a result we all don’t like? And after poring over data (government data moreover) of 50 years, it is impossible to ignore or dismiss the findings.

SMART POLICY DECISION

Some of the conclusions from this, therefore, have to be different from the ones we have held about tribalism. For starters, it means that when people vote for a president from their ethnic group, it is not all “blind tribalism” and narrow cultural solidarity.

No, a tribal vote is in some respects a smart policy decision, because it will confer on you advantages.

But then it gets complicated. Because it is not only your tribe paying taxes, as president you cannot be content with their vote or take care of them only. You do that, it won’t be long before you have a conflict that breaks the country.

So if there are direct measurable benefits in having your tribesmate in power, in a country with many tribes who all pay taxes, the correct and beneficial thing is to have them all sitting around the dinner around.

Secondly, the findings of the study are actually a strong point for rotational leadership. If having your man in State House accelerates your community’s educational and health progress by three to four years, then in diverse countries every tribe deserves to get a chance to have the presidency and boost its fortunes.

ROTATIONAL LEADERSHIP

So here, for the first time, you could argue that we have the most down-to-earth argument for presidential term limits and rotational leadership. You can have term limits, but it is also important that if the last president was from the south, the next one should be from the north.

Also, this finding suggests that in Africa we need to find creative ways to get minority groups to the table and not just leave it to the generosity of a big tribe president to throw them a bone.

Thus for Kenya, while the 2010 Constitution was far-reaching, perhaps the country needs to tinker further with political reform, and look at proportional representation, and for the political parties to go toward Namibia-style party lists for elections.

That way, if a party wins, the Ogiek who is on the list will come to Parliament while under the present system, he might not.

Finally, the study found that these benefits do not take the usual three to four years to be felt. The president’s tribe begins to feel the benefit of his rule immediately. Not surprising.

Even international donors and the UN, usually want to be “seen” by the president to be doing good things.

Building a new school on the road to his village home, and vaccinating children in his district are the quickest way to do that.

The author is editor of Mail & Guardian Africa (mgafrica.com). Twitter:@cobbo3