Why Africa should prioritise cohesive societies over democracy

It is now official: The world is in the thick of a Great Democratic Recession. Tellingly, the influential Foreign Affairs Journal carried on the cover of its June 2018 issue the forlorn title: “Is Democracy Dying?” Ronald Inglehart has argued that the world is experiencing the most severe democratic setback since the rise of fascism in the 1930s.

Against this melancholic backdrop, the Mo Ibrahim Foundation released its 2018 Index on Africa Governance report on October 29.

In a rare blip of optimism, this tool used to measure and monitor performance in governance in African countries, applauded Africa’s “upward trend” in governance.

In a nutshell, the report observed that the overall governance in Africa has been on the rise in the last 10 years (2008-2017).

IMPROVED COUNTRIES

Kenya topped the list of 5 most improved countries at 59.8 per cent followed by Morocco and Cote d’Ivoire with 58.4 and 54.5, respectively.

However, the question remains whether tools of measuring liberal democracy like the Ibrahim Index have outlived their usefulness in the age of “dying democracy”, and whether they reflect the overall picture of the reality in Africa.

The pessimists fear that in its current state, democracy and capitalism have reached their dead end, and its dominance is over for good.

But optimists remind us that democracies have proven remarkably resilient over the years. Its recent decline has unfolded in three phases since 1989.

The first phase, 1989-2005, was marked by a ‘democratic surge’ during what Samuel Huntington popularised as the “third wave” of democratisation.

DEMOCRACY

As western ideals of democracy, free markets and capitalism appeared to sweep across the world, the number of “electoral democracies” grew from 76 to 119 in the 1990-2005 hiatus, the vast majority of them in Africa and Eastern Europe.

It is in this context that Francis Fukuyama, published his tome, The End of History, which became emblematic of the age of audacious liberal optimism that the era of traditional power politics was over and humanity was on a new path towards a more peaceful world.

Rarely captured by reports like the Ibrahim Index is the contradictory context within which the democratic surge unfolded in Africa.

Here, two pro-democracy forces were bound to collide. From below were the soil-and-blood social movements struggling for freedom, economic progress and security.

From above were the white knights of Western civilisation set on remaking post-Cold War Africa on the basis of the liberal values of democracy, free markets and capitalism.

POVERTY

Ideologically propelled by the “democratic peace” theory that ‘democracies seldom go to war’ with each other, the West actively bankrolled “democracy promotion” programmes as a panacea for poverty and the violent conflicts that engulfed Africa from 1990s.

This signalled the forceful ‘return of history’ to haunt Fukuyama’s audaciously optimistic idea of history’s ‘progress’ towards what the philosopher, Immanuel Kant, enchanted as ‘perpetual peace’.

This ushered in the second phase democracy’s spread from the mid-2000s when the democratic surge ended and democracy lost its shine. Emerging democracies failed to meet their citizens’ hopes for economic prosperity, freedom and security.

Notably, democracy promotion in Africa as elsewhere was hoisted on the myth that capitalism, free markets and democracy are a happy trio going hand in hand. But the rise of China to economic prosperity burst the myth that a state needs to liberalise in order to generate economic growth.

REAL SHOCK

But the real shock and most unexpected development is onset of democratic regression in the United States.

Here, the marriage between democracy and capitalism, ill-suited partners brought together in the shadow of World War II, began to unravel.

As the US went to elections in 2016, an inherent tension that has always existed between capitalism and democratic politics become palpable and public. Simply put, the tension is rooted in the contradictory processes that capitalism allocates resources through markets while democracy allocates power through votes.

In the 1945-1970 interlude, democracy called the shots, and set rules. It established protective labour laws, restrictive financial regulations, and expanded welfare systems to tame the markets and shield people from extreme poverty.

After the 1970s, the roles were reversed. A globalised and deregulated capitalism, unrestrained by national borders, began to push back. Capital began to set the rules, and governments follow them.

REAL WAGES

But the hegemony of the market was short-lived. As the inequality gap widened, real wages stagnated, and the job opportunities shrunk, those who felt most victimised by the markets began to resist the so-called costs of adjustment and to reclaim the powers of the state to protect them.

This gave rise to populism, and propelled Donald Trump to White House, ushering in the third phase of democracy’s decline marked by a surge of authoritarianism. Today, three shades of ‘authoritarianism’ are challenging liberal democracy.

One, and most covered in the literature, is the resurgence of Russia, China and Iran in a multipolar world.

Two, is the surge of xenophobic populist movements and populist parties in established democracies across Europe and North America. Three are new ‘authoritarian undertows’ in marginally democratic countries.

DIVIDED SOCIETIES

In Africa’s ethnically divided societies, innovative ways are needed to build socially cohesive civic polities based on a carefully blended universal ideal of the American and French Revolutions and the local realities of Africa’s identity politics.

One of these realities that the Ibrahim Index of governance report identifies is the need for Africa to generate economic opportunities for its booming youth population, which has increased by 26 per cent in the 2008-2018 decade to comprise 60 per cent of Africa’s total population.

Only this can prevent the youth bulge from becoming a curse.

Prof Kagwanja is former Government adviser and currently Chief Executive of Africa Policy Institute.