Why is democracy offering little dividends in Africa?

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Ahead of the 2023 elections in Nigeria, a social worker was busy canvassing the need for free and fair elections. She met a group of market women who were apparently returning from an election outing and on accosting them she said: ‘My sisters, please make sure you vote your conscience in the forthcoming elections. If they give you money reject it and vote your conscience.’

The Social worker had hardly finished when one of the women replied in Yoruba Language, which I translated thus. “You said we should not collect money to vote, if I don’t collect the money what will they give me when they enter office? Will they make me a commissioner or SA? The money they are giving us is the only thing we would see…” The disappointed Social worker was unable to convince the market woman.

Encounters such as this were commonplace during the last electioneering campaigns. Citizens openly expressed frustrations at the lack of dividends of democracy after election cycles.

Though we can say that Nigeria has been lucky to have sustained its longest streak of democratic rule in the last 25 years, evidence of what has been identified as “declining democracy” cannot be said to be missing in the Nigerian content.

In a way, you can blame the state of affairs on the pro-democracy fighters of the 1990s who fought a war but refused to take the spoils. When General Sani Abacha was pronounced dead and General Abdusalami Abubakar taking over announced an 11-month transition, the pro-democracy leaders who had held sway refused to take the lead in the transition programme. They were skeptical about the military’s sincerity and by doing that they left the stage largely for friends of the military or those that can be called money-miss-road politicians. The result is the rudderless democracy the nation and indeed Africa have witnessed in recent years.

Years back, some editors met with one of their friends who had become a governor. The guy had the fortune of having performed well in a previous public office he held during the twilight of the military. The editors complained that his state capital was littered with potholes and that he needed to fix internal roads. The then governor just flared up, No tell me dat, I no pay to get here? He was simply referring to the money he shared during the election and insisting it was harvest time!

Can democracy revive what it has broken in Africa? That is possibly a million-dollar question. In a recent interview published by the online newspaper, The Cable, former President Olusegun Obasanjo was asked whether democracy was working in Africa and he said:

“The point is this: where in Africa have the people benefited from the dividends of democracy? Tell me.” The interview was published by The Cable on September 5, 2023.

The former President was dissecting what French President Emmanuel Macron had called the “epidemic of coups” that was ravaging African countries. Obasanjo had concluded that the liberal democratic tendencies copied from the settled democracies of the West to Africa may not be working. He said it was time to “put our heads together” and fashion a system that would work.

“I don’t know. But we have seen that the liberal type of democracy as practiced in the West will not work for us. We have to put our heads together,” Obasanjo had told The Cable.

He said that what Macron described as an “epidemic of coups” was a “new phenomenon” and that the emerging military leaders are not those who plan to leave in four or five years, but in a generation.

The United States Consul-General in Nigeria, Will Stevens, also attempted an answer to what puzzled Obasanjo when he spoke recently in Abeokuta, Ogun State.

Stevens said that the failure of African leaders to accept peaceful transfer of power, a key tenet of democracy is a major source of the challenge democracy faces in Africa.

“I hope and feel that you (Africa) can fix the problems and the problems are big; it’s climate change which leads to flooding, it is plastics pollution, it is food insecurity, it is the backsliding of democracy in the region.

“Obasanjo served two terms and left power, he set the precedent in Nigeria of you serve and then you step aside for your successor. Nigeria has enjoyed 25 years of presidential succession. President Buhari just did the same thing, he served his two terms and then he stepped aside. That is a big deal in democracy – peaceful transitions of power. That is a huge thing to be proud of, It does not happen very often,” he said at an event held at the Obasanjo Presidential Library, Abeokuta.

But beyond the question of peaceful transition of power as a scourge of democratic growth in Africa lies some other critical challenges. Renowned novelist and author, Professor Chinua Achebe, identified the question of leadership as the main ailment that rocks his country, Nigeria, if not Africa as a whole.

An article by John Campbell and Nolan Quinn, published by the United States Council on Foreign Relations in 2021, equally identified the decline of democracy as an emerging trend in Africa.

Titled, “What’s happening to democracy in Africa,” the article noted that“A democratic decline, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, is underway in sub-Saharan Africa. More Africans live under fully or partially authoritarian states today than at most points in the last two decades.”

It noted further that authoritarian and semi-authoritarian rulers have dressed their regimes in the forms of democracy with either rigged elections or de facto separation of powers. They have fostered illiberal rule and engineered democratic decline, the writers had said.

They identified some reasons for Africa’s declining democracy including unmet expectations of the populace; regional issues such as following one’s neighbours; outside influences; influences of information generation and COVID-19 politics.

Above all, the article identifies the presence of “unscrupulous elites” as a key source of the scourge that has bedeviled Africa. In Nigeria, you won’t need to look far before this example punches you in the face. Poor leadership is a scourge that breeds declining democracy and in fact, ridicules our attempt to grow democratic tenets. The unscrupulous elites have undermined the system to the extent the common man is unable to identify his true worth or need anymore. A number of voters now agree that the tokens they are given ahead of elections or on election days are the only democracy dividends the leaders can afford in four years.

It is strange that African leaders in a democracy are subjecting their people to the sort of inhumanity the colonialists did not even attempt. That is the key to the declining democracy in Nigeria and continental Africa.

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