Tag Archives: africa

Cameroon

The country behind the hair: contemporary Cameroon

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As soon as she stepped off the airplane, she became the instant, unexpected hit of the White House’s summit of African leaders in Washington, D.C.cameroon

No, it’s not Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the president of Liberia, who cancelled plans to visit Washington in the wake of the devastating Ebola outbreak in west Africa.

Africa’s only other female head of state, Catherine Samba-Panza, who is struggling as interim president of the Central African Republic to pacify what’s now been a year of civil war, wasn’t even invited to the summit. (Under the African Union’s rules, no CAR leader was eligible to attend until the country holds new, democratic elections.)

Instead, it’s Chantal Biya, whose flamboyant hairstyle has grabbed headlines from New York to Los Angeles. The Washington Post‘s hard-hitting coverage noted when Chantal Biya ‘and her hair’ touched down in Washington, DC. It’s disappointing that the US media, given so many governance crises across sub-Saharan Africa, has emphasized style over substance during this week’s summit.

Chantal Biya’s husband, Paul Biya, has served as president of Cameroon, a west-central African country that shares a long border with Nigeria, since 1982 — the second year of the Reagan administration in the United States. His 32-year record isn’t exactly admirable. It’s a country that has a GDP per capita of less than $1,300, according to the International Monetary Fund, and it would be even less if not for oil production. For a first lady who confesses a weakness for Dior and Chanel, her husband presides over a country of nearly 22 million people where nearly 40% live at or below the poverty level.  Continue reading The country behind the hair: contemporary Cameroon →

Mauritania

Abdelaziz wins reelection as Mauritania’s president

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Abdelaziz

Mauritania’s president Mohamed Ould Abdelaziz won a fresh term in elections on Saturday with 81.89% of the vote.mauritania flag

The outcome wasn’t particularly in doubt in the Sahelian country of 3.8 million.

Abdelaziz came to power in August 2008 in a coup against Mauritania’s elected president Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi, who had been elected in a rare competitive election in 2007.

From within the military, Abdelaziz also played a key role in the coup that pushed Maaouya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya out of power. Ould Taya had served as Mauritania’s prime minister or president consecutively from 1981 until his ouster in August 2005, which was supposed to pave the way for greater democratic participation and genuine multi-party democracy, leading to the 2007 elections.

But Mauritania’s experiment in democracy came to halt with the 2008 coup, a return to form in a country that has now seen six leaders ousted in coups since Mauritania won independence from France in 1960. 

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RELATED: Mauritania warily eyes internationalized
conflict in neighboring Mali

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A former general, Abdelaziz previously served as Abdallahi’s chief of staff at the time of the coup. Abdelaziz reaffirmed his power in a 2009 presidential election.

Perhaps Abdelaziz’s most important accomplishment has been his aggressive stand against radical Islam and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which so effectively destabilized neighboring Mali in 2012 and early 2013. Despite a long, porous border with Mali, Abdelaziz preemptively attacked AQIM and associated forces, sometimes sending Mauritanian forces into Mali to rebuff jihadists. Continue reading Abdelaziz wins reelection as Mauritania’s president →

Burundi

As world remembers Rwanda genocide, Burundi tilts into political crisis

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Nkurunziza

I write for The National Interest on Thursday that as the world continues remembering the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, which resulted in the deaths of 800,000 mostly Tutsi Rwandans in three harrowing months in 1994, the world is largely ignoring Rwanda’s southern neighbor, Burundi, as it slips further into a political crisis that could drag Burundi back into ethnic violence that marked its own civil war in the 1990s:burundi

As the 2015 election approaches, however, [president Pierre] Nkurunziza (pictured above) has steamrolled the post-Arusha constitutional consensus by pushing through an election law that could allow him to run for reelection, despite growing opposition. Last year, Nkurunziza introduced a tough new law restricting press freedom amid a wider crackdown on journalists. This year has brought even more restrictions on political assembly and casual gatherings, and the imprisonment of regime opponents after a clash between protesters and the police in the capital, Bujumbura. The leading opposition figure, Alexis Sinduhije, a Tutsi and former journalist who heads the cross-ethnic Movement for Solidarity and Development coalition, was arrested earlier this spring in Belgium after fleeing Burundi, though Belgian officials subsequently released him. The government has also persecuted members of the National Forces of Liberation (FNL), the last major Hutu rebel group to sign the Arusha accords (in 2008). Numerous reports that the CNDD-FDD is arming its youth militia, the Imbonerakure, were sufficient to cause significant concern within Burundi’s UN peacekeeping force earlier this year. That’s especially chilling in light of the role that similar Hutu youth militias, known as the Interahamwe, played in the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

I add that the international community could play a role in boosting Burundi’s fortunes through greater investment:

That doesn’t mean there aren’t promising areas of development. Incredibly, Burundians have known since the 1970s that their tiny country holds at least 6 percent of the world’s nickel reserves. So far, however, those mineral deposits have gone unexploited. Investment to develop Burundi’s industrial capacity and its ability to process nickel ore would be a game-changer. So would investment to improve Burundi’s road and rail infrastructure, allowing nickel (as well as coffee, bananas and other agricultural products) to more easily reach a major port, like Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. Moreover, for a country that’s still 90 percent rural, more efficient agricultural technologies could liberate a significant part of the population for more rigorous education and, ultimately, a more broad-based, services-heavy economy. With a median age of seventeen, Burundi is one of the ten ‘youngest’ countries in the world. Therefore, improvements in education could greatly benefit its youthful population and the country’s developmental future.

But none of this can happen under the penumbra of increasing political violence or the threat of further civil war, whether it’s Hutu-against-Tutsi or Hutu-against-Hutu. Though a surge of development might ameliorate some of the worst of Burundi’s political tensions, greater political stability is a prerequisite for attracting the investment that Burundi needs to fuel that growth. As in many of Africa’s struggling states, Burundi is trapped in a tragic “catch-22.”

Nigeria

Nigeria emerges as Africa’s largest economy

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Earlier this month, Nigeria ‘recalibrated’ the way it calculates its gross domestic product to more effectively capture the real value of its economy.nigeria_flag_icon

It’s a step that many countries in sub-Saharan Africa are taking — including Ghana in 2010 and Kenya this year — as they refine the tools they use to measure GDP growth. Nigeria, for example, hadn’t recalculated its base since 1990. Perplexingly, e-commerce, telecommunications and the country’s growing film industry (‘Nollywood’) hadn’t previously been captured.

Not surprisingly, the recalibration caused Nigeria’s official GDP to leap by nearly 75% to around $510 billion, making it Africa’s largest economy. That shouldn’t come a surprise to anyone, in light of predictions that Nigeria would overtake South Africa sometime by the end of the decade. Nigeria is the epitome of the newly emerging Africa. Lagos, its sprawling port, is now Africa’s largest city, recently surpassing Cairo. Its population, already Africa’s largest at 173.6 million, could surpass the US population within the next three decades or so.

But Nigeria’s newfound status is more the beginning of a journey than its terminus, a journey that will become especially pertinent to global affairs throughout the 21st century as Nigeria’s impact begins to rival that of China’s or India’s.

But today, Nigeria’s GDP per capita, even after the rebasing, is just around $3,000. That’s less than one-half the level of GDP per capita in South Africa, which is around $6,600. Though the stakes of Nigeria’s relative success or failure will become increasingly important to the rest of sub-Saharan Africa and to global emerging markets in the years ahead, there’s no guarantee that Nigeria, 54 years after its independence, won’t succumb to state failure.

Nigeria spent its first decade stuck in a tripartite ethnic struggle that ended in a devastating civil war, followed by bouts of military rule from which it emerged imperfectly in 1999. Lingering security challenges, like those posed by Boko Haram, a Muslim insurgency from Nigeria’s northeast, continue to expose the country’s ethnic tensions and the religious and socioeconomic gap between the relatively prosperous Christian south and the relatively underdeveloped Muslim north. Incipient political institutions plagued by a culture of corruption for decades, with less than fully formed democratic norms, could easily erase the stability gains made since the 1999 return to democracy. Although oil wealth has since the 1960s given Nigeria a financial means to solve its lengthy list of developmental, educational, and environmental problems, the mismanagement of oil revenues have so far transformed the wealth into a classic resources curse.

Existential challenges

Ethnic Groups in Nigeria

Even before independence, British colonial rule divided what is today’s Nigeria into a Northern Protectorate and a Southern Protectorate, and the two parts of today’s Nigeria were governed, nearly until 1960, as discrete units. Continue reading Nigeria emerges as Africa’s largest economy →

Nigeria, Uganda

Museveni vetoes Ugandan anti-gay bill after Nigeria law takes effect

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London, 11th July 2012. London Summit on Family Planning

You know it’s been a bad week for LGBT rights in sub-Saharan Africa when the best news came from a leader who referred to gays and lesbians as ‘abnormal persons,’ with an illness to be treated.nigeria_flag_iconuganda

But considering that Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan signed into law on Monday the Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act, which criminalizes not only ‘amorous’ same-sex relationships, but also registration, operation or participation in gay clubs, societies or organizations (including, potentially, US and other Western human rights organizations active in Nigeria), Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni’s decision to veto an anti-gay bill on Friday was somewhat of a triumph, even if the veto was shrouded in a bizarre — and still virulently anti-gay — message:

The President said a homosexual is somebody who is abnormal because the normal person was created to be attracted to the opposite sex in order to procreate and perpetuate the human race. He said, nature goes wrong in a minority of cases.  While in the Bill passed by Parliament there is no provision for killing homosexuals; the President said, “The question at the core of the debate of homosexuality is; what do we do with an abnormal person? Do we kill him/her? Do we imprison him/her? Or we do contain him/her?”

While the President said homosexuality is an abnormal condition that can be cured, he disagreed with the position of Western countries that homosexuality is an “alternative sexual orientation”. “You cannot call an abnormality an alternative orientation. It could be that the Western societies, on account of random breeding, have generated many abnormal people,” he said, adding that his acid test for rejecting Western position is that nature is purposeful.

Uganda and Nigeria are at the heart of an increasingly widening debate within sub-Saharan Africa over homosexuality, and Uganda’s proposed anti-gay laws have been widely covered in the international media.

The current bill, passed in December 2013 by Uganda’s parliament, which is dominated by the National Resistance Movement that’s controlled Uganda since Museveni (pictured above) came to power in 1986, would criminalize same-sex sexual intercourse, with penalties of life imprisonment for Ugandans convicted of ‘homosexuality.’  The bill also creates obligations for Ugandan citizens to report suspected gay and lesbian individuals to the police, and it criminalizes providing advisory services to gay and lesbian individuals.  The latter provision could endanger all sorts of public health initiatives in Uganda, especially with respect to HIV/AIDS.

Earlier versions of the bill mandated the death penalty for gays and lesbians, which number an estimated 500,000 people among Uganda’s population of over 36 million. Continue reading Museveni vetoes Ugandan anti-gay bill after Nigeria law takes effect →

South Africa

Remembering Nelson Mandela (1918-2013)

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Guest post by Andrew J. Novak

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Nelson Mandela, who achieved nearly mythical status as the first post-apartheid president of South Africa, received the name ‘Nelson’ from his teacher Miss Mdingane on his first day of primary school in a small village in the Eastern Cape, as part of a custom at the time of providing African children with Christian names. south africa flag

Before that he was known by his birth name Rolihlahla, ‘troublemaker’ in colloquial isiXhosa, which appears now in retrospect both endearing and prescient. Formal isiXhosa uses clan name as an honorific, referring to a family’s ancestor; Mandela’s was Madiba, the name of a chief who ruled in Transkei in the 18th century.  When he completed his traditional initiation rites of manhood at age sixteen, Mandela was given the name Dalibhunga, ‘convener of the dialogue,’ another name that seems strangely appropriate decades later.  Later in life, he would be known as Tata (father) and Khulu (grandfather) by many South Africans regardless of their own age, as patriarch of a new multiracial democracy.  He was Papa to his third wife Graça Machel, the former first lady of Mozambique, whose life, like his, bore the rugged scars of a nation struggling for independence.

Perhaps the name that most defined his life’s eventual course was a fake one: David Motsamayi, a name he assumed to secretly leave South Africa in 1962 to travel across the continent raising the international profile of the African National Congress (ANC).  He received military training in Morocco and Ethiopia and raised money from the political leaders of several North and West African countries before traveling to London where he met with anti-apartheid activists and reporters.  Upon his return to South Africa, he was arrested at a police roadblock and placed on trial for inciting workers’ strikes and leaving the country illegally.  He was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison in Pretoria before the police uncovered evidence of his role in the founding of the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, Spear of the Nation.

In the famous Rivonia trial, he was convicted of four counts of sabotage and conspiracy to violently overthrow the government and sentenced to life imprisonment.  For the next eighteen years of his life, he lived in a small cell on Robben Island until a journalist’s slogan ‘Free Mandela’ started an international campaign that culminated in a UN Security Council resolution and his eventual transfer to the relative comfort of two mainland prisons.  On the brink of a low-intensity civil war for the next ten years, the South Africa outside Mandela’s cell had changed, and, on February 11, 1990, he was released from prison on live television.

Despite his early legal training and the 1952 establishment of Mandela & Tambo, the country’s first black-African owned law firm, Mandela did not receive his law degree until he completed his correspondence courses in his last months in prison.  Nonetheless, Mandela the lawyer contributed more to development of the rule of law in South Africa than any other person in modern times.  In negotiations at the Convention for a Democratic South Africa from 1991 to 1992, he and South African President F.W. de Klerk succeeded in drafting an interim constitution with the strong separation of powers and a bill of rights.  They also established a timetable for multiracial elections and agreed on the structure of a government of national unity, a process that jointly won them the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993.  The new constitution of South Africa, one of the most progressive in the world, entered into force in May 1996.

Though his successor, Thabo Mbeki, was a more experienced administrator, Mandela provided the moral leadership that South Africa needed in its democratic transition during his five-year term as president.  Mandela the reconciler oversaw the establishment of a truth commission with Archbishop Desmond Tutu as chair to investigate crimes committed under apartheid by both sides.  He tackled the huge disparity in wealth, ending discrimination in social services and helping build national infrastructure: by 1999, housing for three million people had been constructed; three million people were connected to telephone lines and clean water, and two million to the electricity grid; 1.5 million children were enrolled in the education system for the first time; and 500 health clinics were upgraded.

In retirement, Mandela devoted himself to HIV/AIDS activism through his foundation, supporting the protests to provide free anti-retroviral drugs to poor South Africans and allow the government to purchase generics produced in Brazil, India, and Thailand.  In the years that followed, he spoke out against the war in Iraq and Mugabe’s continued rule in Zimbabwe, and in favor of South Africa’s 2010 World Cup bid.  He had largely retreated from public life by 2004, but his international statute did not diminish.

He died as he had lived, a fateful mix of youthful troublemaker and eminent patriarch.

Andrew Novak is the adjunct professor of African law at American University, Washington College of Law

Guinea

Guinea holds successful elections after six-year delay

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diallo

Though we don’t have any election results yet, Guinea successfully held long-delayed parliamentary elections on Saturday, which in itself marks a milestone in the west African country’s democratic development as the first direct parliamentary vote since independence from France in 1958.

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Originally scheduled to be held in June 2007, and then allegedly to be held following Guinea’s first direct presidential election in 2010, the elections were rescheduled time after time until earlier this summer, when the government of Guinea’s president Alpha Condé finally agreed to a UN-brokered deal with supporters of his rival Cellou Dalein Diallo (pictured above) to provide for a peaceful, free and fair set of elections — the vote will clear the way for around $200 million in financial aid from the European Union.

Politics in Guinea, a country of just 10.25 million, largely falls on ethnic lines.  Condé counts on the Malinke ethnic group (around 30% of Guinea’s population) in the northeast to support his Rassemblement du Peuple Guinéen (RPG, Rally for the Guinean People). Diallo counts on the Fula group (around 40% of the population) in the northeast to support his Union des Forces Démocratiques de Guinée (UFDG, Union of Democratic Forces of Guinea), with Condé consolidating support from among the coastal Susu group (around 20%) in the 2010 election to defeat Diallo.

This weekend’s vote to determine the members of Guinea’s Assemblée nationale (National Assembly) will set the stage for the next direct presidential election scheduled to take place in 2015.

Despite relative mineral wealth — chiefly through bauxite, an aluminum ore that constitutes over three-fifths of Guinean exports — the country’s GDP per capita is almost one-half of neighboring Senegal’s.  There are a lot of historical and institutional reasons for that disparity — Guinea was the only country in west Africa to elect independence in 1958, which severed the links between Guinea and France, even after African independence became a fait accompli two years later.  That meant that Guinea took a turn toward an authoritarian, socialist economy under the aegis of the Soviet Union through the Cold War under its first post-independence leader Ahmed Sékou Touré.  Economic reform and a somewhat less harsh political environment under the rule of Lansana Conté between 1984 and 2008 improved the lives of Guineans, but the country lags behind its potential output.

Conté’s death allowed Guinea’s turn, after a half century, toward democracy, though it’s been a difficult transition.  Saturday was the four-year anniversary of the killing of around 150 pro-democracy activists in Conakry, the Guinean capital, and around 50 activists have been killed in the leadup to Saturday’s elections.

Though Condé fought for years to bring democracy to Guinea, Diallo has challenged his government for ruling the country as an autocrat, and there are fears that the progress, however fragile, of the past four years may already be unraveling, especially if the government and opposition cannot agree whether the election was fundamentally fair, exacerbating historic ethnic tension between the Fula and Malinke groups:  Continue reading Guinea holds successful elections after six-year delay →

Rwanda

Rwandan election highlights tension between ethnic, economic stability and authoritarianism

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It’s hard not to have strong feelings about Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s president.rwanda

The one-time rebel leader, who grew up in a Ugandan refugee camp after many Tutsis were pushed out of Rwanda in the 1950s and 1960s, marched into Rwanda’s capital in mid-1994 to take power as the international community dithered, thereby ending the country’s horrific genocide.  He spent the next six years working to pacify the country through various security measures and then set about modernizing Rwanda.  When he became president in 2000, he announced his Vision 2020 plan to develop the country.  Since 2000, his efforts have won the praise of everyone from former president U.S. Bill Clinton to Microsoft icon and philanthropist Bill Gates for rebuilding the country’s infrastructure,  developing Rwandan education and health care and restoring the rule of law.  He can boast an attractive record of foreign investment, and it’s hard not to credit Kagame for an average GDP growth rate of 8.1% in the past 12 years.

But Kagame has served as Rwanda’s de facto or de jure leader since 1994, and he presides over a country where political parties and freedom to assemble are severely restrained and press freedom is very low, a country where critics charge that he rules with an authoritarian style and where dissenters are forced into exile.  His angelic reputation among the international community has been tarnished by his support for the M23 rebels in eastern Congo who are fighting against Congolese president Joseph Kabila.

Suffice it to say that Kagame is a complex figure — Rwanda’s semi-authoritarian savior.  But as a rising power in eastern and central Africa and a touchstone for the failure of the international community to stop genocide two decades ago, the country’s political progress is just as important as its impressive economic progress.   Continue reading Rwandan election highlights tension between ethnic, economic stability and authoritarianism →

Guinea, Kenya, Madagascar, Mali, Zimbabwe

Despite Zimbabwe, sub-Saharan Africa is becoming more democratic, not less

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African legal scholar Andrew Novak and I make the case at Reuters today that despite the reelection of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, sub-Saharan Africa is making gains with respect to democracy, and we examine the eight countries with elections between mid-July and September 30 alone (though as of earlier this week, Madagascar seems to be postponed until later this year).madagascar-flagMali Flag Iconzimbabwe new icon

We look to three catalysts in particular:

Recent African elections demonstrate progress in three ways.  First, long-delayed or boycotted elections are finally taking place, removing military regimes or one-party states from power.

Second, for the first time, several countries having enjoyed two or three free and fair elections in a row. This is significant because running two well-managed elections improves the odds that there will be a third, and then a fourth — turning an isolated electoral experiment into a true democratic tradition.

Third, elections once marred by violence have been carried out peacefully, improving the credibility of political leaders and encouraging coalition-building and a non-zero sum attitude toward governing.

So for every Zimbabwe, there’s a Mali, which represents a return to two decades of democratic traditions.  There’s a Kenya, where president Uhuru Kenyatta’s election earlier this spring wasn’t marred by violence, despite a close race.  There’s a Guinea, where long-delayed elections are moving forward after fraught negotiations between the ruling party and the opposition.  Even in Zimbabwe, July’s elections passed without the violence that resulted in 2008, and Mugabe’s successor will likely have to be much more responsive to economic and social pressures than Mugabe, who too often gets a free pass from Zimbabweans and other Africans due to his founding-father status in leading the country out of white minority rule in 1979-80.

Our conclusion is that there’s room for measured optimism:

It would be a mistake to view the developing African democracy with the same kind of rapture than some international investors have developed in recent years for Africa’s “cheetah” economies.  But in the wake of international discouragement over Zimbabwe’s vote, it would also be a mistake to conclude that African democracy is in retreat, when there are so many signs that it continues to grow stronger.

Photo credit to Joe Penney / Reuters.

African Union, Cameroon, Guinea, Madagascar, Mali, Rwanda, Swaziland, Togo, Zimbabwe

Eight sub-Saharan African elections within nine weeks highlights region’s fragile democracy

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In the next three months, eight sub-Saharan African countries will go to the polls to elect a new president and/or parliament, a relative blitz that will not only highlight the region’s growing, if fragile, democratic institutions, but will call attention to many unique issues facing sub-Saharan Africa: unequal and unsteady growth rates, the role of Islamic jihad and security, improving health outcomes, the rule of law and governance standards, and further development of vital infrastructure.african union

Between July 21 and September 30, voters in countries with an aggregate population of around 100 million are scheduled to cast ballots, though of course not all elections are created equal — or conducted on incredibly equal ground.  In some countries, such as Guinea and Togo, it will be a success if the elections actually take place as planned; in other countries, such as Swaziland and Cameroon, elections will be essentially a sideshow of powerlessness.  In  Zimbabwe, where longtime president Robert Mugabe (pictured above) is seeking yet another term after 33 years in power, and in Madagascar, where voters will choose a new president and legislature after a problematic 2009 coup and a four-year interim government, the vote could herald once-in-a-generation leadership transitions.

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Here’s the rundown, in brief:

Togo: July 25togo

Togo, a small west African nation of 7.15 million people, is scheduled to vote for a new parliament, despite the fact that elections have been cancelled twice — first in October 2012 and again in March 2013.  There’s no guarantee that elections this month will actually go forward, either.  While the government and opposition have apparently now reached a deal to hold elections later this month, the composition of the electoral commission remains a major open issue.

Togo’s president, Faure Gnassingbé, took office in 2005 with the support of the country’s military following the death of his father, Gnassingbé Eyadéma, who had served as Togo’s president since 1967.  Despite winning election in presidential votes in 2005 and 2010, he’s seen as somewhat of an authoritarian leader and his party, the Rassemblement du Peuple Togolais (RPT, Rally for the Togolese People) dominates the unicameral Assemblée nationale, holding 50 out of 81 seats.  Unlike its neighbors, there’s neither a Christian nor Muslim majority in Togo — out of every two Togolese adheres to indigenous beliefs, though one-third of its residents are Muslim and one-fifth are Christian.

Continue reading Eight sub-Saharan African elections within nine weeks highlights region’s fragile democracy →

Kenya

Why the ICC should drop its case against Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta

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Uhuru Kenyatta, after winning a seven-point victory in the March 4 presidential election, will be sworn in later this month as Kenya’s fourth post-independence president.kenya

But he’ll do so with a significant cloud hanging over his head — an indictment from the International Criminal Court on charges of crimes against humanity stemming from the last election in 2007, which precipitated two months of post-election violence that followed allegations of fraud in the narrow victory of incumbent Mwai Kibaki over challenger Raila Odinga.

What’s more, Kenyatta’s running mate, the next vice president of Kenya, William Ruto, is also a defendant on similar charges.

But Kenyatta, who comes from the Kikuyu ethnic group, and Ruto, who comes from the Kalenjin ethnic group, were on opposing sides five years ago, with Kenyatta backing Kibaki and with Ruto backing Odinga.

Those differences weren’t enough to stop Kenyatta and Ruto from joining forces this time around. Their partnership led to yet another defeat for Odinga and, this time around, the election result met with none of the civil turmoil that followed the previous election.

Nearly everyone in Kenya want to move beyond the 2007-08 violence.

Moreover, the ICC’s case against Kenyatta remains an evidentiary weak case by the standard of other ICC efforts. The ICC’s prosecution has already intruded bluntly into Kenya’s domestic politics and governance in a way that the entire Kenyan political elite opposes and that risks the court’s own legitimacy in sub-Saharan Africa, and the Kenyan people — in a free and fair vote — have elected Kenyatta their president, ICC charges or not.

The ICC indictments threaten to transform Kenya into somewhat of a pariah state — the European Union has pompously declared before the election that it would only engage in ‘essential conduct’ with Kenyatta in the event of his presidential victory, and U.S. secretary of state for African affairs Johnnie Carson was widely criticized for trying to subtly ‘warn’ Kenyans to make its choice carefully because it would have ‘global consequences.’

Kenya remains a key regional ally in the otherwise tough neighborhood east Africa, so Western governments will need to walk a tight diplomatic line, notwithstanding the ICC’s role:

A diplomatic fumble in dealing with Kenyatta could damage ties with a nation that has helped quell militant Islamists in the region and push a traditionally pro-Western state closer to China and other emerging powers hungry for openings in Africa.

Kenya’s supreme court earlier this year pointedly cleared Kenyatta, the son of Kenya’s first president Jomo Kenyatta, and Ruto to run in the election despite the ICC charges.

If that weren’t enough, the ICC may have already warped Kenyan politics by boosting Kenyatta’s bid through a sort of rallying effect — giving Kenyans a nationalist cri de coeur in a country where politics are still largely fought and won on ethnic lines.   Continue reading Why the ICC should drop its case against Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta →

Angola

It’s election week in Angola (but don’t expect a real election)

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So Angola goes to the polls this week, and José Eduardo dos Santos, Angola’s president since 1979 (pictured above), will overwhelmingly be reelected, notwithstanding the rumblings of dissent among the young, the poor and the unemployed.

The expectations are that Friday’s election will not be free and fair, as I’ve noted in the past.

But a semi-authoritarian regime with sham elections is a vast improvement on decades of civil war.  So Angola’s making progress, in that in the past decade, the country has pulled definitively out of a 30-year civil war, which began almost immediately after its independence in 1975.  A ceasefire declared in 2002 has held, and the country will have “elections” now for the second time since fighting ended.

An oil boom, too, has boosted the Angolan economy — the country recorded some of the world’s highest GDP growth rates in the past decade, including growth over 20% from 2005 to 2007, and it’s thought to be China’s largest oil supplier.  A drop in oil prices slowed Angola’s growth, but the country is expected to grow at around 10% in 2012 — oil production accounts for nearly 45% of the country’s GDP.

That’s where the good news ends.

Around 40% of the country’s 18.5 million citizens remains mired in poverty, and that fact, and the country’s stark rich-poor divide, has been the central issue in the campaigning leading up to the Angolan election.

Political parties in Angola still correspond to the two major groups that contested the civil war.

Dos Santos’s Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola – Partido do Trabalho (MPLA or the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola – Labour Party) currently controls 191 of the 220 seats in Angola’s Assembleia Nacional.

The main opposition party is the União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola (UNITA or the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola).  Although the MLPA is dominated by the northern Ambundu ethnic group and UNITA by the more southern Ovimbundu group, ethnicity does not play an especially huge role in Angolan politics, nor do standard measures of political ideology.

Isaias Samakuva, UNITA’s leader, has called for the election to be postponed in order to ensure a fairer process, and UNITA has accused dos Santos’s regime of widespread interference in the election process and rigging the vote through the use of state funds and through the control of the state media.  Continue reading It’s election week in Angola (but don’t expect a real election) →

Angola

Dim hope for free and fair elections under dos Santos in oil-boom Angola

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Angola is booming these days — and its capital Luanda, in particular (pictured, above), is booming, flush from the diamonds-and-oil wealth of a country that’s entering just its second decade of peace following independence in 1975 and a civil war that divided the lusophone southern African country of 18.5 million for the ensuing three decades.

For most Angolans, however, around 40% of whom still live in poverty, the benefits of one of the world’s best performing economies of the past decade have still not trickled down.  And that’s what should be the top issue when Angolans head to the polls on August 31 to elect members to the Assembleia Nacional.

Nonetheless, there’s no real indication that the elections will be any more than a show elections for the current regime:

The Angolan government is responsible for numerous incidents of political violence, intimidation of protesters, and crackdowns on peaceful demonstrations that might have a negative impact on the August 31, 2012 parliamentary elections, Human Rights said in a report released today. The government should end its crackdown on peaceful protests and the media with the start of the election campaign on August 1.

The 13-page report, “Angola’s Upcoming Elections: Attacks on the Media, Expression, and Assembly,” describes increasing incidents of political violence and intimidation. Human Rights Watch called on the government of Angola to promptly address these concerns, and urged the Southern African Development Community and the capital’s foreign diplomats to raise these issues with the government.

“The human rights environment in Angola is not conducive for free, fair, and peaceful elections,” said Leslie Lefkow, deputy Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “The Angolan government needs to stop trying to stifle peaceful protests, gag the independent press, or use the state media for partisan purposes if these elections are to be meaningful.”

 The president of Angola, at least nominally, since 1979, has been José Eduardo dos Santos, who is Africa’s second-longest serving leader.  Functionally, from 1979 until the end of Angola’s civil war in 2002, he was merely the leader of one side in a grueling civil war in a country used by both the United States and the Soviet Union as a deadly hot proxy for the Cold War through much of independent Angola’s early history — the civil war reached a less lethal phase only in 1991, with the end of the Cold War and the cessation of arms shipments to the combatants from the United States and from the Soviet Union.

Luanda, now one of the boomtowns of sub-Saharan Africa, is a city transformed.  As Felix Salmon noted last year, only 156 Angolan visas were issues to southbound Portuguese, but by 2010, that number was 23,787.  That may tell you something about the state of Portugal’s economy, but it also says something about Angola’s.  Despite significant slowdown (2010’s GDP growth rate was only 3.4%), Angola managed GDP growth of over 20% for each of 2005, 2006 and 2007, and hit nearly 14% in 2008 as well.  Angola’s oil production has increased so rapidly that it is thought to be China’s top oil supplier.

Angola’s Assembleia Nacional has 220 seats. In the last election, dos Santos’s Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola – Partido do Trabalho (MPLA or the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola – Labour Party; yes, quite a mouthful) won fully 191 of those seats.  Since then, dos Santos has survived an assassination attempt and increasingly vocal protests against his rule.  Despite this unrest, and despite the passage of an anti-fraud electoral law in late 2011, no one believes dos Santos and the MPLA will wake up out of power after the August 31 election.

The country’s politics are still divided on lines that go back to its civil war — the main opposition is the União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola (UNITA or the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola).  The one-time Soviet-backed MLPA is still dominated by the more northern Ambundu ethnic group (which represents around 25% of Angolans), while the US-backed UNITA is still dominated by the more southern Ovimbundu (37% of Angolans).  Even today, though, oil-rich Cabinda province, a sliver of Angola separated from the rest of the country by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, remains separatist-minded, despite the end of the civil war 10 years ago — it is dominated by Angola’s third-largest ethnic group, the Bakongo (about 13% of all Angolans — this group, too, had its own political entity in the Angolan civil war).

UNITA launched its campaign Wednesday, promising a more equal distribution of the gains from Angola’s economic boom, especially in the form of renewed investment in health, education, housing and employment.

While, it’s a platform that sounds fairly pedestrian and reasonable, but it’s still risible to think that UNITA would even have the opportunity to carry through with that agenda.

Angola may have mercifully put its civil war behind it, and a brighter economic future may well beckon, but it looks like the evolution of true democratic institutions will wait for a day beyond 2012.

Photo credit to Veziana Armandi via Flickr.

Lesotho

Who is Tom Thabane? And what next for Lesotho?

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The last transfer of power in Lesotho to Pakalitha Mosisili in 1998 ended in riots and violence by opposition supporters who did not believe that Mosisili’s party had truly won a crushing victory in the 1997 election — although the vote largely reflected the will of the people, the crisis ended only with international intervention from South Africa.

So with word that Mosisili has given up hope to form a coalition headed by his breakaway Democratic Congress party, the path seems clear for an orderly — and peaceful — transfer of power from Mosisili to Tom Thabane, former foreign minister and one-time protegé of Mosisili, later this week.

In the parliamentary election on May 26, Democratic Congress — a party formed only in February 2012 as a splinter from Mosisili’s longstanding Lesotho Congress for Democracy party — won 48 seats.  The Lesotho Congress for Democracy, under Mothetjoa Metsing, won just 26 seats, as somewhat of an evolved protest group, while Thabane’s All Basotho Convention won 30 seats.

Together with the Basotho National Party, the LCD and the ABC are expected to form a coalition under Thabane.

The peaceful transfer of power in the small mountainous country (it’s surrounded entirely by the national of South Africa) comes just after a remarkably similar transfer in Senegal earlier this year.  As in Senegal, the transfer from Mosisili to Thabane is expected to be marked more by continuity than by rupture.

Continue reading Who is Tom Thabane? And what next for Lesotho? →

Senegal

Senegal turns to runoff vote

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With less than one week to go until Senegal’s presidential runoff, the campaign’s narrative since the end of the first round has consistently been one of the opposition mobilizing behind the candidacy of former prime minister Macky Sall and against current president Abdoulaye Wade.

Wade won the first round of the election on February 26 with 34.8% of the vote to Sall’s 26.6%.

In the meanwhile, all 12 of the defeated candidates have endorsed Sall, including former prime minister Moustapha Niasse, who finished in third place, Parti Socialiste candidate Ousamne Tanor Dieng, who finished in fourth place and Idrissa Seck, also a former prime minister, who finished in fifth place. Sall, together with the 12 former candidates, joined for a rally last Sunday in Obelisk Square in Dakar, the site of several violent anti-Wade protests in advance of the first round vote.  Sall and the former candidates have formed the makeshift Alliance of Forces for Change in advance of Sunday’s runoff.

Prominent — and popular — Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour, who was refused a spot on the ballot in advance of the first round, has endorsed Sall as well.  And so has the M23 movement, by and large — the loose coalition that came together to oppose Wade’s arguably unconstitutional run for a third term.  Although the M23 movement did not endorse any first-round candidate, it has mobilized behind Sall as the anti-Wade candidate.

The tense and sometimes violent protests leading up the the first round have now largely replaced by a triumphant opposition confident of victory.  Sall is popular in both Dakar and the countryside, and, with so much of the opposition to Wade lining up behind Sall, it seems more likely than not that Sall will win the runoff.  Continue reading Senegal turns to runoff vote →