Tag Archives: west africa

Benin’s version of Donald Trump wins presidential vote

Patrice Talon, a wealthy businessman and Benin's "king of cotton," won a March 20 presidential runoff. (Facebook)
Patrice Talon, a wealthy businessman and Benin’s “king of cotton,” won a March 20 presidential runoff. (Facebook)

Earlier this month, voters in five countries across Africa went to the polls in what some global news outlets called ‘Super Sunday’ across the continent. benin

In three of those countries, the results were foregone conclusions in what no one would describe as truly free and fair elections:

  • In the Republic of the Congo, known as ‘Congo-Brazzaville,’ because it lies to the west of the far larger Democratic Republic of the Congo to its east, Denis Sassou Nguesso easily won reelection — he’s held power since 1979, barring a short-lived hiatus from 1992 to 1997, after his ousting in a presidential election.
  • In Niger, a country of over 17 million in west Africa, Mahamadou Issoufou easily won reelection after first taking power in 2011. The opposition had boycotted the vote.
  • Ali Mohamed Shein easily won reelection as the president of Zanzibar (an autonomous region of Tanzania) after the opposition boycotted a re-run of a flawed election last October.

But in Benin, a sliver of a country nudged between Togo and Nigeria on the west African coast, voters selected someone who might be considered ‘Trumpian’ in his own right — a business tycoon who dominates the country’s most important industry, cotton production, who drives around in imported Jaguars and Porsches and wears designer clothes, a tycoon whose wealth comes in ample part from connections to the right people, a ‘bad boy’ who swept to power with no real government experience.

Patrice Talon, that Beninese businessman, easily won the presidency in a March 20 runoff with 65.37% of the vote to just 34.63% for former prime minister Lionel Zinsou. In the first round on March 8, Zinsou led with 28.44% to just 24.80% for Talon.

But no emerging democracy is perfect.  Continue reading Benin’s version of Donald Trump wins presidential vote

Burkina Faso’s election is just the beginning of its transition

Roch Marc Christian Kaboré, a former prime minister, will become Burkina Faso's new president.
Roch Marc Christian Kaboré, a former prime minister, will become Burkina Faso’s new president.

After holding a free and relatively trouble-free election on November 29th, Burkina Faso has elected a new, civilian president: Roch Marc Christian Kaboré.burkina faso flag icon

That, in itself, is a milestone for a country that has very little experience with democracy or even civilian leaders, and that just two months ago faced yet another militant coup designed to throw the country’s elections off track. Kaboré is just the second civilian Burkinabé leader since the country gained independence from France in 1960.

Supporters and opponents alike were celebrating in the streets of in Ouagadougou this weekend to mark the second fully contested election in the country’s post-independence history.

Kaboré’s election, however, is just the first step in what could still be a very troubled path to stronger governing institutions, committed democracy and greater development in Burkina Faso, a country of over 17 million people, though one of the world’s poorest (the International Monetary Fund estimates per-capita nominal GDP at just $631).

burkinabe2015

Burkina Faso’s latest political chapter began in October 2014, when long-serving president Blaise Compaoré fled from office in the wake of massive protests against his bid to win yet another reelection. Compaoré, then a young military leader, helped Thomas Sankara take power in a 1983 coup — only to force the leftist Sankara out in 1987, killing his once-close friend Sankara in the process and transforming Sankara into something of a martyr of the African left.

When Compaoré fled power last autumn, he was at the time the world’s seventh-longest ruling leader. Despite his autocratic rule at home, he had become an ally to the United States and to European powers at a time when west Africa has increasingly become a security concern for Western governments anxious to halt the rise of radical jihadist groups from Nigeria to the Sahel. The election comes in the aftermath of a deadly terrorist attack in Bamako, the capital of Mali, Burkina Faso’s neighbor to the north and the west. But the election also comes after the peaceful reelection of Ivorian president Alasanne Ouattara and ahead of scheduled Ghanian elections in 2016. Continue reading Burkina Faso’s election is just the beginning of its transition

Ouattara wins expected lopsided victory in Côte d’Ivoire

A northerner, 73-year-old Alassane Ouattara must introduce more stability in Ivorian law and politics if he hopes the progress of his administration will last beyond the 2010s.
A northerner, 73-year-old Alassane Ouattara must introduce more stability in Ivorian law and politics if he hopes the progress of his administration will last beyond the 2010s.

In a more developed democracy, Côte d’Ivoire’s October 25 election might have been a civil rematch of the 2010 contest between the incumbent, Alasanne Ouattara, and his fierce rival, former president Laurent Gbagbo.Ivory Coast

Instead, Gbagbo is imprisoned at The Hague in The Netherlands awaiting trial at the International Criminal Court as the first head of state to be tried for crimes against humanity that stem from Gbagbo’s refusal to step down from the Ivorian presidency after the 2010 elections, setting the country into its second civil war in a decade as Gbagbo and his allies clung to power.

Captured in 2011 by UN and local forces loyal to Ouattara, Gbagbo still retains a loyal following, and supporters want to see Gbagbo freed.

Instead, Ouattara easily won the presidential vote, election officials announced last week, effortlessly dispatching Pascal Affi N’Guessan, formerly prime minister under Gbagbo from 2000 to 2003 and a longtime Gbagbo supporter.

Ouattara, of northern descent, served as Félix Houphouët-Boigny’s final prime minister from 1990 until the former president’s death in December 1993. Though he attempted to run for president in 1995 and 2000, opponents like Robert Guéï, the country’s military leader from December 1999 to October 2000, managed to have him barred from the race on specious charges that Ouattara was actually born in neighboring Burkina Faso, inflaming northern Muslims by implying that they are something less than fully Ivorian. An economist, Ouattara spent the late 1990s at the International Monetary Fund, where he rose to the rank of deputy managing director. The struggle over the 2000 election and its aftermath directly led to the civil war that broke out in 2002.

Former president Laurent Gbagbo, who once represented the hopes of the Ivorian opposition, now sits in The Hague awaiting an ICC trial for crimes against humanity.

Former president Laurent Gbagbo, who once represented the hopes of the Ivorian opposition, now sits in The Hague awaiting an ICC trial for crimes against humanity.

Ouattara officially won 82.66% to just 9.29% for N’Guessan, though many of Gbagbo’s supporters boycotted the vote. That means that the lopsided victory obscures the fact that Côte d’Ivoire remains highly divided on north-south lines.

Though it might have been a less-than-scintillating contest, it is perhaps remarkable that the country made it through an election without major violence — a consequence aided by the fact of an ongoing 6,000-strong UN peacekeeping force, an international presence for over a decade. Continue reading Ouattara wins expected lopsided victory in Côte d’Ivoire

Guinea struggles with election amid few truly democratic institutions

Supporters of Guinean president Alpha Condé gather ahead of the west African country's October 11 election.
Supporters of Guinean president Alpha Condé gather ahead of the west African country’s October 11 election.

It’s not surprising, perhaps, that as the votes from Guinea’s October 11 presidential election are counted, incumbent Alpha Condé is leading with nearly 60% of the vote. guinea

This is a country where it took six years to schedule a single set of elections for the country’s parliament.

The west African country is the first of three Ebola-stricken countries to hold an election since the epidemic ended late last year, and Condé, who won election in 2010 in the first democratic vote in Guinea’s post-independence history, was expected to fall somewhat short of a majority — forcing a runoff with his 2010 rival, Cellou Dalein Diallo, an economist and, for a brief time, prime minister under Guinea’s 24-year dictator, Lansana Conté. Only weeks before the election, Guinea marked its first Ebola-free week since the height of the crisis.

As it became clear throughout the week that the vote count will show Condé with an unassailable lead, Diallo has withdrawn from the contest following last Sunday’s election, citing fraud and a generally unfair campaign environment. Diallo’s allies had previously called for a delay in the elections, citing delays in providing voting cards to all potential voters, and Diallo himself called for a re-run in the immediate aftermath of the voting, alleging ballot stuffing and other fraudulent practices. EU observers, for what it’s worth, declared the elections sufficiently valid so as not to require a revote, even while analysts are doubting whether sub-Saharan Africa is necessarily becoming more democratic.

* * * * *

RELATED: West Africa’s Ebola crisis is as much
a crisis of governance as health

RELATED: Guinea struggles to schedule elections after opposition protests and six years of delay

* * * * *

With 11.75 million people, Guinea is a fast-growing country in west Africa, though it’s struggled since independence. The first country to break with French colonial rule, it had no democratic institutions to speak of until five years ago. Its first leader, Ahmed Sékou Touré, ruled as an autocrat for a quarter-century, and the country held its first election in 2010 following a two-year military transitional government that took power after Conté’s death.  Continue reading Guinea struggles with election amid few truly democratic institutions

Military coup casts doubt on Burkina Faso elections

_Burkina-Faso_3442941b

Planned elections in Burkina Faso on October 11 do not seem likely to move forward after the country’s interim president, Michel Kafando, was ousted Thursday by the military.burkina faso flag icon

Kafando came to the presidency only last November, following a military coup against Burkina Faso’s leader of 27 years,  Blaise Compaoré, when the longtime strongman tried to amend the constitution to permit him to run for reelection yet again. Initially, during the October 2014 coup, it was Isaac Zida, a leading member of the Régiment de sécurité présidentielle (RSP, Presidential Security Regiment), a high-powered security forced that Compaoré formed as a counterweight to the regular army, who quickly emerged as the country’s interim leader. International pressure forced Zida and the RSP to hand power to Kafando, Burkina Faso’s long-serving ambassador to the United Nations, with Zida serving as interim prime minister.

That arrangement seemed to be working, with Burkina Faso — a landlocked country of over 17 million people in west Africa that neighbors Mali and Ghana — preparing for elections next month.

* * * * *

RELATED: Sankara ghost hangs over Burkina Faso turmoil

* * * * *

Nevertheless, Burkinabés woke up Thursday morning to the sight of lieutenant colonel Mamadou Bamba (pictured above) delivering a terse statement on behalf of the newly christened ‘National Council for Democracy’ that had tasked itself with ‘put[ting] an end’ to the ‘deviating’ transitional regime and establishing a government that would ‘restore political order’ for the purpose of holding ‘inclusive and peaceful’ elections.  Continue reading Military coup casts doubt on Burkina Faso elections

Togo delays vote as Gnassingbé seeks third term

gnassingbe

Guest post by Kevin Buettner

Even in the neglected word of African electoral politics, Togo isn’t necessarily a top story, especially coming so shortly after the blockbuster Nigerian election.togo

But  less than three weeks before Togo was scheduled to head to the polls to determine their next president, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) successfully petitioned the Togolese government to revise its voter registration lists. The subsequent delay stems from allegations by opposition parties that thousands of voter lists contained the names of citizens who were registered twice — and most of the names were considered persons loyal to the incumbent president Faure Gnassingbé.

This is not the first time the opposition has raised concerns relating to the upcoming elections. In late 2014, a coalition aptly named ‘Let’s Save Togo’ led street protests to highlight the unpopularity of the 2002 decision to suspend presidential term limits, which now allows Gnassingbé to run for a third term as Togo’s president. Thirteen years ago, however, the decision facilitated what would become the 38-year rule of Gnassingbé’s father, Gnassingbé Eyadéma, a polarizing political figure in his own right. Continue reading Togo delays vote as Gnassingbé seeks third term

Who is Yahya Jammeh? A look at Gambia’s erratic dictator.

yahya

When you start to add up all the abuses of Gambian president Yahya Jammeh’s 20-year dictatorship, you might think it’s a real shame that Tuesday’s coup attempt has apparently failed.Gambia

Though Gambian officials are reporting that the coup has failed, and other officials are denying that a coup attempt even took place, it’s hard to know just exactly what is happening in the capital city of Banjul. Jammeh is said to be out of the country, though conflicting reports have placed him on official business in France as well as on a personal trip to Dubai. In short, no one know what’s happened (or may still be going on in Gambia) and no one knows where Jammeh is currently located.

Gambia served for centuries as a Portuguese trading colony before it became a British protectorate in 1894. An overwhelmingly Muslim country, it won its independence from the United Kingdom in 1965, and it’s known just two leaders in that time — Dawfa Jawara, who ruled as prime minister or president from 1965 to 1994, and his successor, Jammeh, who ousted Jawara in a chiefly bloodless coup at the tender age of 29. What followed could hardly be called bloodless, however.

gambiamap

Since 1994, Jammeh’s record has been dotted with human rights violations that rank among some of the worst in sub-Saharan Africa, in marked contrast to the conciliatory approach Jawara deployed for the first three decades of post-independence Gambia. Though Jammeh (pictured above earlier this year with US president Barack Obama) might not rise to the level of abuse reserved for butchers like former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, former Liberian president Charles Taylor or former CAR president Jean-Bédel Bokassa, he must certainly rank high on the list of Africa’s most brutal leaders today, earning international scorn for his approach to the death penalty, press freedom and LGBT rights, in particular: Continue reading Who is Yahya Jammeh? A look at Gambia’s erratic dictator.

As Sirleaf pushes for more power, could Ebola victimize Liberian democracy?

Photo credit to Yazzer al-Zayyat / Getty Images.

If there’s a silver lining to the current Ebola epidemic sweeping through Liberia and Sierra Leone, it’s that it’s happening in 2014 and not in 2000, when the two countries were embroiled in devastating civil wars, complete with civilian deaths and the use of child soldiers.liberia

But since March, when the Ebola virus first traveled from Guinea to northwestern Liberia and especially since June, when the first Ebola cases arrived in the capital city of Monrovia, Liberia has increasingly been stuck in the kind of siege mentality that residents though they’d left behind with the end of the civil war in 2002.

Many of Liberia’s nearly 4.1 million residents have been subject to a nighttime curfew from 9 p.m. to 8 a.m. Liberian children are no longer attending school, business and hospitals are not functioning at capacity, and mass transit is reduced to a trickle. Some reports add that robberies are on the rise, in part because of the curfew.

Out of over 8,000 reported cases of Ebola infection (as of October 5), just over 3,900 come from Liberia, which has also reported 2,210 of 3,866 total reported deaths from Ebola. Those numbers don’t include many unreported cases of Ebola infection, and the US Centers for Disease Control estimates that the number of reported cases in both Liberia and Sierra Leone could reach 550,000 by January (or up to 1.4 million, including underreported cases).

* * * * *

RELATED: West Africa’s Ebola epidemic is as much
a crisis of governance as health

* * * * *

The only person to inadvertently enter the United States with Ebola (so far) was  a Liberia — 42-year-old Thomas Eric Duncan, who died in a Dallas hospital on Wednesday morning after flying to Texas from Monrovia late last month. Liberia will be the chief battleground for a US military force of up to 4,000 troops, who will attempt to ameliorate some of the bottlenecks in getting food and medical supplies to health care workers throughout the country.

monrovia2014Photo credit to Pascal Guyot / AFP.

The socioeconomic costs of the Ebola epidemic are, unsurprisingly, rising sharply. The World Bank yesterday reported that the impact to Liberia’s economy in 2014 could amount to $66 million (3.4% of GDP) and between $113 million and $234 million (5.8% to 12%) in 2015. Liberia imports much of its food, and prices for food are rising higher as fewer shipments are delivered to ports as Ebola infections increase. With a GDP per capita of between $450 and $475, Liberians hardly have a margin for much higher prices.

In the meanwhile, with many hospitals closed, due to lack of equipment to handle potential Ebola victims, or simply due to fear, everyday illnesses common to the region are being left untreated, including everything from routine pregnancies to malaria, which manifests similar symptoms to Ebola and which peaks in September and October.

That’s led to increasing efforts by Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to assert control over a country that’s had a functional government for less than a decade. She declared a national emergency in August, and earlier this week, she called for constitutional revisions that would give the Liberian executive vastly greater powers: Continue reading As Sirleaf pushes for more power, could Ebola victimize Liberian democracy?

West Africa’s Ebola epidemic is as much a crisis of governance as health


It’s a fluke of random nature that the fearsome Ebola virus is endemic to some of the poorest and least governable countries in the world. sierra leone flagliberiaguinea

But unlike in central Africa, where previous outbreaks were controlled through limited mobility of local populations, the current outbreak, centered in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, is afflicting a corner of the world that features far greater travel.

So while central African countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo are hardly equipped to deal with modern epidemics, the epidemiological limitations of prior Ebola outbreaks haven’t always required the kind of national mobilization that’s now necessary to bring the west African outbreak under control. Though all three west African countries have worked to build governing institutions, they are all barely a decade removed from some of the most fearsome civil wars in recent African history. That’s left all three countries with populations loathe to trust public health officials, making the Ebola outbreak west Africa’s most difficult governance  crisis since the end of its civil wars in the early 2000s.

guinea-liberia-sierra-leone-2014-current

Though the three countries in the middle of the current crisis are relatively small, the news that Ebola has now travelled to Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, via a US citizen no less, has raised concerns that Ebola could also spread even farther. Though the Nigerian government’s rapid response in quarantining and monitoring those exposed to Ebola was impressive, there are already worries that Ebola has crossed the border into Mali, where the government is still battling to unite the country after a disabling civil war with northern Tuareg separatists (and an influx of international Islamist jihadists).

The outbreak is already, by far, the deadliest in history, infecting 1,201 and killing 672, as of July 25, according to the World Health Organization. in the three countries since the first case was reported in Guinea in February.

So what exactly are the political and historical backgrounds of the three countries in the maelstrom of the current Ebola outbreak? And how equipped are they to handle a full-blown epidemic?

Continue reading West Africa’s Ebola epidemic is as much a crisis of governance as health