223 - Does Democracy Still Work?
Is democracy outdated, at least in the greater world beyond Europe and North America? Autocrats like Hungary’s President Viktor Orban have championed “illiberal” democracy and dictators such as China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Putin have long said and acted as sole arbiters within their countries because, they claim, one-man rule gets the job done better than democracy -- a messy ideology that is inefficient and harmful to the interests of a leading political party force or to those who “know best” and who operate on behalf of a less well informed citizenry. Trump spouts equally corrosive ideas. Now a leading statesman from Africa, Nigeria’s former President Olusegun Obasanjo, has advanced similar notions, speaking for the Global South and for those outside the hegemonic West.
Talking at a conference in Abeokuta, his home town in the southern part of his country, Obasanjo said that “Western liberal democracy has never worked as a system of government in Africa.” It was, he said “forced” on Africans by their (wicked) colonial masters and never took account of the views of the majority of the people upon whom democracy was thrust. “African countries have no business operating a system of government in which they [had] no hands in its definition and design.”
These criticisms have doubtless been welcomed by Xi and Putin, by Orban, by fellow autocrats like Turkey’s Recep Tayipp Erdogan, Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and Tunisia’s Kais Saied, and by military coup-makers and kleptocratic leaders in Africa like Zimbabwe’s President Emmerson Mnangagwa. But, as Ebenezer Obadare, a Nigerian, wrote so wisely last week in the Council on Foreign Relations Africa Transitions blog, “The purported incompatibility of Western liberal democracy with African cultural conditions rests on certain unproven assumptions about African culture; one, that there is a cogent, stable, and essentially timeless ‘African culture’ to speak of; second, that its basic alterity is such that one may rightly expect what works elsewhere not to work for Africans. Third, it is assumed that, being ‘indigenous,’ this culture is thereby superior to Western liberal democracy with its ‘alien’ precepts.”
Obadare also concludes “By reducing liberal representative democracy to a property of the ‘West,’ champions of Afro-democracy simultaneously gloss over the success of liberal representative democracy in various societies and cultural contexts outside the geographic West, and overlook the hard-won progress recorded across Africa. Emerging out of the political ruins of prolonged military rule and endemic authoritarianism, a growing number of African countries have overcome sluggish starts and defied the worst prophecies of doom to institute systems where orderly transition of power is the accepted norm.”
Obasanjo, a general who helped provide fair and sensible governance to Nigeria in 1999 to 2007 after years of military overrule from 1975, by echoing Orban hardly represents the experience of Africa (and by extension the entire Global South) in post-colonial times. Indeed, in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, the founding liberation leaders of one African colony after another demanded what their colonial masters had purported to keep from them – representative democracy. That included elections, freedoms to assemble and to express their opinions, a free media, and, in sum, the ”voice” that the colonialists had prevented them (Western-educated, Western-inculcated, and in the Belgian and French colonies, “evolved”) from having as their own.
Obasanjo is right to point to some of democracy’s Western and northern origins in terms of the Greek demos and British, French, and American post-Enlightenment models, especially as forged in the crucible of the American and French revolutions. But he neglects to discuss (as Obadare hints) the Indigenous democratic practices that in many modalities existed in pre-colonial Africa, even in the monarchical fourteenth century monarchy of Mansa Musa or the Kongolese kingdoms visited by Portuguese voyagers in the fifteenth century. In that same century, massive Chinese fleets visited East Africa and found pluralistic city-states run by chieftains responsive to their peoples.
Of equal importance, several more modern African societies practiced liberal forms of governance that were forerunners of democracy: Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and possibly several of what became Francophone colonies each harbored pluralistic cultures whose practices gave “voice” to their members. They rarely conducted what we now call “elections,” but observed transparency and accountability, holding chiefs and kings responsible for the ways in which they ran their principalities.
Moreover, in the twentieth century a host of African countries (as elsewhere in the Global South) perfected and made fully their own the “liberal democracy” against which Obasanjo now rails. Botswana has been a thoroughly democratic society since independence from Britain in 1966, with impressive economic results (consistently the best on the continent), limited corruption, and lots of “voice.” Zambia has had its ups and downs, but reclaimed democracy with the election of President Hakainde Hichilema in 2021. Kenya and Tanzania have had some rough years, also, but freedom of expression now prevails and helps keep both East African countries functioning on behalf of their inhabitants.
Elsewhere in Africa, as in parts of the post-colonial Caribbean, Asia, and Oceania there is abundant democracy, quasi-democracy, and places that were once fully “free,” and now only “partly” free, or fully unfree, loosely to use the terminology of Freedom House, a New York nongovernmental organization. But to follow Obasanjo’s reasoning and transition to forms of “illiberal” democracy or outright autocracy would take Africa and the Global South strikingly backward. Moreover, that is less my view than it is the view of Africans, Asians, Caribbeans, and the rest who decidedly (and over and over) want more of what Obasanjo calls the colonial instrument “thrust” upon Africa.
None want less. None, even some of the aggrieved and disenchanted youth to whom Obadare refers, want their lives to be run permanently by self-satisfied young corporals or colonels who overthrow elected and much more responsive governments. Everywhere, the bourgeoisie and the recent secondary school graduates want the chances to succeed and prosper, and to criticize, that only democracy permits. As Botswana exemplifies so well, the best governance and the longest-lived continuous democracy on the African continent has produced the best economic, social, political, educational, and health results, as well high marks for “happiness.” If only giant Nigeria were more like little Botswana!