Ethiopia's Election Results and the Myths of African Democracy

Ethiopia's Election Results and the Myths of
African Democracy

24 June, 2010 | By MG Zimeta
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This week, the results of the

recent Ethiopian general

election were

confirmed

. The

Ethiopian People's

Revolutionary Democratic

Front (EPRDF), the

incumbent government

whose leader Meles Zenawi

has been prime minister for

twenty years, have claimed a

landslide win that is neither

revolutionary nor, allegedly, entirely democratic: 90 percent of
parliamentary seats have gone to the EPRDF, 9.6 percent of seats to the
EPRDF's affiliates, one seat to an independent candidate who is the
recently deposed head of the Ethiopian Football Federation, and one seat
- or 0.2 percent of the House of Representatives - to the opposition
party.

The news comes shortly after the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, the
philanthropic foundation behind the multi-million dollar Ibrahim Prize for
good governance in Africa, announced that it would not be awarding
the prize to Ethiopia for the second year running.

This sad succession of events reinforces that wearying myth that "this
is Africa," or "TIA" for short. But a myth is supposed to be a story that
is familiar though not necessarily true. And the danger with the storyline
of the TIA myth is that it can create what psychologist Martin Seligman
has called "learned helplessness": the depressing and incapacitating belief
that whatever action one takes, a bad situation won't be improved. With
a grim forecast like this, there is nothing to lose by re-examining the
central elements of the TIA story to see which can be replaced with
some timely truths.

Perhaps the most salient part of the TIA myth is the idea that leadership
elections in Africa are always hopelessly rigged in favor of the dictator
of the day. At first glance, these Ethiopian elections seem to corroborate
this. But the results also tell a different story: rigged, yes; hopeless, no.
The 2005 elections were the EPRDF's first attempt at multi-party
democracy, and were monitored by Jimmy Carter and a UN mission of
election observers. When the EPRDF "win" was announced, those
elections concluded with anti-government riots, civilian shootings by
government forces, and opposition figures and civil society leaders
being imprisoned and charged with treason and genocide. In contrast,
the early indications from the 2010 election observers are that this
round of voting has been carefully stage-managed in advance to pre-
empt violence and internal protest later. This in itself is not, of course,
good news. Still, it points to the fact that while the EPRDF leadership
may not care for a working democracy, they do care about presenting
the appearance of legitimacy to look good internationally and to attract
foreign investment. In the face of another apparently rigged election,
then, political pressure, scrutiny, and protest should be intensified,
rather than abandoned. By encouraging a genuine democratic culture to
develop in countries like Ethiopia, the legitimacy of an incumbent
government would be strengthened. Opposition parties would also lose
the advantages of "martyr status" and would find themselves under
pressure to offer more than just an anti-government platform.

Another key element of the TIA myth is that political freedoms are
secondary to economic stability and growth: an undemocratic regime
can be tolerated in the interests of protecting a fledgling economy. This
is a line of argument favored by several aid agencies and incumbent
African governments. In Ethiopia the EPRDF attribute their extravagant
electoral popularity, and their popularity with overseas aid donors, to
their record of "double-digit economic growth." But what evidence is
there for this growth? The mainstay of Ethiopia's economy is the
agricultural sector which accounts for around half of Ethiopia's GDP.
The EPRDF reports that agricultural yield has gone up by 40 percent,
akin to Asia's "Green Revolution." But where Asia's Green Revolution
may have averted famine in India and Pakistan, Ethiopia's miracle
agricultural growth has led to no improvement in the standard of living,
according to the UN. And leading development economists have
commented that Ethiopia's agricultural growth figures are "somewhat
puzzling," as the increase in yield has occurred without any comparable
increase in fertilizer use, irrigation, seed variety, technology transfer, or
farmland area. This puzzle could easily be solved with a transparent and
accountable government, but the absence of political freedoms means
the economic situation cannot be effectively scrutinized.

Even if we assume the reported economic growth is real, is it enough?
In the 1880's, Otto von Bismarck, the "Iron Chancellor" and one of
Europe's great reformers, introduced the principles of social welfare for
the very poor. Bismarck's aim was not to create a welfare system that
would help the poor flourish. It was to ensure the poor were
sufficiently cared for to prevent a mass uprising, but also that they were
kept too weak to form a credible opposition. As long as political opacity
in Africa persists, there is no way of knowing if reported economic
growth is simply a way of keeping the large agricultural classes under
control while satisfying aid donors that some good is being done.
Moreover, as long as the policy priority is economic growth and not
political expression, the poor - in Africa and in the West - will always
appear to us as a two dimensional people without character or culture.

One possible solution that could offer the right balance between political
and economic progress is to change how development is measured. The
Capability Approach, developed by the Economics Nobel Laureate
Amartya Sen, encourages us to understand a meaningful human life as
one with the opportunity to develop a range of capabilities and to satisfy
a spectrum of personal and social needs. Under the Capability
Approach, for a country to report good development figures per capita,
economic prosperity must be accompanied by political and civic
opportunities, as well as cultural and personal freedoms. (A fuller
development index like this would also go some way to helping
governments and citizens in more affluent nations to critically assess the
quality of our own prosperity.)

The final core ingredient of the TIA myth is the message that the West
will co-operate with what Bill Clinton once called the "new breed" of
African leaders, at any price. The only requirement we effectively
impose on this new generation of leaders is that they are not as bad as
the "big men" leaders of the past. The problem with this position is that
it offers African leaders little incentive to improve their game.
Increasingly, the "new breed" is beginning to look like the old: Ethiopia's
Meles Zenawi, like Zimambwe's Robert Mugabe and Uganda's Yoweri
Museveni, is a former revolutionary. In view of this, the Mo Ibrahim
Foundation's decision this week to withhold its prize, rather than
reinforcing TIA fatalism, may actually be a declaration of hope: Africa
can do better.

The West's position of unqualified co-operation also has troubling
ramifications for African citizens. It risks creating a generation with low
expectations for what political and cultural involvement can achieve,
and who may be cynical about the political double standards of Western
democratic leaders. If younger Africans manage to escape the harsh
regimes of their homeland as migrants, then it is easy to see how such
cynicism would discourage assimilation in their new countries, leaving
them doubly disenfranchised and alienated. But if they stay in their
homeland, then it is difficult to see how such beliefs will inspire them to
become democratic leaders of tomorrow.

Under these circumstances, what began as a myth may become a reality
that can only reinforce learned helplessness. As the poet Geoffrey Hill
once wrote: "Against wild reasons of the state / his words are quiet, but
not too quiet. / We hear too late, or not too late."

Courtesy