African Elections Must Not Be ignored

            Elections play a significant part in the establishment and maintenance of representative democracy worldwide, but all too often, the entirety of the process of elections is neglected, which can result in electoral disasters that undermine the confidence that is necessary for democracy to be sustained.  Donors and international institutions seem to think if they make a great effort for one election, then not much else is required for continuing elections because the job of correcting errors is done once and for all.  This is yet another example of the cultural misunderstanding that undermines U.S. and other Western efforts to support democracy and economic development in Africa.

            Not only don’t Westerners realize that the African social and political environments aren’t the same as in North America, Europe or Australia, but government officials don’t even see the flaws in their own systems that are picked up by Africans who seek power at any cost like some in the West do.  The desperation to win elections is not confined to so-called African despots – it also can appear in the United States or Canada or the United Kingdom or anywhere else in the developed world, and bad lessons can be as easily learned as good ones are.  One bad lesson that doesn’t seem to be picked up thus far is the tendency to deny criticism of election processes.  When you dismiss the concerns of election losers, you frustrate those who sincerely believe they were cheated out of victory, including their supporters. This can lead to violence when voters feel the democratic process has failed them and that no other legitimate means of redress of their concerns is possible.  That has indeed taken place in African countries after disputed elections, but even here in America.

            The recent elections in Kenya are an example of a situation in which corrections to past electoral problems was believed to have been permanently achieved.  Cheating in elections is as old a phenomenon as elections themselves.  Of course, it was much harder long ago in Africa to miscount votes when voting was confined to a group of village elders comprising a council sitting under a tree.  However, bribery before the vote also constitutes vote tampering and undoubtedly occurred then and in other ancient societies, and let’s not fool ourselves – it happens in America and elsewhere even today.

            Kenya is an example of great efforts to safeguard the election process that was not maintained.  Apparently, donor nation officials thought that all had been straightened out and would never again go off the rails.  Well, they seem not to comprehend that each election is a phenomenon unto itself, involving social and political factors that evolve over time – or not.  Just because you make a grand effort in one election shouldn’t mean you let succeeding elections unfold without sufficient attention or assistance if required.  Western-style representative democracy is not native to African countries, many of whom have been independent of colonial rule for a few decades at most and may remain under the subtle influence of neocolonial efforts.  Just like corruption in Africa, election rigging isn’t only the province of Africans, but also those outsiders who stand to gain from their desired officials attaining or remaining in office.

            The U.S. government, like other Western governments, can respond to election-related crises in Africa, such as the 2007 election aftermath in Kenya, in which more than 1,100 people were killed and more than 500,000 were displaced in violence sparked by the belief that the election had been stolen.  What began as tensions between the political opposition and the ruling Kenya African National Union (KANU) became ethnic exclusion from certain zones – supposedly to clean certain geographical zones of opposition elements, but it soon became clear that there was a serious ethnic agenda.  People join and leave political parties, which is an artificial construct; they cannot leave their group of origin.  Ethnic conflict can become exceedingly ugly and destructive.

            In 2013, following a new constitution approved in a 2010 referendum and under the supervision of the new Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC), the next elections were held.  Originally scheduled for August 2012, the High Court ruled that elections should be postponed until 2013.  As it happened, tribal conflict in August 2012 led to the highest death toll through deliberate killings since the previous election. To prevent another 2007 election aftermath following the next election, donors rolled out multilevel programming to safeguard the organization, the implementation of elections and the counting of ballots.  The International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI) collaborated on a wide-ranging program managed by John Tomaszewski for IRI and Dickson Omondi for NDI (caveat: I worked for IRI and with NDI at various periods).  I was on a Congressional staff oversight mission before this election and was impressed with their program, which used various media, including comic books and radio programming, to promote peace building, women’s political empowerment, youth and marginalized persons involvement and various electoral reforms.

            Nevertheless, given the 8,000-vote margin that just avoided a runoff election, losing candidate Raila Odinga’s coalition and a group of civil society organizations challenged the announced results before the Kenyan Supreme Court, citing the slim margin, serious technical problems with election administration and the failure of the electronic transmission system for reporting provisional results.  The court rejected the challenges and upheld the results as announced by the IEBC.  Odinga urged his followers to accept the court decision and not resort to violence, even as he continued to raise questions about the fairness of the Election Day process.

            The IRI-NDI preliminary election report for the 2022 elections was a mixed review:

            “There have been notable positive elements of the process— a more peaceful pre-election period and improved candidate nomination process, and an increase in
women candidates. On Election Day, voters were able to cast ballots for candidates of their choice in a generally orderly and peaceful process. The elections have not been without challenges, particularly concerns about last minute changes to Election Day procedures, and about the security and timeliness of the transmission and announcement of results. These challenges could exacerbate pre-existing trust deficits and threaten confidence in the process,” the report stated.

            Indeed, there have been concerns about election rigging in Kenya since its first post-independence elections.  That largely is because many Kenyan politicians see elections as a zero-sum game: all for my group and none for yours.  It isn’t just the leaders who promote this view; it’s also their kinsmen. In the run-up to one of the Kenyan elections in the 1990s, an Easterner told me that it was time to end Kikuyu political dominance. “It’s our time to cut the national cake,” he told me.

The concept of mixed government is not common, but rather is sometimes forced on Kenyan and other African governments by donors seeking to help everyone get along.  However, that remedy is unrealistic, and I continue to wish Westerners would put themselves in the positions they require Africans to inhabit.  Would the Democrat presidential winner appoint his Republican opponent as a high-ranking official in his government?  Of course not.  What you would get is what African so often find themselves facing, which is a divided government in the worst sense where your success denies me opportunities in the next election.  If you look good in your job, the credit goes to you and not the government.

This imperative to maintain political power is what makes politicians in African countries so determined to use whatever tactics they can to win or hold onto office.  That could mean limiting voter registration in opposition constituencies leading up to elections, drawing constituency boundaries in an unfair manner, failing to provide sufficient electoral materials before voting, neglecting security for voters and making them subject to violence on the way to vote, manipulating the vote count or designing post-election reviews to favor the ruling party.  All these tactics have been tried and have succeeded in various elections.  There is an ongoing process to preparing for, conducting and concluding elections.  If that process is not properly monitored, you run into problems that will manifest themselves as ruined elections.  Aside from necessary run-off elections, who has the money to continue to re-run challenged elections?  Additionally, how many voters want to cast ballots multiple times?  Thus, it is best to get it right the first time.

There is something to be said in favor of using technology to make elections more efficient, but it comes with its own challenges.  There is such a thing as too fancy a process.  Odinga is challenging the current election for alleged hacking of the computer system registering votes.  Donors have pushed African electoral bodies to implement biometric systems that can more certainly identify voters and linked computer systems that can speed up the counting of ballots, but as Odinga’s election challenge demonstrates, there are usually suspicions of computer manipulation of some kind.  I witnessed such charges during the aftermath of the 1992 Angolan elections, and we have seen that even in American elections. 

In the days when there were paper ballots to be counted, the knock on that was that you could just substitute ballots after voting.  True though that has been, I always taught the African election observers I trained to mind the numbers on the ballots.  They must be within a certain numerical range and should not total more than the number of registered voters for that polling place, except for election officials and security personnel allowed to vote there.  A popular trick when I was teaching observation techniques and observing elections was to transpose numbers reported to headquarters.  For example, if you change 560 votes to 650 votes often enough, you may pick up enough phantom votes to win without creating significant alarms if observers aren’t paying sufficient attention to the process.

Elections in a country like Kenya are too important beyond its borders to ignore warning signs that could lead to trouble.  Kenya’s influence in the East African region is often looked at largely from its contribution to peaceful referendum in South Sudan. Having led the regional Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) peace process that yielded the Comprehensive Peace Accord, Kenya has a particularly strong interest in the South Sudan. But Kenya’s regional importance extends beyond that.  The stability of Kenya is vital for economic development in South Sudan and the Republic of Sudan. Kenya is the economic powerhouse to the East Africa Community and provides human resource, technical skills, as well as several other governance assistances, particularly to the South Sudan. The 2007 post-election violence caused the demolition of the Kenya-Uganda railway line in Kibera in Kenya’s city of Nairobi, which significantly disrupted regional trade. Above all, as the economic powerhouse in the region, it is the fulcrum of regional transportation and commercial expectations, such as being part of the conduit for South Sudanese oil.

So, I heartily recommend that if donors think elections on the continent still matter, then they must act like it to help African election officials, political parties and voters aware of how the electoral process is going at regular intervals.  I wish I could be assured that this will happen, but as I write this, another important Africa election just took place without much noticeable attention – this time in Angola.  Just prior to the Angolan elections, IRI’s Jenai Cox and Mike Brodo wrote in The Hill newspaper that the Angolan elections were expected to be the most competitive in the country’s post-independence history, which has been dominated by the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA).

“Frustrations with incumbent President João Lourenço’s handling of key concerns such as the economic downturn and high levels of corruption have driven support for the newly-formed, (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) UNITA-led opposition coalition, the United Patriotic Front (FPU) — particularly among youth. The MPLA has responded to this development by using its parliamentary supermajority to pass new electoral legislation that will significantly undermine electoral transparency and integrity,” they stated.

Prior to voting, there were widespread predictions that the ruling MPLA could lose.  In the post-civil war 1992 Angolan elections, pre-balloting predictions that UNITA’s leader – the late Jonas Savimbi – would become president led to his decision to return to war when he didn’t win.  Preliminary results this time indicate MPLA has held onto power.  Presumably without Savimbi’s expectations of victory, whatever the outcome, Angola – a diamond and oil wealth nation – won’t again return to conflict.  Yet such concerns should have been accounted for during the preparations for these elections.  I cannot detail what resources were devoted to election preparations in Angola, but we can be assured that it was nowhere near what was devoted to the 2013 elections in Kenya.

In the next year, there are more vital African elections on the schedule, none bigger than the 2023 elections in Nigeria.  After years of accepting poor governance results there for fear of causing more regional disruption, it is clear that human and civil rights in Nigeria must now be the focus of donor policies.  The next Nigerian government must surely do better to protect its people, including Christians and non-extremist Muslims who have been targets of vicious attacks by those who want to wipe them out or convert them.  Nigeria is an oil-rich nation with Africa’s largest population and significant resource potential that isn’t currently being tapped.  The Boko Haram and splinter group phenomenon that started in Nigeria has spread to Niger, Chad and Cameroon.  The collapse of Nigeria would be a disaster for the West Africa region and indeed the entire continent.

The future of Africa and its impact on the rest of the world is often decided at ballot boxes across the continent.  African electoral processes are too important to too many people to ignore.  This is a pot that must be watched to prevent it from boiling over into violence and leading to ongoing misrule.  It is not just an African concern.