Pan-African reflections
By Gamal Nkrumah
Recent days have prompted a positive take, albeit a qualified one, on African multi-party democracy. Sunday's general election in Mali was succeeded by Zimbabwe's presidential poll on Wednesday.
The pivotal question on everyone's mind is: "Must Africans continue mimicking the Western-style democratic system?"
I want to give two cheers to the 89-year-old Zimbabwean incumbent President Robert Mugabe for his sheer tenacity and political acumen. There is no doubt that his people respect him, and that many throughout southern Africa wish they had a leader of his calibre. The long disadvantaged indigenous Africans have had a raw deal throughout the region. Mugabe personifies African aspirations.
Yet, voter registration problems persist throughout the continent. I lived and worked in Zimbabwe for four years: 1986-90. Those years were some of my most memorable and the experience introduced me to a most intriguing part of our beloved continent.
People's willingness to turn out and vote in the bitterly cold Zimbabwean winter speaks volumes of their faith in the democratic process and also their approval of Mugabe. Obviously, preliminary results took the Zimbabwean opposition by surprise. Speaking at the headquarters of his Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), a dejected Morgan Tsvangirai, the Zimbabwean prime minister, said Wednesday's vote should be considered invalid because of polling day irregularities and vote-rigging by 89-year-old Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party. He described the poll as a "huge farce".
I have known Tsvangirai personally during my sojourn in Zimbabwe when he was a human rights activist and a trade unionist leader. "In our view, that election is null and void," an embittered Tsvangirai told reporters in Harare. He did not take questions, and left inquisitive journalists in limbo as he declined to indicate whether he or his party would mount any kind of legal challenge. This is another bad sign for Zimbabwean, and African democracy. The phenomenon of "bad losers" is both distasteful and counterproductive. The venom it generates is palpable.
I had also known President Mugabe personally. His then wife, Sally, a Ghanaian-born brave lady who had endured much suffering in the Chimurenga, or Zimbabwean war of liberation, lost her children – a calamity few mothers willingly withstand. I know that she never fully recovered from that most agonising of blows. Her dignity and love never ceased to impress me.
In those days she was a gracious hostess. She recalled how the couple got married in Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana. She was a young pioneer, and he was a student at the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute, Winneba. I remember having breakfast with the Mugabes in Zimbabwe and when the then Zimbabwean first lady visited Egypt, she always called on my mother, Fathia Nkrumah, and we paid her a courtesy call together.
For me, the most striking aspect of Mugabe was how little he ate. I was mesmerised by the way he picked at his food. He is a Jesuit, and I believe that is the key to his spartan personality.
A devout Roman Catholic and a dedicated Marxist makes for meticulous prudence. Tsvangirai, in sharp contrast, loved his food. The conflicting claims from the competing camps came before Zimbabwe's Electoral Commission had issued any official results.
There has, for some time now, been a sharp disconnect between dominant Western perceptions of Mugabe and how the Zimbabwean president is viewed within his own country. In Zimbabwe, Mugabe is a hero who returned the land to his people, land that was forcibly stolen from the indigenous Africans.
Mugabe had the perfect riposte to the vexing land question: "The black land grab". For this reason, ZANU-PF's ratings, not surprisingly, have not been dropping. Tsvangirai's MDC, on the other hand, has been fast losing its shaky credibility with many of its former supporters moving to political indifference or even support for Mugabe's ZANU-PF.
Mali is a different kettle of fish. Provisional results suggested that former Malian prime minister Ibrahim Boubacar Keita secured 39.24 per cent of the vote in Mali's July 28 poll, well ahead of ex-finance minister Soumaila Cisse on 19.44 per cent. I must say that I know neither man on a personal basis. What I do understand is that Mali's Constitutional Court must confirm the provisional results before the second round vote can go ahead on August 11.
The announcement of a run-off should ease tensions that have risen since Tuesday when partial results gave Keita a large lead, putting him on track for an outright victory in one round. What is pertinent here is how wasteful the whole democratic process in Africa is.
Can impoverished and underdeveloped African countries afford democracy? Yet, the politicians the African electorate vote for push through pivotal public policies. Mali's Cisse angrily announced that he would reject the election result if there were no second round of voting. In much of Africa, democratic or not, corruption has become the main instrument of governance.
Nevertheless, there is no escaping the fact that Africans have taken an insatiable liking for the ballot box. Africans have placed too much faith in Western-style democracy and political pluralism. A record 51.54 per cent of registered voters participated in the high-stakes ballot, which is meant to give the West African nation a fresh start after 18 months of political turmoil and civil war. In Mali, a predominantly Muslim nation, Islamists and the fight against terrorism and separatist insurrection in the northern arid reaches of the sprawling Saharan and Sahelian nation is the dominant political animus.
Western-style democracy does have the potential, alas, to precipitate the kind of conflicts that disfigured the continent in the past. Still, the case for keeping the show of democracy and political pluralism on the road seems rather robust in our beloved Africa.
* This article written as part of Nkrumah's Pan-African Reflections with Gamal Nkrumah column was culled from Daily Graphic/graphic.com/Ghana.
http://graphic.com.gh/features/soldier-on-sham-shows.html