President dos Santos - handover to successor sure to create political battles at the top

Watching Angolan politics involves holding a large magnifying glass to details that in another country would not be worthy of mention. A few hundred protesters calling for change at the top? A leader hinting that he might just step down in 2017? Party bigwigs whispering to journalists that they disagree with the leader’s preferred successor? These become significant only when you consider that President José Eduardo dos Santos has been in office since 1979, and that a few years ago the only demonstrations that were tolerated on the streets of Luanda were those that supported the government.

So when a rapper known as Brigadeiro Mata Frakus took to the stage in February with the words “Tio Zé, tira o pé, teu prazo expirou há bwé!”(Uncle Zé [Dos Santos], take a walk, your time was up long ago!,) it was hard to believe this was the Angola we thought we knew.  Social networking sites were soon announcing a demonstration for 7 March in Luanda’s Largo Primeiro de Maio (1^st of May Square). The organisers were swiftly arrested. But demonstrators regrouped in May, highlighting poverty and commemorating the anniversary of an unsuccessful anti-government uprising in 1977, an incident that for decades was a taboo subject in Angola. Primeiro de Maio was dubbed “our Tahrir Square”, even if the crowds of 200 or so were hardly Egyptian in size. September saw several hundred people attend more demonstrations to mark the 32^nd anniversary of Dos Santos’s presidency. The arrest of demonstrators sparked more protests until those detained were released on the orders of the Supreme Court. Early in December several hundred youths were again confronted by mounted police as they tried to march into central Luanda.

Responses from the government, the ruling MPLA and the state media have been predictable: the demonstrations were trying “to return the country to civil war” or simply “criminal”, or orchestrated by foreigners who wanted to re-colonise Angola in order to exploit its riches. The MPLA bussed people to loyalist counter-demonstrations. The Luanda Provincial Government announced a ban on protests in the city centre, but this did not stop demonstrations from going ahead anyway.

No one in government or at the top of the MPLA is acknowledging that the protests are justified, or even legitimate. But there are signs that the loudest grievance on the streets, namely Dos Santos’s long tenure, has been noted. Anonymous MPLA sources have told the Angolan press that Dos Santos has floated the possibility of his resignation. That is remarkable enough. Internal MPLA elections have long been conducted by a show of hands, a practice that has discouraged, to put it gently, any independent challenge to the leadership.

What has caused consternation in the MPLA’s top ranks, however, is Dos Santos’s preference as successor: Manuel Vicente, chief executive of the state oil company, Sonangol. Vicente has no background either in the army or in active politics: this doesn’t play well among a party elite for whom memories of the anti-colonial struggle and the embattled days of the civil war still count for a lot. The MPLA’s role in relation to government has changed. In the one-party days of the 1970s and 1980s it was an instrument of political participation, albeit an authoritarian one. Since the advent of multiparty democracy, the MPLA’s role has become one of cheerleader for a political order in which decisions – particularly concerning the channelling of public money – have been taken by Dos Santos’s inner circle. MPLA old-timers cannot be blamed if they see Vicente as the embodiment of this tendency.  Vicente has won praise for his businesslike management of Sonangol’s dealings with foreign investors. But Angolans are also aware of investigations that have revealed Sonangol’s role in the diversion of billions of dollars worth of oil revenue. The MPLA knows that if the protests have exposed Dos Santos as a liability to the party, then replacing him with Vicente will not make things easier. Vicente’s opponents have already floated the names of former MPLA secretary general João Lourenço and territorial administration minister Bornito de Sousa as future president.

Dos Santos’s constitutional position has been shaky since 1992, when he missed an outright majority in the first elections, but a rapid return to civil war ruled out the completion of the electoral process. Since then, his hold over the party has allowed him to dictate the pace of change. Parliamentary elections took place only in 2008, six years after the war ended. Presidential elections were expected to follow within a year or two, but instead the MPLA used its increased majority to endorse a new constitution that does away with a directly elected president, and instead awards the presidency to the person who heads the list of candidates in the parliamentary election.

The first elections under the new constitution are expected in September 2012. No matter whom it fields as a candidate, the MPLA will continue to win elections for a generation. Protests have been in Luanda only. In the provinces, which suffered the worst of the war, the MPLA is better able to sell itself as the party of peace and reconstruction. That strategy brought the party 81% of the vote in 2008 and cut the votes for former rebel movement, UNITA, down to 10%. No other party managed more than 4%.

So any change will have to start inside the MPLA. There’s no chance of anyone other than Dos Santos heading the party list for the 2012 election, but it will be worth watching who will be in the vice-presidential spot on the list. If Dos Santos manages to push through his first choice of Manuel Vicente, expect five years of unprecedented discord at the top of the party.  If it’s anyone else, it means that the party has already wriggled out of the headlock in which the president has held it for decades. After 20 years of multiparty democracy (in theory, anyway) and 10 years of peace, 2012 could finally be the year that things get interesting.

Justin Pearce – ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Oriental and African Studies

Pedro Pires - former President of Cape Verde and winner of the 2011 Mo Ibrahim Prize for African Leadership

For more from Mike visit his blog

Former president of  Cape Verde, Pedro Pires, has won the 2011 Mo Ibrahim African Leadership Prize. The prize is given to African leaders who have voluntarily stepped down from power, and who have demonstrated a commitment to good governance.

Pires joins former presidents of Mozambique and Botswana, Joaquim Chissano and Festus Mogae, in receiving the award, worth $5 million with an additional £200,000 each year for the rest of their lives.

Pires, like Chissano and Mogae, is a worthy recipient of the award, with Cape Verde having experienced not just sound economic growth (having recently joined Botswana in being considered a ‘middle income country’), but also a twenty year record of a multi-party democracy which has resulted in changes of ruling party (which despite the recent victory by Michael Sata in the Zambian elections, remains a rarity on the continent).

An award to celebrate examples of good leadership is a good counter to those who portray governments and leaders in Africa as unremittingly awful. But as I argued in 2008, in a comment piece for the Royal African Society on the award of the Leadership Prize to Chissano: “The notion that good leadership can be encouraged through rewards such as … the lure of hard cash and a prize seems rather weak.”

At the time, I saw three issues with the nature of the prize. Firstly, whether it could, as a tool, help improve governance in Africa. The prize money is not sufficiently rewarding to counter the gains to be made from plundering the public purse, nor is it sufficiently prestigious to offer international cachet and standing to tempt the less good onto the path of honour. Secondly, the focus on leadership ignores the constraints (domestic but especially international) on effective governance. And finally, I questioned the underlying message that the prize sent out: is it patronising to suggest that good leadership should be rewarded, rather than expected?

Have I changed my mind? Not awarding the prize in 2009 or 2010 was an important statement, ensuring it did not become seen as rewarding the best of a bad bunch, and suggesting a minimum threshold of expectation for what good leadership should look like. Moreover, it is becoming increasingly prestigious, with the announcement of the award receiving considerable media attention. Is it patronising? I’m not so sure on this any more. If the standards are rigorously applied – and the panel making the decision contains those who few would quibble over their example of leadership – and the prize is seen to go to an individual who can genuinely claim to have made a difference (i.e. it doesn’t reward just good leadership – someone who has done what any president or prime-minister should do as part of their job – but exceptional leadership), then it has merit.

Moreover, even the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded this year to Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (surely a future contender for the Mo Ibrahim prize), Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee, and Yemen activist Tawakul Karman, has not been without its own share of controversy. The award to Barak Obama, on the strength of his commitments made in speeches rather than direct action at the time, looked more like a political comment on his predecessor than a genuine recognition of outstanding work towards peace and reconciliation.

But the point that the focus on a single person underplays wider constraints on effective good governance remains salient, I think. Not only does it give such prominence to a single individual, rather than recognising governance as resting upon multiple systems and layers of institutions and individuals; it also diverts attention from both a criticism of how ‘good governance’ is understood as a concept, and how international policies and processes of globalisation place limits and constraints on what any individual government can do. This is not necessarily the fault of the prize, but the prize has become the lens through which much of the media discusses and presents African leadership and governance.

The concept of good governance appears at first sight rather obvious and non-controversial. Who wouldn’t agree that tackling corruption, enabling political debate and opposition, transparency and rule of law are good things. But look more closely at how donors define good governance, and it becomes clear that ‘good governance’ is governance that supports free markets, open competition, and opportunities for foreign investment. These may not be bad things, but they are certainly not politically neutral. For many critics, good governance is part of the package of reforms to buttress neo-liberalism.

Furthermore, international trade laws and policies, reliance on donor funding, lack of real power on the global stage mean that opportunities for using government and governance as a tool for pursuing a radical alternative is limited (and even if recognised by international prizes, would not be welcomed by those who wield international clout).

So I have changed my mind, to some extent, at least. It has become more prestigious than I thought it would or could. It has not settled on second-best candidates but has had the strength to withhold the prize when no suitable person exists. In doing so, it has sought to recognise exceptional leadership – those who would be considered good leaders whichever country they happened to be leaders in. But – and it is a big but – there is a question about the underlying understanding of what good governance is and looks like. It does still contribute to a picture of African exceptionalism (even if this is not the intention of the prize, but the reaction to it). And it allows the rich world off the hook in its implicit assertion that good leadership rests upon leaders alone, not the contexts in which they seek to lead.

Mike Jennings is  Senior Lecturer in Development Studies at SOAS

This piece was originally published on Mike’s blog http://mikejennings101.wordpress.com/

Michael Sata - Zambia's newly-elected President speaks to supporters

The Result

Shortly after 12 am local time on the 23rd of September 2011, the Electoral Commission of Zambia announced the results of this year’s tri-partite elections on ZNBC, the national broadcaster. In the presidential race, the results given were 1150045 (42%) to the leader of the opposition party, Michael Sata of the PF, and 961796 (36.1%) to the incumbent, Rupiah Banda of the MMD. Sata was announced the winner with seven constituencies outstanding. UPND showed strongly in Southern Province, as expected, although were pipped to the post by the MMD in Livingstone by only two votes.

The final parliamentary results were announced on Sunday 25th of September. Of 148 contested seats, the PF won 60 (40.1%), with the MMD a close second with 55 (37.2%), leaving UPND trailing with 28. Of the remaining 5 seats, three were taken by independents, and one apiece went to the Forum for Democracy and Development (FDD) and the Alliance for Democracy and Development (ADD). 11% of MPs will be women, somewhat below the average of around 15% in sub-Saharan Africa generally and vastly below Rwanda’s level of female representation in parliament, currently at over 50%. But then Britain, that paragon of parliamentary virtue, boasts less that 25%. The PF now faces a difficult problem. Holding only a 5 seat majority over the MMD, the UPND is strongly placed to negotiate a deal with the new ruling party. Hakainde Hichilema (leader of the UPND) like Nkumbula before him may find himself a major player in the new dispensation.

Most informed observers, including the Economist Intelligence Unit, forecast an MMD presidential win, with a possible PF parliamentary majority. Likewise, Neo Simutanyi’s polls (from the Zambian ‘Center for Policy Dialogue’) proved to be well off the mark. The PF  benefitted from the registration of 1,279,181 new voters, many of them young (out of a total electorate of 5,223,316), and a high turnout (around 60% or above) in Central, Northern, Luapula Provinces and on the Copperbelt, Sata’s traditional urban and ethnic strongholds, whose electorate dominate those of the remaining five provinces in sheer weight of numbers. Unlike the previous general election in 2006, this year the PF fielded candidates in every constituency, so undoubtedly garnered some votes in areas outside his strongholds, in rural areas where the MMD was expected to totally dominate.

Whilst it is perhaps a little hagiographic to claim, as one politico-cum-biographer of Sata has, that “Sata bestrides both government and independent media imperiously”, the support given to the PF campaign by The Post newspaper, Zambia’s only independent daily, and the airtime provided by Zambia’s growing number of independent local radio stations, undoubtedly provided a platform which would otherwise have been denied by public, or rather, government controlled media. This platform has allowed Sata to articulate his own brand of demagogy. Building upon ethno-populist appeals to his traditional constituency, coupled with political sniping and coup counting at a national level, Sata has also carefully played on local agendas, promising carefully targeted development and infrastructure projects in areas where previously the PF has had little support.

Elections are both won and lost, and Banda’s inability to control the MDD certainly contributed to his loss. Defections of major MMD players to the PF damaged both their image and control of former strongholds, gaining the PF much needed ground.  As disparities in wealth become ever more visible in Zambia, resentment at the unequal distribution of the benefits of privatisation grows and, as the party which presided over this, the MMD is held responsible. There is no one to point the finger at if you’ve always been the ones in charge, and Sata capitalised on this fact.

The Elections

Certain things are ubiquitous during elections, and often the most evocative of the mood are party slogans. One slogan more than any other has dominated Zambia’s 2011 elections, the PF’s ‘Don’t Kubeba!’, or  ‘Don’t Tell!’. It lies at the heart of the PF’s seemingly successful campaign to negate the benefits of incumbency enjoyed by the MMD. It appeared on posters, on the lips of cadres and at rallies. Dandy Krazy’s ‘Donch Kubeba’ [J1] (with appropriate shushing dance move) has been one of the most popular tunes heard out and about during the last two months. In essence, it encouraged voters to take the chitenge, maize meal, oil, or even bribes offered by the government, even attend the rallies, but not feel they couldn’t vote against them anyway. As a way of upholding the secrecy of the ballot, and running a campaign against an opponent with resources far in excess of your own, it is a risky, but clever strategy. Indeed, the EU Observer Mission stated that unequal access to resources meant a “level playing field” was distinctly lacking during campaigning. Despite this, it appears “Dont Kubeba!” paid off.

The rumour mill, ever a feature of elections, went into overdrive in the weeks preceding it, and contributed considerably to tension across the country. Reports of Zimbabwean police crossing into Zambia via the Victoria Falls bridge and Katangese mercenaries coming south across the border were amongst the most outlandish. More serious were the accusations of corruption or malfeasance in the tendering process for ballot paper printing, and their production (by UPG, a South African based company) and distribution (by the ECZ). Whilst violence did break out on the Copperbelt, a political hot-spot of long standing, the elections were generally peaceful. Most of the unrest was caused by the long delay, longer than in any previous election, between the closing of the polls and the announcement of the results. This led many to fear a repeat of the rigging suspected in previous elections. However, all observer missions, with some reservations, declared the election to have been well run.

The way forward

Banda delivered his final address to the nation with not inconsiderable gravitas, if with some bare-faced lies thrown in, and stated that the MMD would see a new leadership, drawn from a younger generation. With the UPND likely to retain their comparatively youthful leader until the 2016 elections, it may well be that five years from now Zambia’s generation of liberation-era dinosaurs will have become largely extinct. However, having waited so long for power, the spectre of Sata as yet another African leader determined to die in office, regardless of cost, looms on the horizon.

It will be interesting to see what happens over the course of the next few months. Sata has always gravitated towards power, and whilst in the course of his orbit has undoubtedly served in a wide range of government and ministerial positions, what the outcome will be when he himself is in charge remains to be seen. Arrayed behind the PF are a coalition of Zambian nouveaux-riches, politicos and business men of various stripes, some of whom were facing prosecution or already embroiled in legal and political problems under the previous government.  Despite producing a manifesto, the PF has not expounded any clearly defined policies per se, despite the huge numbers of pre-election promises, including the initiation of serious development projects within 90 days.

In his inaugural speech, Sata also continued the policy of toning down his earlier pseudo-nationalist rhetoric; “We will continue to work in fair partnership with the investors already in the country and welcome new ones. It’s our hope that investors will abide by the labour laws of the country ensuring that Zambians are not disadvantaged.” Sata also promised, amongst other things, that “our fight against corruption will go beyond rhetoric and pious hope. Corruption is morally unacceptable and those charged with the responsibility of looking after our resources should guard it jealously.” Clearly, Sata is attempting to steady the boat, as his strident criticism of the actions of foreign investors before the election led some to fear the renegotiation of mining contracts or worse. However, one suspects that the financial clout of Chinese, Australian and South African mining and investment interests will be irresistible. Political capital is expended far faster than its financial counterpart.  But anything is possible in Zambia, bearing in mind the adage that where there’s a will, you must pay.

In general, the result of these elections has been greeted with surprise by those in the country to observe it, and scenes of wild celebrations by those who hoped for it. One imagines that MMD supporters are nonplussed. In a continent where incumbents invariably win, the fact that Zambia has held not only largely peaceful, but seemingly quite free and fair elections is shining example in the region.

Jack Hogan is PhD candidate, University of Kent

By the peaceful standards of modern Malawi, the 20th of July was a very bloody day indeed. At least 19 people were killed and many more were injured, in demonstrations against the Mutharika government that took place in and around the main cities of Lilongwe, Blantyre, Zomba and Mzuzu. Having begun in a peaceful, carnival, atmosphere of red shirts and banners, they quickly turned violent as the heavily-armed police and army, finding themselves in a period of indecision over the legality of these protests, responded characteristically with live bullets and tear-gas.

The old men who lead the Malawian Opposition parties, John Tembo for the Malawi Congress Party, and Friday Jumbe for the United Democratic Front, quickly melted away from the angry streets, leaving the escalating riots to a a few hard-pressed protest marshals  and the party-youth of the governing, Democratic Progressive Party. As always, there were large numbers of angry young men, freed by Malawi’s huge unemployment crisis and eager to express their multitude dissatisfactions.

President Bingu wa Mutharika, himself a nervous and irascible old man, now ruefully contemplates the burned-out houses and the looted shops of this “Warm Heart of Africa” and he blames western interference, along with “satanic” local Civil Society groupings, for the disaster. His rhetoric is becoming increasingly incoherent and apocalyptic.

Bingu’s massive first-term (2004-2009) popularity on the domestic and international fronts, now seems very distant. It was based on his decision to channel Malawi’s scarce foreign exchange reserves into the purchase of foreign chemical fertilisers and hybrid seeds for subsidised use by Malawi’s millions of smallholder, maize-growing, farmers. That bold presidential decision propelled Malawi from regular food deficits to a permanent over-production of the maize food staple. It made Bingu — who was only copying what the USA and the EU had been doing for decades — into an overnight expert on food security and, for many Malawians, their very own “economic engineer”. Even the bilateral and multilateral aid agencies which have kept the Malawian economy unsteadily on its feet since Independence in 1964 and have been temperamentally suspicious of such “unsustainable” economic strategies, were prepared to contribute regularly, through “Budget Support”, to this subsidy, on the principle that emergency food-aid is even more unpredictable and costly.

Bingu, however, lacks political subtlety. He has managed simultaneously to alienate Malawi’s two main generators of foreign exchange: the international donors and the international tobacco-buyers. However understandable it may be, his very public hostility towards their representatives in Malawi: the diplomats of the western embassies in Lilongwe and the American executives of the tobacco-buying companies, Alliance One and Limbe Leaf, has been nothing short of reckless. It has shaken even the British government’s unwavering attachment to its swollen Department for International Development in Malawi. Other bilateral and multilateral agencies are taking their cue from Britain by withholding aid. Furthermore, the market for Malawi’s export staple, burley tobacco, already in serious decline, is more than a little impatient with Bingu’s futile attempts to set minimum prices on the auction floors and interfere in personnel management.

These anxieties and uncertainties have fed into the July 20 riots through the recent austerity budget of Finance Minister Ken Kandodo. Urban Malawians, who gave Bingu and his DPP-party a landslide majority in 2009, and called him the Modern Moses, now blame him for every long queue outside petrol-filling stations, every price–rise in the shops, every interruption in electricity-supply and water-supply, every time foreign exchange is unavailable in the banks, every tax-rise. Such things are becoming daily more frequent. Because of Bingu’s public face as a finger-waggng All-Wise and All-Knowing Leader, he now must personally accept the major responsibility.

Nick Wright has worked in the History Department at Adelaide University (1975-1991) and for Africa Confidential as its Malawi correspondent (2003-2010).

But after months of heated discussions about governance, corruption, the housing crisis and whether Ghana’s oil wealth will be able to transform it into a modern industrial nation, one topic, or rather one person became the focus of debate. Former first lady Nana Konadu Agyemang-Rawlings stirred up a storm when she announced she would run against President John Atta Mills in the race to become the ruling party’s candidate in the 2012 presidential elections. The former first lady, and wife of former President John Jerry Rawlings seemed to trigger a debate about Ghana’s political past and future.

Would Ghana support the ‘big man’ politics of the Rawlings era through voting for his wife, or the imperfect democracy of the present?

After months of veiled political innuendos, oblique insults on both sides and accusations by Agyemang-Rawlings and her husband that Mills wasn’t tough enough on corruption or vigilant enough on poverty reduction, the decisive moment came. At the recent National Democratic Congress  primaries held in Sunyani, Mills defeated Agyemang-Rawlings by a whopping margin of 96 percent. But why was it such a landslide victory and what does it have to say about Ghana’s current political outlook?

When Agyemang-Rawlings’ announced her candidacy in the NDC primaries, the responses reported in the media ranged from thoughtful to laughable. The Ghanaian Times featured a story with the headline ‘Rawlings asked to intervene in wife’s presidential ambition’ and detailed an interview in which a paramount chief requesting, as the headline suggested, that Rawlings curb his wife’s ambition or rather that he put her in her place.

Initially I read the backlash as an unwillingness to accept a strong female leader in a nation and culture in which gender roles are deeply entrenched and politics remains the bastion of men. Agyemang-Rawlings’ failed bid may be illustrative of this. But most of the Ghanaians I spoke with on both sides of the political divide said they saw the former first lady and her husband as one and the same, and Rawlings as an autocrat trying to extend his presidential term.

Weeks before the NDC primaries I was in an office waiting to FedEx some documents and decided to ask the man who was serving me what he thought of Agyemang-Rawlings’ bid to become the next presidential candidate.

“He ruled for close to two decades, they let someone else have ago, and then they have to take over the country again!” He exclaimed while piecing together documents for my parcel.

Over and over I heard similar sentiments expressed.

When I asked a veteran Ghanaian journalist whether he thought Agyemang-Rawlings would stand a chance, he matter-of-factly said that Mills would win because they saw her as inseparable from her husband.

Former president John Jerry Rawlings is a figure who looms large in the nation’s political history. He is a national icon, often lauded for his good looks, charm and charisma. Rawlings is also associated with the anti-imperialist sentiments and Marxist ideals of the past and partly seen as a symbol of the nation’s transition from authoritarian rule to democracy.

But Rawlings is also deeply associated with the ‘big man’ politics that have largely shaped the political landscape in West Africa; a modus operandi from which Ghanaians defensively dissociate themselves. In his early thirties Rawlings attempted to seize power through a military coup in 1979 and was successful  on December 31 1981. During his rule Ghana was a military dictatorship in which all other political parties were banned.

Yet Rawlings is an unusual and liminal figure. While he is associated with political repression and authoritarian rule, many see him as having rescued the nation from economic collapse with the assistance of the IMF and the World Bank and as paving the way for democracy when in 1992 when he finally gave in to demands by the opposition movement to hold democratic elections (in which he formed the NDC and was again elected president until 2001).

Back to the woman in question, Agyemang-Rawlings. Rightly or wrongly, she came to be associated with the authoritarian era of her husband’s rule. This widespread perception of her as her husband’s political ally or puppet could well be correct, but it could also be false and point to some very negative ideas about the role of women in the public sphere. However, the backlash and rejection of Agyemang-Rawlings may also be a sign of something positive: a new political consciousness in Ghana in which the rule of big men is no longer seen as desirable or inevitable.

Clair MacDougall is a journalist who is currently based in Accra, Ghana. She has written for The Christian Science Monitor, The Age, Ms. Magazine, The Caravan, the Indian Express, Unleashed (ABC), and Crikey among others. She blogs about Ghana and West Africa at North of Nowhere. More of her work can be found here.

By Hein Marais

Outside of death and taxes there are few things in life as certain as the outcome of an election in South Africa with the ruling African National Congress (ANC) on the ballot paper – as democratic South Africa’s third round of local government elections, held on May 18, again confirmed.

Ahead of the vote there had been much speculation about a massive protest vote or abstentions, but the ANC’s 63.7% of votes almost matched the 65% it had netted in the 2006 local government election. And more voters turned out than for any previous local government poll.

The ANC still controls the vast majority of cities, towns and villages in the rest of the country – including in KwaZulu-Natal, where it trounced its long-time foe, the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), and the latter’s splinter party, the National Freedom Party (NFP). (The ANC’s 57% of votes in that province eclipsed the 28% captured by the IFP and NFP together.)

The centre-right Democratic Alliance (DA) made its strongest showing yet, attracting 22% of total votes cast and beating the ANC across most of the Western Cape province. It is attracting a trickle of support from black South Africans, but it is yet to shed its image as a political refuge for nervous, disaffected minorities.

Spot lit again is the question, How does a political party that presides over one of the most unequal societies in the world, where one third of workers are jobless, and close to half the citizens live in poverty, triumph so emphatically in election after election?

In national elections, the last time the ANC won less than 66% of votes cast was in 1994, when it netted 63%. In 1999, it captured 66% of votes, in 2004 it got almost 70%, and in 2009 it won 66% (and that was mere months after the split that spawned the breakaway Congress of the People party).

It’s at local government level that citizens’ woes and discontent seem most easily translatable into protest votes aimed, at a minimum, to “send a message”.

Many dozens of community protests every year attest to widespread disgruntlement at the performance of the state, and at the indifferent conduct of many local politicians and officials. These protests are symptomatic of the troubled domain of the local state, and of the intense contests for power, resources and entitlements being waged there.

Financially hamstrung, local councils’ stock of experience, management capacity and warm bodies is hardly bountiful. Management skills are often lacking, and poor political and managerial leadership are common problems. Infrastructure and services are introduced unevenly and at fitful pace, which magnifies the often-merited impression of favouritism and a stinging sense of unfairness.

When polled in late 2010 for the Independent Electoral Commission, only 38% of respondents said they were satisfied with their local government – down from 55% six years earlier. Slightly more than a quarter of respondents said they even trusted politicians.

Yet, consider Mpumalanga, a province that periodically convulsed with community protests in recent years. In the May 18 election, 78% of voters picked ANC candidates and more than 500,000 more voters turned out for the party than had in 2006.

These sorts of phenomena tend to flummox analysts.

Part of the explanation lies in the fact that things have changed since 1994.

Access to schooling and healthcare, and provision of water, sanitation and electricity has broadened for black South Africans, even though very many households struggle (and fail) to afford those services. A smaller share of South Africans now goes hungry compared with 15 years ago.

And SA’s social protection system now benefits some 14 million people; a large proportion of low-income households would probably be unviable without these grants and pensions.

Such gains are tempered by other factors – not least punishing levels of joblessness, the AIDS and tuberculosis epidemics that kill upwards of 200,000 South Africans each year, and the stringent cost-cutting and cost-recovery policies that ration access to basic services in poor communities.

Those are the kinds of paradoxes that especially provoke rancour: there is change, but it’s not seen to be quick, fair or democratic enough.

Much as this exasperates, it does not yet spark outright rejection of the ANC.

Instead it seemed to encourage a drift away from electoral politics; decreasing numbers of voters having been turning up at the polls. The percentage of eligible voters who voted for the ANC shrank from 54% in 1994 to 39% in 2004.

But in the 2009 national poll, the decline in voter turnout reversed. And last week, it did so again. Voter turnout rose to 57.5% (up from 48.4% in 2006), and a million of them were voters who had not been registered in 2006. So apathy doesn’t explain the ANC’s winning streak.

No Alternative?

In last week’s election, the ANC actually netted more votes in KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo, Mpumalanga and the Western Cape than it had in the previous local government poll, in 2006.

The fanfare about the opposition DA’s gains ignores the fact that they occurred mainly in two provinces, Gauteng and the Western Cape. Elsewhere it made marginal inroads, if any.

The typical explanation is that voters lack a credible alternative. But that argument neglects the complex bonds that exist between the ANC and its supporters. Those relationships are not binary (on/off, for/against); they are shaded, they shift over time, and they can lead to “contradictory” actions.

In one respect, the ANC’s electoral supremacy is an index of its knack at preserving its stature and appeal, even in inauspicious circumstances. It does this primarily by positioning itself credibly within a narrative of struggle, liberation and deliverance, a narrative that spans generations.

Supporters know the ANC in several incarnations. One is that of an abstraction, where the ANC represents a repository of ideals, values, and a distillation of a history of struggle. This is embodied in an organisational entity, and it is entrusted to the custodianship of its leaders and officials. Think of it as the “metaphysical” dimension of the ANC.

The mystical overtones are obvious, with secular structures and activities operating in service of virtually “sacred” ideals. It is in this sense that the ANC is seen to transcend the individuals that constitute it.

A community protest does not automatically imply condemnation of the “metaphysical” entity – the idea of the ANC – or even of its leaders. Rather, it can be an appeal for intervention to uphold those values and ideals, and call to order individuals and structures that are seen to be desecrating the organisation and its history.

When Jacob Zuma told supporters in Cape Town in 2008 that the ANC would rule until “Jesus comes back” he was not only hyperbolising; he was tapping into the mystique of an organisation that is invested with millenarian duties.

Often a central demand of protestors is for the President to meet with the community and hear their grievances first-hand. The assumption is that the ANC leadership, once alerted to the facts, will call the transgressors to book, and act promptly and fairly.

Paradoxically, a protest can also be a backhanded vote of confidence in the organisation – as long as the organisation takes up the grievances, and acts to resolve them.

It is in that respect that the ANC has become increasingly vulnerable. Its capacity to serve the public with consistency and to address the causes of discontent – even its inclination to do so – is taking severe strain.

And it’s highlighting the increasing dissonance between the “idea” of the ANC and its secular reality.

ANC leaders’ gloating after the recent poll results suggests the party might be

This week’s outcome presents the ANC with little more than temporary respite. Disgruntlement and community protests will continue, and the party’s authority will be tested, not least by its own supporters.

Wavering Authority

These are not mere teething problems. They are anchored in deeper economic and social crises that date back to the 1970s, and which the ANC government has not been able to resolve.

The party has worked to improve the lives of the black majority, yet close to half the population lives in poverty, jobs are scarce, the country is more unequal than ever, and insecurity is rife.

More jobs are vital, but even the most hopeful pledges envisage 15% unemployment in 2020 – and that’s if one counts beggars, parking attendants and buskers as “employed” (as the official unemployment statistics do). Ignore such generous tallying and the current unemployment rate stands at 35%.

Meanwhile, the ANC has come to host a more disparate assortment of interests, ideologies and ideals than ever.

The organization itself (via its investment arms) and significant proportions of its leaders and office bearers are entangled in profit-making business ventures. Powerful sections of the ANC have developed a reflexive sympathy for policies that put the market ahead of society.

This places a huge premium on retaining power — not for any single goal, but in order to facilitate the pursuit of disparate objectives and ambitions.

These realities – the deprivation amidst abundance and the rampant sense of unfairness this stokes — will keep generating insubordination, and eventually will spark instability. With the scope for material change seemingly cramped, other ways of bolstering authority and building consent have to be found.

One tried and trusted way of defusing uproar is to affirm and valorise bonds that can muffle discord, or channel it in diversionary, more manageable directions.

The bonding and disciplinary force of African nationalism remains the cardinal ideological turnkey of SA’s transition. The versions of nationalism deployed until now have been largely embracing, and mostly undemanding.

But exclusionary interpretations of belonging, entitlement and rights might soon prove to be politically rewarding – even, or perhaps especially, in a society that was split asunder by apartheid.

More profane and resonant varieties are available – ones inflected with racial and ethnic chauvinism, for example, or with narrow, exacting interpretations of culture and tradition.

There is a real danger of recourse to rousing affirmations of identity and entitlement, and to populist discourses of authenticity – who is “really” South African, African or black, what is a man, and where do women fit into all this.

Antipathy toward the “alien luxuries” of liberal constitutionalism might gain support; indeed, heartfelt misgivings about “hollow rights” and a “paper Constitution” already circulate.

Left unchallenged, this might well develop into a form of populist nationalism.

Some in the ANC seem willing to risk such an experiment, in which social conservatism can be combined with licence for acquisitiveness and immoderation, with targeted largesse serving as lubricant.

Some recognize in the lurid spectacle of ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema the prototype of such a “project”

The outcomes are difficult to predict. No doubt such moves will be hotly contested, from both inside and outside the ANC. But it would be foolish to assume a progressive outcome.

Too many coarse tendencies and brazen interests now rub shoulders with power.

Writer and political analyst HEIN MARAIS’ new book SOUTH AFRICA PUSHED TO THE LIMIT: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF CHANGE (UCT Press and Zed Books) has been praised as “an extraordinary achievement” and “by far the best overview of political, economic and social change in post-apartheid South Africa”.

By Renee Horne

As the results rolled in and into the early hours of the morning, the top brass of the African National Congress could be found celebrating their victories in the 2011 Municipal Election.  However, there are some who are worried and questioning about the future. The commonest reaction was:  we are still the most popular party in the land but our rivals are making gains, we need to watch out for opposition, particularly that Democratic Alliance.  Compared to the 2006 municipal elections the ANC has seen both its number and share of the vote cut, the difference being largely made up by a strong showing from Helen Zille’s Democratic Alliance Party.   The ANC may scream victory in the main cities and Commentators may argue that the DA aggressively campaigned to acquire the lucrative Black vote, hence eating into the ANC strongholds and the main cities, but the ANC’s percentage was lower than that of the 2006 municipal elections with the exception of Pretoria and Durban. And many people in the main cities; Johannesburg, Port Elizabeth and Ekurhuleni showed their discontent by not turning up at the polls, or merely voting for another party.

The loss of the Midvaal was a major blow for the ANC and the ruling party did not even make a dent on the DA’s firm grip in Cape Town. In fact the DA maintained its hold on the city with a more than 20% increase compared to 2006.  I don’t believe it was the DA’s aggressive campaigning that gained this ground, rather the ANC should blame itself for not listening to the electorate.  If the ANC thinks it can rely solely on its liberation credentials and that people will still vote on the strength of historical sentiment, it’s dead wrong!

Yebo – yes, the municipal elections were time for a reckoning. The writing had been on the wall for quite some time indicating that the electorate were sick and tired of poor service delivery.  Adding fuel to the fire were the recently reported mismanagement and anti-corruption strikes protesting about the state run waste company, Pikitup which allowed the streets of Johannesburg to fill with rubbish for days. Then there was the row about the 16000 ANC-built toilets in the Free State that were not enclosed. Why were the toilets not enclosed? Why did this lead to an anti-corruption strike? The answers are as ever depressingly simple – politicians and their cronies continue to line their pockets. The Congress of South African Trade Unions’ (COSATU) constant rhetoric that the ANC needs to be more pro-worker and less crony capitalist has left an electorate weary and sceptical.

Asked if your municipality has done anything for you lately or do you know your councillor, most South Africans would say ‘no’ to both questions. However, the electorate do know the firebrand African National Congress Youth Leader, Julius Malema, and South Africa’s Populist President, Jacob Zuma.  So the image these leaders create at a national level, and the scandals they create locally, filters down to the masses.  You see enrichment at the top but it’s not happening to you. The promises the ANC has made do not appear to be forthcoming. Consequently, many are likely to become protest voters and question the value of voting at all at the next national elections in 2014. How 2014 goes really depends whether the ANC shapes up.  Indeed, these municipal elections of 2011 are the ANC’s litmus test. Their lesson for the ANC would appear to be: “don’t take your electorate for granted; deliver on the promises you have made”.

On a more positive note, South Africa has again shown it is a mature democracy pulling off a free and fair election – a rare thing in Africa recently.  The Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) received no major complaints, although some glitches did occur such as a few faulty scanners, voting stations not open on time, and, more seriously, the burning of an election tent at a ward outside Bloemfontein, in the Free State.

Hopefully the IEC will do a similar job and keep a watchful eye on the 2014 election. But the ruling party also needs to keep an eye on its declining support. In the meantime the developing debate over the decline in ANC voters could sharpen leadership battles further. What this might mean is anyone’s guess, but the party could resort to increasingly populist rhetoric to woo its lost voters from the 2011 municipal elections.

Renee Horne is a former journalist for the South African Broadcasting Corporation and is currently a senior PhD Candidate at SOAS – University of London. She is an editor for World Entrepreneur Society.

By Jean-Baptiste Gallopin

Fault lines

The collapse of one of North Africa’s longest-serving rulers – Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia – sent shockwaves through the Arab world and triggered an uprising of equivalent proportions in Egypt, the most populous Arab country. The revolts, which have been on an unprecedented scale, have surprised many and prompted widespread speculation over a possible ‘domino effect’, as a result of which successive authoritarian regimes fall as the impact of developments in Egypt and Tunisia begin to be felt. In this spirit, a guessing game of ‘who’s next?’ has begun.

However, rather than a ‘domino effect’, the Arab world is currently experiencing something that bears closer parallels to an earthquake; while shattering some buildings, most homeowners are merely being forced to undertake long-overdue repairs. The Tunisian and Egyptian examples have shown that large-scale, sustained revolts can occur when specific local incidents tie in with long-standing grievances spanning a broad spectrum of social classes. While such factors are present in many Arab countries, making copycat unrest inevitable, fully-fledged revolutionary change relies on a complex mix of much rarer ingredients. As such, reactive change will be broad but its form will vary.

Much of the Arab world faces deep socio-economic challenges associated with rapid urbanisation and a young, unemployed population. Official unemployment figures across the Middle East and North Africa range from 9.2% in Syria to 30% in Mauritania and 35% in Yemen, though these figures are subject to government manipulation and are in all likelihood greatly understated. They also disguise the fact that the unemployment rate for the region’s growing number of young graduates is much higher than for the declining contingent of uneducated youths – a key factor fuelling socio-economic frustration. To take one example, the official unemployment figure for young graduates in Morocco was 20% in 2008, twice the national unemployment rate.

Added to these socio-economic difficulties is the prevalence in Arab states of authoritarian regimes that actively exclude populations from involvement in public affairs, restrict freedom of expression and rely on brute strength for enforcement. Combined with widespread corruption and cronyism among ruling elites, the exclusion of major segments of populations from the political process is fuelling growing frustration and resentment towards incumbent regimes.

The Arab world’s socio-economic problems have long been highlighted, most notably by the UN’s Arab Human Development reports, first published in 2002. However, the recent uprisings have propelled these issues back on to the political agenda. This clearly shows how a country’s long-term trajectory is intimately tied to broader socio-economic and demographic developments, even in the most authoritarian environments.

Spreading the word

At the same time, these uprisings are ‘giving people ideas’. From Algiers to Amman, Arabs have been closely following recent developments on Twitter and the powerful pan-Arab satellite channel al-Jazeera, whose influence on Arab public opinion is greater than ever. As the Arab world has watched first the Tunisian and then the Egyptian people rise up against their authoritarian rulers, a ‘fear threshold’ has been breached and new political possibilities have suddenly entered the regional imagination. If the Egyptians and Tunisians have succeeded – albeit at this stage to varying degrees – in exerting pressure through street politics, it is almost inevitable that other regional populations will try to emulate their model. In the near-term, therefore, copy-cat demonstrations are likely to continue across the region. However, their scale, frequency and political significance will vary greatly according to the socio-economic and political environment of each country.

It would be wrong to assume that the Tunisian uprising provides a blueprint for what will happen elsewhere in the region. Egypt’s uprising, despite its similarity to that in Tunisia, has shown that regime change is far from an inevitable outcome of popular unrest and that regime insiders are skilled in preserving the essence of existing systems through cosmetic reforms. The appointment of Omar Suleiman, a military man, as vice-president has shown how the Egyptian army has sought to preserve its authority; despite his unprecedented dialogue with the opposition, Suleiman has adopted a stalling strategy in the hope of wearing out the protest movement without implementing radical reform.

Unrest may emerge in other countries, but in most places is likely to be short-lived, class-specific or localised. This is partly because few regional leaders have managed to alienate such a broad sweep of society, including both the lower and upper classes, as in Tunisia and Egypt. In the same vein, however, few regimes will now allow demonstrations to escalate to the point at which they could threaten their survival. Arab leaders have been watching these events with trepidation and will act pre-emptively to ward against similar uprisings in their own countries.

As a result, most Arab regimes are likely to muddle through the immediate aftermath of the current uprisings with a calibrated mix of security crackdowns, cosmetic political openings and a renewed commitment to subsidies on staple goods. In addition, structural factors including the cohesiveness of security apparatuses and broader power bases are likely to make many Arab states more resilient than Tunisia.

Long-term outlook

The significance of this ‘Arab awakening’ may well lie in the longer term. It seems inevitable that the uprisings will open a new era in the Arab state system, in which the politics of populism and street action become more relevant than identity politics focused on sectarian, religious and ethnic divides. For example, Egyptian society, which just two months ago was experiencing growing divisions between Muslims and Copts, has demonstrated a singular unity of purpose in its demand for an end to the Mubarak regime. Accordingly, the fault line in Arab politics could emerge most clearly between regimes and their populations, with the former finding it harder to manipulate social divisions to their own ends.

Beyond the immediate consequences of the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, the events of recent weeks have provided a reminder of the possibility of contested politics, even in authoritarian environments. Over the next few years, the region is likely to witness renewed mobilisation efforts by opposition groups and previously unpoliticised and currently invisible segments of the population. Such new actors in the coming years could pose a meaningful challenge to regimes that today appear solid and could alter the nature of these regimes, depending on rulers’ understanding of the lessons learned from Egypt and Tunisia. Growing popular opposition could also lead to reconfigurations of power within narrow ruling elites, particularly in countries where the security apparatus is firmly entrenched.

Finally, sensitivity to unrest will encourage regional governments to enact more ‘pro-poor’ economic policies in a bid to ease domestic frustrations, for example by stalling on subsidy reforms or pre-emptively buying in staple foodstuffs to forestall ‘bread riots’. Authorities may also be tempted by more overtly populist policies towards foreign companies. While the latter phenomenon has not been prominent in Egypt or Tunisia, it is already becoming apparent elsewhere in the region. A Libyan official in mid-January declared that homes being built by foreign companies ‘belonged to the Libyan people’ and should be seized, prompting the occupation of the buildings by crowds of demonstrators. In Mauritania, meanwhile, higher taxes and more far-reaching local content regulations in the mining sector, which is widely viewed as bringing little benefit to local socio-economic development.

***

Hot spots

More than poverty, it is frustration that drives unrest; more explicitly, it is the anger of young men with limited prospects in the face of a system viewed as unequal and unfair. This is why Algeria, a rich hydrocarbons-producing country that is marred by high unemployment and weak economic development, is likely to prove most susceptible to further unrest in the near future, not least because the government’s unresponsiveness has made rioting one of the few effective popular tools of public accountability, and somewhat of a tradition. Although the regime has proved capable of weathering major domestic unrest, the departure in the coming years of Algeria’s ‘independence-era’ generation could erode elite solidarity and lead to deeper changes in the political system.

Protests were a feature of political life in Yemen before the recent uprisings, but have received increased media attention since. They will continue in the coming months, in particular around parliamentary elections planned for April, though for now they appear unlikely to gather sufficient momentum to threaten President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s hold on power. Despite his lack of popularity, Saleh continues to be perceived by many, including much of the mainstream opposition, as the only figure capable of preventing the fragile country from collapsing into chaos.

Sudan is currently feeling the shockwaves from Tunisia as it enters a transition period that will culminate in independence for southern Sudan in 2011, and which is leading the north Sudanese economy to the brink. An upcoming drop in oil revenues is pushing the northern authorities to cut subsidies on basic staples in a context of crippling debt and an ailing local currency, which is placing a premium on food imports. As global food prices continue to rise, it seems only a matter of time before northern states experience major episodes of unrest. This could threaten President Omar al-Bashir’s control by providing competitors in the ruling elite with the chance to grab power.

Jean-Baptiste Gallopin is a Middle East and North Africa analyst at Control Risks, a political risk consultancy.

Kenya PM Raila Odinga meets Laurent Gbagbo to discuss solutions to Cote d’Ivoire’s political paralysis

In Tunisia, street protests; in Ivory Coast, a call for a general strike meets limited success. In one country, a long-time president leaves power, in the other he’s holding on…for now. 

 Laurent Gbagbo became president in 2000 on the back of a popular street movement after disputed elections. At the moment it seems unlikely that he’ll leave in the same way. The lack of a popular outcry after his widely-recognised election defeat (by more than eight percentage points) to opposition politician Alassane Ouattara has certainly helped strengthen his hand and confounded those hoping for an Ivorian solution to an Ivorian crisis.  

 It probably comes down to a number of factors; bloody crackdowns on what protests there have been, a widespread fatigue after ten years of crisis, the concentration of Gbagbo support in Abidjan – the country’s only major city – and the incumbent’s control of the state propaganda machine. 

 So, what next? Gbagbo has publicly said that talk of a military intervention to oust him makes no sense when you study the African political map and ask how many decent elections actually take place. You’d have to intervene in almost every country he says. So why are the Ivory Coast elections causing such a stir? While other elections have certainly been worse and received barely a whisper of criticism, there seems to be a remarkable international will to see the independent election commission’s results respected. Not since the Second World War, one western diplomat told me, had the world been in such strong agreement on one thing. 

There were a number of factors that were special about these elections. They were one of the most expensive ever held per voter, coming five years late and billed as the real watershed moment for a country emerging from its worst decade since independence. Secondly, the United Nations had a unique role in overseeing and certifying elections, transporting all the results sheets, many of them all the way from the polling stations to Abidjan, and receiving a copy of all the 20,000-plus results sheets. Within several hours of the close of polling, the UN say they knew Ouattara had won. 

So why in a nation about to close a chapter on a decade of strife, did Gbagbo apparently fix the verdict in the face of an international community that had the results, and that had been present in large numbers on the ground throughout the country? Partly the international outcry was unexpected; former colonial power France opting for stability and the protection of its own economic interests could have let Gbagbo stay on. The African Union and ECOWAS could have been expected to take sides with one of their own, who has played the imperialists vs. Africa card on a number of occasions over the past ten years. Maybe Gbagbo thought he could escape from the zero of losing an election, to coming out with at least something; a share of government posts, whatever the risk to the country’s stability. 

Two recent developments on the continent have influenced the crisis; the rise of international law and post-election power-sharing. On the latter, Gbagbo thought mediators would offer him some sort of deal in which he stayed on as president, while Ouattara would be prime minister or vice-president. Unfortunately for him, the African Union sent the Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga to mediate; a man with personal experience of such a deal and who immediately dismissed the idea. Secondly there’s the fear that Gbagbo, or at least his more hard-core allies, could face international prosecution for some of the atrocities committed during the Ivorian crisis. Leaving power has become a riskier business in Africa, and Nigeria’s offer to Gbagbo of amnesty and a luxurious exile wasn’t quite as attractive post-Charles Taylor. 

Western diplomats say the only way this crisis can end is with Ouattara as president. But can Laurent Gbagbo succeed? Will the world lose interest, fail to back up their words with action and accept a fudge? If this was just about Gbagbo and Ivory Coast that could well be possible. But with around twenty elections in Africa this year, the crisis has become a point of principal; success would establish a roadmap for future election disputes and make other incumbents think twice. Failure would show others that even in the most-supervised, transparent conditions, you can still fix an election, even after the results have been given, and get away with it. 

John James is the BBC correspondent in Ivory Coast and studied African Studies at St Antony’s College, Oxford University.

See also

Richard Dowden: Gbagbo’s bloody gamble

An RAS Guide to… Political crisis in Cote d’Ivoire

Yesterday, former South African president Thabo Mbeki addressed the Fifth Al Jazeera Annual Forum in Doha, Qatar. He described and analysed in detail the South African experience of negotiating the transition to democracy, and drew some lessons relevant to the case of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

The text of his address is available here: Thabo Mbeki Doha Speech