Is This African Democracy?

Henning Melber

As before, comrade Bob showed how to pull strings and get away with crime on a large scale. After a decade occupying office without legitimacy, he and his securocrats have just cooked another toxic dish, a recipe for disaster. The brew has a history.

First, you ignore the will of the electorate when you realise that you misjudged the people’s desire and stay in office even when you are voted out. This happened in 2002. Jacob Zuma and Hifikepunye Pohamba (then South Africa’s deputy president and Swapo’s secretary-general respectively) were among the first who hastened to pronounce solidarity. With the support of such peers you continue to control the decisive agencies of state power.

Then you fill the so-called independent judiciary with politically loyal stooges posing as judges. You use the party votes in parliament to adapt, modify and change legislature to eliminate media freedom. You call this the rule of law. You consolidate the military, policy and other security organs as your loyal agencies.

If the people, despite torture, killings, arrests and other forms of terror [such as rape], vote for other parties and candidates (as it happened in 2008), you continue to stay in power [with the help of President Thabo Mbeki] and force opponents to surrender for fear of more massacres.

You form a supposedly ‘government of national unity’. That gives you the grace period to make installations for the next elections while keeping the opponents under control and co-opt them by offering the little taste of power and privileges.

You recruit foreign expertise (even from a country that you abhor but which practices a similar ruthless policy of oppression against people in occupied territories, not unlike apartheid), tested elsewhere and knowing how to manipulate a voters’ roll.

Then you unilaterally proclaim an election date within the shortest possible time to avoid any checks and balances. After all, the so-called government of national unity does not act in unity. Remember: it was created to buy time.

If the fellow governing parties (who do not really govern) cry foul and seek justice before the court, the ‘independent’ judiciary plays the role for which it had been hand-picked. It dismisses the claims and sanctions the elections plot. With very few exceptions, members of the electoral commission do the same. After all, you do not bite the hand that feeds you.

Implementing this plan for ‘re-election’, you also ignore the concerns expressed by the peers in the neighbouring states. That is partly because most of them were lenient and tolerant throughout the decade of abuse power, thereby being part of the conspiracy. They re-embodied the three monkeys who do not hear, do not see and do not say anything.

Last but not least, you again make a careful selection among those who are admitted as external observers. Come the so-called Election Day, everything goes smoothly and – much to the relief of all – without the disturbing features of violence the world was used to. Physical terror is this time hardly required, since everything was in place before the voting day. The result was a foregone conclusion.

The handpicked observers then note that the elections took place orderly. The alliance of autocrats and former freedom fighters kicks in. On behalf of their governments (not their people) they congratulate comrade Bob for his resounding victory. And they live happily ever after – so they think.

If this is not enough to seal the deal, the regime will take care of the further ‘cleaning up’. As it has done with operations Gukurahundi (‘the early rain which washes away the chaff before the spring rains’) during the early to mid-1980s in Matabeleland with over 20,000 killings and Murambatsvina (‘drive out rubbish’) in 2005 displacing hundreds of thousands.

The former liberators know their trade as oppressors.

We have forthcoming elections next year in Mozambique, Namibia and South Africa. None of these states are as much in a mess as Zimbabwe. But their governments played along with the fraud masquerading as ‘democratic elections’. Even the political opposition in Zimbabwe, aware of what was coming, did not pull out of the farce. Calling it theft now comes way too late.

But if we accept this as ‘African democracy’, we can kiss good-bye to the free will of the people and surrender our right to make choices to those who do not care for the people anyway. It suits them.

* Henning Melber is Director emeritus of The Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation in Uppsala/Sweden and Extraordinary Professor at the University of Pretoria and the University of the Free State. He joined Swapo in 1974.