Power sharing: the new military coup

By Blessing-Miles Tendi

Simon Tisdall lamented the comprehensiveness of Ethiopian prime minister Meles Zenawi’s victory in the country’s recent parliamentary elections – his Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front won approximately 97% of parliamentary seats – by arguing that it is evidence for “the alarming advance” of “one-party democracy”.

It’s not the growth of ‘one-party politics’ in Africa that’s the problem; it’s the trend for anti-democratic power sharing.

The staging of multiparty elections that began in Africa in the 1990s has not necessarily translated into multiparty systems. Alongside Ethiopia, and for a diverse range of reasons, Rwanda, Mozambique, Egypt, South Africa, Namibia, Congo Brazzaville, Lesotho, Tunisia, Equitorial Guinea, Gabon, Cameroon, Chad, Tanzania, Djibouti, Botswana and Burkina Faso have dominant party political systems in which a single dominant party has a realistic prospect of winning national elections.

Tisdall is right to point out the problem of single-party dominance. However, “the alarming advance” does not come from the dominant party phenomenon that has been prevalent for two decades now. The real alarming advance is the spread of the power-sharing model as a means for resolving disputed election results, which first occurred following Kenya’s 27 December 2007 elections.

Kenyan president Mwai Kibaki was declared the winner after a farcical and much delayed vote count. Opposition leader Raila Odinga accused him of electoral fraud and refusing to give up power. Disturbing violence erupted in a number of locations. It took the mediation of former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan to bring the conflict to an end on 28 February 2008 through a power-sharing agreement.

By then, over 1,000 Kenyans had been killed and hundreds of thousands displaced by the post-election violence. Under the power-sharing deal, Kibaki became president of a national unity government, retaining most of his presidential powers. Odinga had to settle for the less powerful and poorly defined position of prime minister.

Power sharing in Kenya set a dangerous precedent. Incumbents can now calculate that if they lose elections, waging violence and refusing to step down can facilitate the formation of a power-sharing government in which they will keep most of their power. This threatens to reverse the gains that electoral democracy has made in Africa. Armed coups were an effective means of reversing democracy in the 1960s and 1970s. Power-sharing governments threaten to become the new coups.

Since the Kenyan precedent, the power-sharing model has been applied in Zimbabwe, Madagascar and Togo. In July 2010 Zanzibar will hold a referendum on whether to amend its constitution to allow for the formation of a power-sharing government after future elections, so as to stop recurring political violence over poll results. More widely, power sharing has been advocated as a way of resolving political crises in countries such as Afghanistan and Honduras.

The power-sharing trend is problematic because it applies a model used to end civil wars in scenarios where there is a democratic deadlock. As recent comparative work on power sharing in Kenya and Zimbabwe shows, “the spread of the power-sharing model has generated incentives for anti-democratic behaviour at a time when the progress of many of Africa’s new multiparty systems towards democratic consolidation remains partial at best.

Power sharing as it has been applied so far does not create conditions for effective democratic reform and conflict is postponed, not resolved.”

This article was originally published in the (UK) Guardian newspaper

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