The nightmare of electoral violence in Africa

Solly Rakgomo | Monday February 6, 2023 06:00

Though violence has been a long-standing feature of the democratization process in Africa, its recent manifestations have assumed an unprecedented magnitude and a changing form and character.

This electoral violence has tended to put the democratization process on the line in many African states, threatening the prospects of democratic stability and consolidation.

Examples here include violent elections in countries such Kenya , Uganda, Nigeria, Zimbabwe and others where the attendant search for redress through official and unofficial responses has, altogether, been largely trapped in deepening contradictions.

One might be tempted to pose some questions like what is it about the democratization process in Africa that makes it easily susceptible to violence? In what forms does the violence manifest? What are its implications for the democratization process? Are there adequate institutional frameworks for mediating and managing electoral violence in Africa? What can be done to arrest the spate of electoral violence in Africa? It is very important to critically engage these questions.

The relationship between democratization, elections and electoral violence is a complex one. This complexity may not be all that surprising, however, given the prevailing assumption that democracy and peace are, ideally, mutually reinforcing, with elections serving as the connecting cord between them. Elections do not only allow for political competition, participation and legitimacy, but also permit peaceful change of power, thereby making it possible to assign accountability to those who govern.

This is why it is often argued by prominent scholars such as James Hoglund that ‘elections facilitate communication between the government and the governed, and also have symbolic purposes by giving voice to the public’. As such, a democratic society is, expectedly, a non-violent and orderly society. This partly explains why elections have become part of the international peace-building strategy, which strongly links peace to democratic development. As a people-driven enterprise, democratization retains its meaning, essence, substance and relevance provided it accords the people, irrespective of ideological and/or identity affiliations, adequate recognition in shaping and reshaping issues of governance of their own affairs.

The electoral process offers the widest and best avenue to do this, given the premium it places on popular participation. It then follows that the electoral process as Dean Laakso tells us, must be of high integrity, measured in terms of its degree of adherence to the electoral laws, openness, transparency, accountability, competition and participation.

Any attempt to pervert the electoral process against these virtues may serve to engender electoral violence. Electoral violence basically has to do with all forms of organized acts or threats, physical, psychological, and structural aimed at intimidating, harming, blackmailing a political stakeholder before, during and after an election with a view to determining, delaying, or otherwise influencing an electoral process.

The physical elements include assassination of political opponents, arson, looting, shooting, kidnapping and hostage taking, forceful disruption of campaign rallies, armed raids on voting and collating centers, including snatching of ballot papers and boxes at gun point. The psychological dimension relates to official and unofficial actions that create fear in the people, which may be a product of physical violence. These include threats to opposition forces by security agents or through phone calls and text messages.

The structural dimension of electoral violence seems much more pronounced, being a product of structural imbalance, including unequal opportunities for political parties and candidates, abuse of power of incumbency, falsification of election results, as well as the politicization of security and electoral officials. Furthermore, the weak institutionalization of some key architectures of democratic politics also helps to explain electoral violence in Africa. Some of the most notable institutional architectures of democracy are political parties, electoral management bodies and the judiciary. Ideally, political parties are to be erected on a specific political ideology that will serve as its organizing and mobilization anchorage.

In the absence of one, other tools of mobilization, particularly forces of identity such as ethnicity and religion, become appealing. Given the ease of manipulation and transformation of these forces, they stand the risk of falling prey to corruption and electoral violence. The glaring ideological barrenness of most parties under Africa’s new democracies and the attendant decadence of political parties, which manifest in the gross absence of internal party democracy and the heavy reliance on negative mobilization to win elections, underlie electoral violence in Africa.

It is also evident as Okodima Nnoli tells us, that electoral violence, like an election itself, is not restricted to election day alone. It can happen before, during and after the elections. Pre-election violence may include acts or threats against electoral stakeholders during voters’ registration or electioneering campaigns. Election day violence includes the snatching of ballot papers or boxes, assaults on opposition agents or parties, and harassment or intimidation by security agents. In the aftermath of an election, electoral violence may take the form of violent protests against electoral rigging, whether real or imagined, and of the state’s deploying its apparatus of force in response to the protest, thereby further fuelling the violence. From what has been posited above it can safely be argued that due to electoral violence the foundation of the democratisation process in much of Africa, suffers serious defects. The problem is also exacerbated by structural poverty which makes the people easily susceptible to negative political manipulation, especially during elections. While elections are now being held periodically, they are everything except being truly competitive, free and fair.

Electoral processes are severely compromised, which partly explains why elections are still being boycotted and/or the results are being rejected outright by opposition elements, creating deep-seated legitimacy crises for governments. In most parts of Africa, support for democracy by the political elites as well as by the citizens is hardly genuine, but certainly instrumental. The situation seems worse for the political elite, whose main reason for embracing the democratisation process seems to be the opportunity it offers them to consolidate their hold onto power and further accumulation of wealth. Worse still, major political actors hardly operate within the limits of constitutional provisions, as they employ extra-constitutional mechanisms to pursue their selfish interests, including the struggle for power elongation and abuse of power of incumbency to frustrate opposition forces. This tendency tends to hinder consensus building between the government and the opposition, and to cause violence which become a political nightmare in Africa. Electoral violence has had some dire consequences in Africa’s new democracies. First, there are security implications for the continent in general and affected countries in particular.

Some notable security implications include the collapse of public order, the large numbers of internally displaced persons (IDPs), and the flow of refugees. Moreover, electoral violence hampers effective political competition and participation since only those with adequate coercive cover became main players. As such, the democratization process gradually facilitates the de-institutionalization of the people to become mere clients, onlookers and/or consumers, instead of acting as the primary stakeholders of democracy. The attendant culture of political apathy represents a major threat to democratic consolidation. All these are a serious nightmare to African politics.