Gbagbo’s Demise, the Primacy of Democracy

Financial Gazette (Harare)

Trevor Maisiri

21 April 2011

analysis

SO now Laurent Gbagbo, the claimant to the presidency of Cote d’Ivoire, has been dislodged from the position that he had clung to so defiantly.

The capture of Gbagbo is again one of the enclaves of the testimony of Africa’s grapple with good governance and yet another replication of the political intricacy surrounding conflict across the continent.

As much as there is an explicit depiction of the fresh surge of democracy upon Cote d’Ivoire, which again is shared with the diverse African collectivity, it is the dire cost of attaining that ideal that I have to face up to.

Democracy is an aspired outcome and the process to its attainment has, however, been known to be littered with lost lives, broken limbs, destroyed homes and a general decadence of the African construct, which however must never be the case.

Nkwame Nkrumah, the first leader of an independent Ghana, once retorted: “Many at that time never suspected that Africa would evolve through a time where Africans would need to claim their aspired freedom from their own African leaders.”

Nkrumah’s implication and desires have actually been enmeshed in a typical suppression of the African people by other Africans. Again, it is Nkrumah who said: “It is far better to be free, to govern or misgovern yourself than to be governed by anybody else.”

At that point, he may not have been able to project the plethora of misgovernance that would later infest Africa and therefore translate into a tormenting suffering of the very people that he had sacrificed to liberate.

Between 1961 and 2004, Africa had 80 successful coups and 181 failed attempts (Ngoma, 2004).

This was mainly caused by both urgency for apposite leadership as well as power struggles.

However, the coups set a precedence of the over-projection of the military in shaping the governance matrix of the continent; for either positive or negative means.

To date Africa has had that over-reliance on the military as the final balance of power determinant even if that overpowers the common majority’s preference and insistence. In the situation of Gbagbo’s intransigence, there has always been a double-edge strategy.

While an election was the facade of expected compliance, the military was on stand-by to enforce whatever the electoral institution failed to confer in terms of his power aspirations. Gbagbo’s political consideration was based on the awareness of the slowly simmering transformation of African politics where power is being diffused back into the people and away from institutionalised dispotism and the military enclave. One such conduit has been the rising of opposition politics and the dismantling of single-party and single-leader dominance in Africa.

In the last four years, Africa has faced an increase in fiercely contested elections against a background of rising and robust oppositionism. The days of landslide electoral victories are now evading the African landscape. For example, in 2011, the elections in Niger had to go to a run-off pitting Mahamadou Issoufon and Seyni Oumaron.

In Cape Verde, the ruling party’s majority was reduced significantly in 2011. Again in 2011 the legislative elections in Chad had several districts being ordered to re-run.

In Benin, Yayi Boni won the presidential election by 53,14 percent and, currently, the elections in Nigeria are pointing towards a reduced majority for the ruling party, the PDP.

Africa’s political space is therefore becoming more competitive with the rise of resilient opposition and a populace more aware of its allocation of power. This phenomenal attribute therefore deserves a complementary response by traditional political systems and power basis that have for long sustained single-strand dominance.

Many of Africa’s long-established political parties and politicians are therefore failing to proffer the germane response to this occurrence. Gbagbo is one such culprit and the consequences that have therefore befallen him seem to be embedded in a stringent refusal to consent to reality.

In that regard, the Cote d’Ivoire situation is therefore a mark of a new shade of Africa’s quest for transformational politics. The AU must also be able to intently read into these rising trends and therefore be able to shape its diplomacy in compliance with what I call the “new African dispensation of power redistribution and diffusion”.

The political marketplace has not only opened up to be more competitive, but is coming out strong in its insistence of a new political culture in Africa. Whereas the time of Nkrumah was marked by the importunacy to claim independence at all costs, the era that then succeeded independence was conspicious of the need to consolidate the sovereign mandate ushered by independence.

However, it is within this era that many of the African leaders failed to transcend beyond the limitations of the compulsions of power. Many of them became drenched in the same colonial disposition that the colonial authorities had themselves glorified in.

Today, as we reflect on the ousting of Gbagbo, we urge the AU to “smell the coffee” and institute capacity into the African political landscape that glaringly now demands a devolution of power from the leaders right into the dominion of the people. The conception of oppositionism must be embraced in the AU’s frame of operation and consideration.

The AU’s discordant approach to opposition politics across Africa seems to be deliberately skewed in favour of power entrenchment by traditional power pedestals.

This is one of the very reasons why the recently despatched AU mediation team to Libya was rebuffed by the Transitional National Council.

The AU’s operational mediation context always seems to consider opposition politics as iniquitous and therefore second-rate to traditional political systems.

However, the competitiveness that is now ensuing in political space in Africa is inevitably the new reality of how politics will be shaped in the future and the AU must face that reality and therefore contain it within its contemplations.

If there is anything that we have learnt from Gbagbo’s demise, it is that Africa is now set upon a new political dispensation where elections must take the primacy over intransigent power obsession.

In essence, the phases that have transpired from the declarations of Nkrumah are now coming to a full circle in Africa, where the people’s power will once again be enlivened, this time without the stains of subjugation.

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