Africa should be celebrating, as Nigeria, the continent’s most populous country with 227 million people, toasted its Democracy Day on Thursday. The day has been recognized since 1999 when, after 39 years of military coups, parliamentary democracy was restored to the oil-rich nation.
Unfortunately, as the west African powerhouse marks its achievement, the light of plurality and democracy is dimming across east and central Africa. Over the past six months, opposition leaders have been arrested on flimsy grounds; journalists have been attacked and jailed; and pro-democracy activists have been abducted, detained, tortured, disappeared and have died in police custody.
All eight members of the East African Community (Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Somalia, South Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo) are at war or experiencing serious democratic backsliding characterized by heightened state repression and violence.
With elections due in the next six months in Tanzania (October) and Uganda (January next year), events similar to Mozambique’s postelection protests in November last year — which left 300 killed and US$500 million to US$1 billion in damages to infrastructure and businesses, according to strategic intelligence company Strategic Forecasting Inc — could lead to disruption.
Anti-tax protests in Kenya in July last year left at least 60 people dead and 82 cases of “disappeared” activists by December last year.
Of course, the region is not unique in the world today. As the University of Gothenburg’s Varieties of Democracy project has found, 72 percent of the world population lives in autocratic states, the highest since 1978.
With the world, and particularly the US, engulfed in its own democratic backsliding, there are few multilateral bodies or global leaders to speak up to stem the deterioration.
The African Development Bank expects that the east African region would deliver the continent’s top economic growth rate at 5.9 percent, compared with southern Africa at only 2.2 percent and west Africa at 4.3 percent. Disruptions would imperil that expansion.
Recent events point to a rapid decline in democratic norms and practices. With regular elections and a robust civil society, the region’s economic powerhouse, Kenya, was rocked by a scandal this month illustrating its battle to consolidate its democracy.
Blogger Albert Ojwang was on June 6 detained after the deputy police chief accused him of tarnishing his name on social media. He was arrested in Homa Bay, a town in western Kenya. Inexplicably, he was transferred 354km to the capital, Nairobi, and booked into the Central Police Station. He was later found unconscious in his cell with what the police say are “self-inflicted injuries.”
A panel of five pathologists organized at the insistence of his family found instead that Ojwang had severe head injuries and sustained neck compression and multiple soft tissue trauma. Protests erupted.
Earlier this month, two activists from Uganda and Kenya detailed how they were arrested, tortured and sexually assaulted for weeks in Tanzania after last month trying to attend the trial of that country’s opposition leader, Tundu Lissu. Lissu was in court to face treason charges — which carry the death penalty — after calling for electoral reforms ahead of Tanzania’s general election.
Across Tanzania’s northern border in Uganda, opposition leader Kizza Besigye is in jail after being abducted by police in Nairobi on Nov. 16 last year, while attending a book launch. He faces the death penalty after being charged with illegal possession of firearms and treason. He has denied the charges.
Protests and calls for his release have been rebuffed by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, who has been in power since 1986. Activists said Besigye’s arrest is part of a “systemic crackdown” ahead of next year’s election.
In war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo), the government has suspended the political party of former president Joseph Kabila, accusing it of having an “ambiguous attitude” toward the M23 rebel group that has annexed large parts of the eastern part of the country. The government has also ordered the seizure of Kabila’s assets and banned all media coverage of him.
In South Sudan, the arrest on March 26 of Vice President Riek Machar has sparked concerns that the world’s youngest nation (it gained independence from Sudan in 2011) is on the brink of yet another civil war. The previous one, from 2013 to 2018, led to the deaths of 400,000 people.
Rwanda this month pulled out of the Economic Community of Central African States, citing the body’s decision to prevent it from assuming chairmanship of the bloc due to its being implicated in the conflict in eastern DR Congo. Rwanda is an economic dynamo, but its elections last year had no credible opposition as opponents had been barred, jailed or driven into exile.
Its neighbor, Burundi, has for more than 10 years been characterized by “extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, arbitrary detention and torture,” Human Rights Watch has said. Its main opposition leader this month was barred from parliamentary elections.
The region’s democrats cannot hope for much help from Angolan President Joao Lourenco, the chairman of the African Union (the organization tasked with upholding stability and democracy on the continent). Lourenco has been dynamic in trying to stop the war in eastern DR Congo and igniting infrastructure development on the continent.
Disappointingly, in March at least 20 opposition party leaders from southern and central African states were denied entry or detained in Angola when they went to celebrate the opposition National Union for the Total Independence of Angola party’s 59th anniversary celebrations.
This level of repression and undemocratic behavior has not always been the norm in east Africa. Tanzanian President Samia Hassan was lauded as a progressive champion of human rights after she rose to power in 2021, but her government has jailed opponents and shut down digital editions of three newspapers in the past seven months as she fights for re-election. South Sudan’s post-civil war democracy was hopeful five years ago, but now looks rickety.
The democratic backsliding makes for a bad cocktail. Wars already surround the region — in eastern DR Congo to the west, in Ethiopia’s Tigray region to the north and in northern Mozambique to the south. The continent, with growth of only 3.7 percent this year, according to the World Bank, cannot afford more conflicts or economic disruption.
The region’s leaders have largely been engulfed in attempts to stop the long-standing wars in eastern DR Congo and Sudan. It is time to look within and stem the erosion of democracy within their own borders.
Justice Malala is a political commentator and former editor of South Africa’s This Day. He is the author of The Plot to Save South Africa: The Week Mandela Averted Civil War and Forged a New Nation. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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