U.S. President Barack Obama has won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. The Norwegian Nobel Committee said Obama had been awarded the prize for his calls to reduce the world's stockpiles of nuclear weapons and work towards restarting the stalled Middle East peace process.

The committee praised Obama for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples."

"Very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future."

The laureate wins a gold medal, a diploma and 10 million Swedish crowns (1.4 million dollars or 878,000 pounds).

Obama was one of a record 205 nominees for this year's prize and the decision has come as a surprise to many. Zimbabwe's Prime Minister, Morgan Tsvangirai, had been tipped as one of the favourites.

Despite his ambitious international agenda, Obama is yet to make a significant breakthrough in the Middle East or effectively deal with the threat of Iran's nuclear programme and his country is currently fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Has Obama done enough to justify winning the Nobel Peace Prize? If not, who do you think should have won?

Ban Ki-moon isn't having a good year for public relations. Halfway through a five-year term as U.N. secretary-general, he's been hit with a wave of negative assessments by the Financial Times, The Economist, London Times, Foreign Policy and other media organizations. In a March 2009 editorial entitled "Whereabouts Unknown," the Times said Ban was "virtually inaudible" on pressing issues of international security and "ineffectual" on climate change, the one issue that Ban claims he has made the biggest difference on. The Economist gave him a mixed report card, assigning him two out of 10 points for his management skills while praising him on climate change (eight out of 10 points).
    
This week, Norway's Aftenposten newspaper made an unpleasant situation much worse. It published a confidential memo assessing Ban's 2-1/2 years in office from Oslo's deputy U.N. ambassador, Mona Juul, to the Norwegian Foreign Ministry. Juul's report is scathing -- and it comes from a representative of one of the world's body's top financial contributors. She says the former South Korean foreign minister suffers from a "lack of charisma" and has "constant temper tantrums" in his offices on the 38th floor of the United Nations building in midtown Manhattan.
    
She describes Ban as a "powerless observer" during the fighting in Sri Lanka earlier this year when thousands of civilians were killed as government forces ended a 25-year civil war against Tamil Tiger rebels, trapping them on a narrow strip of coast in the country's northeast. In Darfur, Somalia, Pakistan, Zimbabwe and Congo, she wrote, Ban's "passive and not very committed appeals seem to fall on deaf ears." She says that his recent trip to Myanmar was a failure and that some people in Washington refer to Ban as a "one-term" secretary-general.
    
Juul's letter could hardly have come at a more inopportune time. Ban is planning to visit Norway in the coming weeks, where he intends to meet with government officials and visit the Arctic circle to see for himself the effects of global warming and the melting polar ice. Now U.N. officials fear reporters will be more interested in what he says about Juul's memo than climate change.

So far Ban has not reacted to the letter. However, a Norwegian diplomat told Reuters that Ban's press office had been instructed to hold off on confirming his visit to Norway shortly after the news of Juul's memo began to spread.
    
Ban's PR difficulties didn't start this year. In March 2008, his chief of staff Vijay Nambiar sent a memo to U.N. employees explaining how to say his boss's name. "Many world leaders, some of whom are well acquainted with the Secretary-General, still use his first name mistakenly as his surname and address him wrongly as Mr. Ki-moon or Mr. Moon," Nambiar complained.
 
Then came Ban's own speech to senior U.N. officials in Turin, Italy last year, in which he described how difficult it was to improve the working culture inside the United Nations. The secretary-general seemed to acknowledge that his internal management style had failed. "I tried to lead by example," Ban said. "Nobody followed."
    
Ban's aides vehemently defend him, saying he's being treated unfairly by the press. One senior U.N. official suggested privately that Ban could very well turn out to be "the greatest secretary-general ever." They complain that people continue to compare him to his predecessor Kofi Annan, who was a very different U.N. chief and relied less on "quiet diplomacy" than Ban. Annan became a hero to many people around the world for standing up to the administration of former U.S. President George W. Bush over the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Annan called the March 2003 invasion illegal. U.N. officials also complain bitterly about the indefatigable blogger Matthew Lee, whose website Inner City Press regularly accuses Ban and other U.N. officials of hypocrisy and failing to keep their promises to reform the United Nations and root out corruption. (Some U.N. officials accuse Lee of not always getting his facts right, but his blog has become unofficial required reading for U.N. staffers around the world.)
    
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, diplomats in New York say, is among those supporting a campaign against a second term for Ban. Juul's memo said Helen Clark, New Zealand's former prime minister and current head of the U.N. Development Program, "could quickly become a competitor for Ban's second term." But diplomats say they expect the United States, Britain and other major powers to reluctantly back a second term for Ban, if only because there appears to be no viable alternative whom Russia and China would support.
    
A recent article in the Times of London said the best U.N. chief in the organization's 64-year history was not Swedish Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dag Hammarskjold but the Peruvian diplomat Javier Perez de Cuellar, who held the top U.N. post for 10 years until 1992. Nicknamed "mumbles" because he was so difficult to understand, Perez de Cuellar kept a low profile and, like Ban, preferred backroom diplomacy, not Annan's bully pulpit. Among the Peruvian diplomat's successes were managing the end of the Cold War, leading a long-delayed revival of U.N. peacekeeping and encouraging member states to back a U.S.-led military operation to drive Iraq's invading forces out of Kuwait in 1991.
    
Will Ban's preference for quiet diplomacy make him as good or better than Perez de Cuellar? That remains to be seen.

By Patrick Worsnip
    
What's more important -- the right of a sovereign state to manage its affairs free of outside interference or the duty of the international community to intervene when massive human rights violations are being committed in a country?
 
The United Nations -- nothing if not a talking shop -- has been debating that question this week in the General Assembly. It goes to the heart of what the U.N. is all about.
 
At issue is a declaration issued four years ago by a summit of more than 150 world leaders asserting the "responsibility to protect" -- R2P in U.N. jargon -- populations threatened with genocide or other mass atrocities. It was a somewhat belated response to widespread criticism of the United Nations for failing to stop massacres in Rwanda and Bosnia in the 1990s.
    
The carefully crafted declaration said the responsibility began with the government of the country concerned. If that failed, it foresaw a sliding scale of international action, ranging from advice through mediation to -- in a last resort -- intervention by force. And such a use of force could only be authorized by the Security Council, meaning the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China would all have to agree.
 
Cautious as it was, the summit document was seen by many advocacy groups as a step on the road to fulfilling their dream that if a government was committing atrocities against its people, the United Nations would march in and stop it.
 
In the real world, U.N. officials say, that is not going to happen, at least under the peacekeeping rules that have applied in recent decades. These do not authorize U.N. forces to go to war against the national army of a sovereign state -- a move that would amount to invasion. Witness the six-year-old conflict in Sudan's western region of Darfur -- branded by some as genocide -- where a U.N./African Union peacekeeping force is only now being slowly deployed with the consent of the Khartoum government. The only time that R2P has been invoked in practice -- and even then retrospectively -- was in former U.N. secretary-General Kofi Annan's mission to mediate in post-election violence in Kenya last year, U.N. officials say.
 
This week's debate was to take stock of R2P and discuss how to take it forward, although no immediate action is expected. It came against the background of a determined attempt by radicals led by General Assembly President Miguel D'Escoto, a former Nicaraguan Sandinista government minister, to kick the issue into the long grass.

For D'Escoto and those who agree with him, R2P is code for an attempt by big Western powers to impose their will on the weak. In a contentious "concept note" issued to all U.N. members he declared that "colonialism and interventionism used 'responsibility to protect' arguments." One member of a panel of experts D'Escoto convened to launch the debate, U.S. academic Noam Chomsky, said R2P-type arguments had been used to justify Japan's 1931 invasion of Manchuria and Nazi Germany's pre-World War Two move into Czechoslovakia.
 
While some radical states, such as Venezuela, echoed D'Escoto's line in the assembly debate, human rights groups expressed relief that most cautiously supported a strictly defined interpretation of R2P and backed proposals by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon for developing it. Ban has proposed periodic reviews of how countries have implemented R2P and regular reports by himself on the issue. "To those that argued this week that the U.N. was not ready to make a reality of the commitment to end mass atrocities, the majority of the General Assembly gave its answer: you are wrong," said Monica  Serrano of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect. Despite that, there have been clear signs of concern among developing countries that unless tightly controlled, R2P could be used in support of future Iraq-style invasions of countries that have angered the big powers.
 
What's your view?

President Barack Obama’s choice of Ghana for his first visit to sub-Saharan Africa since taking office has stirred debate in his father’s homeland Kenya.

Some Kenyans believe Obama ought to have come “home” first. Others, especially among critics of President Mwai Kibaki’s government, say he has deliberately shunned the country to show U.S. disapproval of rampant corruption and nepotism in political circles here.

Prime Minister Raila Odinga, who comes from the Luo ethnic group like Obama’s father, said it was wrong to read too much into Obama’s itinerary, given that neither was he visiting other influential nations in the region like South Africa and Nigeria.

“Ghana is symbolic. It was the first African country to gain independence from Britain in 1957. Ghana is very advanced in its transition to democratic form of governance. So it is perfectly logical,” he told Reuters.

“If Obama were to come to Kenya as the first country in Africa, it would send some very wrong signals that he is coming here merely because of some organic relationship that he has with this country. So in fact it is good.”

Obama has been to Kenya several times, most recently as a senator in mid-2006. In a speech then, he took a strong line against corruption, which has plagued East Africa’s largest economy for decades. “If the people cannot trust their government to do the job for which it exists - to protect them and promote their common welfare - then all else is lost. That is why the struggle of corruption is one of the great struggles of our time,” he said.

That speech drew a sharp response from the government. Spokesman Alfred Mutua called Obama a young man who was “very poorly informed” and chided him for “lecturing” Kenyans. When Obama took power, however, the Kibaki government was so happy it announced a national holiday in his honour. The U.S. leader is wildly popular among all sectors of Kenyan society.

So should Obama have included Kenya on his Africa tour? Is he snubbing his ancestral homeland?

South African opposition leader Helen Zille has not endeared herself to the majority of voters who recently handed the ruling African National Congress a landslide victory in the national polls.

Zille came under fire from her political enemies for her appointment of a predominantly white and almost completely male cabinet in the Western Cape, the province where her DA party took power from the ANC.

She retaliated by attacking President Jacob Zuma, calling him a “self-confessed womaniser with deeply sexist views, who put all his wives at risk by having unprotected sex with an HIV-positive woman”.

That referred to Zuma’s acknowledgement that he had such contact during a trial on rape charges of which he was acquitted. The row has ended any suggestion that after Zuma’s election, there might be a period of better relations between the government and opposition.

ANC Secretary General Gwede Mantashe , said Zille has “elevated herself from being the leader of the official opposition to being the enemy”.

Quite apart from the name-calling, the row also looks as though it could distract attention from the opposition’s own efforts to present itself as an alternative to the ANC.

It is not the first time that South Africa’s opposition has found itself caught in a war of words with the ANC rather than showing what it will do differently.

Zille’s opponents say she is still to answer the question over the gender and racial balance in her Western Cape cabinet. Does that matter? What will it mean for her chances of winning over voters from the black African majority, who so clearly backed the ANC in the election? What will it mean for South Africa’s prospects if the government and main opposition are so quickly at each other’s throats?

William Gumede

South Africa’s national elections last week have reshaped the contours of the country’s political landscape. It has almost certainly killed off the careers of many opposition leaders who have become institutions and their parties with them. It virtually obliterated the peer parties of the ANC, with their roots as liberation movements, such as the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC) and the Azanian Peoples’ Organisation (Azapo). It is clear the electorate believes these parties are irrelevant, outdated and under poor leadership. The Inkatha Freedom Party, whose founder, Mangosuthu Buthelezi also professed that it has its origins in liberation movement politics has also been brought down to size.

 The IFP has dominated the KwaZulu Natal province since the 1960s, but embarrassingly lost out to the ANC now. ANC President Jacob Zuma’s overt appeal to Zulu speakers in the province who have supported the IFP in the past, by arguing that is better to support him (Zuma) for the presidency, and have a Zulu-speaker in the presidency, has evidently worked. Many IFP supporters have voted for Zuma merely on the basis of ethnic affinity, rather than his record in government.

 But this strategy also run the risks of increasing ethnic divisions, with some Zuma supporters already whispering for the ‘Xhosa-Nostra’ to be purged from government. This is a reference to individuals who were allies of former President Thabo Mbeki, are Xhosa speakers or who are from the Eastern Cape province from where Mbeki and former President Nelson Mandela hail.

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Morocco serves as the backdrop for such Hollywood blockbusters as Gladiator, Black Hawk Down and Body of Lies. The country’s breathtaking landscapes and gritty urban neighbourhoods are the perfect setting for Hollywood’s imagination.

Unbeknown to most filmgoers, however, is that Morocco is embroiled in one of Africa’s oldest conflicts - the dispute over Western Sahara. This month the UN Security Council is expected to take up the dispute once more, providing US President Barack Obama with an opportunity to assert genuine leadership in resolving this conflict. But there’s no sign that the new administration is paying adequate attention.

The story of Western Sahara would make quite a movie. There was high diplomatic intrigue when Moroccan troops occupied the territory, after Spain abandoned its long-time colony as Generalissimo Franco lay dying in 1975. The subsequent war between Morocco and the Algerian-supported Polisario Front, which sought Western Saharan independence, furnished plenty of action sequences in the desert. There is also the real human tragedy of the Western Saharan refugees, who have languished in exile for more than three decades.

In 1991, the Security Council created the UN mission in Western Sahara, MINURSO, whose mandate has been ritually reauthorized ever since. MINURSO’s original task was to organise a referendum in Western Sahara in which the residents would vote up or down on self-determination. Morocco, on the other hand, lobbied that tens of thousands of Moroccans be counted, a demand that Polisario resisted. 

Morocco’s latest stance is that Rabat share power in Western Sahara with indigenous groups. An autonomy proposal Morocco advanced in 2007 is in fact a credible starting point for negotiations aimed at a power sharing agreement. But Polisario will not discuss power sharing until Morocco recommits to a referendum on self-determination.

It has long been assumed in Western capitals that the Western Sahara question will be resolved through power sharing, but such a solution cannot simply be imposed. Only a negotiated settlement can bring about comprehensive peace.

But the UN does not push effectively for negotiations. Indeed, in rolling over MINURSO’s mandate year after year, the Security Council seems to hope that one party or the other will give in - an attitude that favours the more powerful actor, Morocco, a state that is closely allied with Security Council members France and the US.

The last thing the world needs is more de facto partisanship from the ostensibly neutral Security Council.  Peace in Western Sahara will require that both Morocco and Polisario accept something they do not like. Polisario must accept that the achievement of a comprehensive power sharing agreement with Morocco is a prerequisite for a referendum. Morocco, on the other hand, must commit to a self-determination referendum as a necessary condition for power sharing talks. How to cut the Gordian knot?

The new man in charge of MINURSO is Christopher Ross, former US ambassador to Algeria and Syria. Ross can boast of fluency in Arabic and an extensive background in North African affairs.

King Mohamed and UN envoy to Western Sahara Chris Ross

Instead of waiting for conditions to ripen, the new envoy should, at the next round of negotiations, secure the commitment of the parties - in writing - to a strong Security Council resolution calling for both a negotiated political solution and a referendum. This approach not only balances the interests of the parties but it also unblocks the mutual suspicion currently stalling talks.

 If one side or the other refuses to sign, the Security Council must be willing to wield the weapon of shame and name names. The Obama administration should back Ross to the hilt as enforcer of the UN’s writ.

Western Sahara is not a problem of imagination that needs a Hollywood producer or two. It is problem of political will. With strong, consistent leadership from the US, inside and outside the Security Council, Morocco and the Polisario Front can be put on the right track toward peace.

Jacob Mundy is a PhD candidate in the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. He is coauthor of the forthcoming Western Sahara: War, Nationalism and Conflict Irresolution.

 
Dr Sehlare Makgetlaneng is the coordinator of the Africa Institute of South Africa’s South African 2009 Election Observation and Monitoring Team. He writes in his personal capacity.

The Zuma administration’s foreign policy will be determined to a great extent by the struggle to satisfy national needs and demands.  These can best be understood if we take into account not only the country’s  increasing level of corruption and violent crime, but also high  level of  expectations  from the urban and rural unemployed, the poor and the working class expecting the qualitative improvement in their material conditions.
     
The Zuma administration will commit itself in practice to the value of continuity in South Africa’s foreign policy. Central to this tradition will be popular foreign policy objectives pursued by South Africa since the end of apartheid.
     
They include support for peaceful resolution of conflict on the African continent and beyond, support for the regional and continental organisations and integration as well as multilateralism. It will continue with the country’s practical and theoretical call for continental socio-political and economic renaissance or transformation.
     
South Africa under the leadership of Thabo Mbeki used the African Renaissance to contribute towards the resolution of conflicts in African countries conducive for the operations of its capital and the realisation of the objectives of its socio-economic policy objectives.
     
It regarded its active participation in conflict resolution as key to peace, security and stability in Africa. It viewed continental socio-economic transformation or renaissance as the process to be achieved through peace and stability creation and consolidation, actions against corruption and implementation of socio-economic policies conducive for the operations of foreign investment.
     
The Mbeki administration was reluctant to lead Africa in international relations. It called for a further integration of Africa into the global capitalist system and African solidarity and unity to fight what Mbeki refers to as global apartheid and to contribute towards an equitable world.
     
These two central aspects of South Africa’s foreign policy, focusing firstly on Africa and secondly on developed countries, raised high level of expectations within Africa and the rest of the world and placed its policy on grounds vulnerable to criticism from individuals with different positions and interests in its efforts to serve as a leader of Africa in its transformation and its relations with the rest of the world particularly developed countries.
     
These problems are a dilemma it faced in its attempts to serve as the representative of Africa to the developed countries and the representative of developed countries in Africa. This policy helped to explain why South Africa under Mbeki was unable to substantiate its declared theoretical position on African Renaissance in practice. It impelled it not to antagonise developed countries in its African Renaissance project and to seek support from weak African countries.
     
Under Mbeki, South Africa put itself on the level that Africa expected more than it could deliver in resolving Africa’s problems.
     
It pretended that it could meet requirements of this expectation. It did not substantiate Mbeki’s progressive position that its role in the resolution of the African conflicts should be guided by the struggle to achieve African transformation in the interests of the masses of the people. South Africa remained central to the consolidation of dominance of Africa by developed countries.
     
The Zuma administration will be a substantial and welcome addition to the struggle against Africa’s problems.
     
It will use the country as the regional and continental power to criticise African leaders who are enemies of their people and strive for free, independent exercise of foreign policy.
     
There will be a shift in the direction towards South Africa realising its potential as a centre of independent development on the African continent.
     
It will be under enormous internal progressive pressure to ensure that the country constitutes a strategic continental threat to the internal and external interests inimical to the interests of the continent and its people.

Professor Thandwa Mthembu is Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the  Central University of Technology, Free State. He writes in his personal capacity.

Based on current information on Jacob Zuma’s beliefs, ideas and practices, what are the prospects for his soon-to-be installed administration in South Africa?
My overall thesis is that Zuma is no less enigmatic than former President Thabo Mbeki, his old rival.

But Zuma is more eclectic in thinking and approach. Books have been written about Mbeki’s enigmatic character. But, one thing certain in the socio-economic governance and administration model he ushered in is that he exhibited neo-liberal and pro-capitalist inclinations that made him appear dogmatic and monolithic. This is evident in his macro-economic policy, Gear. It is also evident in his micro-economic policies. BEE policies, for example, were designed to create a new black middle class and “filthy rich” black people, too.

I believe Zuma is no less enigmatic; but is progressively eclectic. At the personal level, whilst he is incontrovertibly traditionalist, he mingles with the Church, modernists and the like, effortlessly.
Zuma has a deep sense of respect for elders, which is, ironically, an integral part of our moral values. Even though Archbishop Tutu has expressed resentment of Zuma as a person, the ANC leader has avoided any retaliation. That is a marked contrast to Mbeki’s response to Tutu’s criticisms of ANC practices in 2004 (not Mbeki himself) – the then president branded the Nobel peace laureate a self-serving ignoramus, a liar and a populist.

Zuma appears to be at peace with his capabilities or lack thereof. He exhibits no mistaken belief that there is no South African who knows better than he does. He is, therefore, unlikely to assemble teams of Harvard professors to solve South Africa’s problems. He has already shown his preference for local talent and will draw on many local experts to solve South Africa’s problems.
On many occasions, Zuma has made it clear Mbeki-led macro-economic policies, including those of the Reserve Bank, will not change, despite protests from his comrades. Further, he has effectively called for a re-alignment of our affirmative action policies, promising Afrikaners that they could be recalled into government positions that require skills that are acutely lacking. Again, this attests to his belief in the worth of alternative ideas and sections of our society. But, despite this reality, the coalition of the media and opposition parties has not stopped to pronounce his indebtedness to his leftist friends.

Worrying our human rights activists, he has made it clear that the laissez faire approach to criminals is up for review. Intriguingly, his rather conservative views on this matter resonate with those of many sections of our society, some liberals included.

We should, therefore, expect the Zuma administration to be more eclectic, pragmatic and open to varied ideas and approaches. In the process, we should witness different and less dogmatic approaches to solving our problems. More sections of our society should feel they matter and that government is accountable.

William Gumede is the author of “The Democracy Gap: Africa’s Wasted Years” and ”Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC”.

South Africa votes on 22 April with not only its globally admired efforts to build democracy in tatters, but against the backdrop of many other promising attempts to build viable democracies across Africa now backsliding.

Military coups, such as the recent one in Madasgascar, assumed to be part of Africa’s terrible past, appear now to again have become a regular occurrence. The election earlier this year of Muammar Gadaffi - who himself came to power by military coup in Libya - as leader of the African Union, by his peers, is symbolic of the continental regression.

When South Africa became democratic in 1994 with Nelson Mandela at the head, it was hoped that the new democracy at the southern tip of Africa would provide a powerful home-grown impetus for expanding democracy across the continent.

And it initially looked promising, with Mandela’s exemplary moral leadership; and his successor Thabo Mbeki’s initial efforts to champion an African economic, social and democratic ‘renaissance’.

However, soon the African curse struck: Mbeki’s moving rhetoric did not match actual day-to-day practice. While preaching democracy, Mbeki clamped down on internal dissent, packed public watchdogs with uncritical loyalists, and looked the other way when allies were shown to be corrupt or incompetent.

It is inconceivable that the ruling African National Congress, with Jacob Zuma at the helm, will not win South Africa’s national elections. Formidable charges of corruption were dropped against Zuma after the acting head of the national prosecuting authority emphasised that the case against the incoming president was solid, but that possible political interference in the timing of whether to press charges against Zuma made the authority reluctant to press ahead.

Most African independence and liberation movements have failed on three levels in government: leadership, building viable democracies and prudently managing their economies.

Some leaders come to power by violent means and rule through violence. Some start off proclaiming themselves democrats, but once in power turn into autocrats. Some leaders prefer to die in office, as the case of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe.

Lack of democracy and the lack of viable alternatives – either because they are brutally silenced or just irrelevant – are among the reasons why oppressive regimes are ousted in coups.

Yet in the still rare cases where opposition parties remove oppressive ruling parties through the ballot box, they often behave no better in power themselves.

Democracy is invariably seen by most of the continent’s leaders and ruling parties in the most minimalistic way – and meaning only holding the occasional election.

Another problem is that very few post-independence African ruling governments have managed to spread wealth evenly. Invariably the benefits go to the old colonial elite and the new post-colonial ones made up of prominent struggle figures and the liberation or independence ‘aristocracies’. The overwhelming majority remain as poor as before.

It is not that there are no quality leaders in ruling African political movements, it is that the patronage system of these movements is so entrenched that serious new contenders outside these networks cannot break through.

Ruling political movements are often the problem themselves: parties run tyrannically are unlikely to be able to build democratic societies. What makes successful independence or liberation movements, trying to overthrow corrupt colonial administrations, often make for poor governments.

Furthermore, liberation and independence movements often mimic the autocratic governments they fight.

Open elections for the top leadership are discouraged, leadership centralised and opposition is often discouraged.

Doctrinaire positions on economics, whether inspired by the West, the East or romantic notions of past African management styles, makes for woolly economics once in power.

African voters often vote for parties and leaders based on their past struggle record, rather than on actual performance in government. Yet, it is their performance in government that will make a difference in ordinary voters’ lives.

Most African leaders, even the out-and-out dictators, claim to be ruling on behalf of the people. Yet, they experience daily life in a way that is outrageously different to that of the average poor supporter: when ordinary South Africans are besieged by crime, Jacob Zuma spends more in a month on personal security than many might earn in years.

South Africa goes into the election with a number of parties, but in Africa, it is not only whether there is an opposition party that is crucial, but the kind of opposition party.

Sadly, in most African countries opposition parties are hardly relevant.

In South Africa, enthusiasm for the Congress of the People, a splinter from the ANC, has abated, following poor policies, the undemocratic election of its leaders and poor visibility.

The global financial crisis is likely to make daily life even more difficult for ordinary people not only in South Africa, but across Africa.

Such worsening conditions may prove the catalyst for restless long-suffering ordinary Africans to rebel against failing governments.

However, it may also provide unscrupulous, but failing leaders, the excuse to reverse democratic reforms, blaming scapegoats for their own inadequacies, bowing under the pressure from their allies to extend corrupt patronage, or to embark on irresponsible economic populist measures, to bolster their own power.

Most African parties and leaders often still mostly blame outside and internal forces for failures, which block the necessary self-examination.

Yet, unless there is thorough introspection by African political movements themselves, to learn from past failures, viable democracy will remain a distant dream for the continent’s long-suffering ordinary citizens.