Manoah Esipisu is deputy spokesperson at the Commonwealth Secretariat. He is co-author of “Eyes of Democracy: Media in Elections”. He writes in his personal capacity.

Next week South Africa will hold its fourth elections since the extinction of apartheid and the rise to power of freedom icon Nelson Mandela. The election will come four months after the cliff-hanger 2008 election in Ghana, and ahead of potentially critical elections in Angola, Malawi and Mozambique.

Elections do not have a very good reputation in Africa, and, in my view, there are seven reasons why.

Lack of political will

So profound and fundamental is this problem that if it is not addressed it can render all the others irrelevant. A botched election is as a result of a deliberate political decision by somebody to subvert the electoral process in their interest. For example, the (now defunct) Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK) did not wake up one day and say “We think that we are going to change the results of this election. We think we are going to mess with the paperwork so no one will know what the result of this election was.” It is clear that there was a deliberate decision by a Mr X or a Mr Y to tell the Commission what to do or what not to do. And because of structural or other reasons beyond my immediate understanding, the Commission (as an institution and its leadership) was vulnerable to that kind of pressure.

The lack of political will partly stems from the winner-takes-all model associated with most democratic processes in Africa. There is so much at stake that no one wants to risk losing. No one wants to be on the outside.  There are really no profound ideological differences in the political parties. It is simply that people who are on the inside want to stay on and people who are on the outside want to get on the inside. Being on the inside means that you are in control. Ultimately it is all about money and power.

Abuse of incumbency

An incumbent will use all the resources at their disposal while in office to try and rig the electoral process or manipulate it to their benefit. This is a significant issue of perennial concern to Africans. It takes various shapes and forms. It could range from an incumbent using vehicles and staff from a government department to subverting money (as was the case in Zambia in 2001). It could also be as nasty as the manipulation of state media, the judiciary and the electoral commission. It is a serious problem.

Weak institutions

Many electoral commissions in Africa are weak and vulnerable. They are not properly independent .The way they are nominated and composed – usually by the executive and without a proper vetting process by parliament, leaves them open to abuse and manipulation. They often do not control their budgets and yet the way that budget is released or not released could impact their performance. Whether they are given adequate staff and whether resources are made available on time are critical to whether they can truly play their role as institutions responsible for democratic transition. The problems cited above could lead to a lack of confidence and a credibility crisis for an electoral commission. That’s why electoral commissions can falter and fail. Sometimes it is no fault of their own. They are designed to fail.

Two other institutions are worth mention. The lack of an independent and credible judiciary could be a death sentence to an election. Where does an aggrieved party or individual turn to if they are unhappy with the process? Conversely, when the judiciary stands up to be counted, it can have a very positive effect. If there is one significant positive that came out of the Nigerian election (April 2007), it was the role of the judiciary. In electoral-related cases filed in Nigerian courts, the judiciary came up with a number of decisions that went against the political will of the administration of Olusegun Obasanjo and is seen as a great positive to emerge from the process that was roundly criticised by domestic and international observers.

State media can also be designed to fail. In Malawi for example, the Malawi Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) was created as a government agency. The broadcaster’s leaders rightly say that unless parliament changes its mandate, they must serve the government in power. Ahead of elections next month, the MBC on average gives the ruling party more than 90 percent of coverage and the one percent to the opposition is all negative.

Weak political systems

Parties are often vehicles for individuals (which could be fine), but personality politics often provoke conflicts. Personal rivalries and fallings out are sometimes allowed to creep onto the national stage. Sadly, it is not about the name of the party or what it stands for, it all comes down to the name of the individual.

Poor voter registration processes

I often come across poor voter registration processes. On the one level it is a very technical issue. It can be down to a lack of civic education, it can be due to a lack of planning and money and resources. But even where there is cash in abundance, it can still go wrong. Ghana acknowledged that it had an inflated roll in some regions in last December’s election while Bangladesh, which had tens of millions of voters, had a perfect register with a digital photo for voter identification.

If people are not registered to vote, they are denied that right and nothing can be more profound. It gives people who want to be aggrieved after the election a good reason for rejecting the result. A good voter register is also your greatest insurance policy for the integrity of the ballot.

Lack of transparency in results process

Transparency is a key issue. This is a very simple thing but ultimately it can create a lack of confidence, suspicion, tension and then violence. And when someone or a party loses, they can claim to have been cheated. If electoral officials fail to provide adequate transparent proofs that a claim of cheating is erroneous, people will assume that it happened. They will say there is no smoke without fire and they will start using it to whip up tensions.

Lack of inclusivity

At the end of the day, elections are run for voters and political parties – who are the customers. And yet the attitude often in Africa is not to keep the customer happy. The attitude is often to keep the customer outside the shop. The parties and voters are seen as the enemy by the electoral commissions rather than stakeholders. One of the greatest strengths of the Ghanaian election was the existence of an inter-parties advisory committee which sought to fix emerging problems through adequate consultation with all those involved. It is a great thing to undermine rumour and conjecture; it is a great thing to enhance confidence. South Africa has a similar arrangement although the model is different from Ghana’s.

South Africa’s case

The extent to which South Africa tackles these challenges – in next week’s elections and beyond - will provide lessons for the growth of democracy in Africa which, although boosted by the smooth transition in Ghana, is still scarred by the 2007 and 2008 elections in Kenya and Zimbabwe.

In Kenya, it may be dangerous to speak your mind.

In a country that once prided itself on its freedom of speech and lively public debate,
political activists now say their lives are being threatened, and a U.N. special investigator has said that Kenyan police systematically intimidate human rights defenders.

“Dozens of prominent and respected human rights defenders have been targeted in a blatant campaign designed to silence individual monitors and instill fear in civil society organizations at large”, said U.N. Special Rapporteur on extra-judicial killings Phillip Alston, in a report he released on April 7.

Alston was appointed in February to investigate allegations that at least 500 people have been victims of extra-judicial executions at the hands of Kenyan security forces since 2007.

Weeks after his appointment, two activists who had spoken out against police brutality were murdered in broad daylight when their car was blocked on a central Nairobi street and unknown gunmen opened fire on them.

The two men, Oscar Kingara and Paul Oulu, were outspoken critics of a police campaign against an outlawed religious movement known as the Mungiki, which has been accused of operating extortion gangs and committing gruesome murders.

(more…)

Before the G20 meeting, there was a lot of talk inside and outside Africa about making sure the continent did not get left out while the world’s richest and most powerful set out plans to save their own economies.

So how did Africa fare?

On the face of things, perhaps not too badly.

“Our global plan for recovery must have at its heart the needs and jobs of hard-working families, not just in developed countries but in emerging markets and the poorest countries of the world too,” the communique says in paragraph 3.

In concrete terms:

• Resources available to the IMF will be trebled to $750 billion.
•  There will be support for a new allocation of Special Drawing Rights of $250 billion – something that could help poor countries
• There will be support for $100 billion more lending by Multilateral Development Banks (those include the World Bank Group and the African Development Bank)
• There will be $250 billion support for trade finance.
• Use will be made of resources from IMF gold sales “for concessional finance for the poorest countries”.
• Global financial institutions will be strengthened and reformed, ensuring that emerging and developing economies, including the poorest, must have greater voice and representation.”

The point on the gold sales was something for which Africa, represented at the summit by Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, had made a particular push.

But not all appeared so impressed. In East Africa based Business Daily, Allan Odhiambo’s piece was headlined “Africa thrown to back burner at G20 meeting.”

According to Nigeria’s ThisDay newspaper, President Umaru Yar’Adua’s main lament was the fact that Africa’s most populous country was not there (South Africa, with the continent’s biggest economy, was represented).

South Africa’s President Kgalema Motlanthe was quoted as saying he was “quite pleased” with the results of the summit.

How well do you think the G20 did for Africa? Will Africa really have a bigger say over the global financial system in future? Will that help?

A group from east Africa’s biggest slum has proved that you don’t need a big farm in the countryside to produce food crops for sale.

They’re planting organic vegetables on a small allotment in the middle of Nairobi’s Kibera slum that his been cleared out of an old rubbish tip.

A year ago, nothing grew on their patch of land. Today, tomatoes, cucumbers, pumpkins and kale flourish.

Kibera is home to nearly one million people, who mostly live in corrugated iron shacks with no running water.

Victor Matioli grew up a tough inner-city kid. He never imagined that one day he’d be a farmer with a passion for plants and for the soil they grow in.

(more…)

The overthrow of Madagascar’s leader may have had nothing to do with events elsewhere in Africa, but after four violent changes of power within eight months the question is bound to arise as to whether the continent is returning to old ways.

Three years without coups between 2005 and last year had appeared to some, including foreign investors, to have indicated a fundamental change from the first turbulent decades after independence. This spate of violent overthrows could now be another reason for investors to tread more warily again, particularly as Africa feels the impact of the global financial crisis.

“Although I don’t think these instances of instability in Africa are related to each other or part of a pattern, I think there’s no doubt external constituents and businesspeople around the world will assume there is a pattern,” said Tom Cargill, Africa Programme Coordinator at London thinktank Chatham House.

The fact that coup makers have succeeded without being forced to step down or even face major censure could also embolden those who might be tempted to take power in bigger countries, where falling growth is encouraging disaffection.

“Look at … other African countries, so-called pivotal states: Nigeria is in a terrible state, so is Egypt, so is Kenya, all these so-called big countries,” said Hussein Solomon, a political science professor at the University of Pretoria.

Although there can be a tendency to group very diverse African states together, the picture is far from uniform - Ghana’s presidential election two months ago was one of Africa’s closest, but avoided major violence, reassuring investors despite an acute fiscal crisis.

But social pressures are growing across Africa as a result of the world economic crisis.

The dramatic U-turn by rich countries as they bail out or buy up failing industries is also prompting a reassessment of the model sold to Africa by Western donors since the Cold War — a combination of market capitalism and multiparty democracy.

Cargill said factors were both the financial crisis and the rise of one-party state China, an increasingly important source of investment and trade for Africa.

“I think in future the whole idea of the democratic capitalist system will be tested and questioned, and there will be some who take advantage of its being questioned for their own private ends to launch their own bids for power,” he said.

That debate is already taking place at the African Union, whose rules ban unconstitutional seizures of power but whose chairman for the next year, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, opposes what he says are foreign democratic structures imposed on Africa.

The AU has told Madagascar that any seizure of power by unconstitutional means would be considered a coup d’etat, punishable by AU sanctions or suspension.

But that sits uneasily with Gaddafi’s rebuke last week of Mauritania’s first democratically elected leader, largely confined to his village after being deposed in a coup last year.

“He must accept the fact,” said Gaddafi, who seized power in 1969 “He is not the first head of state to be overthrown.”

Is Africa returning to the old ways or did it never really leave them behind? Will a reassessment of the financial model pushed by Western donors also mean a new look at the multiparty democracy?

                                                                                                                                                                      After just a year in power, how is Kenya’s coalition government doing? Well, to many in the East African nation it seems unimpressive and out of touch.

With corruption scandals mounting and his government reeling from public disapproval, President Mwai Kibaki called his first news conference in years — to talk about his wife.

To widespread bemusement,  he chose not to address national problems, but to rail against media stories that he had a second wife.

For many, the bizarre event symbolised a disconnect between leaders and people that is jeopardising a divided coalition government and fuelling disillusionment.

“Yeah, yeah. Who cares?” asks one woman in a camp for internal refugees, turning away from Kibaki on TV in a withering portrait by Kenya’s leading political cartoonist, Gado.

People complain the unity government of Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga is simply failing them.

“We are dying and being killed. We are being repressed and oppressed … And Kibaki talks about his personal life!” said commentator Keguro Macharia.

Some Kenyans predict the coalition will split. Others want a new election.

Yet with memories of last year’s post-election violence still raw, and given Kibaki’s survival of past crises, some analysts say the government will just limp along chaotically until a 2012 poll.

“It’s a horrible conundrum,” said a foreign diplomat in Nairobi. “Kenya obviously needs a fresh start, but that risks inviting in the demons again. The alternative is stagnation and paralysis for the next three years, which is sad.”

Civil society groups say the coalition government is guilty of runaway corruption in almost every ministry.

The government is further provoking the public by failing to take seriously accusations that security forces have killed hundreds of people illegally, critics say. Thousands of students took to the streets on Tuesday in a protest against the alleged killings.

The disillusionment seems to have taken a generalised aspect beyond the usual tribal and party political lines.

“There is a revolutionary feeling,” anti-graft activist Mwalimu Mati told Reuters.

In one survey last month, when Kenyans were asked what was the coalition’s greatest achievement, 70 percent said none.

Another poll this week showed a third of Kenyans want a new election, although two-thirds also said they feared another round of violence at the next election.

Adding to the tense politics, Odinga’s wing of government — borne out of the opposition Orange Democratic Movement that says the Dec. 27 presidential election was stolen from it — says Kibaki’s side is riding roughshod over it.

Some members of Kibaki’s Party of National Unity have told ODM to get out of government if they do not agree with its appointments, statements and decisions.

Odinga is in a bind, seeing his reputation fall fast as he is part of a non-reforming, under-performing government, but loath to go back into opposition.

His claim to moral authority has been dented, too, by accusations that one of his men, Agriculture Minister William Ruto, was responsible for kickbacks and corruption. Ruto denies the charges.

Odinga’s frustration is obvious. After the murder of two rights activists last week, he even warned that Kenya was “hurtling towards failure as a state.”

Kibaki has stayed largely silent and above the fray.

Plenty of government ministers and parliamentarians openly acknowledge that much is wrong in Kenya right now, although they accuse critics of exaggerating the problem for political ends.

For now, Kenya’s common people, or “wanainchi” as they call themselves in Swahili, are pleading for more responsible government.

A U.N. investigator has castigated Kenya’s police force for hundreds of alleged extra-judicial killings and called for both its chief and the Attorney General to be fired immediately.
 
In a scathing indictment of the east African country’s security forces, Philip Alston, the U.N. rapporteur on extradicial executions, said he had received overwhelming evidence during a 10-day tour of systematic, widespread regular and carefully planned killings by the police. He said they were “free to kill at will” and did so with impunity for motives ranging from private disputes to extortion, to shooting a suspect instead of making an arrest. “The Kenyan police are a law unto themselves and they kill often and with impunity, ” said Alston, a law professor from Australia. In a statement laced with angry sarcasm, he accused the police of failing to provide him with virtually any of the information he sought, including the number of officers in the force. He supported allegations that police had killed 500 suspected members of the notorious Mungiki crime gang in 2007 in an attempt to exterminate it and 400, mostly opposition, demonstrators during a post election crisis last year — as reported by an official inquiry. Army and police are also accused of torturing and killing at least 200 people in an offensive to suppress a rebel movement in western Kenya.
 
Alston demanded the immediate dismissal of Police Commissioner Hussein Ali but did not stop there. He said long-serving Attorney General Amos Wako, who he accused of consistently obstructing attempts to prosecute those in high positions for extrajudicial executions, must also go, calling him the embodiment of a system of impunity. Alston added that Kenya’s judicial system was bankrupt and another obstacle to achieving justice.  And he even attacked President Mwai Kibaki for remaining completely silent about impunity.
 
Alston’s condemnation was perhaps the most high profile and powerful in recent years but it follows numerous reports by human rights groups about extrajudicial killings by the police. Ali, an army general who has led the force for five years, has survived numerous other controversies.
 
The government spokesman, Alfred Mutua, who as a sideline produces a popular television cop squad drama, immediately rubbished Alston’s statement, saying he had not been in the country long enough to draw accurate conclusions. But Kenya’s biggest newspaper, the Daily Nation, noted in an editorial that this was a routine response from the government and the U.N. official’s report could not be dismissed so lightly, an opinion shared by the other big daily, the Standard. But the government appears set to ignore even such high profile criticism, as it has done with allegations against the police in the past.
 
The case also underlines the divisions within Kenya’s unwieldy Grand Coalition government, set up almost a year ago to end ethnic bloodletting after the disputed election that killed around 1,300 people. Alston was invited to carry out his investigation by this very government, although it is not clear who did so. He said Prime Minister Raila Odinga and Justice Minister Martha Karua had expressed concern about his report. Odinga was quoted in the Nation as saying: “We must act on the report. No one will be spared. I am not willing to compromise on this one.” He doesn’t seem to have spoken to Mutua.  
 
But whatever Odinga says, nobody is holding their breath for a radical overhaul of the police despite wide public disgust over their tactics. A recent opinion poll showed that 70 percent of Kenyans surveyed felt the coalition government had achieved nothing since it was formed last April. Only 33 percent thought any political or business leader guilty of organising the election violence would ever be convicted. Former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who led mediation to end the crisis, warned that political manoeuvres delaying the establishment of a tribunal on the violence threatened the country’s stability.
 
Will Kenya ever tackle these fundamental problems? Will violent police ever be brought to book?

A new book on corruption in Kenya is considered so explosive there that copies are only being sold under the counter in Nairobi by some book sellers too nervous to display them openly.

“Within these pages, we stand eyeball to eyeball with corruption. The book is an ironclad tell-all that mercilessly bares all to the light,” said the local Sunday Nation newspaper in a review of Michela Wrong’s book. “It feels dangerous to just read, let alone write.”

Just published, “It’s Our Turn to Eat” tells the story of Kenyan anti-corruption whistleblower John Githongo, who uncovered details of one of the country’s biggest scandals, the $750 million Anglo Leasing affair involving inflated security contracts.

At the heart of the book is a portrayal of an ethnic clique intent on enriching itself and holding on to power - a picture familiar to many other African states.

We are told that, as Githongo’s investigation deepens, the circle of suspects widens to include many senior officials, members of the Kikuyu tribe, Kenya’s biggest, to which Githongo and President Mwai Kibaki belong. When he made his findings public in 2006, Githongo was vilified by critics for betraying his tribe in exposing “Africa’s Watergate”.

“The title of the book is an appeal Githongo’s colleagues made to him: ‘It’s our turn to eat, John. Don’t rock the boat’,” said former British envoy, Edward Clay, who once equated the Kenyan government’s tolerance of grand corruption to vomiting on the shoes of the donors who provide aid. “For the corrupters it is a sweat provoker,” he said at the book’s launch in London.

Wrong’s book is being serialised in Kenya’s biggest newspapers, The Nation and The Standard, at a time when the government is again tainted by scandal.

Since Kibaki’s disputed re-election set off tribal-based clashes that killed at least 1,300 people last year, a unity government bringing in leaders from other ethnic groups including the Luo and Kalenjin, as well as Kikuyu, has been accused of foul play over everything from the sale of a hotel to fuel and maize supplies.
   
Even for a nation used to hearing about corrupt practices, the scandal involving the mismanagement of maize reserves has stoked anger at a time 10 million Kenyans face starvation.

“People are really mad because politicians used a system devised to bring down maize flour prices to enrich themselves,” said one Kenyan professional in Nairobi. “The flour is still expensive, inflation is up and drought is threatening lives. People are baying for blood.”

For many kenyans, it seems Kibaki’s promise to end graft, the pledge that first brought him to power in 2002, sounds as hollow as ever.

So, what can be done?

Wrong argues that the key to fighting graft in Africa does not lie in fresh legislation or new institutions.
   
In Kenya, as in many other countries, the anti-corruption body is “part of the grand corrupters’ game, providing them with another bureaucratic wall behind which to shield, another scapegoat to blame for lack of progress,” she says.

“Rather than dreaming up sexy-sounding short cuts, donors should be pouring their money into the boring old institutions African regimes have deliberately starved of cash over the
years: the police force, the judicial system and civil service”.

Donors, she said, “would do better to target the Western companies, lawyers’ chambers and banks which make it possible for crooked African leaders to spirit hundreds of millions of dollars out of the continent each year.”

Do you think that would help? Do Githongo and other whistleblowers make a difference?

For those looking to invest in Africa, the best prospects are in Nigeria and Ethiopia according to a new index of potential investment destinations published this week.

But should anybody want to put money into Africa at a time the global financial crisis and falling prices for export commodities, on which the continent is so reliant, have discouraged investors who had begun to see some African countries as promising frontier markets?

“Africa is going to overtake the Middle East to become the second fastest growing region in the world after emerging Asia. It will be affected by the global financial crisis but it is much less exposed than many places,” Katharine Pulvermacher, chief executive of business consultancy African Rainbow said this week on the launch of its Star of Africa index.

The index’s creators told my colleague Peter Apps that potential growth in energy, water and communications consumption could amply reward investors taking the risk in Africa. South Africa, Mauritius and Tanzania took third, fourth and fifth place respectively on the index. Somalia, Chad and Eritrea were the least appealing countries for investors.

The International Monetary Fund’s most recent forecast of economic growth for Africa this year was 3.3 percent – much slower than the 5-6 percent of recent years but good by the standards of Western countries in recession. A senior IMF official noted recently, however, that African growth could be sharply lower than its forecasts.

“Remittances, tourism revenue and even aid, we feel could fall further,” said the IMF’s Africa Department Director Antoinette Sayeh.

The African markets that had attracted most foreign investment in recent years – not only developed South Africa but also countries such as Nigeria and Kenya – are among those that have so far been hardest hit, while smaller economies that may not have had so far to fall have been less touched.

Despite the global woes, bulls still cite long term changes in Africa such as improvements in political and economic openness, a decrease in the number of conflicts, new technology, emerging middle classes and long term investment from Asia as reasons for optimism. Zimbabwe’s stock exchange restarted on Thursday after a three-month halt and a still shaky power-sharing deal has brought some hopes of economic revival in what used to be a strong performer.

For some, looking to the long term is not enough, though. UK asset manager New Star – being bought by a rival - said this month it was winding up its Heart of Africa Fund due to deteriorating market conditions on the continent.

Is Africa a good bet for investors? What do you think?

Where once African officials might have viewed infrastructure projects solely as a good source of kickbacks, these days there is pressure from electorates, at least in some countries, to deliver on promises of improvements.

The growth that many African states have enjoyed in recent years has exposed the failure of the continent’s infrastructure still more starkly – with even South Africa suffering the kind of power outages that much of the rest of Africa has grown far too used to.

Infrastructure is in theory the focus of this year’s African Union summit, although as always it will be overshadowed by crisis in Somalia, Zimbabwe, Congo, Darfur etc…

The global financial crisis is an even bigger threat to hopes of strengthening Africa’s infrastructure.

Last year, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda all set out to borrow money internationally through sovereign bonds, for the upgrade and expansion of roads, water supplies, irrigation schemes and electricity generation capacities. That followed Ghana’s successful launch in 2007 of sub-Saharan Africa’s first Eurobond outside South Africa to help fund infrastructure development.

But the plans of the east African countries have been knocked off course despite early assertions from confident governments that they would not be affected by the global downturn which began in the Western world.

Kenya is exploring alternative ways of raising the $500 million it had originally planned to raise from a debut Eurobond. Tanzania and Uganda both made similar announcements.

But the problem of poor infrastructure remains as pressing as ever and could restrict growth in Africa once the current global financial storm ends.

A senior World Bank official has said Africa risks a “lost decade” of underdevelopment if it neglects projects to boost energy and transport infrastructure because of the global financial crisis – comparing the situation they face now to that in Asian countries a decade ago.

How much of a priority should infrastructure be for African governments at this time? Is there anything they can do to raise the money needed? What do you think?