By Howard W. French
The 1980s are usually recalled as a decade of one-party rule in Africa, and beyond that, of the receding tide of civilian-led government in the face of military takeovers in one country after another.
Having covered the phenomenon while working as a freelance journalist based in West Africa for a little more than the first half of that decade, I recall my excitement when I returned as a reporter for The New York Times at the start of the 1990s, which are often remembered for quite the opposite: the rebirth of democratic politics on the continent.
This time around, I covered the arrival of elected governments in several places, but most strikingly to me in Mali and Benin, whose dictatorships in earlier eras I had seen close-up myself.
Among my strongest recollections from this bold new era of participatory politics and competitive elections is of a warning I received from an editor back in New York, telling me not to get carried away in my enthusiasm for what seemed to me to be an unmistakably positive wave of change.
Privately, I chafed and bridled over this. The Western press had long caricatured Africa as a place of “big men” and their goons, as well as of corruption, pestilence, violence and famine—that is, when it bothered to cover the continent at all. Now, with Africa moving toward democracy—moreover, of its own volition—I was being urged not to accord so much weight to what seemed so clearly to me to be a historic wave of change.
I stuck to my guns as best I could, writing the news stories and analyses that I felt needed to be written, not worrying when they got buried deep inside the newspaper or limited to shorter articles. Looking back now, amid today’s prolonged season of military coups across West Africa, however, it is hard not to feel differently. The editor was right about democracy on the continent, in fact, even if it was for the wrong reasons. This style of government, in its most familiar form of political parties and regular trips to the polls, where citizens get to vote according to their own whims, was always bound to be fragile in Africa in our era, experiencing as many setbacks as advances.
After at least six recent military coup d’etats on the continent since August—one in Burkina Faso, one in Guinea, two in Mali, one in Sudan and one in Chad—as well as an unsuccessful attempt at one in Guinea-Bissau just yesterday, the conventional wisdom that comes to many today as easily as did my enthusiasm over the wave of elections I covered nearly three decades ago is that Africans have fallen out of love with democracy, or that it simply doesn’t work on the continent. But if I were an editor fielding the stories of correspondents today, I would caution any reporter coming to that conclusion just as strongly as I was cautioned for the opposite slant back then.
The changes of regime that the world has recently seen out of Africa in favor of soldiers in khaki huddling around tables in hastily arranged appearances before the cameras to announce the overthrow of civilian governments are neither surprising, nor are they likely to be permanent. I remember watching the coup of Maj. Gen. Muhammadu Buhari in Nigeria in 1984, when he declared, “We have dutifully intervened to save the nation from imminent collapse,” and looking back, it is remarkable how little this template for self-justification has changed.
Civilian rule is taking the blame today in places like Mali and Burkina Faso, but it is hard to imagine how military rule can set things right. This means that military leaders are likely to take the blame tomorrow.
Sooner or later, though, civilian governments will replace most of these newly installed military regimes, once it becomes clear just how hard it is to wield power to any great effect in the most vulnerable African states. In fact, that is what happened in Nigeria, ultimately bringing Buhari back to power as an elected civilian president. In the meantime, other elected governments are bound to fall.
The crisis of African politics in this recent moment, although not limited to it, has been centered in the broad belt of semi-arid states situated to the immediate south of the Sahara Desert, known as the Sahel. In reality, it is not so much a crisis of systems of government as it is a far more complex and hard-to-resolve crisis of economics, demography and the environment. As I wrote in a recent column, this is true for most of the African continent, which has had little success finding a viable station for itself in an unforgiving and brutally competitive global economy.
And that’s not for lack of trying. Many African states invested heavily in education, health care and other public services in the exuberant early years of independence, following long decades of paltry efforts in these areas under stingy and exploitative colonial rule. Newly independent countries sampled pretty much every ideological flavor out there, and even created new ones of their own. Some hewed close to their former colonial powers, keeping on European advisers and favoring private investment from abroad. Others tried much more nationalist approaches and experimented with import substitution and heavy investment aimed at industrialization or other paths toward higher growth rates, which they hoped would enable them to break out of the low stations colonial rule had left them in. Almost nothing seems to have worked.
Prospects for the Sahel have always promised to be among the most difficult anywhere in Africa. The region combines ecological fragility and limited arable land on one hand, with some of the world’s highest population growth rates on the other. Add to that the fact that almost every state in the region has been beset by violence from insurgent Islamist fundamentalist groups over the past decade or more. As a result, countries with scant room to maneuver and no obvious good answers about the best way forward in order to provide greater security and prosperity for their people are being pushed over the edge.
Civilian rule is taking the blame today in places like Mali and Burkina Faso, but it is hard to imagine how military rule can set things right. This means that military leaders are likely to take the blame tomorrow. In fact, looking back over the past 75 years of independence in Africa, there are no strong examples of grand state-building by army leaders who seize power. In fact, as the political scientist Paul Nugent once wrote, “nothing is more corrosive of military unity than military rule.”
Citizens of African states in crisis, and they are by no means limited to the Sahel, have cheered on the military before only to regret it. Their disenchantment with their governments is understandable, and yet no regime on the continent has figured out a path forward that can deliver improved living standards with a recipe or lessons that can be easily applied to others.
The Sahel poses what are perhaps the most daunting challenges of any region. Its countries are landlocked, with unsustainably high birth rates, widespread poverty, gender inequality, failing educational systems and few, if any comparative advantages, to compensate for these things.
If solutions are to be found for problems as many and varied as these, they are unlikely to come via men in khaki or by diktat. Democracy is clearly no magic bullet, but bringing people together in a national project based on choice and participation is likely to be part of the answer.
Howard W. French is a career foreign correspondent and global affairs writer, and the author of five books, including the recently published “Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World.” You can follow him on Twitter at @hofrench.
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