Understanding Tahrir Square: What Transitions Elsewhere Can Teach Us About the Prospects for Arab Democracy by Stephen R. Grand

Author:Stephen R. Grand [Grand, Stephen R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780815725169
Google: -qM_vQEACAAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 18096446
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Published: 2013-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

Like Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa has had more than its share of strong men dominating national politics. Yet a continent that often has been written off as a lost cause—one mired in poverty, kleptocracy, ethnic and tribal tensions, civil wars, and state failures—has in fact had its share of stunning successes. What the grim statistics about Africa hide is that while viewed in the aggregate the continent continues to be extremely impoverished and to experience high rates of conflict and instability, a number of countries within Africa are in fact performing remarkably well, both politically and economically.1 The story of Sub-Saharan Africa over the last two decades is really a tale of two continents: one in which democratic and market reforms have laid the foundation for more effective governance and robust economic growth and another that continues to be plagued by the same maladies—authoritarianism, state-dominated economies, conflict, disease, and poverty—that have afflicted Africa since independence. Understanding the dynamics behind African countries’ divergent trajectories can provide valuable insights on the prospects for democratization in the Arab world.

The Third Wave's Impact

The Third Wave of democratization had a transformative effect on large parts of Africa, much as it did on Latin America and the former Eastern bloc. The Third Wave began in Africa in November 1989, just as the Berlin Wall was coming down in Germany, when voters in Namibia elected representatives to a constituent assembly to write a new democratic constitution for their country. In 1990, a national conference gave civil society leaders in Benin an opening to call for a multiparty democracy, leading to the end of the 19-year reign of strongman Mathieu Kérékou. In February 1990, South African opposition leader and anti-apartheid crusader Nelson Mandela was released from prison, setting in motion South Africa's eventual transition to democracy.

Those developments ended up having dramatic ripple effects across the continent. At the time, much as in Latin America, dictators reigned in almost every country of Sub-Saharan Africa; the lonely democratic exceptions were Botswana, the Gambia, and Mauritius. The great hopes fostered by the independence movements of the 1950s and 1960s had dimmed as Africa's new leaders consolidated their control, rigging elections and ignoring any constitutional constraints on their power. The term “rule of the big man” aptly captured the nature of politics in most of Africa. Towering post-independence figures like Mobuto Sese Seko, Kenneth Kuanda, Kwame Nkrumah, and Julius Nyere dominated the state and the economy.

The Third Wave brought dramatic changes to many parts of the continent. The first was a profound change in norms throughout the region that led to free and fair elections being regarded as the sine qua non of political legitimacy. In response to public pressure, a number of governments announced plans for elections and expanded the rights of citizens in the early 1990s. Between 1990 and 1994, thirty-eight Sub-Saharan African countries held competitive elections, twenty-nine of which were considered to be “founding” elections. Whereas Africa had seen no more than two competitive elections a year in the 1980s, there were fourteen in 1993 alone.

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