Democracy’s supply and demand in Africa at a tipping point

Last week, as I travelled through West Africa, I was seized with trying to make sense of the countervailing winds competing to claim the future of the African continent.

It’s quite the puzzle, attempting to reconcile the retrenchment of good governance in South Africa and throughout Central Africa, where leaders who have failed their people refuse to relinquish power, with the recent democratic coup in The Gambia, the historic defeat of an incumbent president in Ghana, and the consolidation of democracy throughout West Africa.

What were the forces at work? How could we influence them? Would Africa’s authoritarian leaders take comfort in President Trump’s embrace of less-than-democratic leaders elsewhere in the world — in Turkey, Egypt, the Philippines and in Russia? How could we tip the balance?

{mosads}Luckily for me, I met up with Dr. Gyimah Boadi in Accra, Ghana’s capital city. Gyimah is the Executive Director of the Center for Democratic Development (CDD), and a co-founder of Afrobarometer, a pan-African network that conducts public opinion surveys on democracy and governance in 36 countries in Africa. As a former professor at the University of Ghana, and with a PhD from the University of California, he is one of Africa’s foremost democracy students and advocates.

Born on Oct. 2, 1953, Gyimah is a man on a mission, advocating with cap-in-hand for support to strengthen Africa’s nascent democratic institutions. He is a regular in Washington, D.C. at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI).  

We met up on May Day, at HSI Orient Center for Health and Wellness on the outskirts of the city. Gyimah has large, deep-set, sauce-pan brown eyes, and a bald head that is always perspiring. He smiles with eyes-wide-open.

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“I love this place!” says Gyimah. “But I dislike the chairs, they rest too low to the ground.”

That’s not a complaint, but a practical observation for the 63-year-old Gyimah, whose lower limbs were weakened by polio as a toddler, and further strained by injury as he managed a childhood where handicapped children were granted no special accommodations. He navigates life with a cane and a crutch, and immense upper body strength. Gyimah possesses a complete absence of self-pity, he sees his handicap as a daily companion. The word “burden” is not in his vocabulary.

Growing up, Gyimah first wanted to become a preacher, then a lawyer. Inevitably, a curious child, coming of age just after Ghana received its independence from Britain in 1957, political science became his obsession, and then his calling. Since young adulthood, Gyimah has been involved in every major political milestone of the country, including its 2016 presidential and legislative elections which brought in the fifth president of Ghana’s Fourth Republic.

I coordinate with the waitress to add another cushion to Gyimah’s lawn chair before he takes a seat. I fix my chair the same way. Over way too-sweet iced green tea, along with spicy seafood salad, chicken and cashews, and mixed vegetables, we catch up.

I explain to Gyimah that I fear that my optimism about the future of democracy in Africa was coming across as naïve, and share with him one of the many comments I received on my recent column, this one from a journalist based in Senegal from a prominent news daily in the UK.

She writes to me, “Sadly I don’t think I can agree with you. While The Gambia was positive in the end, at a similar time, terrible things were happening in Gabon and the DRC, South Africa is becoming more undemocratic by the day. I just don’t think tiny, unimportant Gambia translates into anything wider.”

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Gyimah shakes his head, knowingly. Then he offers, “neither one of you is wrong, Riva.”

“You need to think of democracy as a commodity. How much is available? What is the quality of the product? What do people want? What are they willing to pay for it — to do for it,” clarifies Gyimah.

“The journalist sees small ruling cliques still clinging to power. And to her, their grip feels like it is getting stronger. She is pessimistic. You are speaking of the free will of the African people, and their readiness to hold leaders accountable, and for you, their voices are getting louder. You are an optimist,” he continues.

Gyimah explains to me that this debate goes to the very heart of Africa today, and that he sees the continent at a “tipping point.”

Will democracy be supply-constrained, or demand-driven? Will leaders be forced to make way for the next generation, or will frustration with the governing authorities diminish the belief of the African people in democratic institutions, opening the door for a return to authoritarianism?

Afrobarometer has measured this phenomena. Its latest polling released in November 2016 found that 7 in 10 Africans believe democracy is preferable to all forms of government. And at the same time, more than half of the respondents surveyed are dissatisfied with the quality of their democracy.

The Afrobarometer report concludes that there is a “democratic deficit” where demand for democracy exceeds supply, and because of this, the continent is likely to experience popular pressure for democratization, with the danger that unmet democratic demands may contribute to social unrest.

Gyimah notes that if you look at polling in the rest of the world, Africa is an outlier in its unwavering belief in democracy. Recent research in the Journal of Democracy shows that North America, Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand have all become more cynical about the value of democracy as a political system, and, overall, less hopeful that anything they do might influence actual public policy.

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“There are no assurances that Africa will continue to be an outlier. There is no guarantee that democracy will ultimately prevail,” Gyimah concludes.

“That’s why democracy assistance from multilateral, bilateral and individual donors is vital at this time. As domestic pro-democracy groups in Africa labor to reclaim lost ground on democratic governance and to protect and deepen democratization in their countries, they benefit greatly from solidarity on the part of the international community,” he exclaims.

After vigorous notetaking, which included opening the links with my iPhone to Afrobarometer’s graphs and data sets, I return the conversation back to the comment that prompted Gyimah’s political science lesson and ask if I am wrong to be optimistic?

Says Gyimah, “No Riva, you are not. I too am a believer that the continent’s future will be demand-driven, and that a young generation, empowered through education, social media and new technologies, will claim their right to be heard.”

Gyimah says that contributing to his sense of hope are the actions of the U.S. Congress last week, which prevented President Trump from making unprecedented cuts to the U.S. foreign assistance budget, indicating, he believes, that the consensus built in pursuit of democracy-building over decades in America is stronger than any one White House occupant.

And then Gyimah adds, “I have always held that the right leader can lift a nation, and the emergence of an anchor democracy, can lift the entire continent. And here I am hopeful, because I believe we are going to see this phenomena in Ghana in the coming years.”

And with that comment, some two hours later, Gyimah asks for the check and we pack up 75 percent of the food we ordered, as neither of us found the time to eat. But we did manage to finish our too-sweet iced green tea, only after it was thrice diluted.

K. Riva Levinson is President and CEO of KRL International LLC a D.C.-based consultancy that works in the world’s emerging markets, and author of “Choosing the Hero: My Improbable Journey and the Rise of Africa’s First Woman President” (Kiwai Media, June 2016), Silver Medal winner Independent Book Publishers Award, Finalist, Foreword Reviews INDIES ‘Book of the Year’ Awards. Follow her on Twitter @RivaLevinson.

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