Interventions (21 page)

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O
n leaving the country after that final press conference, we found the Nigerians had lent us a very different airplane than the one in which we had arrived. It was old, run-down, and did not look entirely safe. On seeing it, Kieran Prendergast, my insightful and witty under-secretary-general for political affairs, turned to me, laughing through his beard: “Well, you've done what they needed you for. Who cares about you now?” Indeed, within fifteen minutes of taking off, the flaps jammed in a mechanical failure, and the pilot told us that we had to return and change aircraft.

But it was not a false start for Nigeria. Abubakar followed through in the months later. Political prisoners were released, and the military regime's system of oppression began to lift more each day. Elections to the national assembly were held by the end of the year; Abubakar voluntarily stepped down as he always said he would and, in May 1999, presidential elections were held. The result was a reformist African leader, Olusegun Obasanjo, carried into office by popular vote, in a new democratic system that still endures today.

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Nigeria's transition is one of many stories indicative of the fact that elections alone are not enough to transform societies into functioning and legitimate democracies. What is needed are, on the one hand, a set of governing institutions and rules, which have to be built up over time, that protect the results of elections and so the rights of people; and, on the other hand, responsible and accountable leadership that serves the people. In short, the transformation of African democracies requires good governance that builds the rule of law, not the rule of force or the rule of one man. Since independence, however, these characteristics have long been in short supply in Africa. Instead, a system of rule whereby power and authority was built around the personality of the leader has prevailed throughout much of this time. It is a destructive form of rule, most commonly brought into being following illegal seizures of power.

Zimbabwe was a prime example of this. In 1965, the white-minority government of Southern Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe) unilaterally declared independence from Great Britain, thwarting the British intent of building a multiracial democratic system as part of the decolonization process. From 1970, Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo led an armed rebellion against the white minority government, with victory for the freedom fighters arriving in 1980. Mugabe took office as prime minister in that year, and then as Zimbabwe's first executive president in 1988—a position that he still holds.

What made Mugabe such an impressive revolutionary leader also made him an autocratic and ultimately dangerous president for Zimbabwe's people. The need for unity, the aversion to pluralism, the distaste for division that the revolutionary experience brings, meant that his rule unfolded in an increasingly autocratic style.

But the perils of this personalized form of rule only became fully apparent from the late 1990s, when he launched a series of aggressive and disastrous land reforms. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Zimbabwe was arguably one of the best-performing countries in Africa in terms of human development. These misguided reforms led to a crippling of the economy and an extraordinary decline in the standard of living and health for Zimbabwe's citizens. But the idea of Mugabe's authority was too entrenched in the political system and in his own mind for there to be any question of his stepping down. Zimbabwe's political institutions were not strong enough to allow any viable means for curtailing his rule or ensuring his removal. Brutal repression increased in Zimbabwe in order to uphold Mugabe's power in the face of unrest.

Pressure from outside, among other African leaders, was slow in coming and feeble. This was largely because of the reverence in which Mugabe was held across Africa due to his heroic revolutionary achievements. Furthermore, he had directly helped the leaders of other freedom movements in the past, such as in Namibia, South Africa, and Mozambique, whose governments were now run by the very same people. In the community of African leaders, he was effectively the foreman of a union of freedom fighters.

The worst feature of this system of rule is that even when the figure in power might seem like a good and desirable leader, such men can, and often do, change. This then leaves the people exposed to dangers from which they have no institutional protection. This was the way it went with Mugabe. His major misdemeanors as a ruler only emerged two decades after he took office.

I personally observed Mugabe's leadership transformation, from a clearly sensible and calculating style into one of irascible, even paranoid, defensiveness. Mugabe's political character, forged in revolutionary war in the Zimbabwean bush, was one that compelled him to hit back when threatened. This was his style. As he grew older, this trait, combined with the escalating criticisms of the outside world, drove an ever-deepening obstinacy in his destructive domestic policies.

I began my time as secretary-general with good personal relations with Mugabe. Even in the midst of the turmoil in Zimbabwe, I saw a value in having this cordial relationship with him—it allowed another potential “way in” for the international community to make him change course. But I may have lost this asset after I commissioned a study on the brutal slum clearances in Harare. Anna Tibaijuka, the head of the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat), conducted the study, producing findings that were frank and hard-hitting regarding the government's culpability. After that, Mugabe, long wary of British influence in Zimbabwe, accused Tibaijuka of being a British spy sent to Zimbabwe to do Tony Blair's bidding.

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Z
imbabwe acutely demonstrates the danger of relying on the value of any one man for the health of a country. It is only in the building of representative, responsible, and accountable institutions—with a power, sanctity, and life span greater than that of any individual—that citizens can entrust their collective fate. Leaders like Nelson Mandela understood this. Mandela stepped down without hesitation after one term, citing the very same reason: institutions were always more important than any individual.

In its origin, support for the Big Man system as the solution to African problems derived almost entirely not from a genuine regard for the capacity of such individuals but the requisites of subservience to these autocrats and dictators, for fear of one's status and life. But over time this produced a sense of political culture: these Big Men were how Africa best dealt with its challenges—a conceit pandered to for many years by both Africans and outsiders.

The problems of Africa, however, have always stemmed from a lack of institutions: a lack of the institutional resources necessary to deal with the complex political, social, and economic problems faced on the continent. But irresponsible, unaccountable personalized systems of rule are the enemy of these. Cultivating the authority of a single individual over an entire and diverse population means that any institution that empowers the population's various constituencies has to be blocked or crushed. It means institutions that uphold a system for the peaceful transfer of power between political parties and between leaders have to be eroded or eradicated. Civil society institutions, organizations, and activists independent of the state, and so beyond the control of the Big Man, can never be allowed to flourish. Free enterprise, underpinned by free societies and systems of regulation and law independent of the day-to-day whims of the leader—an essential feature for private sector–driven development—cannot be allowed.

This is the core of why I have long seen Africa's problems as deeply intertwined. The problems of coups, the mismanagement of economies, brutal regimes, the continual violations of human rights, and underdevelopment are all mutually reinforcing. True leadership means institution building: the hard, enduring work of constructing the many forms of government institutions and the independent organizations of civil society necessary for Africa's problems to be met. True leadership means throwing all of one's effort into the mammoth political work of peacefully distributing power between different factions, groups, and constituencies for the common good. True leaders are those who seek to build the power of Africa's people—not their personal power.

But there were few African heads of government who did this in the years after decolonization. This is where colonialism did play an important, destructive role, as it created many of the structural conditions for the politics that followed. This is not to soften African responsibility, which I still emphasize as paramount, but to falsify the suggestion that this system of rule is ingrained in the African psyche and in African culture. Instead, it emerged from the complications caused by externally imposed structures.

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T
he 1885 Congress of Berlin saw the colonial powers divide up Africa into territorial units that made no sense on the ground—partitioning kingdoms, states, and communities from one another, and arbitrarily melding others. Furthermore, the colonial system introduced laws and institutions that were designed to exploit local divisions to enable the strength of the colonial authority, rather than attempts to bridge these divides.

It was these arbitrary boundaries and these divisive institutions and systems of law that most newly independent African countries inherited in the 1960s. The resulting challenge of creating genuine national identities within the colonial-created boundaries gave too much opportunity for the new African leaders to assert the value of their personalities in papering over these divisions. In the absence of any organic unity, some African countries turned to the authority of individual rulers instead of attempting to cultivate political pluralism. The colonial state had not encouraged representation or participation, and neither did the leaders who followed.

Compounding this trajectory in African politics was the continent's revolutionary experience. The struggles for independence, valiant in their purpose, created problems for the politics of the postcolonial era. For freedom fighters, and for good reason, unity was to be prized above all in the fight against colonialism, such was the internal discipline necessary to lead a successful campaign for independence.

This approach to the organization of revolutionary cadres and the mobilization of supporters for a common cause was translated into peacetime politics following these wars. Thus, the very qualities that made revolutionary leaders effective during times of armed struggle often rendered them poor rulers in peacetime. Into the postcolonial state they carried with them the rhetoric of absolute unity beneath their authority. They suppressed even the notion of division.

Thus, revolutionary movements, united in the goal of decolonization, gave way to one-party states, pretending away the divisions of their societies and providing further justification for personalized rule.

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T
he campaign for African democracy is sometimes tripped up by ideas of cultural relativism. The reasoning goes as follows: democracy is a Western value, not a naturally African one. As with views emphasizing the culpability of colonialism, this serves only those who desire the moribund status quo. More important, such arguments are built upon entirely bogus and defunct reasoning.

In fact, in Africa the values of pluralism and collective decision making are ingrained in our oldest traditions, identifiable in the deepest vestiges of African culture across the continent. The traditional means of dispute resolution is to meet on the grass, under a tree, and to stay until a solution agreed by all can be found. In Ghana, we have a saying: one head alone is not enough to decide. In reality, African communities from the village level upward have traditionally decided their course through free discussion, carefully weighing different points of view until consensus is reached. Even in the system of rule by chiefs, the leader still had to govern with the will and support of the people, otherwise the chief could be removed.

The concept of
ubuntu,
a Xhosa word describing a notion that all Africans instinctively relate to, is also highly relevant. It is an element of African humanism, loosely translating into a notion of collective dependence: “I am because we are.” It is a philosophy that denotes a sense of an equal share of all in society and in one another, a philosophy that holds at its heart principles that translate easily into notions of liberal democracy.

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I
n my years as secretary-general, I saw the sheer appetite in Africa for political change. But in 1997, it was mostly hidden from view, kept so by the fear of Africa's overbearing rulers and the taboo against open criticism of these powerful men. It only took the slightest act of rhetorical leadership to bring this enthusiasm to the surface. One minor but telling incident was when I was in Gabon at a press conference with mostly African journalists. One of them asked me a grating question: “Mr. Secretary-General, you often criticize Africa and African governments. But is this fair? Why do you do this?”

“I work a lot for Africa and I recognize its hardships,” I replied, “but I'm an African and I reserve the right to criticize Africa and Africans. And I will keep doing this.” The response from the press was immediate and spontaneous applause. At a press conference this was a very strange thing to witness. But it showed how just touching on this hidden nerve was enough to expose the real desires of Africans for accountable and responsible systems of rule.

Great strides have been made in African governance in recent years, but much more is needed. Progress is deeply uneven. In Ghana, for example, since the repeating cycle of coups was ended, there have been three successful democratic elections, each involving a peaceful transfer of power. It is no coincidence that Ghana is also the only African state to have met both the poverty and hunger components of Millennium Development Goal 1, following its successful implementation of, among other things, strong agricultural reforms. However, in 2009, the Freedom House Report concluded that only eight African countries were fully democratic, twenty-five partially democratic, and twenty-one authoritarian. A problem is that elections have emerged in some instances as only a veneer of democracy rather than as a genuine feature of political transformation. Elections have been used to perpetuate the rule of the same dictators as before.