By DREW
HINSHAW and PATRICK MCGROARTY
On the same November morning
when Boko Haram seized yet another village in Nigeria ’s
north, police in riot gear surrounded the country’s House of Representatives in
the capital city of Abuja .
But they weren’t guarding the country’s parliament against an assault by the
notorious Islamist insurgency; they were there to block a politician from
casting his vote.
Nigerian lawmakers were
scheduled to vote on whether to renew a bill that allows soldiers to detain
suspects without cause in areas threatened by Boko Haram’s gunmen. Mr. Tambuwal
expected to lead the legislative bloc opposed to this grant of sweeping state
powers. Instead, the police fired tear gas and
effectively shut down the Nigerian parliament.
Some world leaders have
managed to stay in office well past their constitutionally mandated
expiration dates. Here's a
look at how they've managed to do it.
“There are signs of the
predatory nature of military rule” returning to Africa, said Larry Diamond,
director of Stanford University ’s Center
on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. “This is a calamity for a number
of these countries.”
To friends of democratic
development, Africa ’s
54 countries pose perhaps the world’s most important test of whether
representative institutions can flourish amid low living standards and rapidly
changing economies. Leaders from the U.S. ,
Europe and Latin
America have visited the
continent to promote open, politically accountable government. They know that China , Africa ’s
biggest trading partner, is offering a rival model in the form of
market-powered autocracy.
For now, the advance of
democracy in Africa appears to have stalled.
In 1990, just three of Africa ’s
48 countries were electoral democracies, according to Freedom House, a
Washington-based pro-democracy advocacy group. By 1994, that number had leapt
to 18. Two decades later, only 19 qualify.
This disappointing record
raises difficult questions about the possibility of poor countries becoming
durable democracies. Several African states—Botswana and Zambia ,
for instance—seem to be headed in that direction. Rising middle classes there
are demanding more accountability and transparency from their governments, and
public services are gradually improving.
But many more African
countries, such as Angola and Sudan ,
are resource-rich, single-party autocracies that have consolidated their grip
on power, thanks in part to high oil prices and low-interest loans from China .
Some political scientists hope that a slowing Chinese economy—and dropping crude-oil
prices—could give a second wind to democracy in Africa ,
forcing closed regimes to hold elections in return for Western loans.
But spreading democracy isn’t
as simple as dangling aid and applauding elections, democratization experts
say. Even hopeful cases like Ghana and Benin must
confront long histories of military rule woven into their political evolution
In many African countries,
soldiers have run the show since the earliest days of colonialism. In the late
1800s, Europeans recruited local men into new armies to help conquer a vast continent.
Throughout the imperial century that followed, Europeans used those colonial
brigades to repress the African lawyers, civil servants and journalists who
were agitating for independence.
After World
War II , Britain , France and
other European empires withdrew. But the militaries of many newly independent
African states continued to suppress their own civil societies. Africa weathered more than 60
coups between 1960 and 1990, according to the African Development Bank. Some
overturned election results that military leaders found unpalatable; others
promised to stamp out political corruption, took over and became corrupt
themselves.
Many of these regimes relied on
Cold War-era patronage from Washington or Moscow .
Soviet patrons often found themselves bankrupt after the Soviet Union collapsed
in 1991, and the U.S. lost interest in
supporting corrupt regimes such as Zaire under
Mobutu Sese Seko.
In the post-Cold War era,
dozens of African countries tried to escape financial trouble by staging
elections in return for U.S. loans
and aid. The soldiers who once lorded over countries such as Ghana and Nigeria returned
to their barracks. After the al Qaeda attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, many African
governments began to receive military training from U.S. officials
seeking new allies in their war on Islamist terror.
That growth has empowered a new
middle class. In Senegal , Uganda , Kenya and
elsewhere, cosmopolitan young consumers have rallied to demand Western-style
democracy. Political scientists had hoped that this rising constituency would
convince soldiers that they were better off reaping the benefits of economic
advance from the sidelines than standing in democracy’s way.
But it often hasn’t worked out
that way. Despite rapid economic growth, Africa ’s
civic institutions remain weak, struggling to provide basic services. Public
hospitals in West
Africa are
fighting an uphill battle against Ebola. Child-protection agencies are watching
young constituents join Islamist rebellions in Nigeria and Kenya .
Against this backdrop of weak
state capacity, African armies stand out for the manpower and funding they
enjoy. They are also increasingly well organized: The U.S. trained some 52,000
African troops in 2013 alone, at a cost of $99 million. So when trouble brews,
African presidents and protesters alike often turn to the most capable
institution at their disposal.
“When you feel some imminent
danger, you call the military,” said Mulbah Morlu, a leader of Liberia ’s
top opposition party. But his own country’s history shows the risks of that
approach. After Liberia ’s
14-year civil war ended in 2003, the U.S. paid security
contractor DynCorp International, based in McLean , Va. ,
to train the country’s new, 2,000-person army. Other institutions like the
health ministry received scant attention.
The Ebola crisis has exposed
that gap. Some Liberian doctors abandoned their posts when the epidemic
exploded in June and July. The country’s health ministry struggled to track
individuals crisscrossing the country carrying the deadly virus. Frustrated,
President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf called in the military.
That was the wrong move, Ms.
Johnson Sirleaf now says. Instead of isolating individuals with the virus, her
soldiers quarantined whole neighborhoods—at one point firing shots into a crowd
and killing a teenage boy. That scared people elsewhere into hiding their sick
neighbors, and the virus spread exponentially.
“I did not know what to do,” Ms. Johnson Sirleaf
said last week. “Capacity is always an issue with us.”
Embattled presidents aren’t the
only ones asking African armies for help. In some of Africa’s poorest
countries—Mali, Guinea, Niger—groups fighting for democracy say that they are
fine with the occasional military-led ouster of an elected leader, if a coup is
what it takes to speed the democratic process.
“Civil society, because of its
frustration, wants a transitional process,” says Alex Vines, an Africa analyst at the
London-based think tank Chatham House. “In the short term, a military coup is
seen as expedient.”
That is what happened last
month in Burkina Faso ,
a quiet democracy in turbulent West Africa .
A former army officer, Blaise Compaoré, had won four elections and governed for
27 years; the constitution banned him from a fifth run. When he tried to change
the constitution to seek one anyway, tens of thousands of protesters took to
the streets and set fire to government buildings, demanding that he leave the
constitution alone.
Amid the chaos, an odd alliance
formed: Protesters rallied behind Mr. Compaoré’s own security detail. Officers seized power and
promised new elections within a year. The next morning, protesters thronged
back into the streets and started sweeping, a symbolic gesture meant to welcome
their new military rulers.
“It is we in civil society that
insisted the army come and restore order,” says Aristide Zongo, executive
director of the Burkinabé Association for Reducing Child Mortality. “From my
point of view, it’s quite acceptable.”
This isn’t how democracy
advocates had hoped that Africa would progress. In the
1990s, activists argued that democracy would pave the way for development.
Elections would make African presidents accountable; those presidents would
improve governance and expand services; as governance improved, big companies
would flock to the continent.
But that virtuous cycle hasn’t
taken hold. Though the end of the Cold War did nudge many African autocrats
toward elections, businesses rushed in far faster than governance improved.
Today, blue-chip companies such as Wal-Mart
Stores Inc. and General
Electric Co. are expanding into countries whose leaders have never
faced a real electoral contest.
Elections have now been held
across the continent, but their credibility varies. In some countries, rulers
deploy state security forces to marginalize opposition leaders. Less autocratic
leaders foster loyalty by doling out state jobs and other perks that would
raise eyebrows even in many developing nations.
A whole generation of elected
leaders is now angling for more time in power. Next year, both Faure Gnassingbé
of Togo and Joseph Kabila
of Congo are
expected to seek third terms. (Mr. Kabila will have to change Congo ’s
constitution to do so; Togo has
no term limits.) Both men inherited power from their fathers, who were
ex-military leaders.
Other African leaders are even
more entrenched. Angola ’s
president, José Eduardo dos Santos ,
is a military commander who has used his country’s vast oil wealth to build a
police network that has helped to neutralize rivals for more than 30 years. In
2012, his party won more than two-thirds of the vote in elections that
observers called deeply flawed.
Robert Mugabe, 90, has ruled Zimbabwe since
1980. This week, he tightened his grip on power at a party conference by
sidelining perceived rivals and backing his 49-year-old wife, Grace, for a
senior party post. And former rebel commander Paul Kagame, Rwanda ’s
president since 2000, is widely believed to be weighing a constitutional
amendment that would allow him to remain in power beyond his second elected
seven-year term, which is set to end in 2017. He says that he will do what
Rwandans ask of him.
The youth of the continent’s
population makes it harder for these autocrats to gauge the political winds
circling around them. Half of Africans are under 19. For many of them, faster
economic growth hasn’t translated into jobs and better living standards, and
they don’t necessarily identify with opposition leaders, who are often as old
as the presidents they seek to dislodge. Some view the military as the best of
a bad set of options.
For the U.S. ,
this is complicated terrain. Washington wants to build up Africa ’s
civil society but also its armies. In 2009, during his first visit to the
continent as president, Barack Obama told
Ghana’s parliament that “Africa doesn’t need strongmen, it needs strong
institutions.” Yet Mr. Obama’s time in office has coincided with the
rise of Islamist insurgencies in Africa such as Boko Haram in Nigeria and al-Shabaab in Somalia .
Much U.S. effort
has thus gone to training soldiers, not building health ministries or electoral
commissions.
The result has been to create
strong armies in weak states, said Sean McFate, a former DynCorp official who
trained soldiers in Burundi and Liberia .
“If the most capable institution is the military, in a crisis, that is what the
country is going to lean on, whether that is the appropriate tool or not,” he
said.
The military remains a
swaggering presence in Nigeria , Africa ’s
most populous country. On the surface, the country is a flourishing democracy:
Its economy has averaged 7% growth annually during the four-year term of
President Goodluck Jonathan, one of the first elected Nigerian leaders who
didn’t come from the military. But Nigeria ’s
army—which led the country almost nonstop from 1966 to 1999—still wields
considerable power. A fifth of Nigeria ’s
nearly $30 billion budget goes to the armed forces.
Still, the military has
repeatedly lost ground to Boko Haram—a fanatical sect that
until recently was armed with just bows, arrows and swords. Soldiers who
complain that they lack bullets and body armor have abandoned a swath of
northeastern Nigeria as large as Belgium .
Meanwhile, their superiors have spent lavishly on flashy equipment, including
newly purchased Russian-made helicopters that have crashed because Nigerian
officers can’t communicate with the Ukrainian pilots hired to fly them, said
one security adviser.
Mr. Jonathan has defended his
army’s efforts. When Kashim Shettima, the governor of a state in Boko Haram’s
heartland, complained that the army was being gutted by corruption, Mr.
Jonathan threatened on television to remove the soldiers guarding Mr.
Shettima’s house, exposing him to attack by Boko Haram.
The military has defended Mr.
Jonathan, too. Soldiers have blocked opposition leaders from landing at
airports during their campaigns, and in June, soldiers confiscated bundles of
newspapers containing articles criticizing government corruption. (The defense
ministry later said that the newspapers were being used to sneak terrorist
supplies around the country.)
“Our soldiers are not involved
in politics,” said Nigeria ’s
military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Chris Olukolade, who declined to comment on
individual incidents. In a statement, Mr. Jonathan’s office said: “It is
absolutely wrong to accuse this administration of repression. If anything, this
administration has been most tolerant of opposition.”
In October, Mr. Tambuwal, the
speaker of the house, broke ranks with Mr. Jonathan. The police soon recalled
his bodyguards. When they blocked his sedan from entering Nigeria ’s
House of Representatives last month, lawmakers helped Mr. Tambuwal to enter
through a side gate. Police chased them down and shot tear gas into the
building’s lobby. By noon, the legislature of Africa ’s
largest democracy was shut down.
Boko Haram spent the day
driving unchallenged into the remote village of Azaya
Kura . Fighters killed
at least 45 people there, residents said, then slipped back into the woods.
_____
De THE WALL
STREET JOURNAL,
06/12/2014
Ilustración: Alex Nabaum
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