EDITORIAL: Southern Africa passes test of democracy

The year 2024 will go down in history as one that tested electoral democracy in Southern Africa. With its imperfections, the region passed the test. 

During the year, Mozambique, SA, Botswana and Namibia held presidential and parliamentary elections. After 30 years, SA’s governing party, the ANC, lost elections, polling less than the required 51% to form a government. With its 40% votes, it cobbled a nine-party government it called the government of national unity (GNU).

After almost six decades in power, the Botswana Democratic Party lost elections to an opposition coalition led by Duma Boko, a Harvard-educated lawyer, and in Mozambique there is mounting evidence that Frelimo, the governing party for more than three decades, may have lost last month’s parliamentary and presidential elections. 

The Mozambican elections results, which favoured Frelimo, have yet to be certified by the Constitutional Council, a higher electoral body. More than 50 people, including two opposition officials, have died during and after the elections.

In Namibia, which held parliamentary and presidential elections last Wednesday, the polls were marred by chaos and technical glitches. 

This past week, Filipe Nyusi, the outgoing president of Mozambique, offered an olive branch to the opposition parties which are challenging Frelimo’s victory. The talks, aimed at defusing month-long violent demonstrations, were boycotted by Venâncio Mondlane, the presumptive winner of the elections who is in hiding in SA. Two of his advisers were killed.

The Nyusi-inspired talks are widely seen as an admission by the governing party that the elections were neither free nor fair. The regional body — the Southern African Development Community (Sadc) — has been wringing its hands over the dodgy elections in Mozambique. 

On the small island of Mauritius, the opposition has taken over. 

These recent elections reveal a few things about the continent, especially its southern tip. First, they show that Africans — both leaders and voters — care about electoral democracy especially in the Sadc region. 

Second, increasingly the youth, as was shown in both Mozambique and Botswana, care about who leads them. It is the youth that has been at the forefront of street protests in Mozambique. It was the youth that humbled the autocratic William Ruto regime in Kenya to withdraw the tax bill. In SA, Julius Malema, leader of the EFF, weaponised the ANC Youth League to give the ANC a run for its money. In Namibia, for the first time, the youth vote is a key determinant in this year’s poll. 

Third, and related to the preceding point, voters are voting not on emotion and legacy; rather, they are voting on bread and butter issues. It matters less who liberated a country, and more about whether the rulers have delivered a better life for the voters. SA’s governing party has just discovered this reality. 

Fourth, voters feel less ashamed to change historical choices over time than they did in the past. A case in point is SA’s May general election.

Jacob Zuma’s MK party mustered 17% of votes without a manifesto, policy programme or a leader. The party filled up stadiums in the run-up to the elections. It was only last month that the party published a constitution. 

And lastly, the veneer of, rather than real, democracy matters particularly to the leaders. 

Unfortunately, the foregoing narrative doesn’t apply to the western part of the continent which has been cursed with military coups. At least three countries in that region are run by unelected military juntas. Neither does this mean democracy has replaced the “strong man” syndrome. 

Towards the end of his ruinous reign of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe’s army staged a “soft coup” to remove him and replaced him with his protégé Emmerson Mnangagwa. 

In Botswana, the BDP handed over power without a single bullet being fired. In Zambia, an opposition leader was allowed to take power. He has not jailed his former jailers. 

Still, Southern Africa’s democracy remains imperfect. The electoral authorities are not sufficiently independent; nor is the judiciary — the ultimate adjudicator of disputes. 

The Mozambican opposition’s best hope for its grievances is not the law courts, but a political settlement or regional solution. A worrying trend has been a tendency to resort to manipulating elections processes instead of allowing the electorate to choose their rulers. Mozambique is a sad reminder of this tendency. 

Worse, the continent has tended to support the incumbents. Which is understandable. The familiar equates stability. 

The challenge for Africans now is to improve the quality of their democracy. Regular elections don’t equate to better democracy.