Emerging trends in political violence in Africa

 Political violence tied to electoral competition is on the rise across countries in Africa south of the Sahara, along with a contest over livelihood resources. These pose major threats to the well-being of the continent's population and its young democracies, writes Kwesi W Obeng.

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THIS year, 2013, marks the 50th anniversary of the formation of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), predecessor to the African Union, to promote the unity and solidarity of African states to accelerate their efforts at achieving a better life for Africans.

Attempts at unifying Africa remain a work in progress at best but African leaders have declared 2013 as the 'Year of Pan-Africanism and the African Renaissance' to promote 'an integrated, prosperous and peaceful Africa, driven by its own citizens and representing a dynamic force in global arena'.

Year-long activities are planned to facilitate and celebrate African narratives of past, present and future to energise Africa's one-billion-strong population to use their 'constructive energy to accelerate a forward looking agenda of Pan-Africanism and renaissance in the 21st century'.

Over the last half-century, a number of issues and events have pulled together to define Africa (rightly or wrongly); how Africans see themselves; and how the rest of the world perceives the continent. Two of such issues are poverty and political violence perpetrated especially on Africans by fellow Africans and of course by external powers.

The global perception of Africa is also changing somewhat. Not too long ago, Africa was described as 'the dark continent', 'the hopeless continent' and similar disparaging terms. Today, the same people are describing the continent in superlative terms. The African continent is now talked about in the global media and global centres of power and commerce as the 'world's next economic powerhouse'. Perhaps the phrase that has caught the public imagination around the world the most is 'Africa rising'. The 'Africa rising' narrative is woven around the extraordinary expansion of economies on the continent, particularly the mineral, oil and gas-endowed states, since the year 2000.

While the focus of this article is the emerging trends in political violence in Africa, it is worth stating that with both China and India rapidly pulling ahead in the economic transformation of their societies, especially in the last two decades, poverty is now regarded essentially as an African problem, nevermind that there are many more poor people in India alone than in the whole of Africa.

The causes and motivation for political violence are immense. Central to any analysis of violence in politics is the question of power. The deeply entrenched patrimonial and rent-seeking politics practised across Africa, in which political leaders essentially retain their grip on political power by distributing public resources, contracts and jobs to cronies without recourse to laid-down rules, if they exist, has been noted as a major source of tension in African politics.

Again, the general lack of distinction between the personal and public and between individual and the state compounds the opaqueness of African politics and its linkage to political violence and crime. In too many cases, power holders have treated state resources as personal properties as many office holders perceive public office not so much as a privilege to serve the people but as an avenue to extract and accumulate personal wealth. In essence, the elite are mostly unaccountable to the people in many African polities.

Political violence is perpetrated by both state (including the army, police and parastatals) and non-state actors. Warfare and even mass massacres - as in Rwanda in 1994 and Sierra Leone and Liberia in the 1990s - have not been peripheral to Africa's post-independence experience. About two-thirds of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa have experienced an armed conflict since independence but political violence is by no means exceptional to Africa. According to the United Nations, more than 90% of all Africans live in neither war nor crisis areas.

Leading political violence datasets such as the Armed Conflict Database from the Uppsala Conflict Data Programme, the Peace Research Institute of Oslo and the Social Conflict in Africa Database show that in comparison to other regions of the world, Africa is the leader in neither the frequency nor duration of such major forms of political violence. Asia is a leader in both frequency and duration of major forms of political violence.

Historically, there have been shifts in political violence in Africa. Over the last half-century, there has been a shift from anti-colonial wars, to proxy wars of the Cold War era, to what some academics describe as 'reform' (representing the NRM regime of Uganda's Yoweri Museveni) to warlordism as exemplified by warlords in both the Liberian and Sierra Leonean civil wars of the 1990s.

The struggle for independence and the Cold War gave rise to different kinds of violence. The superpower rivalry of the Cold War era, for example, triggered and funded the bitter civil wars in Angola and Mozambique. In Angola, the United States along with its Western allies and then apartheid South Africa armed Jonas Savimbi's UNITA against the Marxist MPLA regime. In Mozambique too, the United States and other Western powers and the racist South African regime engineered and armed RENAMO to fight another Marxist administration, FRELIMO. Although they have ended, these wars remain some of Africa's longest and most bitter conflicts.

Presently there are about a dozen low-level insurgencies on the continent. These include the separatist movement in the Caprivi Strip in Namibia, the Lord's Resistance Army in northern Uganda, Boko Haram in Nigeria, the Casamance insurgency in Senegal, Cabinda separatists in Angola, Tuareg and Al Qaeda affiliates in northern Mali and the Sahel, the Ogaden insurrection in Ethiopia, several armed groups in Chad, Central African Republic and Congo DR, Darfur region in Sudan and insurgencies in Africa's newest state, South Sudan.

Electoral competition

While there has been a consistent decline in warfare and large-scale mass killing of civilians including genocide over the last decade, other forms and patterns of political violence are emerging or are re-emerging in Africa. Of the two most important emerging forms of political violence, one is closely tied to electoral competition and the other linked to livelihood resources.

From Kenya to Nigeria, Malawi to Madagascar, Ghana to Uganda, Cameroon to Ethiopia, Cote d'Ivoire to Guinea and from Senegal to Zimbabwe, election-related violence has claimed thousands of lives, homes and businesses. These conflicts have the tendency of setting back the economic recovery process as they seem to reoccur with each election cycle in the various countries.

In many countries on the continent, electoral competition is generally pursued as a zero-sum game and political opponents are subjected to intimidation, harassment, violent displacement and even death. That the winner of an election gets to control nearly every aspect of the state system raises the spectre of violent contestation of electoral outcomes.

Elections may be the sine qua non of democracy but they remain significantly inadequate, even ineffectual, in addressing social grievances, particularly grievances linked to growing land and water scarcity, environmental destruction, food insecurity, socio-economic inequity and population growth in the region.

A number of factors may account for the high levels of political violence associated with the electoral process in Africa, including not least the deeply entrenched informal patronage systems, politics of exclusion, mal-governance and socio-economic uncertainties of losing political power, especially as most African constitutions concentrate power at the centre - the presidency. Weak electoral institutions, election fraud and the general opaqueness of elections and rules governing the electoral process in some countries could also be attributed to the levels of violence associated with electoral contests in Africa's young democracies.

The massive 'third wave of democratisation' that swept across the continent in the 1980s and 1990s was expected to end the cycle of senseless violence and introduce a more transparent and predictable election of leaders and development of rule-based governance institutions on the continent. However, the promise of a peace dividend has truly been shortlived. In some countries, it never materialised. A case in point is Congo DR.

The brutal killing of about 1,500 people following the disputed presidential elections in 2007 in Kenya perhaps marked a watershed in this new trend of political violence connected to electoral contests in Africa.

Assassinations of high-ranking political figures and their supporters have characterised Nigerian and Guinea Bissau elections in recent years. The April 2011 polls that elected Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan to office touched off ethno-sectarian riots, resulting in about 500 deaths. In South Africa, clashes between the ruling African National Congress and the Inkatha Freedom Party claimed over 2,000 lives between 1990 and 1994.

In Ghana, a razor-thin victory by one of the two major political parties nearly turned violent in 2008. Results of the country's 2012 presidential polls were contested at the country's Supreme Court. The opposition New Patriotic Party contested the declaration of the ruling National Democratic Congress candidate and former vice president John Mahama as president of the republic. After eight months of hearing the case, the Supreme Court upheld (by a 5-4 majority decision) that Mahama was duly elected. The Court also called for reforms of the country's electoral system.

Prior to the Court's ruling on 29 August, civil society groups and policy research think-tanks had warned of the likelihood of pockets of violence breaking out especially in the Great Accra Region, Ashanti Region and the Northern Region whichever way the verdict went. However, no violent incidents were recorded after the Court's verdict, a poignant testament to the country's strengthening democracy.

Raila Odinga, former Prime Minister and the defeated candidate of the Coalition for Reforms and Democracy (CORD) in the 4 March 2013 Kenyan presidential election, challenged the results at the courts. Kenya's Supreme Court treated with dispatch and upheld the verdict of the Electoral Commission which declared Uhuru Kenyatta and his Jubilee alliance as winner of the polls. No violence linked to the Court's verdict was recorded but Kenyatta and his vice president William Ruto are facing charges of genocide at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The charges are linked to their alleged involvement in the bloody 2007 post-election violence.

Kenya and Ghana, historical trendsetters in Africa, may yet be setting a precedent on the issue of contestation of disputed election results through clearly laid-down procedures, the courts, rather than the resort to violence on the streets with guns, machetes and sticks. However, the payoffs from electoral violence in Africa are huge, including access to juicy and high-profile public jobs and contracts, and so it remains to be seen if other countries will follow this precedent.

But of course other forms of political violence also matter, not least those linked to livelihood resources. Indeed, the widely reported electoral violence cases in Cote d'Ivoire, Kenya and Zimbabwe all had access to land (or the lack of it) at the core.

As climate change takes its toll on Africa's vulnerable landscape - leaving its watersheds and rivers dry - and the extractive industry renders its most arable lands uncultivable and displaces rural communities, even as reinvestment of even the minimal revenue from mining into industries that can outlive the mines is lacking, contestation over livelihood resources such as land and water is set to intensify.

Already the science shows that given Africa's geo-physical characteristics and lack of depth and poor quality of infrastructure, the continent will suffer the worst consequences of global climate change, unlike any other region of the world.

Linked to these is a growing wealth gap as African economies expand. The growing inequity in the distribution of this new wealth is feeding anger in many parts of Africa. Put bluntly, the economic growth of the last decade has yet to trickle down.

Africa cannot afford to slip up on tackling both political violence associated with elections and threats posed to livelihood resources from various sources.                                          

Kwesi W Obeng is Assistant Editor of African Agenda. This is a revised version of an article which originally appeared in African Agenda (Vol. 16, No. 2).

*Third World Resurgence No. 278, October 2013, pp 21-23