Weak democracy spells doom for Africa

A few months ago I attended an open lecture by the famous pro- liberal democracy theorist Francis Fukuyama. Prof Fukuyama burst into the global limelight with the publication of his book, The End of History and The Last Man, in 1992.

Contextually set during the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of USSR, the book theorised that Western liberal democracy and free market capitalism had relegated communism and other forms of socio-economic ordering to history.

For the acclaim the book got, it did get criticism with equal measure. Critics accused Prof Fukayama's theory of lacking cultural relativity and venerating Western values a tad too much. Of particular concern was the book's obsession with the evolution towards democracy as the most desirable form of human government or evolution towards "Denmark", Prof Fukuyama's own quintessential example of an ideal democracy.

Well, since 1992, democracies rose and collapsed in newly independent post-Soviet societies and recovering Socialist states, and then China happened. China seemed, still seems, to be the very embodiment of Prof Fukayama's anti-thesis.

A colossal mass of state that has lifted billions out of poverty without either pandering to Western-style liberal democracy nor, free-market capitalism. So much so that in lieu of developments spanning a quarter century after his maiden book had prompted a lecture with the title, "Is democracy Under Recession." After his lecture, one gentleman asked whether Africa needed democracy or "visionary dictators", citing the all-too-familiar Paul Kagame of Rwanda and the late Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore as evidence of the latter's worth.

Surprisingly, there is not a region that Prof Fukuyama's lecture could be more relevant and surprisingly timely than East Africa. The Eastern Africa Community has invested a lot of effort on the economic integration front since. Surprisingly, not a lot has happened on the socio-cultural, integration front. There has been a conspicuous absence of the evolution of common synthesis and convergence of political culture, which is baffling given that differences of ideological and philosophical nature are the same ones that caused the original post-independent community to wither and break up in 1977.

Are the values of democracy and economic growth mutually exclusive? Take Burundi for example, where the neo-despot Pierre Nkurunziza has elected himself beyond the constitutional two-term in office, effortlessly.

Although the EAC's heads of state did put in half-hearted attempts to put Mr Nkuruzinza's third-term ambitions to bed, the moral basis upon which this would have happened was questionable, given that the other EAC presidents have indiscretions of their own.

Mr Kagame has all but succeeded in earning himself an extra-constitutional seven-year term in office, with the preposterous claim that only 10 voters in a country of 3.6 million voters oppose his third-term bid. In Uganda, a country the former US ambassador described as an "African Success Past its Time", President Yoweri Museveni (71) will have spent 30 years in power by May of 2016, yet he is seeking to extend his stay in power to 35 years.

Mr Museveni, who transitioned from a military ruler into a civilian president after the promulgation of a new Constitution in 1996, seeks to change the same constitution to give him an extra term. A few weeks ago President Uhuru Kenyatta gave a speech in the Ugandan Parliament in which he chastised the Opposition and then added fuel to the pro-third-term fire.

Save for Kenya's unforgiving political culture, it would not be un-imaginable for Mr Kenyatta's mandarins to suggest a third term if he does win his re-election in 2017. On its part, Tanzania is a curious case of a country where the political elite decided it was much more economical sharing out political largesse than fighting for them. Although the country transitioned into a multi-party democracy in 1992, it has been turned into a de facto one-party state owing to the Chama Cha Mapinduzi's stranglehold of the political system. Only recently has CCM's long-term rule been threatened by Edward Lowasa, a former Prime Minister who defected from CCM to an opposition coalition. On their part, Tanzanians are unique for their political servility, unlike their neighbours up North. They have developed a submissive political culture that allows political leaders to get away with political misdemeanours without substantial political pressure.

Contrary to popular opinion, the biggest existential threat to the EAC as a functional social-economic community lies not in the economic nationalism of its people, but in the conscious lack of the cultivation of a common political culture. The EAC lacks the adoption of irreducible standards of democracy, pluralism and rule of law.

Indeed some of the reasons the European Union ticks, not only lies not only in stringent application of rules on such issues such as democracy, rule of law and human rights, it also lies in a pretty homogenous value system, held by majority of the EU's citizens.

Some of the reasons, fissures have started occurring from Countries like Greece, lie in the latter's wish-washy political system, which gives politicians much more discretion than in any other country within the union.