Much ado about elections in Africa

We are in the middle of a spate of elections across Africa. Last year, a dozen countries went to the polls. Ten more have held elections this year, with about thirteen more to go before the end of 2019. In a formal sense, democracy appears to be sinking deep roots into the continent’s soil. Gone are the days of the last quarter of the twentieth century when military dictatorships and one-party states where the norm.

However, this has not translated into the betterment of the lot of the poor masses. Two thirds of the least developed countries in the world are in Africa. This of course does not mean that everyone in those countries bear the brunt of poverty. The politicians and businessmen in countries like Congo, Mozambique and Uganda which are considered to be some of the poorest countries in the world, enjoy opulent lifestyles.

The key to ostentatious wealth for these degenerate figures of the African ruling class is political power. And through hook or crook (quite often some mixture or the other of both), they hold on fast to power.

We have seen quite a few of them kicked out at the polls in recent times. Yahya Jameh in Gambia, Abdoulaye Wade in Senegal and Goodluck Jonathan in Nigeria, are just a handful of such. But their successors have equally not represented a paradigm shift. And in countries like South Africa (and Botswana), a dominant party system appears entrenched, despite high rates of poverty, unemployment and destitution.

Mass anger has burst out time and again. Working-class people and youth have intervened on the political scene organising from below against unpopular leaders with strikes and street protests in Burkina Faso, Senegal, Nigeria and Congo. In North Africa popular revolts soared further to revolutionary heights in 2011 Tunisia and Egypt. These firmaments of uprisings have been reignited in recent months across Sudan and Algeria.

Elections held in the aftermath of these mass movements, which radical or revolutionary left forces helped to ignite or fan the embers of, have also not led to qualitative change in the direction of politics or the social-economic realities facing working-class people. When the dust of revolts settled and the polls were cast, a new version of what was, a new face of the same class of ne’er-do-well bosses took over the reins of office.

It is important for change-seeking activists to ask some pertinent questions. Why do elections make little difference to the lives of the immense majority of the population? Where has the left been in the electoral terrain? How can power be won from below - by the working masses?

Do elections make any difference to working-class people?

It would be wrong to simply dismiss elections in particular and bourgeois democracy in general, in Africa or elsewhere. Working-class people have a broader space to legally organise and disseminate alternative ideas than under overtly autocratic regimes of bourgeois rule such as military dictatorships, apartheid or one-party systems.

It is also important to note that these freedoms were not given on a platter of gold by the bourgeoisie. We won them through struggle. And bourgeois democracy does not then preserve these, on the contrary it limits what it is forced to give. When we ask for more than the crumbs that capitalists are ready to give, the might of the coercive fist of the state emerges, for example as armed bodies of men who killed 34 miners at Marikana, in democratic post-apartheid South Africa.

The other side of the coin is however even more dangerous. The view of bourgeois democracy, as “government of the people, by the people, for the people” is aimed veiling its class content, which elections further reinforce. It is government of the bourgeoisie, by the bourgeoisie over working-class people.

Elections are meant to reinforce the illusion of complete democracy under bourgeois rule in three important ways.

First, those in government - who actually are our class enemies – are presented as our executive and legislative representatives. This illusion is perpetuated with the myth of sovereignty supposedly resting in the people by dint of the boring chore of ticking a ballot paper every four or five years. Where there are laws of recall of representatives, they are exceedingly tortuous and thus hardly ever invoked. 

Second, is the idea of “free entry and free exit” which is a myth in politics as much as with the so-called “free market”. Within the context of some set regulations, it could be argued that any group of persons, including working-class people could form their own parties and contest for elections. But the sheer cost of elections makes it rigged in favour of the rich, from the get-go.

Third, especially where there are alternative (bourgeois) parties, elections represent political transaction. A government is voted in supposedly to make life better for the people it claims to represent, so why would it be returned back to power if it fails to deliver? Therefore, those in government would ordinarily want to invest in education, health, jobs etc, for them to be deemed worthy to be the ones to fool the masses again and not the opposition.

The fact that some progressive reforms could be wringed out from the miserly hands of this or that government is thus assumed to show the “dividends of democracy”, thus acting as a gimmick for the legitimation of bourgeois democracy.  

There is however a major problem with this third leg of bourgeois democracy’s enchantment in the current period. Capitalism is in crisis and, it would seem there is not enough resources left (after filling the bosses’ ever-expanding purses) as concessions to “bribe” working-class people with. Austerity measures is the game in town. Either way the poor masses vote now for this section of the bosses or the other, we will end up being told to tighten our belts.

Where is the left in electoral politics?

There are some on the left who would simply dismiss electoral politics as “bourgeois democracy”, which is of little concern to revolutionary struggle of the working masses. Such dismissal at times might be no more than a “feel good” pill, particularly after dismal showings at the polls.

Some others would express pride at scoring just a few thousands or even hundreds or just dozens of votes when the major bourgeois parties count their tallies in the millions. This handful of votes are described as the “real” expression of the working-class, and the party’s electoral failures perceived as a “successful campaign”. Generally, the smaller and less significant a supposedly vanguard party is, the more it is likely to toe this line.

These two approaches which are not uncommon on the left, do not help matters. Revolutionary socialists have no illusion that socialism can be overthrown through the ballot box. Even if a socialist government is voted into office, without smashing the capitalist state, its demise is as good as given. The Chilean counter-revolution of the 1973 “9/11”, is a chilling reminder of this fact.

Socialist revolution can be won only as the act of self-emancipation of the working-class. It is not socialist parties that make the revolution, it is working-class people. Socialist parties help to deepen class consciousness and independent organisation of workers and the broad array people exploited and oppressed by the capitalists. This must be what guides our struggles on the streets, in the factories and our communities. It is also what must guide our involvement in and understanding of electoral politics, within bourgeois democracy.

Socialists participate in elections, as part of the working-class to raise working people’s demands in opposition to the more general seemingly cross-class platforms of the bourgeois politicians. This aims at serving as a pole of attraction to working-class activists, drawing more and more of rank and file workers to socialist ideas. Elections are thus seen as part of the broader strategy of building a mass-based socialist workers’ party.

But the extent to which a socialist party can effectively do this largely derives from how rooted it is in the first place, within the working-class movement. Socialists participation in elections is thus also a test of strength, helping us to gauge how deeply entrenched our ideas and organisation are, in the class we represent.

The impact of the radical and revolutionary left in recent elections on the continent has been abysmal. This punctured high hopes at the beginning of the year, particularly in Nigeria and South Africa with rich histories and rising class struggles, that elections in these countries would rally the poor masses and youth around the banner of newly formed parties on the left, and send home a clear signal to the bosses that their days are numbered.

It is however “morning yet on creation day” as Chinua Achebe would put it, if we endeavour to learn the correct lessons.

Which way forward to democracy from below?

The historical conjuncture we are living through is best summed up in Gramsci’s words “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” The old that is dying comprises not only the bosses’ class, but also sections of the left and trade union bureaucracy which they lean on for support.

There is an emergent left, as part of the new. It encompasses elements of the old left which have re-learned what they know in the light of what lessons from history, apt perspective of the current situation and practical involvement in struggle.

This rebirth of organised revolutionary forces on the continent might appear to be rather late in the day, coming a decade into the global economic crisis. But yet it represents the new beginning, faltering as it might be, of working-class people and youth’s spear and shield in the class war we are embroiled in between the few rich and the immense majority of the people whose lives become ever more precarious by the day.

The poor electoral showings we have seen partly reflect this lateness of revolutionary birth. An element of its birth which has largely gone unnoticed is its internationalist spirit.

Expressions of this include the series of “Pan-Africanism and Socialism Today” conferences, and longer duration training and exchange of ideas amongst cadres of this new left across the continent, over the last five years. These will serve as its bones.

Its heart however must be the working-class and its limbs the day-to-day struggles of the people’s struggles. Electoral cycles cannot be its compass. It must indeed reshape this with the ultimate aim of overthrowing the near-empty shell of bourgeois democracy.