D+C Development and Cooperation (No. 1, January/february 2002, p. 18-20)

Liberation without Democracy?
Flaws of Post-colonial Systems in Southern Africa

Henning Melber

With the gaining of political power by the ZANU/PF in Zimbabwe in 1980 and by the SWAPO in Namibia in 1990, the final decolonisation of the African continent took its course. In 1994, a democratic political system under a lawfully elected ANC government was also established in South Africa. That meant that the change from internationally ostracised minority regimes to sovereign state structures legitimised under international law had finally also been completed in Southern Africa. The top point on the agenda was attaining and exercising national self-determination, while the democratic reform of the countries’ societies was given lower priority.

As a result, the ‘democratic question’ soon arose in these countries, the last in Africa to be decolonised. The ‘Second Wind of Change’, which made itself felt further north 10 years earlier, is now also blowing in Southern Africa. Thus A.M. Kambudzi, a critic of conditions in post-colonial Zimbabwe, speaking at a conference in February 1999 on Robben Island (South Africa’s former maximum security prison), called for a second liberation of Southern Africa from non-colonial internal repression. He named the forms of personalised power, the lack of institutionalised good governance, and centralised command and control structures as the burden of national liberation processes. He said all were factors inimical to internal political stability.

After liberation:
the ‘democratic question’

Following the proclamations of formal independence the governments were formed by the anti-colonial liberation movements, which had indeed been far from non-violent. They took over control of the state machinery and reorganised themselves as political parties. They claimed their legitimacy to rule stemmed from their emergence from the decolonisation process as democratically elected representatives of the majority of the people. Since then, with varying results (and sometimes accepting the use of further physical violence), they have been able to strengthen their political dominance and maintain control over the state. This is true even if in Zimbabwe at present it can be seen that even these governments will not last for ever.

How much individual opportunism in sometimes outright absurd dimensions is bound up with social transformation can be seen from the example of Jonathan Moyo. At the Robben Island conference already mentioned he complained that utterly unacceptable things were happening in the name of national liberation. He said it filled him with pain that some of the island’s former inmates had left the prison only to turn their entire countries into Robben Islands. This had only been possible, he added, because the liberation movements had had no culture of democracy. That was certainly plain talk. But hardly a year later Moyo became Mugabe’s advisor, and in the meantime, as his Information Minister, he has acquired the dubious nickname of the ‘Goebbels of Africa’.

It is hard to see that the new political rulers in Southern Africa have benefited from the learning processes which the earlier independent states further north went through. The latecomers have gained nothing from the ‘blessing’ of their later birth. The social transformation processes in Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa can at best be characterised as a transition from controlled change to changed control. The result is a kind of rule on a narrow societal base which is becoming ever more similar to those of other African countries.

The post-colonial perception of politics within the ruling parties, and among large sections of their grass roots supporters, shows often a blatant lack of democratic awareness and forms of neo-patrimonial systems (see the article by Gero Erdmann in this issue). Tendencies to autocratic rule and politically motivated social and material favours or disadvantages are obvious. The political rulers’ penchant for self-enrichment with the help of a rent- or sinecure-capitalism (see the article by Gerhard Hauck in this issue) goes with the exercise of comprehensive controls to secure the continuance of their rule. Accordingly, the term ‘national interest’ means solely what they say it means. Based on the rulers’ (self-)perception, individuals and groups are allowed to participate in, or are excluded from, nation-building. Such selective mechanisms of the exercise and retention of power have little or nothing to do with democratic principles.

Liberation without democracy

In the meantime, in view of the sobering experiences which followed the initial euphoria over attaining sovereignty under international law, critical voices are mounting, including among those who followed and supported the liberation struggles with great sympathy. One of the most prominent of them is Canadian John Saul, a professor at York University, Toronto, who began his career as an Africanist at the University of Dar es Salaam. Later, he was co-editor of the magazine Southern Africa Report, which was published until 2000. As a scholar, he was engaged academically and politically in practical solidarity for more than 30 years. He now qualifies the achievements of the Southern African countries, whose struggles for independence he always supported, as “liberation without democracy”. He frequently criticises human rights violations within the liberation movements and the inability of most of the movements to tackle the problem constructively and self-critically.

Like Saul, others have analysed the processes in which victims in the role of liberation fighters became perpetrators. Breaking the taboos in this regard is necessary in a debate which deals increasingly with the content of liberation, and critically reflects the concept of solidarity of past years. The much-celebrated attainment of formal independence is no longer being equated with liberation, and certainly not with the creation of lasting democracy.

Liberation struggles:
no breeding
ground for democracy

Instead, there are increasing attempts to investigate the structural legacies which in most cases set far too narrow limits to realising societal alternatives in the post-colonial countries. The realisation is growing that the armed liberation struggles were in no way a suitable breeding ground for establishing democratic systems of government after gaining independence. The forms of resistance against totalitarian regimes were themselves organised on strictly hierarchical and authoritarian lines, otherwise they could hardly have had any prospect of success.

In this sense, the new societies carried within them essential elements of the old system which they had fought. Thus aspects of the colonial system reproduced themselves in the struggle for its abolition and subsequently in the concepts of governance applied in post-colonial conditions. They share the binary view of the colonial discourse of the past.

The result of such general conditions is that the new system has little transparency. Those in power are at best prepared to be accountable to themselves. There is a lack of critical faculties and extremely limited willingness to accept divergent opinions, particularly if they are expressed publicly. Nonconformist thinking is interpreted as disloyalty, if not equated with treason.

But the marginalisation or elimination of dissent limits drastically the new system’s capability for reform and innovation. A culture of fear, intimidation and keeping silent reduces the possibilities of durable renewal at the cost of the public weal. In the long term, this means the rulers are themselves undermining their credibility and legitimacy.

The former liberation fighters also have an expiry date (at least biologically). That applies not only to the groups themselves but also to their potential clientele among the people, as the example of Zimbabwe shows. So cultivating the myth of the liberators is not enough for orderly conduct of government business. Thus the rulers’ restriction of their coteries to their own groups of functionaries from the days of the liberation struggles, as still can be seen today, is counterproductive. It is motivated primarily by the wish to reproduce kindred spirits in a cosy and familiar milieu.

As a criterion for classification this has less to do with the concrete political-ideological persuasion of the party liners than with their similar perception of politics, which is based on common personality structures and features of an authoritarian character. In this context, resolute democratic outlooks and convictions are hardly to be recommended. Nelson Mandela, who has recognised that, pointed out in an interview the need to include divergent opinions in the perception of prevailing politics. He called for tolerance in solving national tasks, thus criticising the increasingly restrictive policies of the political regime in his own country.

Power corrupts ­ the ‘Third
Term’ movement

Similar mechanisms can be seen in many other societies around the world that are regarded as democratic states. That power corrupts is by no means a solely African truism. Nor that giving up power – even in democratically anchored and regulated conditions with a long tradition – is difficult for many once they have had a taste of it.

Nonetheless, it might be more than a coincidence that it was precisely in Southern Africa that the ‘Third Term Movement’ founded by Namibia’s President Nujoma arose. True, Zambia’s President Chiluba was unable to continue it, but Malawi’s President Muluzi can be seen as another brash aspirant for a third term. A principle enshrined in the country’s constitution which limits tenure to two terms of office is to be repealed by means of a parliamentary majority. In formal terms, such a procedure can in fact be regarded as legal. But legitimacy also has moral and ethic dimensions which require respect as part of the lasting anchoring and consolidation of democratic rule.

The argument used to support extending the mandate of heads of state armed with sweeping executive powers – that only an incumbent can maintain the continuity of reasonably stable political conditions – unintentionally signals a lack of democracy. Actually, a sustainable democracy calls for the consolidation of socially institutionalised and legal framework conditions which enable the process of open political communication regardless of the persons in power. Or, as two members of the South African Institute of International Affairs put it with regard to the ambitions of the president in neighbouring Malawi: the real test of a democracy is how peacefully and constitutionally a country carries out a change in its political leadership.

Frantz Fanon as prophet

More than 40 years ago, the Martinique born psychiatrist and political revolutionary, Frantz Fanon, writing from Algeria, described presciently in his manifesto, entitled “The Wretched of the Earth”, the internal contradictions and limits of anti-colonial resistance and organised liberation movements with respect to their emancipatory shortcomings.

Writing at a time when the Algerian war of liberation had not even ended Fanon prophesied the abuse of government power after attainment of independence and in the wake of establishing a one-party state. In a chapter on the misfortunes of national consciousness he predicted that the state, which by its robustness and at the same time its restraint should convey trust, disarm and calm, foists itself on people in a spectacular way, makes a big show of itself, harasses and mistreats the citizen and by this means shows him that he is in permanent danger. The growing blending of party, government and state among the ‘liberation movements in power’ indicates a very similar development in the post-apartheid era.

The specific constellation based on the use of force to gain liberation from undemocratic and repressive conditions like those that prevailed in the colonial societies of Southern Africa was hardly favourable for the durable strengthening of humanitarian values and norms. As part of abolishing anachronistic, degrading systems of rule it created new challenges on the difficult path to establishing sound and robust egalitarian structures and institutions, and in particular to promoting democratically-minded people. But independence without democracy is still far from being liberation.