Ludicrous as it sounds, every registered voter in forty-three polling stations in Kiruhura district, Uganda turned out to vote for President Yoweri Museveni and his National Resistance Movement (NRM) during the 2016 polls in Uganda. In Rwanda, 98.79% of the electorate voted to re-elect Paul Kagame as president in 2017. Teodoro Obiang, president of the ‘Democratic Party’ in Equatorial Guinea, has been in office since 1979, making him the longest-serving head of state in the world.
John Pombe Magufuli, the president of Tanzania rose to popularity in 2015 because of his simple life as head of state and tact for austerity measures. To his glory, the hashtag #WhatWouldMagufuliDo took over social media imploring African leaders to mimic his leadership. He curbed down foreign trips by government officials and instead ordered them to visit villages and the rural parts of Tanzania. He walked the talk by only making nine international trips (all within Africa) during his first tenure in office. However, his ‘popularity’ and modus operandi of leadership has been challenged. His government has often banned public protests through repressive laws and arrested dissenting voices. For example, comedian Idris Sultan was arrested for ‘cyberbullying’ after a video of him laughing at an old photo of Magufuli was shared on social media. During the last general elections, the main opposition leader, Freeman Mbowe got arrested pre and post the election for holding and planning protests. The polls were marred with vote-rigging allegations as Magufuli’s party returned to power with a landslide win.
The irony of the aforementioned political trends makes us question democracy in Africa. Does the rule of the people prevail when the trajectory is set and ‘democratically dictated’ by one person? Here is the answer: ‘It depends’. Robert Godin and Charles Tilly in The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis, argue that:
"In response to each big question of political science, we reply ‘‘It depends.’’ Valid answers depend on the context in which the political processes under study occur. Valid answers depend triply on context, with regard to understandings built into the questions, with regard to the evidence available for answering the questions, and with regard to the actual operation of the political processes.”
During an election year, political pundits and analysts storm news channels and write articles that project the outcome of the polls, but to what extent is their analysis true? For example, in Zambia, Who will win the elections in August? It depends! Firstly, it depends on who is answering. The sympathisers of the government will boast of the improvement in infrastructure growth, empowerment schemes, and the newly built glitzy highways. They partly ignore the crumbling economy, hike in the standard of living, and abuse of public funds. These factors are the basis of the points in support of an opposition cadre. And depending on one's political leanings, what they believe far outweighs the argument in contrast.
These uncertain times, this context we are thrust into, challenges and begs us to self-question these political regimes we now live under. Has governance become worse or have we just become more informed citizens? Citizen journalism has empowered us to dictate the information we consume. Newspaper, radio, and TV news no longer control the bone of contention of political discourse. So when we question the incompetence of leadership in the past with the present, context comes to light because of the filtered and unfiltered information we have.
But no matter our dominate source of information, or how knowledgeable we are now, political systems have remained constant. They are highly convoluted processes, dependent on an array of multiple factors whose permutations and combinations can produce just any outcome. So, you ask, “Does the rule of the people prevail when the trajectory is set and ‘democratically dictated’ by one person?” It really depends.
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