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Let's face it, tribalism keeps African democracies honest

Sunday November 07 2010
obbo

In recent days we have had two elections in Africa whose outcomes were determined by tribalism.
In Guinea, an election ended inclusively with former prime minister Cellou Dallein Diallo and veteran opposition leader Alpha Conde placing as the top two candidates.

Supporters of the politicians, representing Guinea’s two most populous ethnic groups, the Peul and Malinke, fought each other as the run-off was delayed, leaving at least two dead and dozens injured.

In Cote d’Ivoire, after waiting for nearly 10 years, the people voted on October 31 —and handed out an inconclusive verdict.

Now the incumbent big man, President Laurent Gbagbo, is set to face ex-prime minister Alassane Outarra at the end of November in a run-off.

Ex-president Henri Konan Bedie, who was toppled in 1999 in Ivory Coast’s first military coup, lost his deposit. He has complained that he was cheated — and he probably was.

Ouattara is wildly popular in the pro-rebel north, and cleaned out the vote there. Gbagbo took most of the south.

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Africa’s tribal politics can be deadly, and depressing if you are a modernist. But underdeveloped Africa would be worse off without its tribes, their murderous passions notwithstanding.

This is because tribalism is Africa’s naturally occurring mechanism of checks and balances on excessive power.

Every government that is a dictatorship and nearly all the over-dominant parties in Africa are a result of military coups (Egypt’s National Democratic Party), or rebel wars (Uganda’s NRM and Angola’s MPLA).

Otherwise, in a free vote, tribal politics ensures that hardly any African political party can ever get absolute power through a popular mandate — which is good for democracy.

This forces the politicians to reach out to other tribes to do political deals, and in the process be more inclusive.

In East Africa, Kenya, which has had the most interesting experience and encounter with multiparty politics, proves the point.

To break Kanu’s 38-year lock on power in December 2002, President Mwai Kibaki cobbled together a broad alliance, the National Rainbow Coalition (NARC), which presented itself as a collective leadership, led by a “summit” on which various party leaders sat as equals.

Critics pooh-poohed it as a “council of tribal chieftains.” And, of course, it made for a delightfully chaotic period in Kenyan politics. What it prevented, though, was the re-emergence of a dictatorship.

In 2007, Prime Minister Raila Odinga replicated the formula, with a “Pentagon” of co-equal leaders in his ruling Orange Democratic Movement. In some of his campaign posters, he appeared with the full cast of the Pentagon!

Even the fear of retribution against the president’s tribes by disaffected tribes after his fall from power, has forced quite a few African strongmen to be more inclusive and gentler in their rule.

Modern Africans, I suspect, are basically anti-state and in their “native” state, deeply democratic creatures.

They are loath to give any particular big man a lot of power in a free poll — unless, of course, you steal or buy it from tribal chiefs.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is Nation Media Group’s executive editor for Africa & Digital Media. E-mail: [email protected]

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