A few days ago I attended an interesting two-day gathering in one of East Africa’s capital cities. It brought together an eclectic mix of young and not-so-young, well known and still rising academics and activists. We had been convened to discuss “alternative approaches to democratisation.”

The theme captured a growing trend among sections of Africa’s intelligentsia: Dissatisfaction with the manner in which democratisation processes have unfolded on the continent since the heady 1980s when single-party and military dictatorships began to collapse like dominos and to be replaced by so-called multiparty democracies.

A general stocktaking of what has happened produces a litany of failures, at least in the minds of those who expected that “democracy” would beget all the good things that “dictatorship” had failed to bring about: Peace and stability, prosperity, participation by citizens in decision making…

Africa’s first generation of post-colonial leaders had come to power promising to eliminate poverty, disease and ignorance. At a general level, they were convinced that the quickest route to a new Africa was via politics without the rowdy contestations that accompany adversarial multiparty competition.

They saw themselves as democrats and believed in the possibility of single-party democracy, of which Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere was a vocal promoter. Mwalimu believed that “Where there is one party, and that party is identified with the nation as a whole, the foundations of democracy are firmer than they can ever be where you have two or more parties, each representing only a section of the community.”

Well, by the 1980s, we thought we knew better. Single-party rule had left a bitter taste in our mouths. Helped by sympathetic external forces, we embarked on creating a new reality that would bring us in line with the rest of the world out there, where democracy had produced modern, free, and prosperous societies.

A generation and a half later, some wonder whether we got it right. Others are convinced that we didn’t, and now want us to return to the drawing board and see if we cannot come up with something more in tune with the “local context.” Of course, a closer examination would show that the lamentations are a little too generalised.

Adversarial political competition has produced different results in different places.

Still, there are places where its results have been inarguably toxic. It is those places that have coloured the views of analysts such as the ones I spent the two days listening to and arguing with. The dominant view in the room was that democratisation as is currently being pursued in much of Africa has produced some undesirable outcomes.

They include entrenched dominant political parties; elections that do not produce change; a general absence of policy that advances general interests; and uninspiring opposition parties that do not address existing structural obstacles to genuine democratisation.

Very good, you may say, but where should we go from here, and how shall we get there?

It reminds me of several experiments, some of them ongoing, and others that have failed or been abandoned. Perhaps the most interesting of the current experiments is the Rwanda one where, after the civil war and genocide, several political parties agreed to pursue “guided democratisation,” rejecting conventional competitive politics.

This arrangement has invited criticism from believers in the superiority of unrestrained competition. Inside the country, however, the dominant view is that, imperfect as it may be, the prioritisation of consensus building is working, that it is responsible for the statistically proven success in tackling poverty, disease, and ignorance and promoting peace and stability in pursuit of prosperity.

Will it work in the long term? It is a difficult question to answer, not least because the parties involved never specified how long they wanted the experiment to go on. All we can say for now is: “We shall see.”

Perhaps the most spectacular failure was Yoweri Museveni’s “No-Party” democracy in Uganda. The idea was simple but had a somewhat powerful intellectual basis.

Uganda, Museveni and other preachers of the gospel of no-party politics believed that Uganda was a backward society in which conventional multiparty politics made no sense, given that in thinking about politics, Ugandans were driven by ethnic, religious, and other passions, not class interests.

They therefore sought to create a system in which all potentially contending elites would work together towards solving the same problems of poverty, ignorance, and disease, while pursuing prosperity which, they hoped, would produce the social classes that would eventually make adversarial political contestation meaningful rather than divisive and dangerous to society’s wellbeing.

For the first 10 years, it seemed like Uganda had finally found the right antidote to its fractious and often murderous post-colonial politics.

And then, for complex reasons, the whole thing collapsed after 20 years and Uganda returned to multiparty politics.

Now, some analysts, regardless of political affiliation and what they think of Museveni, are beginning to wonder whether the change wasn’t too precipitous, and whether the resulting, sometimes violent contestations, represent progress.

Whatever the answer, here, as in Rwanda and elsewhere, how to get what we want is the most important question for aspiring reformers.

Frederick Golooba-Mutebi is a Kampala- and Kigali-based researcher and writer on politics and public affairs. E-mail: [email protected]