Elections in Africa have become extremely fraught affairs. Maybe they were always fraught affairs.

But, in the hullaballoo surrounding the so-called Second Liberation — the return to political pluralism and the supposed end of the era of military coups d’état — we seem to have forgotten that fact.

We’ve ended up nonplussed and surprised. At the growing strength of the new authoritarianism, at election-related violence that now seems almost inevitable.

Consider the findings of a report just released by the Kampala-based East and Horn of Africa Human Rights Defenders Project, titled, “Caught up in bitter contests: HRDs working in the context of elections in Sudan, Ethiopia, Burundi and Uganda.”

It concludes that HRDs, bloggers and journalists have been essentially criminalised in the electoral processes of all these countries (Uganda’s is just getting underway).

It is a regional trend with worrying implications for upcoming elections in Tanzania at the end of this month, Uganda early next year, Rwanda in early 2017 and Kenya later in the same year.

Features of this regional trend include the surveillance of HRDs, bloggers and journalists, harassment, arrest, torture, digital and physical attacks and exile.

In the lead-up to elections in the Sudan, civic organisations were shut down and HRDs and journalists arrested and charged with various criminal offences.

In Ethiopia, the Anti-Terrorism Proclamation of 2009 was used to equate bloggers and journalists with terrorists and enable the shutting down of media houses.

Nine bloggers and journalists were arrested and charged with terrorism-related offences and 37 HRDs fled the country for the duration. No less than 118 HRDs fled Burundi between April and August this year.

It does not bode well when people whose work is essentially about enabling ordinary citizens to fully exercise their election-related rights are shut down in this way.

The new report of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Peaceful Assembly and Association, Kenya’s own Maina Kiai, is an interesting comparison of how states approach the question of “enabling environments” for the private sector as opposed to the civic sector.

It finds that, with few exceptions, states globally now seek to encourage the private sector to grow and succeed while simultaneously discouraging the civic sector. Through requirements affecting entry, regulation, resourcing, the ability to exercise political influence and so on.

Thus the ability of the private sector to attract foreign funding and investment is lauded and increasingly enabled. While that of the civic sector is denigrated and increasingly restricted — in the name of the all too familiar laments about state sovereignty, national security and even “aid effectiveness.”

For instance, while Ethiopia has registered a whopping 1,500 per cent increase in foreign direct investment through the private sector since 2009, civic organisations that work on human rights have been restricted from letting foreign funding make more than 10 per cent of their total budgets.

A double standard is at play.

L. Muthoni Wanyeki is Amnesty International’s regional director for East Africa, the Horn and the Great Lakes