One question we must ask ourselves as Africans is what we should do with democracy now that we have it.” These were the words of one of my favourite African academics, an old émigré who as a young troublemaker was forced to run away from his native country and settle in Europe. A few decades down the road, he has not returned home to live there.

However, in recent years, since the system he fled from collapsed, he has been visiting every now and then and has even been playing an important role in thinking about matters of public policy and contributing to policy making in the country.

His remarks about the imperative to think about what to do with democracy in countries that have just acquired it followed a long and vigorous discussion about the benefits and challenges of democracy, narrowly interpreted to mean regular multi-party elections and frequent changes of leadership.

We can debate it interminably, but there are certain things that democracies have done. They have raised standards of living beyond anything anyone would have expected only 100 years ago.

George Orwell may be famous for having written Animal Farm, but he also wrote books such as The Road to Wigan Pier that provide valuable insights into the kind of squalor the English lower classes lived in just over a century ago.

There is also a great deal of social history describing similarly backward living conditions, even starvation, elsewhere in Europe during the same period. If one encounters Europeans who behave and talk as if these things never happened, blame it on their ignorance of their own history.

But democracies have done other things too: Providing the environment for inventors to use their creativity and for thinkers to spawn all kinds of useful ideas, all of which has contributed to making them enviable places to live in. Balance requires us to acknowledge that some dictatorships have been just as good at doing this stuff. However, democracies have generally taken the lead.

Over here in Africa, however, these fruits of democracy remain elusive, even in countries touted as those from which the rest of Africa should learn how to govern itself.

Botswana, Mauritius and a few others are yet to show us their great inventions. Be that as it may, those Africans who have lived through numerous and largely pointless violent “revolutions” could have benefited from the long-term peace and political stability these countries have enjoyed. Which takes me back to the discussion with the old professor.

There is no denying that, since the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the “winds of democratisation” started blowing through post-Cold War Africa, we have witnessed some strange happenings here. In many instances, the push against authoritarianism has begot explosions of violence that have left their victims wondering if the fight for democracy was really worth it.

But that has been merely one of several problems democracy activists could not have foreseen. The other has been what to do after deposing authoritarian governments.

A common approach has been to dismantle the systems that upheld deposed governments, including firing from their jobs most if not all the people who served under them, including those who would have been running security apparatuses. These have then been replaced with new people, many with no clue about how to do what they’re supposed to do.

In this way, entire technocracies have been done away with, and with them, huge amounts of highly valuable institutional memory. If one hears people in newly minted democracies comparing new occupants of public office unfavourably with their predecessors and lamenting about falling standards of public administration, here is one reason why this usually happens.

But there is also something else. Africa’s new democracies, like their counterparts elsewhere, with only a few exceptions, have adopted the five-year limits on presidential terms.

There is broad agreement that this is a good thing, but is it? If so, what is it good for? Consider this: once a new party and government have been elected, they spend at least two years settling in and familiarising themselves with how things work. They then spend the third year trying to implement their manifesto.

By the fourth year, they start thinking of how to win the next election, often with very little to show in terms of achievements over the previous three years. By the fifth year, they start setting up campaign teams and, to cover up for poor performance, bribing voters and making plans to outmanoeuvre their opponents.

Experts have begun to suggest that these strictures produce governments that are short-termist in their orientation, while the real work of development and causing long-term social change requires long-term planning and self-application. This short-termism usually means that new governments led by new parties tend not to carry forward whatever projects their defeated adversaries have left in the pipeline.

It was against this background that the good old professor called for some thinking about what to do with democracy when we get it. It seems to me as if he has a powerful point there.

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