Old and new EA to square up at the polls

Three East African Community presidents will fight for their jobs in elections this year: First will be Burundi’s Pierre Nkurunziza, followed by Rwanda’s Paul Kagame and then, towards the end of 2010, Tanzania’s Jakaya Kikwete.

Both Kagame and Kikwete will win, and you can take that to the bank. Burundi’s post-war politics is still taking shape, so we cannot speak with equal certainty about Nkurunziza, but it is a good bet he too will be back.

Kagame and Kikwete might be popular at home (depending on whom you talk to) but the real reason they have their upcoming elections in the bag has nothing to do with that. Rather, it is because incumbents in East Africa, like in most of Africa, always win elections. Even when they lose elections, they still win.

While Southern and West Africa have had sitting presidents defeated at the polls, East African leaders have remained “immune” to electoral defeat. One reason is that since Independence, there has been only one truly free election in East Africa — Kenya’s in December 2002.

Otherwise, from the last day of 2007 into early 2008, Kenya was consumed by deadly violence after the opposition Orange Democratic Movement claimed that the election had been stolen for President Mwai Kibaki.

The country only stepped back from the mouth of the grave after a power-sharing deal gave ODM some of the spoils.

Through the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s, according to political lore, the ruling party Kanu turned Kenya’s elections into a carnival of poll thuggery.

In Tanzania, the ruling Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM) is too entrenched to be defeated, but even with that critics say the party is also a habitual vote cheat. In the island of Zanzibar, where CCM is not universally loved, it brazenly swindles votes to retain power.

Vote-stealing

In Uganda, President Yoweri Museveni’s rise to power started with a rigged election in 1980, in which he came third. Angry, he took to the bush to start the guerrilla war that brought him to power in 1986. But in one of those sweet ironies of history, the Museveni government has turned the country into a laboratory of election burglary. Kampala seems addicted to vote-stealing.

In Rwanda, the ruling Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) is so dominant, the opposition just hasn’t a prayer. As a result, the opposition, especially that based outside the country, argues that there are no elections in Rwanda. Only coronations.

Whether these criticisms of electoral practices are fair or not, they are still striking for many reasons.

East Africa, for example, is considered the leading adopter of new information technologies in Africa. Small wonder then that it was Safaricom that was the first mobile phone company in the world to launch M-Pesa, the mobile phone money transfer and e-wallet service.

And though it has fallen behind today, in Africa Uganda pioneered radical forex currency liberalisation, the opening up of the airwaves, the liberalisation of the fuel industry, the privatisation of the energy sector and, remarkably, it was a world leader in combating Aids.

Once again, 2010 will be another test whether it will be the backward politics of East Africa, or its innovative forward-looking side that will win out. Old East Africa will win, but we have still made progress. In years past, there was no new East Africa in the contest.