In Africa, when it comes to elections, especially presidential ones, legitimacy becomes the keyword. When assessing legitimacy, it is essential to first establish if the African states we recognize as such are, in fact, legitimate. This controversy has been around ever since the first African states were established. We must accept that the states we inherited from the colonizers were not designed to serve the interests of the people, and that these artificial states were not created by us.
The truth is that those who replace the Europeans have always considered the neo-colonial states as their own personal property. In this sense, all institutions resulting from the neo-colonial framework serve only to preserve the status quo. After rigged elections, it always amuses me when I hear well-off politicians, who benefit from the system, consistently urging deprived citizens to respect their country’s institutions. Evidently, you can only respect what protects and feeds you. Yet, for many Nigerians and Africans in general, these so-called institutions neither protect them nor meet their needs, as they have felt and experienced. How can elections or liberal democracy serve a state that is not functional and unable to meet the basic needs of its citizens under these circumstances?
Even in the Western nations that we always claim to emulate, studying their histories reveals that industrialization came before democracy, not vice versa. We must come to grips with the fact that organizing elections is one of the most complex political processes to carry out. The most recent US presidential elections show that even Western nations are dealing with this reality. What then of third-world nations such as the African predatory state with its glaring infrastructure deficit, significant energy insufficiency, particularly in Nigeria, and high food and economic insecurity? Therefore, how can we expect these dysfunctional states to guarantee free and fair elections if they have been unable to provide basic necessities for their people?
There are fundamental issues like legitimacy, sovereignty, and security Africans must courageously address such as legitimacy, sovereignty, social contract, security and economic development in order to assertively undertake the process of statebuilding.
It is unfortunate that the majority of Nigerians and other Africans already consider what is happening in Nigeria to be normal. Even one of the spokespersons of the Peter Obi campaign, the famous Barrister Dele Farotimi, went on air and said that even if his candidate had won, he should still have been illegitimate because the system is rigged and could never produce free and fair elections. He further lamentably emphasized that Nigerians cannot expect any justice from its judicial system. Unfortunately, this is a fair assessment of the state of presidential elections in Africa. We have witnessed, in the past three years, as countries in the Sahel region that had previously ousted dictators then proceeded to conduct liberal elections, only to discover some few years later that these elected presidents were overthrown through a street revolution with the assistance of the military. In spite of this, the international community and the African Union still persist on multiparty elections as the best solution to end transitional governments in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Guinea.
It is about time to acknowledge that multiparty elections are part of the problem and that liberal democracy cannot be a panacea for bad governance in Africa. It is time to stop treating the symptoms and focus on curing the root causes of the persistent disease that has plagued African states for over six decades. There are fundamental issues like legitimacy, sovereignty, and security Africans must courageously address such as legitimacy, sovereignty, social contract, security and economic development in order to assertively undertake the process of statebuilding.
I strongly recommend the President-elect, instead of expressing their readiness to work with the myriad opposition candidates only after they win the elections in an attempt to calm down violence, invite all the political, religious, and business elites, including the traditional rulers and representatives of all young groups, to sit down and put in place a legitimate state. This kind of state must dissociate itself from its colonial and neo-colonial structures by fostering the advent of modern political institutions that must respond to the needs of its people and be accountable to them. If this condition is not met, I fear that liberal democracy will one day not only ruin us but also lead to our recolonization, if it has not already occurred.
Wanah Immanuel Bumakor
Researcher and Consultant in Peace Studies and Conflict Management