AN ALTERNATIVE SYSTEM OF GOVERNANCE REVISITED
This posting was published last year and it attracted a lot of attention through personal e-mail messages expressing agreement with the viewpoint either in total or with some reservations and a few in total disagreement. But virtually all were unwilling to submit their comments to be published except for a couple. I am republishing it in the hope that it will generate the type of bold public debate it was intended to provoke because the viewpoint is still relevant and topical. In private reflections we continue to question the relevance of the system of democratic governance as practiced in many of our countries. Why not subject it to rigorous public reflections through this platform or any other in the hope of a successful search for a viable alternative?
Going by the “successful” elections in a number of countries in recent past and the keeping in check those trying to usurp political powers through unconstitutional means in a few countries, such as Mali and CAR, democracy must be well and alive in Africa! So, why think or talk of a need for an alternative system of governance?
Democracy has been adopted as a system of governance and practiced primarily in terms of balloting and elections by a group of privileged political groups or class called “political parties”. Few African countries have ideologically derived and driven political parties and rarely are the so-called manifestos of the parties actualized after elections.
Democracy transcends balloting and elections. It is ¨governance by discussion and public reasoning.” (See The Idea of Justice by the Nobel Laureate Professor Amartya Sen, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 2009. African countries should not be lulled into believing that western ¨democracy¨ as currently practiced, primarily as balloting and elections, has a viable foundation upon which to build durable and unadulterated political and socioeconomic development.
In practice, western democracy is an expensive system of governance for the privileged few with huge sums of money to buy the media and disseminate misinformation about political opponents for the sole purpose of winning elections. In the process, these “politicians” also buy the electorates who due to their poverty of the mind and means are left with selling their votes in the absence of any objective programme of civic education and the inability to make informed choices. Once in office, the “politicians” proceed to loot the treasury to pay back for what they have “invested” in getting elected. Some even boast publicly about how they rigged elections, how much ill-gotten wealth they have been able to acquire and flaunt these publicly without any scruples or sense of guilt.
A form of governance worthy of exploration by African countries is "benevolent autocracy" as a transition to a home grown "democratic governance" that has as its foundation "discussions and public reasoning". The system has a visionary leader supported by an administrative machinery that shares his or her vision and in turn ensures that the vision is also shared by the masses.
Such a system would necessarily require some concentration of political power, but the issue is not the power in itself but how it is used. When the military came to power in the 1970s and 80s in a number of African countries, citizens were jubilant, hopeful that the military would use the autocratic or dictatorial power to correct for the ills of society. Instead the power was misused and the outcomes were disastrous. The military failed woefully to use the power for the common good. Rather, they used it for selfish ends with obscene scale of corruption never before witnessed as was the case with Sani Abacha et al.
What African countries need are visionary leaders with the capability to assemble around them, those that share their vision of development, those that have been schooled in stewardship and service, not those that see the shared vision in terms of the loot to be shared. "Benevolent autocracy" is a viable transitory form of governance that is rooted in Africa's own traditional values and system of governance. It involved the chiefs as counselors to the traditional ruler, with whom they shared a common vision. Although they are counselors, there was room for dissent even though the ruler was a "benevolent autocrat".
President Nelson Mandela was impressed and influenced as a young boy by seeing the democratic nature of the proceedings of the local meetings that were held in the Regent's Grand Palace in Mqhekezweni. According to President Mandela in Long Walk to Freedom, Little Brown & Co . Boston, Massachusetts and London 1994 p19 – 20.
"My later notions of leadership were profoundly influenced by observing the regent and his court. I watched and learnt from the tribal meetings that were regularly held at the Great Palace. ... On these occasions the regent was surrounded by his 'amaphakathi' a group of councilors of high rank who function as the regent's parliament and judiciary....Everyone who wanted to speak did so. It was democracy in its purest form. There may have been a hierarchy of importance among the speakers, but everyone was heard, chief and subject, warrior and medicine man, shopkeeper and farmer, landowner and labourer. The foundation of self government was that all men were free to voice their opinions and were equal in their value as citizens. Women , I am afraid, were deemed 'second class citizens'. Democracy meant all men were to be heard and a decision was taken together as a people".
Other cultures in different parts of the World share a similar form of approach to governance and have applied this in modern times as seen in cases such as Indonesia and South Korea. Three cases in Africa that have or have had some semblance of such an approach to governance at different times are Ghana (a la Rawlings), Ethiopia and Rwanda.
Modernization of Africa's own traditional values and system of governance and scaling it up to the national level deserve consideration as an alternative to western democracy, the foundations of which are not well understood and the practice of which is disadvantageous to the masses of the population.
