Africa’s battle with election riggers amid political power in perpetuity and regressive democracy

Can the political opposition win elections even when the incumbent government is determined to remain in power at all costs? This is a challenge for Africa where many leaders or political parties seem to have staked claims to power in perpetuity.

Elections have proliferated in Africa as they have across the world. Three decades ago, there were very few on the continent. Today almost every country in Africa holds them. Yet in Africa, as globally, democracy appears to be retreating. Freedom House assesses only 37 of Africa’s 54 nations to be electoral democracies, and of those, only eight receive its highest accolade of being ‘free’ both in civil liberties and political rights.

The anomaly of increasing elections and regressive democracy is explained by the depressing fact that “authoritarian leaders have learnt how to manipulate elections to stay in power,’ said Nic Cheeseman, Professor of Democracy at the University of Birmingham, at a webinar held by The Resistance Bureau this week.

These leaders are “using regular polls as a device to merely legitimate their illiberal and often highly oppressive regimes,” he said. The event on “How to (Not) Rig an Election: Protecting democracy through the ballot box”, gathered opposition politicians and activists from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Angola, Uganda and Zambia. 

The discussion focused on how to defend electoral democracy and aired some difficult questions, such as: is it worth contesting elections when defeat-by-rigging is certain? And how do you react when yet another poll has been stolen from you, as Angolan activist Âurea Mouzinho asked about last month’s elections in her country. Mouzinho is global policy advocacy and campaigns coordinator at the Global Alliance for Tax Justice.

The People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), in power since independence in 1975, was officially declared the winner. This despite losing 10% of the vote since 2017 and scraping home with just over 51% against the almost 44% of the opposition coalition led by the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (Unita).

Unita’s parallel voter tabulation showed it had beaten the MPLA, Mouzinho said. Yet its court challenge was summarily dismissed without an independent examination. Unita took up its seats in Parliament to the dissatisfaction of many Angolans who expected to be called for mass protests, especially in Luanda where Unita won by a landslide. But that would probably have provoked a bloodbath, said Mouzinho. “And a country that has suffered so much war shouldn’t lose one more life.”

So what now? Some believe the MPLA might respond to its near defeat by tackling corruption, poor governance and poverty. Mouzinho suspected not and that it would lose even more heavily in 2027, at which point it might abandon even the pretence of democracy. The only hope for the opposition is to increase its parallel voter tabulation to make it even harder for the MPLA to claim victory. 

Martin Fayulu — widely believed to have won the DRC’s 2018 elections, which were given to Félix Tshisekedi — similarly told the webinar how the opposition feared protesting would have provoked a bloody government reaction. He described how the Congolese people were betrayed by the African Union (AU) and other regional African organisations that he tried to persuade to push for new elections 18 months later.