African leaders have a lot to learn from German polls

By Boniface Manyala

As German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the leader of the conservative Christian Democratic Union party, celebrated her victory, I could not help but marvel at how actual democracies conduct their polls. My mind took me on a trip around Africa.

For a while I toyed with the idea that Africa has conducted democratic elections. But this line of thinking is selfish; it serves only to gratify my transient wishes. Africa has never had genuine democratic elections. Even the highly acclaimed recent cases of Ghana and South Africa had their own deficiencies.

In Germany, during campaigns, Merkel promised to run peaceful campaign machinery that "would do justice to the importance of Europe". And true to her words she lived to the promise.

Unlike in Africa where persons seeking political offices are known to make similar commitments only to revert to outlawed groups and weapon-brandishing youth to coarse political support. This tendency, probably, has been exacerbated by our obsession with the impression that elections are a procedure for deciding winners and losers.

It’s through such systematic, free and peaceful campaigns that Merkel has succeeded to end her grand coalition arrangement with the Social Democrats led by her challenger Frank-Walter Steinmeier. This victory presents her with an opportunity to form a government with pro-business Free Democrats, who finished equally strong. In Africa, however, the problem is not so much that democracy fails; it is that we fail to test democracy. Even the same model of coalition governments, which we have since imported from the West, fails because it is intended to breed a government of "convenience" by strange bedfellows, whose priorities clash.

Then there’s our reluctance to embrace change. Look at India for instance. The world’s largest democracy, with more than 700 million registered voters in May successfully held its polls by electronic voting.

We are still battling with the idea of allowing those in the Diaspora to vote, when India, for the second election running, deployed easy to use battery-powered machines to collect and count votes. Batteries. And you still say Africa can’t afford technology?

We have continued to conduct irregular polls because the leadership wants to maintain the status quo, through a system open to manipulation, bribery and intimidation.

It was not until the recent Bomachoge and Shinyalu by-elections that Kenya, through the Interim Independent Electoral Commission of Kenya, used transparent ballot boxes. And all this time we have been asking why our elections are never transparent.

Merkel won because she adhered to the principles of a democratic election. Her rival, Steinmeier, admitted "there is no talking around it: this is a bitter defeat," and vowed to lead a strong opposition.

Now tell me the last time you heard such a genuine concession of defeat from an African leader?

Democracy is expensive, yes, but can we bear the cost of our lethargy?

—The writer is a journalist: bmanyala@yahoo.com