Ivory Coast is a divided society. The outsized egos of its presidential candidates were fed by a real social crisis that divided the country into a regional civil war. No one familiar with the country’s unfolding crisis should have been surprised by the ruling party’s refusal to accept the verdict in a ‘winner-takes-all’ election. Africa had already witnessed similar refusals in other countries, notable Zimbabwe and Kenya.
The notable thing is the refusal by those who pressed the solution in the Ivorian case to heed the lessons of a similar crisis in Africa. When it came to Zimbabwe and Kenya, power-sharing arrangements were put in place, with a helping hand from SADC in Zimbabwe and the UN in Kenya. The objective in both cases was to avert a full-blown crisis.
In the Ivory Coast, however, the UN insisted on an election, and a regime change in line with its results. When the election led to a political stalemate, the UN, a body set up to strengthen peace-keeping, came in with guns blazing to force a military implementation of its preferred solution.
In the words of Akyaaba Addai-Sebo, the Ghanian analyst I quoted earlier, Cote d’Ivoire was “an avoidable disaster.” The price of that disaster will surely be paid by the people of Ivory Coast in the years to come.
Full article in Al-Jazeera.
Many excellent pood points are made. A conflict probably could have been avoided–at least for the moment. But things I found dissatisfying about the analysis:
If you didn’t know much about Cote d’Ivoire, you could be forgiven for thinking that the UN foisted elections on the nation, and started and won the subsequent conflict. Outside influence is strong, but this is not a nation that complacently follows the orders of an international agency. Nor is local politics solely driven by the egos of Presidential contenders. Mamdani–one of my favorite political scientists–is usually the last person to make such omissions, and I’m surprised to see this line of attack.
Mamdani also holds up power-sharing as a means to avoid crisis. But crisis in what space of time? What one wants is a political equilibrium stable in the long term. I’m less confident that the power-sharing route is a successful one–in terms of either growth or stability. I don’t think there’s an easy answer here, and (as readers will get tired of hearing) I get frustrated when I see solutions presented simply.
Mamdani also looks at Cote d’Ivoire in isolation. Or rather, he takes lessons from the past, from elsewhere in Africa, and omits the lessons that Cote d’Ivoire will impart to the future. Kenya and Zimbabwe are powerful precedents precisely because nations in the region look to these examples in times of political crisis. So, for the hundreds of elections yet to come in Africa, what message do you want to send to incumbents or opposition rulers who lose the poll: stand and fight for a power sharing agreement, or accept the outcome?
Finally, at what price democracy? If the 2010-11 violence was the only life lost for legitimate future elections, Cote d’Ivoire could count itself among history’s least bloody democratic transitions. I think Mamdani’s point is that this will not be the last blood shed. He is probably right. But the historian and the economist alike ought to ask: what is the counterfactual? Fewer deaths? Less uncertainty? Lower poverty? Lesser oppression? Personally, I think not. But that is just a guess. And what I would have liked to see is the counterargument.
11 Responses
Mamdani and Thabo Mbeki are both cry babies on this issue and fail to put forward a potential solution to the problem…Mbeki’s approach is selfish, opportunistic and financial.. Randgold, MTN etc etc… The reward Mbeki got from Gbagbo in his mediation attempts in 2004/2005 was MTN, a mobile network snatched away in an already closed deal from Etisalat (UAE) in the last minute for his “excellent peacekeeping” efforts.. Mbeki needs to come out from under his jaundiced pan-Africanist blanket and just admit to the world that he is just a hard-nosed capitalist trying to fatten the wallets of his own offspring…
Mamdani fails to acknowledge that all parties agreed to go to elections knowing very well that they may lose. ” and yes, us Africans are capable of power transitions without bloodshed……..the UN, a body set up to strengthen peace-keeping, came in with guns blazing…” The truth on the ground is that the UN took more bullets than they shot… For once the UN should be commended for the great work carried out in Cote d’Ivoire..
A lot of food for thought. In essence, power sharing deals want to limit bloodshed, and is consensus not a good thing?
In democracy, consensus is indeed mostly a bad thing. It is exactly the alternation of power that leads to less abuse, less corruption. By never really alternating, the advantages of elections are not realised, while the disadvantages (costly elections, etc.) are still maintained.
I would agree that a power sharing deal might not have been feasible in this situation. I also question the idea that it was wrong to put pressure on Gbagbo for elections. Mamdani presents it as if the UN arbitrarily forced an election date when in fact Gbagbo had been postponing elections for five years. And with each postponement tensions in Cote d’Ivoire rose, as the opposition was not too keen on the status quo. If Mamdani’s assumption was that things would have been fine without elections, I would say he was wrong.
Lastly, is Mamdani misspelling Houphouet – or is his version “Houphet” simply an alternate spelling that I’m not aware of. Not to be snarky, but the historical background is quite lenghty for an Al Jazeera article and that would be a pretty big error.
Power-sharing could be a great way to transition into a full on democracy. It might be met with less opposition than a complete “winner-takes all” and eventually, the more favored party could make its way into full leadership. I don’t believe the UN’s now or nothing forced election and subsequent intervention was really helpful. I imagine the pressure from the UN was felt before they intervened. I think it is hard sometimes for outsiders (especially those lucky enough to live within democracies) understand how difficult it is and how long it can take to make such drastic government chages. I think Cote d’Ivoire deserves more time.
RE: Mamdani’s unexpected omissions (a brief comment)
As a former huge fan of Mamdani’s work, I have to say I grew wary of factual accuracy of many of his claims. On one hand I stil admire his critical approach and the aim to geneaologically uncover hidden structural imbalances. On the other hand, since his crashcourse into the issue of Darfur (Saviors and Survivors; Naming and Shaming and related writings), I personally got the feeling he is not using deduction anymore, but merely picking up random facts to prove his grand narratives (to be sure – that does not make the narratives wrong). (See the whole discussion – about 36 blog posts from Mamdani, de Waal, Dal, O’Fahey and others – on de Waal’s blog. Should you be time pressed, read the last three paragraphs in one of the articles here. I consider it a great summary of his work – http://blogs.ssrc.org/sudan/2009/05/18/ofahey-responds-to-mamdani/ ).
Still, I know hardly anything about Cote d’Ivoire and do not feel competent to judge his account here. This is clearly more an impression on his way of working (if not a clear ad hominem attack).
Hmm, maybe I had a different reading on Mamdani’s argument on the Ivorian crisis and his counter-argument proposal. I don’t think Mamdani argues that “local politics {was} solely driven by the egos of Presidential contenders”. In fact, he does state after quoting Akyaaba Addai-Sebo that the egos of the protagonists cannot fully explain the crisis: “The oversized egos of protagonists is at the heart of the power struggle in the Ivory Coast – former Prime Minister Alassane Ouattara, the Speaker of the Assembly Henry Konan Bedie and President Laurent Gbagbo – cannot fully explain the origins of the north-south civil war.”
In my reading, his argument is geared more towards the crisis of postcolonial citizenship in Ivory Coast, i.e. “who is an Ivorian with a right to participate in the political sphere?” — a compelling argument that can explain the roots of many recent political crises in post-colonial countries, e.g. the Congo, Sudan, Sri Lanka, etc. Local politics was driven by the politicizing of “indigenous” and “settler” identities, not the egos of the protagonists – though they did feed on this social crisis.
I also did not get the same reading that he, or Mbeki, fully support power-sharing agreements from the get-go. The counter-argument or alternative is to firstly, reform the political system to address the debate on citizenship. Instead of having winner-take-all elections, (in line with Mbeki’s article) the conditions need to exist to conduct elections in the first place. Clearly, this was not the case and it became the first and most crucial mistake the international community and the Ivorian political elites made (the Ivorian political protagonists had an agenda to proceed as such, the international community should have advised otherwise).
A transitional power sharing agreement with a caveat of barring the protagonists in future elections (advocated by Addai-Sebo) allows time and space to reform the political system and the citizenship debate. As a Kenyan, I completely agree that the power-sharing agreement following the 2007 election crisis has been an exercise in futility but given the crisis that ensued, it was the only foreseeable option (a transitional power-sharing agreement that bars Kibaki, Raila, Uhuru and Ruto from future elections in Kenya is also an interesting question to consider!). The question that Mamdani and Mbeki ask is: given the crisis that has ensued from the inadvisable election, why was a similar power-sharing arrangement not pursued? This may not be a conspiracy – as Mamdani/Mbeki have been interpreted – but it definitely smacks of double standards, especially when there is evidence that both parties committed election fraud and the country was pretty evenly split. The message that should be sent out to future elections in Africa is that conditions need to be right to have elections in such divided societies — the crisis of citizenship needs to be resolved before the discussion of elections can be broached.
I agree that the rhetoric that Mamdani and Mbeki (and Addai-Sebo) employ regarding the “outside influence” detracts from their main message, which is unfortunate but is still very compelling. It was amazing that the UN SRSG, a neutral party, decided to provide itself the mandate to declare a presidential election. I’m actually surprised not more has been written on that – and the precedents it sets for future UN involvement.
First of all, both Gbagbo and Ouattara made it clear all the way that they do not want a power sharing system, nor a so called National Unity Government that is often nothing other than a promotion of incompetence. They made this point clear during the campaign (Although Ouattara is revisiting that now.)
Yet the crisis could have been avoided easily; just recount and audit the election! Gbagbo never said he won and that Ouattara should go to hell. He instead asked for an independent third party audit! That never happened.
Mr. Gbagbo said he is the true winner (backed by the institutions of Cote d’Ivoire) and Mr. Ouattara said he won (Backed by the UN and the HEAD of the electoral commission).
Then Gbagbo said, let’s have a recount/audit by a third party. The UN secretary general Mr. Ban Ki Moon’s reply to that request is that , and I quote: “a recount will be a grave injustice”. Yet a recount/audit just saved Haiti from a similar situation. In fact Ouattara should be the one asking for a recount/audit to further his legitimacy. Instead, a rebel group has now been renamed into a republican army and we are now awaiting for the next crisis unfortunately.
Check out Mbeki’s much firmer denunciation of the UN’s behavior: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/29/what_the_world_got_wrong_in_cote_d_ivoire.
Mamdani is wrong on all fronts. The UN did not go in with guns blazing. They were protecting the elected leader and the violence got out of control when Gbagbo’s thugs began killing protesters and resuming death squads. The Forces Nouvelles then moved south and Gbagbo further aggravated the situation by giving out guns to untrained youth. He is also certainly wrong when he cites Kenya as a good example of power sharing to avoid a crisis. Kenya already had a full blown crisis when the power sharing deal was struck to avert complete tribal war. But I would say Ivory Coast is now in a better position to build a peace now than Kenya is. Kenya has just kicked the can down the road.
I am similarly confused by Mamdani’s position. He suggests that we should have a power-sharing agreement so the Ivorians can work it out amongst themselves; we shouldn’t impose solutions on them. But the elections was a form of “working it out for themselves” – in fact, as Kenyans will tell you, power-sharing is a means for questionable elites – not “the people,” whatever that may mean – to work it out amongst themselves, by hook or crook. How many Kenyans and Zimbabweans have I heard say that a power-sharing deal “has been imposed on us?”
As you rightfully point out, the Kenyan and Zim analogy is misplaced, not only because those countries were in very different situations (the Ivory Coast was coming out of civil war, and had already been experiencing a power-sharing agreement for the past three years) but because we do not yet know the consequence of these power-sharing deals. Should we settle on an illegitimate power-sharing deal as a short-term solution to a problem, only to perhaps see it break out it again in five years?
As you say, it is more complex that Mamdani makes it out to be. (See his recent article in LRB on Congo for equally frustrating logic.)
When I read the Mamdani excerpt I feared for a moment that you were quoting it in agreement. Kenya and Zimbabwe are surely not examples to hold up. In fact it could be argued that Gbagbo was angling for such a power-sharing agreement by accepting Kenyan PM Raila Odinga as mediator. Thanks for your post.