Hello. Welcome back to Conversation with
Stephen Kamugasa. This is the fifth and final
podcast episode in our Genocide series. Today's
guest is Dr. Nic Cheeseman, a political scientist
and professor of democracy and international
development at the University of Birmingham,
specializing in democracy, elections, and
African politics. Nic read politics, philosophy
and economics at the University of Oxford
and then received an M.Phil and D.Phil from
the same university. He was elected a Cox
Fellow at New College but left in 2006 to
take up the position of Associate Professor
at Jesus College, Oxford. He served as the
director of Oxford's African Studies Centre
before moving to the University of Birmingham
in 2007 to become a professor of democracy
and international development. In 2022, he
became the inaugural director of the university's
new Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability
and Representation, CEDAR. Professor Cheeseman
is the recipient of many awards, recognizing
his exceptional scholarship, and the most
recent is the Josiah Mason Award for Academic
Advancement at the University of Birmingham.
He is also the author of many notable books,
the most prominent being Democracy in Africa,
Successes, Failures, and the Struggles for
Political Reform. In this episode, we discuss
the topic, how critical is democracy in a
multipolar world? Dr. Nic Cheeseman, welcome.
Thanks, it's great to be here.
The name Cheeseman is unusual. You are the
only person I know named Cheeseman. A quick
search on the internet showed that it is
rooted in ancient Anglo-Saxon culture, It
is a name for someone who worked as a maker
or seller of cheese. The surname Cheeseman
literally means cheeseman. Early recordings
of it can be traced back to the Assize Rolls
for 1260 in Cheshire, England in the United
Kingdom. Nic, please tell us something about
your family background with special reference
to your childhood. And how did your childhood
experience colour your appreciation of reality
in relation to your work as a professor of
democracy?
Thanks, well it's great to be here and thanks
for looking up the family history, that's
interesting. I think it's often difficult
to work back and to work out how you ended
up where you are. You can go back and find
certain key moments in your personal history.
What explains why I've had so much of an
interest, passion for, and relationship with
countries in Africa, particularly places
like Kenya and Zambia over the years. I could
go back to my undergraduate at Oxford University
with a great professor there, Gavin Williams,
who was really important when I arrived at
university to me and really inspired me to
study Africa, which was one of his great
passions. Then you could go back a little
bit further. I spent time in Africa in between
a number of African countries, in East Africa
and Southern Africa, in between doing my
A-levels and going to university. you could
go back a little bit further. My mother actually
spent some time in West Africa doing some
of the research for her own studies many
years ago before that. So there was, I guess,
a sense of travel and adventure that I might
have picked up on when I was younger. The
idea that actually the interesting things
in the world are not necessarily you know,
in the UK. And if we go all the way back,
you know, my grandmother on my mother's side
was actually born in South Africa very briefly
before coming back to the UK. So there's
lots of sorts of connections that you could
kind of go back to over the years to suggest
where the research would end up. But I think
a lot of it is also, you know, luck. I was
very close to going to Cambridge to study
Wittgenstein and philosophy, and then at
the last minute decided I actually wanted
to study something that I thought would have
a more immediate impact and be more immediate
to the kind of challenges that the world
was facing. And that pushed me in a more
political direction. And then the combination
of that and some of the great professors
and scholars we had in Oxford pushed me towards
African politics. And then I worked with
my PhD supervisor, Dave Anderson, who was
a great expert on Kenyan politics. That's
how I ended up in Kenya. And obviously then,
I've essentially been following Kenyan politics
as closely as I can ever since. So I think
there's a lot of serendipity and a lot of
luck, as well as some kind of crucial turning
points that maybe we could point back to.
In the introduction of your book, Democracy
in Africa, you write on page one the following,
and I quote, those who depict sub-Saharan
Africa as a hopeless continent are often
unaware that the region contains two countries
that have enjoyed uninterrupted multi-party
politics since independence, Botswana and
Mauritius. Indeed, states in which elections
have not led to civil conflict or political
disorder are typically overlooked in favour
of cases in which the body count makes for
more eye-catching headlines. Why, in your
opinion, do people view Africa as a hopeless
continent?
Well, that line, of course, Hopeless Continent,
I was notorious because it was put on the
front cover of The Economist magazine. And
so one reason why I used that particular
term is to evoke that front cover, which
I think caused some consternation and some
controversy when it was used. In some ways,
I think it's understandable. I think we see
the media in general rushing to cover conflict
more quickly than they cover peace. It's
the thing that will be more absorbed and
more desired by audiences around the world,
and there's a kind of motor there of public
appetite and the need to you know, get column
inches and the need to secure advertising
that we understand in the media. I think
in the African context that's often overlaid
with, you know, a relatively limited understanding
of Africa. Often certain stereotypes are
inherited from colonial rule, some of them
racist, many of them misleading, that compounds
that sense of the media searching for those
stories. And so it's often true that you'll
see that even really good pieces on Africa
that are more nuanced, that are more reflective,
won't be the ones that get most shared on
social media and devoured. So I think it's
a broad combination of the kind of ranges
of information and media that have been produced
over the years, the stereotypes that they've
generated, and then the kind of competitive
nature of media reporting. All of that has
generated quite a misleading understanding
of what happens. Now that's of course not
to say that a lot of those stories aren't
true. I mean there are countries that have
experienced horrible wars horrible conflict.
There were a lot of countries in which democracy
has struggled to get off the ground. But
that is only one side of the coin, and that
other side of the coin is really important.
Not only because it's important to understand
those countries in Africa as well, and a
lot of the lenses that we're given traditionally—conflict,
ethnic politics, neopatrimonialism—don't
help as much in those countries, but also
because I think if we want to reverse and
decolonize how Africa is understood, those
stories are really important for challenging
those assumptions and those oversimplifications.
On page 11 of your book, under a subheading
neo-patrimonial rule, you write the following,
and I quote, it has become a cliché to note
that one of the barriers to establishing
democracy and strong states in Africa is
the prevalence of neopatrimonial rule, yet
the term is often misunderstood and misapplied.
Neopatrimonialism is not simply a synonym
for corruption, rather it refers to the collision
between pre-existing patrimonial forms of
political organization and the modern colonial
state. Nic, Please define for us, in a language
an ordinary person can clearly understand,
the true meaning of democracy. And why, with
special reference to recent protests in Kenya,
does a clear understanding of neopatrimonial
rule help us better appreciate challenges
facing democracy in Africa?
Wow Stephen, that's four massively difficult
questions in one sentence. So that's a big
challenge you're laying down for me here,
but I'll try and meet it and do you justice.
When it comes to democracy, obviously we
all have a slightly different understanding
and a different belief about what democracy
is and should be. Some people would give
us a very sort of limited definition. They
would say, you know, free and fair elections
to select the government. Other people would
use the famous, you know, one-liner, government
of the people, for the people, etc. We would
have a number of different sort of very limited
definitions like that. Others then, of course,
if we were to think classically about people
like Alexis de Tocqueville and others, would
put in there not just a kind of political
equality, in other words, one person, one
vote, but more than that, a kind of understanding
that democracy needs to be underpinned by
a degree of social equality. That if one
man is rich enough to be able to buy another
man, democracy is never going to function
well. And so particularly in the European
variation, there's often a thinking that
democracy is not just one person, one vote.
It's also about a certain level of social
and economic inequality which enables that
system to work and that set of things together
constitutes democracy. The other thing that
I think is important to consider is whether
or not we believe that democracy should protect
the Rights of minorities. So on the one hand
you could have a majoritarian version of
democracy that says whatever the majority
want goes. That's one version of democracy.
Or you could say that democracy is actually
fundamentally about creating a system of
checks and balances that prevents anybody
within a country from being manipulated for
the ends of other people, and protects the
Rights of citizens of different genders,
of different sexualities, and of different
minorities, and that we understand therefore
democracy in a sense as a kind of system
of protection. Where I would be personally,
and it's not where anyone else necessarily
has to be, but my vision for democracy is
that bigger vision, that vision that delivers
a degree of social equality, that vision
that protects the Rights of minorities. To
me, when we think of democracy, we think
of what we want democracy to achieve, for
me, democracy is valuable because of how
it does those things. So I would be in favor
of strong checks and balances to protect
minorities and other groups. I would be in
favor of a democracy that is focused on trying
to bring about a certain kind of social equality.
And I would be someone who would say that
if we went and saw a democracy that neither
protected those Rights or created a situation
in which there was a degree of social equality
that we would then be talking about a very
poor quality democracy or not a democracy
at all. So you asked then a second question,
and your second question related to neopatrimonialism.
Now, I say in the book, and in other work
I've done in a 2018 book for Cambridge University
Press on Institutions and Democracy in Africa,
one of the things I say there is that there's
been too much use of the term neopatrimonialism
in studies of Africa. It's been, in many
ways, the dominant framework through which
people have seen Africa academically for
a long period of time. And the idea of neopatrimonialism
is roughly this, that you have a kind of
set of political cultures that are rooted
around say ethnicity or the charisma and
family position and ties of a particular
leader and their location within a community
and that those ties and that way of thinking
about power is not about elections or a meritocratic
bureaucracy. It's about, for example, it
might be something that connects more to
the idea of monarchic rule. In other words,
kings and queens or chiefs and traditional
leaders. You have your position by the way
that you were born into it within society,
not necessarily because you were chosen by
the people. So the idea in neopetrimonialism
is that that's one way of organizing power
in politics. Another way is what we might
think of as the kind of modern state, where
you have a centralized bureaucracy, people
are promoted on the basis of meritocracy,
the best people get the jobs at the top,
and you have the government selected on the
basis of free and fair elections in which
every individual votes on the basis of their
own self-interest, and everyone gets an individual
ballot. It's not a group recognising a leader
because of how they were born. It's a set
of individuals voting for their favourite
candidate in a competitive process. The idea
of neopatrimonialism, the central thesis,
is that colonial government attempted to
implement in Africa this modern, bureaucratic,
meritocratic, election-based state. Although,
of course, colonial government itself was
very repressive and often didn't introduce
forms of political participation until the
very end of the colonial period. But that
the state that was introduced at the end
of the colonial government and was supposed
to govern independent Africa would look like
this. That was the vision. but it didn't
work, it didn't take, you might say, because
it was not consistent with or complementary
to the existing set of understandings and
beliefs of people within society, and that
effectively those formal institutions were
wiped away didn't work as intended because
people operated on the basis of these other
more traditional patrimonial values and forms
of politics. In other words, the leader of
the country wasn't checked by Parliament,
wasn't checked by the judiciary, wasn't voted
in and out by citizens because that way that
they gained their authority and the way that
citizens understood their role was on the
basis of a really different kind of political
logic. Now, what I argue in a lot of my work
is that that idea often leads people to say
that African politics doesn't have meaningful
political institutions, that leaders operate
without checks and balances, that we see
a series of princes or philosopher kings
or leaders who operate without constraint.
And therefore, we can almost ignore the role
of political institutions in the way that
we analyze politics in Africa. And actually,
every time we've gone to look at it, you
know, we see that the institutions that are
in place matter in really important ways,
whether we're talking about, you know, the
legacy of a kind of French legal system or
British legal system, whether we're talking
about countries that operated one party states
or military regimes, However, we're talking
about systems that have more or less levels
of decentralization. All of these differences
turn out to actually have quite significant
importance for the way that politics actually
operates today. So one of the things I consistently
say to my students is, you know, it might
not always be as easy to see exactly how
institutions are shaping politics, but they
are. And it's really important not to assume
that all countries are neopatrimonial, or
that this form of politics is equally true
across the continent. So just to give you
one example, one of the things that sometimes
happens out of a kind of neopatrimonial framework
is that people will say, Ah well, because
of neopatrimonialism we get weak institutions,
because of weak institutions we get corruption,
so all African states are really corrupt.
But in reality we know that there are some
states that have been historically much less
corrupt. Botswana would be a good example,
despite having diamond wealth, has historically
been much less corrupt, historically been
much less neopatrimonial than other countries
which fit the model better. So again, the
danger of that model is that if we apply
it in a one-size-fits-all way, we do a lot
of violence to the flexibility of the variation
and the different experiences of different
countries in Africa. The final bit of your
question brings us to Kenya and the protests
that we've seen. And there, of course, I
think what you could say is that, in a sense,
we do see a bit of a clash between the demand
of people for democracy and accountability
and a government that delivers and a system
that, in some ways, still is operating on
the basis of some of those neopatrimonial
logics. So we, in a sense, have the clash
between the two, not neopatrimonialism completely
dominating against other forms of politics,
but actually the interaction and competition
between those. Why do I say that? Well, one
of the things we obviously saw in Kenya where
we had youth-led protests was Kenyans coming
out, very many young Kenyans coming out across
ethnic lines to demand that their government
do a number of things better. One, tackle
corruption and reduce corruption. Two, get
rid of the finance bill, which was very upsetting
for a lot of people because it significantly
increased a range of taxes and they'd already
had a number of fees increased by the government.
So the cost of living was getting much higher.
But there were also complaints, you know,
among the protesters about, you know, different
kinds of government failures over many years,
failure of government to invest economic
funds and loans well, a tendency, you know,
to focus too much on the position of the
president and not to have good enough quality
people in terms of cabinet secretaries, cabinet
ministers, in other words, and so on. So
there were a range of different complaints
that were there. And many of those complaints
related to, in one way or another, complaints
about lack of inclusion in politics and about
accountability. So you could read a lot of
those complaints as being a bottom-up demand
from younger people for a better quality
democracy to deliver them better quality
development and economics. And that was the
kind of challenge that was being pushed on,
a system that has failed to deliver, partly
because it still has a lot of those elements
of patrimonial politics operating at the
top. One of the things I think is really
interesting coming out of that Kenyan experience
is, to what extent are we going to see more
of that in the next 10 years? We know that
African countries have very large youth populations.
We know that we have processes of urbanization
that are bringing people together. across
ethnic lines, we know that we see significant
improvements in education in a number of
different African countries. So one of the
things I'm really interested in is, is that
changing the way that citizens think about
themselves and the state? Is it changing
the way they think about what the government
delivers to them and owes them? And is it
changing the way they're thinking about how
they want to engage politically? In other
words, are we going to see a new group of
young people in urban areas operating not
on the basis of their ethnic identity and
voting for their ethnic leader, but for the
person who will deliver on their particular
agenda? And are we going to see them being
more assertive and more demanding of government
in ways that push accountability and reduce
corruption? Now that would be a really exciting
prospect, but of course, you know, we've
only really seen one round of protests in
Kenya. There were maybe some echoes of those
protests in Nigeria and Uganda, but they
were driven by very different forces as well.
So I think one of the big questions for me
for the next 12 months is, was the Kenyan
experience a one-off or is it actually a
structural change that we will start to see
playing out in a growing number of countries?
Speaking of democracy in Africa, You write
on page 19 of your book the following, and
I quote, the average African country is at
least twice as diverse as New York or London.
And the number of small ethnic groups in
countries such as the DRC, Nigeria, and Uganda
would have made it impossible to design polities
that would have been both ethnically homogeneous
and large enough to be viable It's therefore
unsurprising that African states grouped
together a range of different communities
with a little sense of a common identity
and that subsequent intercommunal relations
were often characterized more by mutual suspicion
than by a sense of solidarity. Is it true
that the colonial powers believed in the
idea of tribe and the Africans gave them
tribes to believe in? And how critical is
tribal identity in modern African politics,
where the idea of democracy is a pressing
issue?
That's a fantastic question. It's also another
challenging one. So let me see if I can now
rise to the challenge. I think it's a really
good point that we need to think very carefully
about the question of how were states designed
and how were national borders drawn. and
then the question of the implications of
that for the present day. One of the points
I'm trying to make there in the book is that
people will often say, well, the colonial
government created this problem by, for example,
drawing arbitrary borders that didn't make
sense, that created countries of a number
of different ethnic groups in the same place.
And that's true, and there are many things
we can lay the blame at the doors of colonialism
and I've written about the way that forms
of European colonialism predisposed African
states to what I've called a form of fragile
authoritarianism. But it's also true, as
you were pointing out there in that quote,
that actually in many countries we see a
high number of ethnic groups, and that in
order to design countries that were mono-ethnic,
in other words, that only had one ethnic
community in them, you would have had to
create hundreds and hundreds more states,
many of which would have been landlocked,
many of which would have been too small to
actually be feasible in terms of producing
economically enough to sustain themselves.
The challenge of creating effective political
systems and building political relations
between ethnic groups is not one that can
be resolved by designing new borders. It
has to be dealt with another way. And that
brings me to the question of how people have
tried to manage ethnicity and the implications
of that. Now I think it is true that colonial
governments believed in tribes. They tended
to have quite racist assumptions about peoples
and to have assumptions about the hierarchy
of peoples. And they would often assume that
groups that looked whiter or looked more
European in one way or another would potentially
be closer to Europeans, and in their racist
worldview, those would be closer allies than
people who didn't, and so on. So they did
believe in tribes. They believed in the idea
of people who had been in the same tribe
for hundreds of years, millennia. And they
constructed forms of government on that basis.
And in doing so, they institutionalized a
lot of the differences between groups, a
lot of the differences between different
people who spoke different languages, as
a result of those assumptions. In many cases,
we know those assumptions were not true.
We know that actually there were communities
that often intermarried. We know that identity
shifted. We know that in some cases, for
example, people spoke different languages,
that sometimes languages were not actually
barriers. That in some cases, different groups
spoke the same language or aspects of the
same language. we know that there was quite
a lot of migration and mobility around in
pre-colonial Africa, and that traditional
leaders who were, for example, too repressive,
or seemed to be too abusive, or seemed not
to offer any protection to people, often
experienced people migrating and leaving
their territories in search for other areas.
And because Africa, in that situation, if
we go back now to the 1700s and 1800s, was
a continent in which we had vast amounts
of land and at that point not as many people,
that this kind of form of migration was a
way of escaping from authoritarian, dictatorial
thought systems in some cases. So the reality
on the ground was much more complex, much
more fluid, much more nuanced. but the colonial
government fixed that in many cases. Classic
examples, of course, being in countries like
Rwanda, creating identity cards that would
state people's identity and ethnic group
on them. Or, for example, in Zambia, Daniel
Posner has shown only translating key educational
or religious materials into so many languages,
which essentially then means that people
need to use those languages if they want
to gain access to those education and those
resources, or risk being left behind and
so all of a sudden you see a significant
shift in the sorts of languages that people
are speaking. So colonial governments really,
through creating a more rigid system, enabled
the strengthening of ethnicity and tribe.
Now, again, this is an important point of
terminology. Colonial governments would have
referred to tribes. Some African citizens
today refer to tribes, but often academics
and researchers prefer to refer to ethnic
groups because tribe has colonial connotations,
and using the term ethnicity and ethnic group
is a way of sort of signaling that you understand
that to an extent, you know, tribe is an
inventive, created term that is deeply contested.
Now, you asked a particular point there about
to what extent did colonial governments believe
in tribes and Africans gave them tribes to
believe in. And there is a great degree of
that. There's really important research by
people like Leroy Vale and others who suggest
that there's a lot of local entrepreneurialism
in this period. I've been in the archive
in Kenya, in the National Archive, and seen
letters from different ethnic groups asking
to have a paramount chief recognized by the
colonial government because they believe
that that's going to be a way of extracting
more resources. So in other words, communities
that didn't necessarily always historically
recognize a paramount chief, didn't recognize
a central authority, weren't classic tribes
in that sense, trying to become more like
that because that's the avenue of securing
more resources. So one of the things we see
during the colonial period is this kind of
creative co-production of the idea of a tribe
as a political unit in a way that in many
countries didn't really exist beforehand,
but of course in some countries had done.
And so that's the sort of legacy that colonial
government leaves for post-colonial Africa.
Now, the extent to which that legacy remains
is partly about the extent to which post-colonial
governments have played upon those divisions,
have played divide and rule politics. So
classic examples here would be to compare,
say, Tanzania where historically, under Julius
Nyerere, the first president of Tanzania,
you had a situation where there was a strong
emphasis on national culture, on the use
of Swahili as a lingua franca, on certain
common symbols that could bring people together,
a focus on teaching civic education, and
therefore creating the idea that there were
Tanzanians, not people of different ethnic
groups, and that being a very strong focus
throughout Nyerere's time in power. Then
you could compare that to somewhere like
Kenya, where under Jomo Kenyatta you have
more of a survival of the fittest model.
Ethnic groups are expected to look after
themselves. The state doesn't provide so
much. There's less of a focus on building
a cohesive national identity, and you see
ethnic competition ravine politics over resources.
Those two different ways of managing ethnicity
create very different types of societies.
In Tanzania, ethnicity is much easier to
manage, doesn't play such a central role
in politics, doesn't create so many divisions,
hasn't been a source of election violence.
And in the Kenyan context, all of those things
have come to pass. So we see, in other words,
the ways in which leaders manage ethnicity
and manage different ethnic groups is really
important to the extent to which ethnicity
continues to be a major driver in African
politics today. Now, one of the things that's
then maybe worth saying just at the end of
that is that one of the sad things about
identity politics, which can be quite divisive
and can generate instability and conflict,
is that it doesn't tend to take that much
to mobilize that into politics, to get people
to be afraid of each other, to get people
to be suspicious. But it takes a long time
to get it out. In other words, if you have
an episode of ethnic violence, if you have
an episode of a leader of one group demonizing
another, it then can often take quite a long
time to actually be able to mobilize that
out of politics in order to be able to actually
go back to a situation in which those tensions
and those divisions are much less pronounced.
And that's one of the great challenges I
think we're still facing, that even in countries
where governments that play divide and rule
have been replaced, it takes a long time
and really strong proactive policies to reintegrate
people and to build back that sense of a
more harmonious, consensual national identity.
In chapter three of your book, where you
turn your gaze on transition, you write on
page 91 the following, and I quote, in contrast
to Kenya and Tongo, The independence of political
institutions in South Africa had not been
wholly undermined by neopatrimonial politics.
Of course, power was abused and apartheid,
and the regime was often closed and opaque,
with the secretive Afrikaner Broederbond,
also known as Afrikaner Brotherhood, wielding
great influence behind the scenes. But South
African leaders operated under real constraints.
Nic, how significant are independent institutions
to political transition? That is, the peaceable
transfer of power from one leader to the
next. And what is your recommendation for
fostering such institutions in support of
democracy in Africa?
So yeah, institutions are critical, 100%
critical to the ability to actually manage
a transition from one government to the next,
to the ability to constrain leaders. It's
all about those institutions. So do we have
strong legislature? Do we have a strong and
independent judiciary? Do we have a strong
and independent electoral commission? But
of course, The fact that you have those institutions
and that they're strong and independent also
depends on a number of other factors. So
for example, do we have strong public support
for those institutions that protects them
if the government decides to try and manipulate
them? Do we see, as we were talking about
a moment ago, the attempt to subvert those
institutions by using patrimonial strategies
and so on? So aspects of political culture,
aspects of social norms come in here as well.
But yes, absolutely. The most important factor
here to look at, in my opinion, is the extent
to which those institutions are independent.
and can therefore check the power of the
government in a genuine way. And where we
see that that's the case, transfers of power
become much more feasible. And where transfers
of power are much more feasible, you start
to see, for example, competitive politics,
the breakdown of the ability of one party
and one leader to dominate politics. And
that's a really good thing in general. In
general, in African countries, we see leaders
who stay in power for longer becoming more
corrupt, becoming more likely to manipulate
elections, less likely to deliver to their
people. So being able to get rid of a leader
when he's performing badly, even if the next
leader doesn't perform great themselves,
is still a benefit over having to have that
leader be there and become president for
life. And of course, one of the really worrying
things we've seen over the last 20 years
is an increased number of presidents trying
to set themselves up as presidents for life,
for example, by removing presidential term
limits in the case of people like Yoweri
Museveni in Uganda, removing age limits as
well as term limits to make sure that they
can stay effectively until they die in office.
So those institutions are absolutely critical.
How do we build them and foster them and
strengthen them? That's one of the big multi-million
dollar questions. If we could answer that
easily and effectively, we could transform
the state of democracy around the world.
One of the challenges we face is that building
good institutions is one of the most difficult
things that there is to do. So one of the
things that we really need to think about
is how do we creatively create stronger institutions
in countries where they don't exist Right
now. And that's really difficult, you know,
we have to be very clear about how big a
challenge that is. We have seen it done though
in recent times in some African countries,
I would say that the Judiciary in Malawi
is stronger than it was 30 years ago and
has been emboldened, for example, to reject
the election result in 2019, becoming one
of the only courts in the world to reject
the election of a sitting president. The
Kenyan Supreme Court, of course, before the
Malawian one, set that precedent in 2017
in validating that election. And we see in
Kenya that in response to post-election violence
and a political crisis that challenged the
legitimacy of the regime in 2007-2008, we
then get the political elite accepting a
new constitution which introduces devolution,
47 new counties with directly elected governors
and senators. We see the creation of that
Supreme Court, and we see a process of judicial
vetting that actually vets many of the judges
and removes some of the worst offenders from
the previous regimes in terms of corruption
and bias in decision making. And so we get
a judiciary and a Supreme Court, that the
people have more confidence in, which then
enables that judiciary to nullify the election
in 2017 and to take the wrath of the government,
which was deeply unimpressed and unhappy
about that decision. So in a country like
Kenya, despite all the challenges that I
talked about earlier when I talked about
the problems in the government of President
Ruto and the protests of young people, If
in a context like that, that difficult, that
challenging, we can see significant institutional
innovation, the creation of new institutions
such as devolution in the Supreme Court,
processes of cleaning up those institutions
that have actually meant that they perform
better. They're not ideal. There are still
challenges to the way that devolution works,
to the way that the judiciary works. But
that clear improvement and progress demonstrates
that this is possible. I think the question
then for a lot of us is, what are the exact
conditions that enable that to come about?
In the Kenyan context, perhaps, it was the
political elite realizing the extent to which
they brought the country to the brink, that
men accept a constitution that perhaps they
wouldn't have accepted otherwise, combined
maybe with the fact that the president of
the time, Mwai Kibaki, was in his second
term in office, and therefore wasn't standing
for election again, and therefore was willing
to introduce reforms that would bind future
leaders but would not bind himself. And perhaps
those two things were particularly important.
Now, of course, that's a really interesting
conflation of events that enabled the institutional
strengthening to happen in Kenya. The challenge
is that we don't see those things a lot of
the time. And of course, we don't want to
see one of them. We don't want to see the
conflict and the instability. that we saw
in Kenya. So how do we actually bring about
those changes in countries where we don't
see that violence? Well, going back to what
I was saying before, one thing that does
seem to be really important is that these
kind of changes are often more likely to
be brought in by a president who's leaving
power and doesn't plan on being there forever.
President Kibaki in the Kenyan context. So
perhaps one of the things again that that
takes us back to is the importance of defending
presidential term limits and having leaders
who know that at a certain point they won't
be in office. And that then generates a greater
opportunity in the final period of those
leaders being in office to generate the kind
of reforms that would actually strengthen
and make more independent electoral commissions
and judiciaries moving forwards.
Turning to chapter four of your book, entitled
Exporting Elections, International Actors
and the Era of Democratic Dependency. You're
Right on page 109, thus, and I quote, following
decades of failed interventions around the
world, European and North American donors
were desperate for a success story by presenting
Uganda as a client guinea on which international
aid programs could be tested, Museveni offered
donors a chance to show that their policies
would have worked if only they had been implemented
correctly. Thus, Museveni committed his government
to talking about and tackling HIV-AIDS at
a time when most African governments were
refusing to recognize and respond to the
danger posed by the pandemic. He also embraced
the advice of IMF and World Bank, accepting
economic liberalization as the price of preventing
political liberalization. Please talk to
us about why the donor community felt compelled
to put their relationship with Museveni above
the need to democratize Uganda's political
landscape. And do you think Western donors
were naive about Museveni, with special reference
to an open secret that is his long-running
project to create a presidential monarchy
in Uganda?
I think donors both European and North American
donors at the time felt that they needed
a success story, somewhere they could point
to that was doing well, partly in order to
show that their programs could be effective,
partly because demonstrating that aid could
work helped to make the case for aid back
home. And of course, one of the challenges
for donors is to justify why scarce resources
should be spent abroad rather than on taxpayers
needs domestically. So that's a factor that
was playing in. I think Museveni also carefully
manipulated Uganda's history of instability
and conflict to tell donors that there would
be more instability and violence if they
forced him to democratize too quickly. And
that was perhaps another factor in the back
of donors' mind, that they didn't want to
force a process and therefore generate instability
and then be responsible for the instability
that resulted. I think there's also a fact
that Museveni has just been very clever at
manipulating people's perceptions of him.
We roll the videotape forwards a little bit
from the period I was describing there to
the more recent period. He's gone from being
willing to be one of the only African leaders
to talk about HIV-AIDS to now being a leader
who has supported, for example, international
missions in other countries by providing
Ugandan troops in situations where actually
those missions have ended up being fairly
dependent on Ugandan troops. He's also been
a supporter of Western policies and programs
around anti-terror operations. And again,
in all of those ways, he's consistently ingratiated
himself with governments around the world.
And that has then led them to mute their
criticism of him. Did he fool them? I'm not
sure he necessarily always fooled them. I
think in some cases they understood who they
were dealing with and they made trade-offs.
They traded off Ugandan democracy against
stability, development, and so on. I think
perhaps where they made the biggest mistakes
was, as you say, to one, fail to understand
what would happen in the end, which is that
Uganda's economy would begin to struggle,
that Museveni would end up lacking genuine
innovation, that his desire to be a president
for life would stop political change and
therefore prevent economic revitalization,
and that Museveni would become a big part
of the problem rather than the solution.
I think they also perhaps failed to understand
how strategic Museveni was and how he would
very quickly abandon them if it was in his
interest to do so. And of course, one of
the things we've seen in the last couple
of years is Museveni increasingly distancing
himself from his former Western allies and
increasingly talking positively about governments
like the one in Russia. So I think this is
unique to Uganda. Uganda was a particularly
good example of this process, but it's something
that we've seen in other countries as well,
where, for example, Rwanda would be a good
example, where the British government until
recently had a plan to send refugees to Rwanda,
which then led the British government to
have to imply that Rwanda was safe. And of
course, that flies in the face of some of
the advice the British government itself
has received and given over the years. So
this kind of process of leaders understanding,
Paul Kagame and Rwanda being very good at
this as well, how to impress donors, claiming
to be good on performance, then meeting donor
priorities in terms of whether it's refugees,
migration, economic policy, security, and
then using that to essentially insulate themselves
from global criticism for the lack of democracy,
that's something that we've seen in a number
of different places. I think the most striking
example of it for me is that in Uganda, when
we've seen significant human Rights abuses,
so the arrest of Bobi Wine when he's an opposition
candidate in the election, the arrest of
Kizza Besigye before Bobi Wine as the main
opposition candidate, you know, the brutality
that was meted out to Bobby Wine supporters
at the last election, many of whom, you know,
were beaten, some were killed, some were
tortured, some we still don't know what happened
to them, that there wasn't a stronger, more
powerful, you know, international outcry
about those abuses which were just flagrant
explicit, there for everybody to see, not
in any way disguised. And that really is
a problematic situation, not just because
it lets down people in Uganda, who want to
see a better quality democracy, more accountability,
more inclusion, but also because it sends
a signal around the world that the international
community is not acting consistently. And
I think that evidence of hypocrisy and inconsistency
is one of the things that gives ammunition
to authoritarian leaders. It's one of the
things that they now point to as evidence
that people shouldn't listen to international
and Western criticism when it comes to democracy.
Because they will say, they're talking about
democracy here, but did you notice that they
didn't do it in Saudi Arabia? Did you notice
they didn't do it in Uganda? Did you notice
they didn't do it you know, and the examples
might go on to include Gaza and the Middle
East and so on. And that sense of inconsistency
and hypocrisy is slowly eroding any moral
high ground Western states, you know, may
have once had. So I think Uganda is a really
good example, not just of how those competing
priorities can play off and undermine the
promotion of democracy in an individual country,
but also how that process can then complicate
the credibility of Western donors when it
comes to promoting democracy and development
more broadly.
The title of our podcast is How Critical
is Democracy in a Multipolar World? Now,
on March 27th, 2024, Nic Westcott, a professor
of diplomacy at Soares University, London,
published a comment on your website, Democracy
in Africa, entitled, As the Opposition Wins
in Senegal, Is Democracy in Africa Really
Backsliding? He wrote the following, and
I quote, In 2023, Xi Jinping launched China's
Global Civilizations Initiative, its Global
Development Initiative, and a Global Security
Initiative. Like the old Belt and Road Initiative,
these are designed to reorient the world
towards China, in this case ideologically
rather than physically. While their substance
remains vague, The initiatives provide an
alternative to the Western norms embodied
in the UN, its multilateral institutions,
and the multiple charters and agreements
promulgated under its auspices. They are
an integral part of efforts to reframe the
debate from one of democracy versus authoritarians
to the global South and its reliable friends
in the global East versus neo-colonialist
exploitative West. The latter narrative is
gaining traction in Africa, boosted by the
Gaza crisis, where Western countries are
often seen hypocritically as quick to condemn
Hamas, but slow to criticize the huge death
toll Israel has inflicted on Palestinian
civilians. Nic, in the context of our podcast
theme, How critical is democracy in a multipolar
world? Do you also think that democracy may
one day flourish on the continent of Africa?
Put another way, are there any bad democracies?
I think there are. And I'm broadly speaking
optimistic about the future of Africa. And
the reason for that is partly what we talked
about a moment ago when we talked about what
we've seen recently in Kenya. We see young
people who have been brought up with elections,
who are used to being able to choose who's
in power. And let's not forget that Kenya
has had two transfers of power. We could
quibble over whether President Ruto winning
was a real transfer because he was deputy
president before. But We've essentially had
two elections in which the candidate the
president wanted to win didn't win. So we've
got countries like that, that people are
starting to get used to having a say, Malawi,
Zambia, where people are used to being able
to vote out the president, Gambia, Liberia,
Sierra Leone, and where the belief in being
able to speak your mind and being able to
choose your leader is very powerful. and
very vibrant. And I think in those societies
leaders can try and shut that down, they
can try and intimidate civil society, they
can try and intimidate the media, but that
impulse of wanting to have a say and expecting
to have a say in politics will continue.
And so I think one thing we'll see in the
authoritarian states of Africa, for example
the new military hunters after the coups
in West Africa, But also, you know, some
of those authoritarian states in southern
and eastern Africa is that they will continue
to face significant challenges because people
in those countries want to live in a democracy.
And we know that. We know that from the Afrobarometer
data. So broadly speaking, I am positive
and hopeful that long term processes of education,
economic growth, rising middle class, urbanization
will create stronger opportunities to foster
that impulse and to turn it into more democratic
institutions and processes. I'm also aware
though that that's going to be a very long-term
process and the governments and leaders will
try and manipulate it, they will try and
manipulate how urbanization works, they will
try and move citizens around the country
to prevent the formation of pro-opposition
or pro-democracy urban blocs and we will
see support from China and Russia in some
cases enabling authoritarian states to commute
human Rights abuses and so it's going to
be a long-term process and a long-term struggle.
But I do believe that over the longer term,
that struggle in the very long term will
lead to a more democratic set of societies,
because I believe fundamentally that that's
what people in those societies want. In terms
of the situation globally, I think you're
absolutely Right about the points you make
about the West and the way that the West
is seen to be hypocritical, and the way that
that then plays into a kind of language of
decolonization and of the role of the West
in colonizing and human Rights abuses and
so on. All of that comes together as a very
powerful package which is well used by, for
example, the Russian government and its allies.
I do think, though, in time that one of the
things that people will start to see is that
the Russian government is very similar. That
we actually will start to see, for example,
people in West Africa whose governments are
now in league with Russia and for whom their
resources are being exploited both to keep
governments in power and to satisfy the demands
of Russia, will start to see Russia in a
similar way that they previously saw France
as actually part of the problem sustaining
authoritarian and unresponsive governments,
rather than as a form of solidarity. So it's
not in that sense that I'm much overly optimistic
about people coming back to Western governments
and once again realigning themselves that
way. It's more in terms of my optimism that
I think people will become much more critically
aware of the problems of engaging with Russia
and China in the way that some countries
have been and that that will then lead to
another backlash and one of the things that
that will do is bring people back to the
idea that actually, you know, being too much
in debt to any global power is an unhelpful
position and that they need to take control
of their own political systems. And as I
say, that what they want in most cases from
the survey data we have is to be able to
make those systems more democratic and more
inclusive and more accountable.
As democracy totters in a multipolar world,
what keeps you up at night?
Almost everything, Stephen, especially as
I get older, almost everything keeps me up
from my own aches and pains all the way through
to what we've seen over the last 10 years.
We've seen a rise in digital manipulation.
We've seen rising authoritarian innovation.
We've seen greater influence from authoritarian
states, whether we're talking about Turkey,
Iran, China, Russia, you know, a much broader
range of states than people often recognize,
you know, all the way through to the new
mechanisms that are being used to manipulate
civil society, the spread of anti NGO legislation,
you know, in the wake of Russia's foreign
agent law. there are so many things that
keep me awake at night and i do think the
situation we face globally is much more challenging
now than it even was ten fifteen years ago
so despite my kind of broad optimism of the
longer term i'm also very worried about all
of these short term struggles and i think
one of the things that you know those of
us who care about and are interested in democracy
and equality and fairness and freedom you
know need to do is to come together to make
sure that everybody is aware of how great
the challenge is and that that longer term
more inclusive more peaceful and prosperous
future is only going to be possible if we
actually start to see real mobilization of
pro-democratic forces around the world.
And finally Nic please advise our listeners
where they may find your book Democracy in
Africa.
You're very kind Stephen. Well people could
find that book Democracy in Africa and also
a newer book How to Rig an Election. They're
in all good bookstores but particularly you
could find them on Amazon. Many of my chapters
and my journal articles I make freely available
on a website called ResearchGate so if you
go to Nic Cheeseman on ResearchGate you can
get a lot of my information and publications
for free. And I try and make that as accessible
as possible. So please head there. I'd also
head to any good bookstore and you should
be able to get a copy of those books. And
thank you very much for an interesting conversation.
Dr. Nic Cheeseman, thank you very much for
being a guest on this podcast. This podcast
was brought to you by the Kamugasa Challenge
in partnership with Democracy in Africa.
Democracy in Africa is a platform dedicated
to building a bridge between academics, policymakers,
practitioners and citizens. We dedicate this
podcast to this podcast episode to the Right
Reverend Dr Alan Wilson, the former Bishop
of Buckingham. Thanks to his willingness
to take risks as a leader, he put himself
forward to play the guinea pig and help launch
conversations with Stephen Kamugasa as a
first guest. the Right Reverend Dr. Alan
Wilson died suddenly and unexpectedly on
February 17th, 2024. We are taking a short
break and we'll resume service in the new
year with a brand new series on leadership.
The first episode in the leadership series
is entitled, Why Great Leadership Will Make
You Question Everything. An interview with
Ms Sally Percy, an experienced business journalist
and editor who specializes in writing about
leadership and management. The podcast will
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