14 - 20 December 2000
Issue No.512
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 14 - 20 December 2000 Issue No.512 |
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Tale of two elections
Another week, another election in Africa. In a bare-knuckle brawl for power, opposition parties in both Ghana and Ivory Coast are making bold bids to dislodge ruling parties. Ivory Coast survives in a difficult neighbourhood, and there the fight had turned into a free-for-all. As if proximity to the conflicts in Liberia and Sierra Leone were not enough, the West African country endured serious inter-communal strife on its own patch.
The big political issues in Ivory Coast concern questions of tribe, religion and nationality. Ghana, however, is not far removed from the mayhem to its immediate west. While Ghana's elections have been internationally acclaimed, its more unfortunate neighbour's dubious polls were resoundingly decried. The Ivorian political establishment, unlike Ghana's, has not learnt the hard lesson: that trying to tinker with numbers simply creates new grievances and future disasters. But the two neighbours have much in common. Both countries are saddled with a debilitating debt burden, and they share a similar ethnic mix.
The Ivorian crisis has brought into sharp, unmystified focus ethnic and social problems that potentially also beset Ghana. Ghanaians cannot afford to gloat with self-satisfaction and gloss over such potentially explosive domestic contradictions. The ethnic Akan are politically dominant in both Ivory Coast and Ghana. The tribal leaders of the ethnically related Ashanti and Baoule people in Ghana and Ivory Coast respectively both traditionally despise and deride Muslims who migrated from the north to provide cheap labour for their cocoa and coffee plantations.
As the curtain descends on his presidency, Ghana's Jerry Rawlings boasts that he is steeled for the trials and tribulations of political oblivion. The triumphant opposition will insist that, like Chile's General Pinochet, Rawlings answer for past misdemeanours. If, as is widely known, Rawlings craves credibility and a commendatory mention in history books, he must apologise for his gross violations and abuse of human rights in the 1980s when he was at his poisonous worst. Ultimately, the depth of denial about the atrocities committed at the dawn of Rawlings's military rule will remain an indelible blotch on his record. What Ghana now needs is a fresh, healing administration, and reconciliation entails justice.
Ghanaians are rightly nervous about the regional political situation. Ghana's relatively peaceful presidential and parliamentary elections last Thursday, which resulted in a sweeping victory for the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) in parliament, were followed on Sunday by riotous parliamentary elections in neighbouring Ivory Coast. The Organisation of African Unity (OAU), the United Nations (UN) and the European Union (EU) pronounced the Ivorian polls, in which less than 30 per cent of the electorate bothered to vote, null and void because the chief opposition figure Alassane Dramane Ouattara, leader of the northern-based Rally of Republicans (RDR), was barred from standing.
Ouattara, a seasoned politician who had previously held several senior cabinet ministerial positions, has his power-base in the northern half of the country inhabited mainly by Muslims, who form a precariously slim majority in the country as a whole. Muslims in Ivory Coast are infuriated that they do not wield more political power in spite of their numerical strength. Ouattara's detractors claim that his parents originally hailed from Ivory Coast's northern neighbour Burkina Faso, and that he holds dual nationality. Ouattara is pejoratively called a Mossi -- the Mossi people are the largest ethnic group in Burkina Faso, many of whom have settled in Ivory Coast. Ouattara, a former Ivorian prime minister, World Bank vice-president and front-runner for the post of UN secretary-general on an Ivorian ticket, was disqualified by the country's Supreme Court on the grounds that he was "non-Ivorian."
There was a time when Ivory Coast had defined its niche as the economic powerhouse of the region. Today, its economy in tatters, it is a country in search of identity. Muslim Ivorians boycotted the elections and hoisted the flag of Burkina Faso in protest at the government's decision to hold elections. Polling did not take place in 29 of the 32 constituencies in the north of the country, where government buildings were ransacked and officials hounded and harassed.
Dispirited Ivorians hung around this week, the initiatives largely out of their hands. The struggle between Ouattara's supporters and the Ivorian political establishment's hooligans has taken the Ivory Coast to the brink of national disaster. Hundreds of Ivorians died on 24, 25 and 26 October. But the RDR officially claims it stands for national unity. Ouattara is a Muslim married to a Christian, while RDR Secretary-General Henriette Diabaté is a Christian married to a Muslim.
The curious notion of "Ivoirité" or "Ivorianness" took hold in the more prosperous southern part of the country. Northerners and foreigners, both popularly perceived as Muslim non-Ivorians and despised as illegal aliens, were targeted for retribution for seeking jobs, mostly menial, in the richer south. Ivoirité is based on anti-Muslim sentiment in the south and cannot stand the test of time.
Foolishly, former democratically-elected Ivorian President Henri Konan Bédié, ousted last Christmas by General Robert Guei -- now relegated to the dustbin of history -- opened a can of worms when he barred Ouattara from standing in the presidential polls, ostensibly because his nationality was in question. Bédié's ploy was utter and foul calumny. Few southern Ivorian leaders, however, have not since been tempted to use this political weapon against Ouattara. Therein lies the national Ivorian tragedy.
The now ruling Ivorian Popular Front (FPI), headed by Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo, won a landslide victory in this week's parliamentary elections. The FPI has fully embraced Ivoirité. Party pessimists assert that demographics are turning against them. The influx of foreigners, mostly Muslims from impoverished Sahelian countries to the immediate north of Ivory Coast, has risen sharply in recent years. Those permanently settled in the country naturally demand citizenship and full civil rights. They make up Ouattara's party's natural base. The latest round of Ivorian parliamentary elections was rejected by regional, continental African and international organisations. These influential bodies have strongly objected to the imposition and institutionalisation of the ideology of Ivoirité because it undermines the legitimacy of the decision-making processes in Ivory Coast. There is no kindly light at the end of the tunnel.
In neighbouring Ghana, the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), popularly perceived as an Ashanti-led party, won parliamentary elections but fell just short of taking the presidency outright. The ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) presidential hopeful Vice President John Atta-Mills won 45 per cent of the vote, while his main rival, the NPP's John Kufuor, won 49 per cent. In Ghana's 200-seat Parliament, the NPP won 97 seats while the NDC held on to 90 seats. In the previous parliamentary polls, the NDC held 130 seats while the NPP had 61. NDC optimists claim that the party will swiftly recover from its election wobbles of last week and resume course on an even keel for the next presidential elections in 2004. Realistically, the NDC is a spent force. It might well be about to crumble and disintegrate.
Despite the thin veneer of liberalism and openness, Rawlings, for much of his rule, set an extreme example of autocratic rule governing an outwardly stable and democratic African country, which concealed deep structural crevasses. Towards the end of his rule, some cracks were beginning to show. The NPP stalwarts display an uncannily similar attitude to "northerners" and "foreigners" as the Ivorian elite. What is now hoped is that Ghana will set a model example of a tolerant democracy that eschews the cancerous tribalism that has ruined and torn Ivory Coast apart.
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