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Bucking the trends: Africa, Zimbabwe, demand for democracy, and elections
Research and Advocacy Unit
May 02, 2012

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Across sub-Saharan Africa, formal institutional rules are coming to matter much more than they used to, and have displaced violence as the primary source of constraints on executive behavior. From decolonization in the early 1960s through the 1980s, most African rulers left office through a coup, assassination, or some other form of violent overthrow. Since 1990, however, the majority have left through institutionalized means - chiefly through voluntary resignation at the end of a constitutionally defined term or by losing an election. Elections are also becoming more important as a mechanism for selecting leaders in Africa, as reflected in the large increase in both their number and their competitiveness. The fact that incumbents still almost always win, however, underscores that the major challenge connected with the task of limiting presidential power in Africa today is not so much promoting elections as making certain that leaders adhere to constitutional limits on their continued eligibility to contest them.

This observation by Posner and Young has great salience for Zimbabwe today, where the struggle for democracy requires both the need to limit the term of office of the President as well as the need to ensure that elections are genuinely competitive, and to begin the serious steps towards a people-serving democracy. From the first serious challenge to ZANU PF's hegemony in 2000 to the clear demonstration in 2008 that ZANU PF had actually lost the elections, the dual struggle to overcome the "Big Man" paradigm, and ensure legitimate elections, bedevils Zimbabwean politics. Is Zimbabwe wholly out of step with the trend in Africa towards democracy and genuine elections, or is it that Zimbabwe represents the most extreme form of "dominant-power politics" on the continent, another trend hidden beneath the veneer of a "shallow" democracy? This article examines the Zimbabwe crisis against the general trends towards democracy in Africa.

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