Nauseating Trend of Power-Sharing

Abdulai Bayraytay (Concord Times)—There is a scaring political trend unfolding in the recent post-colonial history of sub-Saharan Africa that if left unchecked will replace the heinous trend of social movements of rebel wars and guerilla warfare resorted to by losing politicians after they would have lost elections. And this drift is the scandalously nauseating power sharing gimmick of giving some concessions to the opposition, banking on the false premise that this would serve as a quick panacea to negotiate post-election disagreements.

The most worrying precedent this power-sharing craziness is setting is that all an opposition leader needs to do after s/he loses an election is to ignore the results, provoke violent unrest and lobby for mediators to swoop in for a so-called government of national unity in order to defuse tensions. This, by all indications is nothing but a bastardization of the whole political process that upholds the political norm of ‘when you lose an election, you have to step down’. The paradox of Africa’s fledgling democracies is just a starting point for negotiations.

The above premise is predicated on the fact that even though the Kenyan political crisis is potentially different from Zimbabwe by virtue of incumbent President Robert Mugabe’s defiance of all clarion calls not to hold elections that later culminated in his proclamation as the grand winner, the South African Development Community (SADC) under the auspices of the African Union seems to be on the path to prescribe the Kenyan dose as a solution to resolve Zimbabwe’s political crisis. What the African Union has failed to contend with is the more or less reason to believe that Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai, two political arch rivals who dastardly loathes each other could ever form a workable partnership. This means any sort of power-sharing deal is little more than a fantasy as leaders of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) continue to fear for their lives.

And, this brings to mind the recent political skirmishes between the opposition sierra Leone Peoples’ Party (SLPP) and the ruling All Peoples’ Party government that has the potential to blur the credit rating of Sierra Leone as a country to have held very transparent and credible elections in her post-war period. This is where parallels could be drawn to the sordid Kenyan and Zimbabwean examples as the opposition Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) is reported to have adopted as policy the fomenting of trouble for self aggrandizing political gains. This accusation was editorialized in the August 20, 2008, (page 3) of one of Sierra Leone’s prestigious dailies, Peep Newspaper thus: ‘...sections of the SLPP have openly declared that their only political objective is to render the country ungovernable and, in the process, work for a power sharing deal to bring the SLPP back to government...’ Even if one would buy arguments by some commentators on Sierra Leone’s politics that the recent spate of violent skirmishes between the ruling APC Party and the opposition SLPP were as a result of the psychological denial on the part of the latter to accept that it has indeed lost the presidency, what one would scoff at is any pre-matured insinuation of power-sharing that has the semblance to the Kenyan example through hoodwinked political intimidation and violence. This is against the background that the politics of power-sharing in Africa in recent times will not only succeed in undermining the values of democracy, but that it will make mockery of the very legitimacy of political sovereignty and the essence of elections.

What further makes the option of power-sharing a rather feeble and cosmetic solution is its temporariness as evidenced in Kenya where the violence might have been stalled but left in its wake a highly divided government that remains highly dysfunctional. This is a situation where ascendancy to power through the barrel of the gun and warfare is fast replacing blackmail and coercion.

The above was exactly the tactic employed by the mercurial Revolutionary United Front (RUF) as it unleashed mayhem, brutality and the most heinous of crimes from March 24th, 1991 to the declaration of the war over in 2002. In spite this, the International Community, namely the United Nations exerted pressure on the meekly former President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah and his SLPP Government into negotiations with the RUF that culminated in a power-sharing deal under the terms of the Lome Peace Agreement of 1999.

Even though the adoption of multiparty democracy is being suspiciously perceived by some Africanist scholars as yet another attempt by the West to foster the unfinished work of domination through neo-liberal prescriptions, yet it is the only way through which the one party politics of winner take all (the Machiavellian version of politics) was mitigated. Therefore, any form of blackmail through political violence, intimidation and blackmail should be seen to be robustly resisted.

Note: The author, Abdulai Bayraytay holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree with Honours and a Master’s degree in Political Science & International Relations from Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone and Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada respectively.

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