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    Explaining Africa’s democracy in historical context

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    A contextual look at super-power politics and Africa

    At the height of the Soviet Union’s glasnost and perestroika in 1990, Africa’s political stage was also undergoing major and unsettling transitions for parliaments and presidencies. The world order prior to President Mikhail Gorbachev’s ascendency to power in the former Soviet Union was tragic enough to make Africa the battle ground for proxy super power wars in places like Angola, Namibia, Ethiopia, South Africa and Sierra Leone. It was a period called, aptly, the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union were cold bloodedly supporting opposing sides in internecine conflicts with arms, training and intelligence to defeat the other while they cheer on in highly charged propaganda.

    By the propaganda of the time, the Soviet Union was presented by the West as a dictatorship where the rule of law was non-existent and where people lived in constant fear of an arbitrary State. The Soviet Union in turn presented the West as an exploitative capitalist class where the few were controlling the resources and lives of the vast majority and were workers rights were subsumed under economic profit-making considerations. So it was ‘exploitation’ calling out ‘dictatorship’ and vice versa. And they fought their proxy wars in battle fields far away from their sovereign territory. So when by dint of economic reality in the USSR socialism proved structurally and functionally unworkable to address growing poverty and collapsing economic bases and Mikhail Gorbachev emerged as Secretary-General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1985 and de facto leader of the USSR, his commitment to demokratizatsiya (‘democratization’), and uskoreniye (‘acceleration’ of economic development), had reverberating impact not only across the vast Soviet Union empire that had straddled from eastern Europe right into then East Berlin in the heart of western Europe, but also in Africa.

    It was not uncommon for countries like Sierra Leone to position itself as non-aligned in the struggle between East and West but closer examination would reveal a socialist leaning country under then President Siaka Stevens who himself as Secretary-General of the All People’s Congress (which became a one-party state in 1978) was automatically de facto ruler of the country. In Ivory Coast, president Félix Houphouët-Boigny also claimed to be non-aligned while he was actually Paris’ right-hand man and the national currency of the Ivory Coast was the French franc.

    Gorbachev’s political and economic reforms gained steam in 1990 after he became president of the Soviet Union by election by the Congress of People’s Deputies. Yet they failed to arrest the economic decline and so gave cause for conflicting and contradicting interpretations as to what was wrong. Reformists who wanted greater and faster openness and democratization blamed Gorbachev for not doing enough; communist hardliners were inversely alarmed at the fast pace of reforms which looked like an abandonment of the fundamental policy of the state which was communism, an antithesis of capitalism. In this tussle for the soul of the Soviet Union whose influence around the globe included protecting socialist or socialist-leaning governments (including in Africa), came the collapse of the empire as reformists gained the upper hand over the communists. In a coup in 1991, the communists toppled President Gorbachev and instituted military rule to which the reformists responded by calling the people to the streets in unprecedented mass protests. By the definition of the West of the East, protests were anathema and so the sheer number of hungry and angry people sent western capitals into overdrive in gleeful reaction to the implosion of the enemy from within. The reformists’ argument was compelling as they blamed 70 years of communist ideology for their sorry state and painted the coup leaders as direct beneficiaries of State’s economic monopoly while the rest of the population remained as peasants surviving on peanuts. It was at this point Boris Yeltsin, a member of the Soviet parliament that had elected president Gorbachev, burst into the scene to become the face and voice of change and he found no reason to stop satellite states from gaining independence from the Soviet Union while he reclaimed Russia for Russians.

    USSR collapse and the consequential fallout for Africa

    With the collapse of Soviet power came the collapse of socialist satellite states and USSR allies in Africa, from Ethiopia to Mozambique, to Ghana and Sierra Leone. In the latter, the ‘liberation’ from the shackles of one party ‘socialist’ rule came in the form of a declared war by an unknown group that called itself the Revolutionary United Front that was to later turn the country into a killing field between and among opposing sides in a conflict that grew into conflicting thematic themes such that the war was soon dubbed as ‘senseless’ by international policy experts and innocent Sierra Leoneans caught up in it.

    The end of the Soviet empire and the emergence of a wounded Russia, in turmoil and in search of its footing, were perceived by the rest of the world as capitalist West gaining the ascendancy (at last) over communism USSR and the United States easily eased itself into the driving seat as the solitary power on the world stage.

    The ramification of this was that the US encouraged people to rise up against repressive African governments who were synonymous with one man rule and so leaders like Mengistu Haile Mariam of Ethiopia (the USSR’s strongest ally in Africa) and Mobotu Sese Seko of Zaire, who used to play Washington against Moscow, were toppled one after the other. It was post revolution and that was when the seeds of civil societies were planted by western money coming from the nascent think-tanks and organizations, engaging the disenfranchised educated elites in Africa who became increasingly organized and vocal to demand greater economic openness and constitutional reforms in the manner of western democracies.

    For Sierra Leone, the second impact of post-USSR collapse, apart from the RUF war declared in the east of the country in March 1991, was a military coup in April 1992 that was widely greeted by the people after the country’s economic collapse was blamed on the repressive APC one party government, deemed as one of the surviving relics of the old world order.   

    End of Part 1

    Part 2 will seek to examine the institutional changes that emanated from the end of the Cold War in Africa and a critical look at Sierra Leone’s post-war parliament

    About the author

    Cyril Jengo Snr holds an M.Phil in Political Science from the University of Sierra Leone and is interested in Africa’s political economy vis a vis international trade. His versatility has seen him excel in the corporate world of marketing and sales for such companies as Airtel and Onlime

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