Can Democracy Prevail in Africa?

Kenya has a General election today. Already, before the election, a senior electoral official has been found dead, with irrefutable evidence of torture on his body. Massive preparations have been made to ensure that the voting is properly conducted, but opposition leaders are ready to claim that the presence of security officials at all polling stations is for the intimidation of voters rather than for securing the fairness of the poll. The electronic voting machines will prevent any tampering with paper ballot forms, but can give rise to massive possibilities for malpractice in the processing of the votes. The last election was followed by a period of violence in which at least a thousand people died; and a repeat of that horror is dreaded by the peaceful mass of the population. Much of the voting will be on tribal lines, which gives the Kikuyu the strongest chance of retaining power since they remain the largest tribe.

Kenya, at least, has elections; with are conducted with every appearance of propriety. Most of the people obey the law, and most of the elected opposition MPs take part in civilised debate, most of the time; and the civil service is broadly professional, and corruption is not crippling to normal economic processes. Not many African countries have a similar level of adherence to the sort of constitutional norms that the former colonial powers left them with.

Most African countries' boundaries were set by conventions between the European occupying powers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There is little concession to ethnicity in the allocation of people to states, which were given independence by their former occupiers within the nonsensical frontiers that their colonisers had compromised upon. Thus some parts of some tribes live in reasonably prosperous countries where to some extent the rule of law is respected; while their ethnic cousins are repressed and suppressed in adjacent states.

From the northern tip of the continent to the extreme south, and from east to west, with just a few exceptions like Kenya where a form of democracy prevails, there are two options for the state to operate: strong-man dictatorship with reasonable social stability, or anarchy. Some states, particularly in central Africa, have been in anarchy for decades; with internationally-recognised governments controlling little more than the capital city, the airport and the ultimate pinnacle of corruption in the distribution of the mineral royalties and international aid that comes into the country. China has been willing to exploit such situations where a Chinese corporation has been able to secure a defensible area of land for exploitation for farming or mining, and in some cases that has helped greatly to stabilise the country in which this takes place. But in general, from Libya to South Africa, the tragic abuse of the majority of the population goes on.

The umpteenth attempt to rid South Africa of its demonstrably corrupt president is taking its course, and may at last succeed: shortly before his term is due to come to an end anyway. Many of the formal procedures and processes that were established by the British colonial regime, and retained by the white supremacists during the apartheid era, are still maintained; thus it is curious to see forms of procedure that seem to accord with the European democratic tradition still being used to cover the chaos into which South Africa seems inexorably to be descending.

I was studying politics when the first former colonial territories were granted independence; and was bemused to see tribal politicians wearing western suits and ties as they sat on parliamentary benches modeled on those of their former coloniser, in some cases - briefly - deferring to a 'Mr Speaker' in a black gown and a white full-bottomed wig. Such images quickly disappeared from the world's newsreels. There is now little reportage in the west of the day-to-day politics of any African country: the stories are all too sad and too familiar. Nobody expected the election in a former Belgian colony last week to produce any result other than what happened; just as nobody expects change in Kenya. There is a chance that the logjam will break in South Africa, but the prospect for returning to the 'rainbow nation' image of the first years of Mandela's presidency are slim.

A small part of the tragedy can be ascribed to the colonial frontiers and the colonial legacy: but, after half a century of independence, most of the blame for the chaos is ascribable to Africa: and so the solutions must emerge from African minds and become accepted in African hearts. That is the only way in which true progress in politics and in economic affairs will be achieved.

Mrs May's Curtsy

I have no idea how many people in the UK yesterday watched the live BBC presentation of the scenes near Ypres, where a solemn commemoration was rightly being held to mark the centenary of the Third Battle of Ypres. As a child, I was soon aware that almost every older man in my circle had served in the First World War: they were tight-lipped about their own roles, but they all shared reflections of the sheer horror of the Somme and what I heard as 'Passiondale': the battle that was commemorated yesterday. What was really remembered - unashamedly - was the absolutely unnecessary slaughter that marked such events.

There has been a long-running debate about the generalship that sent tens of thousands of men to be [literally] drowned in mud, for no military gain whatsoever. It has fascinated me that there have been defenders of the supreme commander Haig - of the whisky family - and his colleagues, other than their own descendants; and that a sort of stalemate has been reached on the historiography of events like Ypres III. When it started to rain, heavily, on the third day of fighting and it became blatantly obvious that over the ensuing wet days the artillery shells from both sides stirred the land into deep mud, the campaign should - at the very least - have been suspended for long enough for the suitability of the ground to bear a battle to be reassessed. But no, the 'donkeys' at HQ threw more and more men into the slaughter: and no gain could be made for over a month, until dryer conditions returned.

The centenary ceremonies yesterday and on Sunday did not re-open the historiographical debate, directly; but the general direction of commentary was that the battle stood as an example of the utter waste and devastation that war can cause. In attendance were the King and Queen of the Belgians, the Prince of Wales, the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall, the German Vice-Chancellor and Foreign Minister, various Belgian luminaries, Commonwealth representatives, and Mrs May: who read from the old testament of the Bible. For once, the prime minister's clothes were not bizarre: she had chosen to wear a smart black suit, with a hat that looked like it could accommodate a substantial beehive.

Had the prime minister been a man, he would have greeted the various royalty with a handshake and a 'neck bow'; which can be made to look like a friendly nod: but Mrs May went the whole hog, and curtsied: which is a pretty abject form of submission. It seemed normal for the Duchess of Cambridge to curtsy to the Queen of the Belgians - it's what royalty do, within the trade - but for the prime minister of Great Britain to make such obeisance to junior royalty in a foreign country in the second decade of the twenty-first century seemed strangely out-of-place and out of time.

It was even more surreal, for me, when the news bulletin that followed the broadcast from Belgium cited  a 'Downing Street source' as shutting down the open Cabinet rift over how Brexit is to be implemented. The prime minister had, apparently made it clear [before or during her trip to Ypres] that the free movement of EU citizens into Britain would end on the day in March, 2019, when the two-year negotiating period begun in March 2017 would end.

So while she was showing anachronistic subservience to present and future kings and their consorts, the prime minister was wielding the muscle of a modern head of government in the most damaging possible way. It will not be practicable to shut the ports and airports in March, 2019 without absolutely devastating the economy. There is no way a government committed to austerity that is working with a quantitatively and qualitatively devastated civil service can set up the border posts and the equipment and trained manpower that would be needed to effect a 'hard Brexit'. Far from reasserting her authority, Mrs May has again demonstrated her uncomprehending irrelevance.

This is not a matter to gloat about: it is as tragic for the people of Great Britain as were the events that the prime minister went to Belgium to recall.