On Thursday night, the Challenging Orthodoxies Society (COS) welcomed Kenyan expert Kiruja Micheni and Dr Sarah Bracking from Manchester University’s Institute for Development Policy and Management (IDPM) to address the pressing question of democratization in African countries. With last year’s electoral dilemma, overshadowing Kenya and Zimbabwe, the shakiness of African democracy has come to its fore. The controversial issue of colonial interference by the West to build stable democracies attracted considerable interest; about 70 people attended the event in Lime Grove next to UMSU. Students engaged in a lively 60-minute Q&A session and reached a general consensus that there is still much to be done to achieve substantive democracy at the grassroots level.
After an introduction by COS Chair Sarah Wakefield, the event was kick-started with a definition of democracy and what it ought to look like in order to apply the notion to an African context. Sarah Bracking stressed the importance of political equality and popular control: “Democracy can only exist when the people get to choose their politicians on the basis of sovereignty.” Relating this to his country’s colonial past, Kenyan-born expert Kiruja Micheni added that such sovereignty should be understood as the absence of repression because “it’s all about the people’s power to express their will and establishing institutions to make their voices heard.” Both Bracking and Micheni agreed that ‘perfect’ democracy exists nowhere, “it is always a matter of degree.”
The process of colonization is still very much present in the minds of the African people. The panelists argued that we should reformulate the way we think about colonialism not as an end state, with “the French putting up the Ugandan flag”, but as a process that is constantly recreated: This does not only apply to the global economy and the marginalization of developing countries in world trade; it is also relevant in the case of the West’s ‘crusade’ to democratize other countries as in the case of Afghanistan and Iraq. According to Dr Bracking colonialism continues in the sense that “we expect Africa to become democratic according to a western understanding of democracy.
The consequent question by the students related to possible solutions to the seemingly ongoing problem of colonialism. What does it take to stop the West from ‘dictating the terms’? Bracking admitted that Africa is kept in a “dependent relationship” to the occident. She used the most recent example of the credit crunch: Everything on Africa’s stock exchange came form the World Bank and the IMF. The real problem with this is that African countries themselves “do not have a voice in those organizations whilst the USA holds a veto power,” says the IDPM lecturer.
Picking up on this point, the audience was keen to learn more about the role of foreign intervention. However, the question itself already implied that foreign intervention is an important part of democratization in Africa which Micheni promptly rejected: “I strongly believe that the solution has to come from Africa.” Bracking then stressed that territorial sovereignty is often abused when “you use your starving people as a human shield.” She made it clear that the mediation process is not working as “more than one third of the children are malnourished and have to dig up tree roots to survive.” The students agreed with the lecturer and criticized international institutions for not helping developing countries enough. With its wealth in natural resources, Africa could make serious profit out of world trade “if only it wasn’t as the end of the oppression chain,” states Bracking. The panelists’ message of continuous colonialism made the audience realize that, with corruption and western hegemony in tow, “Africa still has a long way to go,” concludes Development Economics student Simon Hilton.
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