Podcast: Democracy by consensus in Africa: does it actually work?

Posted on September 19, 2023 by criticalsouthblog

Lawrence Hamilton is the SA UK Bilateral Chair in Political Theory, based at the Universities of theWitwatersrand and Cambridge. He contributes to rethink political theory from and for the Global South. His works include Amartya Sen (2019), Freedom is Power (2014) and The Political Philosophy of Needs (2003).

In this month’s podcast I interview University of Pretoria Philosophy Professor Bernard Matolino, about democracy by consensus versus majoritarian democracy looking at issues of representation and equality.

Matolino casts a critical eye on misgovernance on the continent, even touching on the subject of the controversial former South African President Jacob Zuma and his late counterpart Robert Mugabe.

Also, not to be missed, in our monthly feature called the Political Agenda, political studies scholar Moshibudi Motimele looks at the recent coup in Niger.

Zimbabwe elections 2023: a textbook case of how the ruling party has clung to power for 43 years

Posted on September 11, 2023 by criticalsouthblog

David B Moore is a professor of Development Studies at the University of Johannesburg. He has been researching and writing about Zimbabwe’s political history and political economy Zimbabwean politics since the mid-1980s. His new book Mugabe’s Legacy: Coups, Conspiracies, and the Conceits of Power in Zimbabwe, was released in mid-2022.

Opposition supporters calling for free and fair elections outside the offices of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission in Harare in 2018. Jeksai Njikizana/AFP via Getty Images.

Few were surprised as, near midnight on 26 August, the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission announced incumbent president Emmerson Mnangagwa’s reelection in yet another of Zimbabwe’s tendentious contests. His inauguration on 4 September sanctified his return to power.

Fewer still were shocked when South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, attended Mnangagwa’s inauguration regardless of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) election observation team’s critical report and the absence of most of his peers from the SADC and the African Union.

Mnangagwa gained 52.6% of the 4,561,221 votes cast. Nelson Chamisa, head of the main opposition Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC), garnered 1,967,343 or 44%. Zanu-PF’s 136 of parliament’s 210 seats is just under the two-thirds needed to change the constitution.

I’ve observed and written about all Zimbabwe’s elections since 2000, when Zanu-PF first faced strong opposition from the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) under Morgan Tsvangirai. My book Mugabe’s Legacy: Coups, Conspiracies, and the Conceits of Power in Zimbabwe covers nearly 50 years of Zanu-PF’s propensity to gain power by any means – even genocide.

This election displayed many of these patterns. However, each election has registered variations as Zimbabwe hovers between open democracy and fully shut authoritarianism. Zanu-PF’s score, with contemporary variants, ranges from pre- and post-election intimidation to electoral “management” and playing off its regional neighbours. The CCC and civil society choirs also shift their tone in response: from outright rejection and court challenges to pleas for reruns and transitional governments.

Long-term, immediate and post-election intimidation

The post-2017 coup period foreshadowed many of Zanu-PF’s contemporary strategies. First was the soldiers killing at least six demonstrators (and bystanders) just after the mid-2018 elections. In January 2019, a “stayaway” kicked in just after Mnangagwa announced a 150% increase in fuel prices. Planned chaos ensued as riots, looting and protests were encouraged by a multitude of unidentified forces. More than 17 people were killed. As many women were raped. Nearly 1,800 other bodily violations ensued amid mass trials and convictions.

Since then, Zanu-PF has reminded many people not to engage in opposition.

By mid-2020 the targets moved towards women in the MDC. The case of CCC activist Moreblessing Ali’s murder in May 2022 indicates a new variant on “silent murder”. Ali’s brother, Washington, a long-time MDC-CCC activist in the UK, gained the help of CCC MP and lawyer Job Sikhala to publicise his sister’s murder. Sikhala has been imprisoned since his campaign on behalf of Ali.

I examine this horrific assassination in the next issue of the journal Transformation. It illustrates how the move towards land-baron-led gangsterism in Harare connects with Zanu-PF hierarchies of power.

The August 2023 pre-election murder by stoning of CCC activist Tinashe Chitsunge indicated this sort of politics running wild.

After the election, demonstrators and soldiers did not encounter each other en masse: no shootings. However, residents visiting pubs in “high density suburbs” encountered rough treatment from unidentified people with guns and brand-new uniforms. Later, Glen Norah councillor Womberaishe Nhende and fellow activist Sonele Mukuhlani were left naked after their abduction, whipping and injection with poison on 3 September. Their lawyers, Douglas Coltart and Tapiwa Muchineripi, were arrested when visiting them in hospital.

The well-funded “Forever Associates of Zimbabwe” (FAZ) earned its keep by intimidating folks during the pre-election phases. FAZ is a Zanu-PF mix of semi-intellectuals and aspirant entrepreneurs. They are Mnangagwa enthusiasts needing connections to the Zanu-PF state.

They ran illegal “exit polls” at the stations. FAZ’s members, purportedly paid by the Central Intelligence Organisation, kept their promise to “dominate and saturate the environment while denying the same to opponents” – including those within Zanu-PF during its primary nomination contests.

Judicial and electoral ‘management’

The clouds over liberal horizons darkened further in the legal spheres of repression. The “Patriotic Act”, passed ahead of the elections, makes too much opposition-talk with foreigners treasonous. The still unsigned amendment to the Private Voluntary Organisations Bill promises to end all hints of civil society support for opposition parties.

The gerrymandered delimitation exercise remapped mostly urban constituencies so they stretch to peri-urban and nearly rural areas. Zanu-PF hoped the majority would thus support it, as in the countryside. This tactic linked well to election day’s improprieties. Up to 75 urban polling stations experienced unexpected and unprecedented shortages of ballot papers. This caused long and uncertain waits. Some stations extended voting to the next day.

In Glenview, a Harare suburb, hundreds of poor voters walked kilometres to vote by 7am. They waited – peacefully, fortunately – eight hours for the ballot papers.

At other stations, night-time voting added to voters’ roll problems due to the hasty delimitation exercise that left many in the wrong constituency. They were advised to find the correct one.

Where voting continued to 24 August, how many returned?

The V11 forms

Widespread concerns about the V11 forms came on top of worries about the thousands of people giving up on the lost ballot papers. These sheets are posted on the outside walls of the 12,000 polling stations. They show all the votes. They are meant to enable anyone to keep score at the first polling stage. Then the official counting moves on to ward, constituency, and provincial counting centres, and finally to the national “command centre” where the presidential vote is tallied and announced. Suspicion runs rampant about what happens at the links in this chain.

Election NGOs and other organisations were collecting and tabulating images of the V11 forms for digital release. Too late: Zanu-PF conducted on-the-night raids as they were at work.

As the Institute for Security Studies’ southern Africa programme head Piers Pigou noted in conversation with me, if the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission was worried about the election’s legitimacy, the V11 forms would have been on its website immediately. But they are not there – or anywhere.

Regional responses, CCC plans and democracy’s future

As noted, the election observers’ reports do not paint a pretty picture of the election. The Citizens Coalition for Change hoped to exploit the split between the SADC observers and their SADC masters. But the SADC’s council of elders seems unable to help the CCC’s plans to arrange a rerun guided by an international committee. South Africa’s enthusiasm for its neighbour gives little solace to northern democrats. Given Zimbabwe’s courts’ past biases on the legality of elections, the CCC did not bother taking the judicial route.

Mnangagwa’s inauguration has put all those plans to rest. No reruns. No new versions of government of “national unity”, modelled after the disputed, violence-marred 2008 contest, or transitional councils. At most, the election observers’ reports portend further critique. The Zimbabwean democratic forces have to think again, and harder, about ways to a better future.

In sum, if Zimbabwe’s 2023 election foreshadows future battles between authoritarianism and liberal democracy, the former has gained the upper hand. Zanu-PF’S iron fist remains, with a velvet coating, albeit fraying. As a woman overheard discussing this election observed, the only hope may be Zanu-PF destroying itself as it almost did in 2017.

This article is republished from the The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Podcast: The quest for constitutional reform in Chile: how corruption gets in the way

Posted on August 21, 2023 by criticalsouthblog

In this month’s podcast I interview Dr Camilla Vergara, the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Cambridge on the ongoing quest for constitutional reform in the South American country. She breaks down the challenges with systemic corruption and talks to us about the need for plebian democracy in the world.

And in the political agenda segment political studies scholar Moshibudi Motimele goes to Senegal where there has been an internet shut down since June 1 due to widespread protests.

Podcast: How Africa’s autocracies are representing women

Posted on July 19, 2023 by criticalsouthblog

Nicole Beardsworth is a lecturer in Politics at the University of the Witwatersrand and an honorary research fellow in Politics and International Studies (PAIS) at the University of Warwick. Her PhD research focused on opposition parties and electoral coordination in Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe and her broader research is on the history and politics of sub-Saharan Africa, with a focus on political parties, governance, democratisation and elections in Southern and Eastern Africa.

In this month’s episode of Critical South, Dr Nicole Beardsworth from the University of the Witwatersrand interviews Aili Tripp, a Professor of Political Science, Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin, who explains why African autocracies adopt gender reforms. She tell us if there are any differences between how autocracies and democracies on gender in the promote women as leaders to gain traction.

And in our political agenda segment this Time, Dr Laura Martin takes a quick look at how democracy is faring in West African country of Sierra Leone.

Men Listening to Women: the epilogue

Posted on June 28, 2023 by criticalsouthblog

Terrell Carver is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Bristol, UK. He has published widely on sex, gender, sexuality and masculinity/ies, and on Marx, Engels and Marxisms. His latest books are Marx in the ‘Classic Thinkers’ series for Polity Press (2018), and Masculinities, Gender and International Relations for Bristol University Press (2022).

The following ‘Epilogue’ was written as an English-language postscript to a truly remarkable book in Spanish: ¡Hasta mi mamá! by Monserrat Sepúlveda. The book documents a unique feminist engagement: one man volunteers to listen to, and at the end respond to, ‘the women in his life’ who ‘tell it like it is’ about the harassment, abuse, violence, indignities, subordinations and patronising put-downs they have experienced in their lives.

Getting a man to listen to testimony from those he knows and loves breaks all the boundaries that hetero-patriarchalist-masculinity engrains in men, however they ‘personally’ feel about it. This man, after such harrowing testimony, has to think what to say in response.

The publisher decided to modify the structure of the book so as not to include an epilogue at all, so a Spanish-version of the text below was not prepared. The book will be published by Libros del Amanecer in Santiago, Chile, in 2023.

Epilogue

This book begins in just the right place: with a man listening to women. But note that Alejandro has agreed to this, so he had a choice, and opted in. The default option – for men – is not to bother, or rather, why would I? Listening to men is one thing, listening to women is quite another. This whole situation is highly unusual, quite apart from the topic.

This situation is unusual, not simply because ‘the floor’ here belongs to women, but because men – or at least the one – are meant to listen, and to listen in a certain way. They are meant to take what’s said seriously, to empathize, and to think about it, to change their thinking, or at least consider it. They are used to this from other men, and with regard to the kinds of subjects that normally come up in that ‘monosexual’ context. But this situation is quite different.

It’s all through the looking glass in this book, plunging men – or at least one – into the opposite of a wonderland. Suddenly a lot of uncomfortable ideas become weirdly real and so much clearer. On this side of the looking glass, gender isn’t just a binary, and it doesn’t locate us unequally. Gender is already a hierarchy, and it locates us in a relation of domination and subordination. What is unequal here isn’t women with men. It’s an inequality of power within which subordinates cannot be leveled up. In order for that to happen, dominators must be leveled down. So rather than a wonderland, for men this reversal is an inversion, the power-hierarchy turned upside down. What would that be like?

Being a man subordinated to other men isn’t unusual. It’s the way that masculinity works: ‘nested’ hierarchies of winners and losers, engaged in competitive struggles to rise to the top, necessarily pushing others down a rung, down a peg or two … they are losers, so there can be winners. It’s easier to see inequalities of power in that single-gender, masculinised and masculinising, context. It’s far more difficult, and indeed contradictory, to understand gender as a hierarchy of domination (by men) and subordination (for women), yet somehow an equalizable situation. If, indeed, very many men are seriously invested in that idea in the first place.

If we subtracted the gender-binary from the power-structures of society, and considered ‘human’ as the operative category, then equalizing power-relations among humans might start to make sense. Or rather we might start to consider what power-flows among humans construct the human condition, how we feel about that, and indeed what is to be done. There are all different kinds of humans, or rather we understand humanity through differences that are constantly evolving. And through those differences some people construct flows of power at the expense of others. In this push-pull situation a concept of equilibrium probably makes more sense than one of equality. Looking back through time, and still having regard to the present, it is evident – to feminists anyway – that the equilibrium in human power-relations has settled in a very skewed way, and that pushing back on this is very hard work.

The opening scenario for this book – a man listening to women and taking them seriously – is at odds with some of the language through which the interlocutors within the text try to make sense of the power-dynamics that are the issue. That kind of misapprehension is not an accident. The gender-language here comes from the United Nations, international tribunals, academic agencies, commonsense and real life – all of which is dominated by men in their ‘nested hierarchies’. In those hierarchies, organizations merge with structures, and structures merge with masculinity/ies. Or rather those structures constitute the instructive scripts, and the disciplinary practices, through which the binary domination of masculinity over femininity, men over women, is made to ‘make sense’. Or else.

What sense, then, does ‘gender-based violence’ actually make? Violence has commonsense referents, albeit with less well defined ‘grey areas’, such as psychological and structural attributions. Gender is most often, in contemporary discourse, a reference to, or even a synonym for, women and things associated with them, stereotypically. How women actually are, as individuals or even as a group, doesn’t figure against that stereotypical ‘wisdom’. Or rather that ‘wisdom’ tells some humans what to do, how to be, which box to tick … and take the consequences. Gender, gendered and gendering are also flags for feminist thinking about what men have called ‘the woman question’. This book, and a few others, have turned the tables on that.

Can ‘gender-based violence’, then, be women’s violence against women? Obviously not, or rather that isn’t what we’re talking about here. What we’re talking about here is men’s violence against women. The narrative memoirs collected in this dialogical book are an important contribution to the documentation that has only recently been allowed. Until recently there was no need to censor or prohibit these accounts – because they weren’t of much interest to readers, academics, publishers, who were mostly men. As a group, men had, and still very much have, far more money, power and influence than women, notable women notwithstanding. And notice how few of them there are, and how variable is the rate of change. We don’t often see these harrowing accounts, because men find it easy to overlook women and what they say, to be uninterested in taking women seriously, to be quite happy with women’s subordination and marginalization. Men are used to the world that way.

Why then does ‘gender-based violence’ (GBV) take center-stage over ‘violence against women’ (VAW)? Note that even with VAW we’re still not naming men. Obviously men don’t want that kind of publicity as a group, and from that perspective, a few ‘bad apples’, ‘bad hats’ and ‘bad guys’ are neither here nor there. Wash out the stain and it’s all squeaky clearn.Even if secretly ‘bad boys’ are admired, sensationalized, fetishized and fantasized.

‘Gender-based violence’ is such an interesting locution because it is so contradictory. If gender usually references women, how then can the same word also reference men? Could it possibly be applied to men’s violence against men? Discursively, for men, the solution is to expunge the apparent contradiction – what’s a woman can’t be a man – and to locate the violence, not in women, which is barely thinkable, but in something other than men.

Anyway, if and when there is women’s violence against women, how much of a problem is that – for men? As a matter of empirical and unmistakable fact, men are far more violent personally, and have far more chances to make far more violence, than women. All of these structures are dominated by men, even if – under pressure – they admit women to the masculinizing processes that legitimize the production, distribution, exchange and consumption of the means through which violence takes place. And, by the way, this includes bare-knuckle assault.

In both GBV and VAW men’s violence against women disappears into an abstraction ‘gender’, where evidently it is ‘based’. That paradoxical ‘grounding’ of violence in an airy abstraction really does the trick. The violence against women under consideration here can’t really be about men – it must be about something abstract, something immaterial, something structural, some agency that you can’t really see. The testimony in this book definitely suggests otherwise, however, and one hopes that more than one man is listening to the voices in the text, and taking women more seriously – anywhere everywhere – as a result.

Anyway the abstraction here that is really relevant isn’t actually mentioned. It is an unnamed, unreferenced, sacred and sacrosanct, visible-in-plain sight reality – heterosexuality. Heterosexuality is what makes sense of gender as a binary and as a hierarchy – as much as it does. The dialectic of desire, the political economy of ‘opposite sex’ relationships, the rituals of birth, marriage and kinship – notwithstanding same-sex variations on those themes – provide a matrix of intelligibility through which the important things in life are promulgated, regulated, celebrated, recorded, memorialized and commemorated. Women experience all these power-plays rather more viscerally than men, or if not, they are commonly made to – by men. It’s men who control the choices that they allow women to have. And it’s women who, over the years and rather more recently, have had some successes in pushing back the power-hierarchy, and taking back control, or anyway for some that’s the idea. To do that they have to confront men. And that is not without risks.

What this book does is to give readers experiential detail that men find it easy to be incurious about, thus to ignore, and that seldom comes out in public in the written word as directly as it does here. But readers are going to be confronted with a challenge. Where there is domination there is violence, because violence is the terror through which subordination can be assured. Or rather, since subordination is fragile, a terrorizing program of random and unpredictable violence is constantly required to keep it going. It is that kind of terrorism that is documented in this book.

Suppose that heterosexuality made sense without masculine domination and feminine subordination. What sense, would the words ‘men’ and ‘women’ then make? How would eroticism and desire work without that particular power-differential? Or rather, what would have to be expunged from the current matrices of intelligibility for a non-violent, non-dominating, truly egalitarian sexuality to make sense? The first thing that would have to go would be the ambiguity-creating, and male-exonerating, locutions of ‘gender’ through which the realities of male power – over females and over each other in ‘nested hierarchies’ – are made to disappear. Gender has a proud history as a foundational concept for feminist struggle. But it can also be a useful device for creating the fog of war.

‘Nested hierarchies’ among men and masculinized individuals are important because they are structures of complicity, as well as aggression. And they are structures of a difference that is quite radical and utterly binary, or so it is made to appear. That binary emerges very clearly in the way that this volume has been put together. The women involved are very puzzled in trying to understand why men take so little interest in their thoughts and feelings, not to mention their personal security, and find it so easy to excuse themselves, and of course each other. They are keeping their power-hierarchies in place, in relation to each other and in relation to women. This activity does not require anyone’s intention, necessarily. In fact it hardly requires any thinking at all, hence this volume has – in my experience – a radicalism that is unique.

Men have a lot of listening to do, a conclusion that clearly follows from the disturbing and troubling content of this book. Within the structures of masculinity and masculinization men have zero incentive to do this. All the incentives are to marginalize women and not take them seriously. There are few, if any places in the world that officially categorize men’s violence against women as a particular kind of crime. And even if they do, there isn’t anywhere that registers femicide as something other than yet another homicide. In homicide cases most perpetrators, and most victims are men – by far. Moreover it is those violent activities which are iconic for the super-iconic warrior-masculinity through which the nation-state is celebrated. And if not actually performing as warriors in armies, men are waving flags and celebrating faux-violence as sport. Lately they are allowing, even encouraging women to do the same, in armies, on teams, even in business and commerce. Perhaps at some point tokenism and inclusion will hit a tipping point, and women will be positioned to do the talking, and men the listening. At least in some areas, some of the time. But it is far from clear that that is what’s going on. Conversely it is quite likely that many men suspect the great inversion might be coming, hence there are daily activities of resistance. Those activities are what this volume documents.

Somewhere in the gender-mix warriors were supposed to be protectors – of ‘womenandchildren’, to borrow the feminist parody of any number of instructive stories, international laws and everyday practices. How then, and why then, do men do so much violence to women? Answer: they give themselves permission for all kinds of reasons, and women have a hard time pushing back to get their excuses exposed as inadmissible. This book is an important contribution to that latter activity.

Acknowledgements

Cynthia Enloe, Seriously! Investigating Crashes and Crises as if Women Mattered (University of California Press, 2013).

Terrell Carver and Laura Lyddon, Masculinities, Gender and International Relations (Bristol University Press. 2022).

Podcast: Radical Politics and Representation: a space for citizen power and progress

Posted on June 24, 2023 by criticalsouthblog

In this month’s podcast I interview Professor Lasse Thomassen from Queen Mary University of London and Professor Laurence Piper from University West Sweden about radical democracy, representation and populism.

We discuss the Cape Town suburb of Hout Bay to understand how the residents there are not being represented and what it means for their citizenship.

And we talk about Donald Trump’s brand of populism.

Also in this episode, in the political agenda segment, political studies scholar Moshibudi Motimele gives a rundown of the conflict and the never ending road to democratic government in the North Eastern African state Sudan.

Sit back and enjoy!

Podcast: Mugabe’s murky legacy

Posted on May 19, 2023 by criticalsouthblog

In this month’s podcast Professor Lawrence Hamilton interviews Professor David Moore on his new book Mugabe’s Legacy: Coups, Conspiracies and the Conceits of Power in Zimbabwe.

Moore talks about modes of production in Africa, corruption, violence and rent-seeking and gives us his views on exceptionalism in Zimbabwe and South Africa.

Robert Mugabe is known as the anchor of Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle and problem child in its post-colonial politics.

But what is the real legacy of his long 37 year rule of Zimbabwe?

Sit back and enjoy!

Critical South launches a podcast

Posted on April 21, 2023 by criticalsouthblog

Critical South has now launched a podcast! Keep an eye out for new episodes each month where we talk political theory and tackle all sorts of contemporary political issues.

South Africa’s electoral reform: a missed opportunity

In our inaugural episode this month we’re looking at the very touchy subject of electoral reform in South Africa.

Just this week South African President Cyril Ramaphosa finally signed the Electoral Amendment Act into law. But within days there is already a group of civil society organisations plan to challenge it in the Constitutional Court.

Are you keen to understand why they’re so unhappy with the amended law? Why not get some insights into the new law through this interview between Professor Lawrence Hamilton and Dr Sithembile Mbete, who was on the ministerial advisory committee for the amended law.
Mbete has a hearty one-on-one with Hamilton giving us the backstory to the Electoral Amendment Act, which came about after the Constitutional Court ruled that the Electoral Act was unconstitutional and needed to be amended.
But there is still a lot of unhappiness about the legislated changes. Dr Mbete tells us all about it – and why it’s still problematic.
Delving deeper into electoral reform later in the show she tells us about developing democratic sustenance, on vehicles for political representation, and why the youth are not just not going to the polls anymore. This spells trouble!
Also, in our political agenda feature we jet to Chile where Dr Camila Vergara tells us how an increase in metro fare in Chile led to a long process of deliberation, dispute and debate that ended in a radical constitution that was never adopted.
And to top it all off, Mbete gives us some critical insights into Julius Malema – the sometimes contentious character behind the men and women in red overalls in South Africa’s parliament.

Winner-take-all elections can erode trust in democracy

Posted on November 14, 2022 by criticalsouthblog

Sanjay Ruparelia holds the Jarislowsky Democracy Chair at Ryerson University in Toronto. His major publications include Divided We Govern (OUP 2015), The Indian Ideology (Permanent Black 2015), and Understanding India’s New Political Economy (Routledge 2011). Ruparelia serves as a co-chair of the Participedia network (participedia.net), associate editor of Pacific Affairs, and as an expert for V-Dem: the Varieties of Democracy Project (Sweden).

The sweeping victory of the Coalition Avenir Quebec in the recent provincial election has renewed public debate over the distortions generated by our first-past-the-post electoral system. Attempts to introduce some form of proportional representation have failed to win enough support in several provincial referendums over the past two decades. Yet the drawbacks of first-past-the-post, dismissed by Premier François Legault as simply the concern of “a few intellectuals,” should worry us all.

Winner-take-all elections, designed to produce majority governments, are likely to deepen executive overreach, political frustration and social polarization – key elements of democratic backsliding that are intensifying around the world today.

In theory, our system of electing a single representative who amasses a plurality of votes to serve a constituency has many advantages. First, it often rewards a single party with a majority of seats in the legislature, producing stable governments that have a greater chance of implementing their programmatic agenda. Second, first-past-the-post creates incentives for parties to court the “median voter” who reflects the middle of the ideological spectrum, which encourages moderation. Finally, electing a single representative to serve a particular riding creates a strong tie with its constituents, bolstering democratic accountability.

Premier Francois Legault waves to his caucus members as he arrives at the Coalition Avenir du Quebec caucus meeting, in Brossard, Que., on Oct. 6.Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press

Yet these virtues, which our electoral system often fails to achieve in practice, co-exist alongside significant drawbacks. The political stability enjoyed by majority governments can encourage them to ignore or be less responsive to the preferences, values and interests of citizens who voted for other parties. That is the point of majority rule – winners earn the right to govern. Yet parties that capture less than half the vote clearly do not represent the views of the majority of voters, let alone citizens who did not vote because their ballots may have little impact in uncompetitive ridings. The willingness of our elected leaders to heed this fact, to exercise political self-restraint in pursuing their partisan agendas and tolerate opposing views, has arguably diminished in many democracies in recent years. Small vote swings can lead to massive seat changes and policy lurches over time, hardly a recipe for stability.

In addition, first-past-the-post does not automatically push aspiring politicians to pivot to the centre of opinion to gain broader electoral support once they have captured their party leadership. A fragmented electoral field with several parties contesting for power, which increasingly describes many established democracies around the world, lowers the threshold for winning. And in many democracies, the centre of gravity has arguably shifted to the right of the ideological spectrum in recent years, pulling nominally centrist parties with it. A mechanical rule that disproportionately rewards and punishes winners and losers in an election often fails to induce political moderation or represent voters’ preferences.

Finally, although the members of our Parliament and provincial parliaments are elected to serve particular constituencies, they are disciplined foot soldiers far more accountable to their parties. In recent years, the vast majority of candidates seeking party nominations in federal elections ran uncontested. Many elected representatives stress in private that robust political debates regularly take place within their party caucuses. Yet citizens would be hard pressed to know given how easily most of them submit to their party whip. Public dissent is rare for anyone who seeks greater political influence or a cabinet appointment.

The shortcomings of first-past-the-post increasingly apply to Canada. Our democracy already concentrates political authority to a far greater extent than other Westminster systems, given the disproportionate power of the prime minister, provincial premiers and respective party leaders.

Suffice to say, electoral systems based on proportional representation have their own limitations. Backroom intrigues and internal hierarchies can determine who is selected to represent the party in the legislature (yet this clearly happens in our system too). Fractured electoral verdicts frequently compel parties to stitch together ruling coalitions capable of winning a numerical majority that may not have campaigned together. And proportional representation is not a simple antidote to the erosion of democratic norms, institutions and practices. Many countries that use proportional representation electoral systems, from France and Italy to Sweden and Germany, have witnessed growing social polarization that reflects and fuels the rise of far right parties that threaten minority rights.

But the fact that we describe a first-past-the-post electoral system as winner-takes-all underscores its majoritarian character. In an era of growing executive overreach, social discontent and ideological polarization, where many citizens feel their votes do not count in the end, political majoritarianism poses a genuine hazard for our democracies. We should take it seriously.

This article is republished from the Globe and Mail with permission and first appeared on 02 July 2021. Read the original article here.

Farewell to a Great Philosopher: Kwasi Wiredu (1931-2022)

Posted on March 14, 2022 by criticalsouthblog

Paulin Hountondji is Professor Emeritus at the National University of Benin in Cotonou and is a Research Associate in Political Theory at the School of Social Science at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. He has published a number of influential texts on the history of African Philosophy, and is considered one of the most important figures in this field.

Kwasi Wiredu remains the greatest African philosopher. Until his recent death, he was the oldest and greatest, despite his almost shocking modesty. Although many – both before and after him – have published original works of great depth, his precision, nuance, rigor of analysis and, moreover, sense of humour, was incomparable.

A Ghanaian philosopher, Wiredu bowed out on January 6, 2022 in Tampa, Florida, USA, at the age of 90. He leaves behind a wife, the elegant and dynamic Adwoa[i] Gifty, 5 children, 11 grandchildren, 2 great-granddaughters aged 6 and 4 and a swarm of readers and disciples who will continue, from generation to generation, to feed on his penetrating views and his immense contribution.

Born on October 3, 1931 in Kumasi, Wiredu studied philosophy first at the University of Ghana in Legon, a suburb of Accra, then at the University of Oxford in Great Britain. He exerted considerable influence through numerous articles grouped in two collections:

Philosophy and an African Culture, a collection of articles from 1966 to 1976[ii]
Cultural Universals and Particulars
Wiredu also edited:
A Companion to African Philosophy, with the collaboration of William Abraham, Abiola Irele, Ifeanyi Menkiti.
And along with his compatriot Kwame Gyeke, he co-edited the book Person and Community.

It is a pity that he remains largely unknown in French-speaking Africa![iii] I heard about him as early as 1967, during a symposium organised by the African Cultural Society (alias Présence Africaine) and the Association of Scandinavian Friends of “Présence Africaine” in Denmark. He was already, I believe, head of the philosophy department at Legon and was represented at this conference by Martin A. Kissi.

Later, during my brief but fascinating stay in Kinshasa and Lubumbashi, which took place at the same time that Mobutu’s Congo was being renamed Zaire, the philosophy department accepted my proposal to launch a bilingual journal called the Cahiers Philosophiques Africains / African Philosophical Journal. I was editorial secretary. The first issue published, among other things, an article by the Kenyan philosopher Odera H. Oruka, who was at that time still known as Henry O. Odera. But there were no contributions from Wiredu.

My first real encounter with Wiredu was in 1972 when I permanently returned to Dahomey (present day Benin). One of the first initiatives upon my return was to create a structure for exchanges and discussion between black African philosophers of all sub-disciplines and ideological orientations. The idea was simple: until then, like their colleagues in other disciplines, African philosophers had prioritised vertical exchanges with their European and Western counterparts. But it was time to favour horizontal exchanges between Africans. I was young, I was daring. The roads in Nigeria were good and less dangerous than today. I drove to the universities of Lagos and Ibadan, to the University of Ifè – which has since been renamed Obafemi Awolowo University – where the late Olubi John Sodipo, then head of the philosophy department, edited a remarkable philosophical journal, Second Order. Then I went to Lomé and Accra. The University of Ghana guesthouse was comfortable. I was warmly welcomed by Wiredu. We shared the same ideas. Appointment was made for a meeting in Cotonou.

This meeting took place on January 3, 1973, in a modest classroom of the Protestant secondary school in Cotonou then directed by the late Samuel Akle, himself a philosopher, the constituent assembly of an association called the Inter-African Council for Philosophy (IACP).

Olu Sodipo was elected president, Abdoulaye Elimane Kane, from the University of Dakar, 1st vice-president, Wiredu was 2nd vice-president, Aloyse-Raymond Ndiaye from the University of Dakar general treasurer, Odera Oruka from the University of Nairobi Assistant General Treasurer and myself Secretary General. The IACP immediately requested and obtained its affiliation to the International Federation of Philosophical Societies / Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie (FISP), an institution which organizes the World Philosophy Congress every five years in conjunction with UNESCO.[iv] The IACP was thus de facto affiliated, through FISP, to the International Council for Philosophy and Human Sciences / Conseil International de la Philosophie et des Sciences Humaines (CIPSH) based in Paris in the premises of UNESCO, and whose Secretary General was then Jean d’Ormesson of the French Academy.

It was out of the question to transfer the African Philosophical Journal to Cotonou as it was rightly claimed by the National University of Zaire (UNAZA) as its inalienable property. We therefore created a bi-annual publication, Consequence: journal of the Inter-African Council for Philosophy. The first issue contained, among other texts, the French translation of an article by J. E. Wiredu (as he was still known at the time)[v] previously published in English in Universitas, an inter-faculty journal of the University of Ghana.

At the end of the 1970s UNESCO decided to launch a vast survey of philosophical teaching and research in the world. The head of the philosophy division, Moroccan scholar Mohamed Allal Sinaceur, asked me to carry out this survey for French-speaking Africa. An Anglophone scholar was needed to conduct the same survey in English-speaking Africa. It was Wiredu.

The lessons of this double investigation were to be drawn during a UNESCO experts’ meeting organized in Nairobi in June 1980. Wiredu presented a remarkable paper, in which he urgently called for a ‘conceptual decolonization’, no more and no less.[vi] For him, a multitude of concepts and statements that seemed self-evident as long as they are stated in European languages were simply unthinkable in African languages. The universality of these concepts and statements were therefore only a false universality.

A very simple example of this is the Cartesian cogito. Instead of this inaugural certainty on which Descartes intended to have found the whole edifice of knowledge: ‘I think, therefore I am’, the Kenyan John Mbiti found it more natural to say: ‘I am because we are. And since we are, therefore I am’.[vii] Before him, Senghor had formulated what seemed to be the reaction of the Black African to the cogito: ‘I feel, I dance the Other, I am’. Alexis Kagame had shown the incongruity of the expression ‘I am’, which remained unintelligible in the Bantu languages as long as it was not supplemented by determinants that give it meaning: I am this or that, I am such place, etc.

Wiredu, in turn, took specific examples from the Akan languages to relativize and put in their proper place some of the most classic notions of the Western philosophical tradition. And at the end of his communication, he launched this appeal in the form of a manifesto: ‘African philosophers, let us learn to think in our own languages!’

I have never forgotten this lesson from Wiredu. It came to meet my militant convictions on the need for rehabilitation and development of African languages. But what Wiredu shows is that this claim, which at first sight is simply political, refers to an infinitely deeper issue; that beyond political, economic and cultural decolonization, the most radical issue is conceptual decolonization.

The Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o [viii] will say the same thing differently when calling for ‘decolonizing the mind’.[ix] Suiting the deed to the word, he will say his ‘farewell to the English language’ and will henceforth write novels and plays in his mother tongue, Kikuyu, or in his vernacular language, Kiswahili, even if it means leaving it to others the care of translating them into English if they deem it useful.

Born on January 5, 1938, Ngugi is six years younger than Wiredu. In a way, the latter didn’t go that far. He did not say goodbye to the English language. He has not resolved to write now only in his mother tongue, Twi, or in another Akan language. But the difficulty was not the same. Because philosophy is not literature. Telling is one thing, thinking is another. Telling a story, real or fictional, in an African language is different to analysing problems and forging the right concepts for this purpose.

In line with what Wiredu wanted, 15 years ago the African-Canadian philosopher Chike Jeffers remarkably solicited several African philosophers to write original articles in their languages. The young academic won his bet. The result was a multilingual collection where the original texts appeared on the left and the English translation on the right.[x] A preface by Ngugi wa Thiong’o written in English, inevitably, opened this collection where texts written in seven African languages followed one another. Wiredu’s closed the collection. Its original Twi title, Papa ne Bone, translated into English as Good and Evil. [xi]

Beyond the Legon campus, Wiredu has enjoyed national influence in his country. Philosophy and an African Culture was originally the title of his acceptance speech at the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, delivered in October 1976, before it became the title of a book of which this speech constituted the first chapter.

Beyond Ghana, he radiated on the continent, lecturing in various countries in sometimes restricted frameworks, as in Benin, or in broader frameworks as in Abidjan, Nairobi and elsewhere. In 1984 he carried out a visiting professorship at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria.

Beyond the continent, like many African academics, he yielded to the attraction of America. Contributing to the influence of Africa, Wiredu has carried out teaching assignments at the University of California in Los Angeles, at the University of Richmond in Virginia, at Duke University in North Carolina. Since 1987, he held a permanent position at the University of South Florida in Tampa, where he became a Distinguished Professor.

The patriarch is gone. As part of the fourtieth day ceremonies, a solemn tribute was paid to him at Legon under the joint aegis of the University and the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences . Both institutions have claimed him. Africa has claimed him. It only remains for us to fully integrate him into our intellectual heritage and to continue his fight.

[i] Pronounced a’joa

[ii] French readers are tempted to translate: “Philosophie et culture africaine – as if the English title were: Philosophy and African Culture. The indefinite article (an African Culture) clearly indicates that it is a specific African culture, the Ghanaian culture, and more precisely, as the contents of the book show, the culture of the Akan.

[iii] Lucien Gagni, now philosophy teacher in a high school in Parakou, North Benin, prepared under my direction and defended in 2009 at the University of Abomey-Calavi an excellent dissertation for a diploma of advanced studies (DEA), which has remained unpublished, on Kwasi Wiredu : presentation, commentary and partial translation of Philosophy and an African Culture. In addition, we will read with interest an exhaustive and critical study of Wiredu’s work published by a Nigerian academic, Sanya OSHA: Kwasi Wiredu and Beyond: the Text, Writing and Thought in Africa. Dakar: CODESRIA Press, 2005

[iv] The general assembly of FISP is held every five years within the framework of this congress. On this occasion FISP renews its steering committee. Wiredu was thus co-opted at the 18th World Congress in Brighton (Great Britain) in 1988 and reappointed for a second term at the 19th Congress in 1993 in Moscow. Aloyse-Raymond Ndiaye was co-opted at the 20th Congress in Boston in 1998 and reappointed for a second term at the 21st Congress in 2003 in Istanbul. I myself was co-opted in Istanbul in 2003, reappointed for a second term at the 22nd Congress in Seoul in 2008 and for a third and final term (now authorized by the rules of procedure) at the 23rd Congress in Athens, Greece, in 2013. Since the 24th congress meeting in Beijing in 2018, the CIAP is represented by Suleyman Bachir Diagne

[v] J. E. = Johnson Emmanuel, as he told me at the time.

[vi] Kwasi Wiredu, “Philosophical Research and Teaching in Africa: Some Suggestions (Toward Conceptual Decolonization)” in Teaching and Research in Philosophy: Africa. Paris: UNESCO, 1984

[vii] See John Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy. London: Heinemann, 1969

[viii] Like Oruka and Wiredu, Ngugi also changed his name. He was initially known as James Ngugi.

[ix] Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind. The Politics of Language in African Literature. London/Nairobi: Heinemann Educational, 1986

[x] Chike Jeffers (ed.), Listening to Ourselves: Multilingual Anthology of African Philosophy. New York: State University of New York Press, 2013

[xi] The exercise is not that easy. I had also been asked, but I was unable to complete my article on time. And despite the encouragement of Chike Jeffers who promised to publish it separately, I still have on my computer since 2009 this unfinished article which I had titled in Gungbe (the vernacular language of Badagry, Nigeria and Porto-Novo, Benin which is very close to Fongbe, the Fon language spoken in Benin and all other Gbe languages wherein a language is called Gbe): “Núdodíndín: dagbe kaví ylankan? (Curiosity, value or counter-value?)