Exactly one year from now in May 2020, Ethiopia is expected to hold its first truly democratic elections following which a government elected by majority vote is expected to take power for the first time in the long history of the country. Voices have already started to be heard reflecting the doubts, hopes and expectations of the public. There are many people who hold pessimistic views as to the possibility of holding Elections 20202 in light of present obstacles triggered by ethnic conflicts and massive displacements.
There are also optimists who say that the elections must be held by any means because missing them would not only be a promise betrayed by the government. It might also spell the end of a promising period for democratic transformations that might not return another time soon. As a practice, elections are seldom postponed because of security concerns. In Afghanistan elections were held in 2018 amid Taliban and ISIS terrorism that has turned the entire country into the one of the world’s deadliest war zones.
The elections were not perfect but they helped maintain a legitimate government that is still in power and is trying to stabilize the country. The Afghan elections were held while bombs and rockets were raining down on the capital Kabul. The elections were held because the Afghan people believed that the most effective tool to bring about and maintain peace and stability is to hold regular elections as scheduled and deny the opponents of democracy an opportunity to continue with their destabilizing activities.
Early in 2019 elections were held in Nigeria despite the fact most of the northeastern regions were under constant threat of Boko Haram terrorism and many areas were off reach of electoral authorities. Last March 7-8, regional administrative elections were also held in 29 of the 33 provinces of Nigeria although the insecurity created by Boko Haram has not stopped. The Nigerian people and the political parties did not ask the postponement of the elections until peace and stability prevailed in northern Nigeria.
Neither did Afghans ask the elections to be postponed although rockets and bombs were pouring over their heads and they took them as the price to be paid for democracy. Other instances of elections taking place in a situation of ethnic or political crises could be sited. The DRC elections last year took place while most of the eastern part of the country, as large as half of Western Europe, could not be reached by the elections. Egypt after the Arab Spring revolts of 2014, is another case of elections that took place in an atmosphere of political uncertainty and or crisis.
In all the cases enumerated above, elections did not exacerbate the crises but led to some degree of normalization, stability and hope. Had elections not taken in Afghanistan, Nigeria, DRC or Egypt, the anti-democratic forces could have found a political alibi to further promote their destabilizing agendas and made elections impossible to hold in the near future. Are these places better off after the elections were held? This may be debatable but they are not certainly worse than what they used to be before the elections. Imagine what could have happened had the elections been postponed or cancelled.
The crises in the countries could have worsened and the chance of holding democratic elections postponed indefinitely. This could have discredited their governments as incompetent and unable to honor the promise they made to hold the elections and this could have benefitted no one else but the anti-democratic forces that were working to sabotage the elections despite the public’s massive electoral enthusiasm and participation in the polls.
Democratic elections are scheduled to take place in Ethiopia in May 2020 in accordance with the constitution and according to the wishes of the reformist leadership now in power in the country. There is however no hundred per cent support for holding the elections as scheduled. Opinions are divided between those who want the elections to be held as scheduled and those who want them to be postponed until conducive situation is created for holding them. The proponents of this point of view say that the ethnic and other conflicts as well as the resulting displacements that are exploding here and there across the country make it impossible to hold elections as scheduled.
So, elections need to be postponed until the constraining factors are removed and peace and stability had been restored. Without downplaying the serious concerns of these people, we can say that not holding the elections as scheduled would make the situation even worse than what it could look like by May 2019. In the first place, there is no formula for holding elections in accordance with the degree of stability and peace in a given country.
In the above example about Afghanistan, we can say that peace and stability was near to zero when the elections were held. The situation in Nigeria was improving during election time as Boko Haram was losing its previous military clouts in north-eastern parts of the country. The same could be said about DRC and the situation in Egypt in 2014 was even more volatile when the elections were held and deemed democratic despite the fact that the military soon took power by overthrowing the legitimately elected government of Mohamed Morsi.
Elections turn bad when the results are not accepted by the contesting parties or when the party in power claims undeserved victory as it was the case in Ethiopia in 2005. The situation in Ethiopia now and probably a year from now is not worse than the situation in those countries when they held their elections. In Ethiopia, one of the causes of instability or ethnicmotivated violence and displacement is the absence of a legitimate and democratically elected government.
This has encouraged extremist, populist and nationalist elements and groups to ignore the central authority and take the law into their own hands and create the mayhems we have been witnessing for much of last year. Moreover, the ethnic conflicts in this country are believed to be exacerbated by political forces within the system in their bid to reassert their lost authority by creating chaos and anarchy. The present government could not take tougher measures against them for two main reasons. One is its commitment to human rights and the second reason is that as an authority born of the reform process and not a democratic election, it lacks the legitimacy to act in a tougher way.
State violence has proved futile in stopping ethnic-inspired crises. On the contrary violence begets violence and makes it cyclic. Lawlessness is bound to play in favor of chaos and anarchy while elections tend to deprive the forces of destruction the opportunity to carry out their evil designs by imposing law and order through the agency of an elected and legitimate authority. There may be chaos before, during and after the elections but these are transitional phenomena that will die down and disappear once the democratic authority takes office and takes measures against anti-democratic forces.
The present government is a transitional one and its major task is to hold a democratic election in order to bring about legal authority that will rule over the entire country until the next election. This government’s chief mandate is to keep peace and stability by peaceful means, because the use of force and repression would create further anarchy that will postpone the elections by leading to a state of emergency. And one of the chief objectives of the 2020 elections will certainly be to bring the country to a higher degree of stability by putting an end to the illegal activities of extremist nationalists who are exploiting the transitional situation to promote their destructive agendas.
A democratically elected government will thus serve as the legal tools and the legitimacy needed to stop the violence and thuggish activities of criminal elements who are now using the vacuum of authority in some parts of the country to push their agenda of turning the country into an ungovernable entity akin to Somalia next door. The present instability in Ethiopia is nowhere near what prevailed in Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) or Nigeria during their elections.
There is no civil war and will be no civil war in Ethiopia in the future because the locus of political contradictions and differences are different from the countries we indicated above. In Ethiopia, the contradictions are not deeply rooted religious or tribal ones and are largely provoked by elite fragmentations and struggle for power from above by nationalist political elites while the majority of the people want law and order to prevail so that they can return to normal life. The extremist elements that are funning the flames of conflicts have no mass support but opportunistic followers. The contradictions chiefly arise from the different elite groups that are vying for power.
They don’t come from the people who are only passive observers of the elites’ politicking while the latter are trying to exacerbate their differences and use them to win over followers as accessories to power and privilege. Even in Somalia where clan and tribal allegiances have led to untold miseries for the last 22 years, elections could be held in the most important parts of the country and a more or less legitimate government is now sitting in Mogadishu. Democratic elections may not be magic wands but they have at least the capacity for creating large political spaces for dialogue and understanding.
They make discussions and debates possible and create platforms for issues to be discussed in public and the electorate to be informed before going to the polls. They help hostilities to be replaced by co-optations by ethnic parties and their constituencies by further opening up the political space. The proponents of postponing the elections maintain that stability must prevailed before elections will be held. They forget that elections and the preelection times of discussions, debates and general public mobilization are important weapons for hammering out differences and making the issues clearer than ever.
On the contrary, political blackouts and the absence of open discussions are breeding grounds for all kinds of sinister scheming. Furthermore democratic debates help sort out the cynics and demagogues from the genuine and honest politicians and expose them to public judgment. Pre-election debates and discussions bring the national debate to a higher level and show or make crowd shouting or mob anarchy and emotional outbursts transient phenomena that are irrelevant to the democratic process.
Fast backward to May 2005: The four months preceding the elections were more important in boosting electoral consciousness and for making the issues at stake clearer than the previous four or five years. The differences were not about ethnicity or nationalism; they were about democracy, freedom and human rights. The competing parties did not raise ethnic issues to counter even the false claims of the EPRDF as the winner by force. This is the basic lessons politicians should learn from May 2005: Elections should not be about identity but about freedom.
Let us see now the flip side of the issue. What would happen if the democratic elections would be postponed indefinitely. Postponing the May 2020 elections will create the largest political vacuum and the biggest uncertainty into which all kinds unpredictable political actors will try to fill the vacuum. Society like nature abhor vacuums. Postponing the elections might be a recipe for disaster and another lost opportunity for freedom and democracy. The process may not be free from irregularities but elections are better than political vacuums that might be filled with the extremists that have so far wrecked so much havoc.
No election is perfect even those that take place in democratic countries. Allowing the government to postpone the elections would invite disruptive forces to come forward and create conditions that might make the elections impossible to hold. That would in turn allow the government to create all sorts of pretexts to stay in power and autocratic tendencies to take root once again. Postponing the elections will send the wrong message that the transitional government has failed to deliver the promises and has to go before elections would be held. And this would amount to a recipe for disaster and encourage the anti-democratic forces that had been waiting in the wings to stage a political comeback in the name of restoring stability and order in the name of constitutionalism.
This in turn would have a negative domino effect on the democratic process. It would deprive the present transitional authority of its remaining legitimacy by encouraging a frontal attack on it. Last but not least, postponing the elections would give the anti-democratic, extremists, ethnic and nationalist parties the ammunitions they need to discredit the transitional authority and stage a last ditch attack on its alleged inability to rule the country. The present government is facing serious challenges. As many people agree, it has to secure relative peace and security not for the sake of holding elections but because one of its chief mandates is to protect the lives and properties of innocent citizens.
It has to identify the sources of the current destabilization and insecurity as well as massive displacements and use nonviolent means to mitigate them. One year is a relatively long time for a country in transition. Anything positive or negative might happen in the time before, during and after the elections. As there is no life without risks, turning the May 2020 elections into a triumph of freedom is a risk worth taking because it might turn out to be a real game changer in Ethiopian political history.
The Ethiopian Herald Sunday Edition May 26/2019
BY MULUGETA GUDETA
