In Africa, Democracy Gains Amid Turmoil
Sarah Childress, Wall Street Journal, June 18, 2008
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- In late March, Noel Kututwa's colleagues fanned out across Zimbabwe to monitor the country's presidential elections. The democracy advocates quickly published their tally, projecting President Robert Mugabe had lost his first election since taking power in 1980.
"We expected to be arrested immediately," he says in an interview, but "we wanted to make sure our election was legitimate."
Mr. Kututwa's work in Zimbabwe is part of a shift obscured by his country's bloody election season: Democracy is making gradual gains in sub-Saharan Africa. The trend is driven by a cadre of activists, armed with little more than determination and cheap cellphones, who are outmaneuvering Africa's ruling strongmen.
Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade presides over one of the more stable democracies on the continent. See some of the good, the bad and the ugly elected rulers in sub-Saharan Africa.
African democracy has faced jarring setbacks recently. In Kenya, tribal violence killed more than 1,000 people and threatened to tear the nation apart after contested elections earlier this year. In Nigeria, the ruling party blatantly stuffed ballot boxes in national polls last year, according to international observers.
In Zimbabwe today, the opposition party and human-rights groups report near-daily acts of intimidation carried out by Mugabe supporters. Since the election, the opposition Movement for Democratic Change says at least 60 members have been killed, including four who had their eyes and tongues cut out. The government denies participation in the violence. Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition leader, has been detained by police five times.
Mr. Mugabe raised the stakes this week, promising "war" if Mr. Tsvangirai triumphs in the hotly contested run-off scheduled for June 27, and accused the opposition of fomenting the violence. On Monday, Mr. Mugabe vowed to hold on to power even if he loses. If he acts on that threat, Africa's democratic march will have suffered a significant blow.
But in many ways, the unrest stirring Zimbabwe and other nations is coming because democracy has chalked up modest advances. Mr. Mugabe's ruling party lost its stranglehold on Parliament in the March 29 vote. And the president, whom international observers and the opposition accuse of rigging previous elections, was forced into an embarrassing run-off.
Mr. Kututwa and the Zimbabwe Election Support Network -- the nonpartisan coalition of local nonprofit groups he heads -- played a crucial role in that defeat. Field workers at far-flung polling stations called in, faxed or text-messaged results to organizers in the capital of Harare.
Working out of a command center at the capital's Holiday Inn, the group crunched the numbers and came up with Mr. Tsvangirai as the projected winner. Faced with an independent count, most of the international community accepted those numbers, making manipulation harder.
These days, "it is very difficult for any dictator or any incumbent to falsify the results of an election and just get away with it," says Mo Ibrahim, a Sudanese telecom tycoon who has become a democracy advocate.
Economic Growth
The democratic gains across sub-Saharan Africa come amid the fastest economic growth the region has seen in three decades. Foreign investment is flooding in on the back of soaring prices for the oil, metals and minerals that are plentiful across the continent. The boom, coupled with the region's democratic progress, offers some hope that after a period of post-colonial turmoil, sub-Saharan Africa may be slowly emerging into a more peaceful and prosperous era.
In many countries, democracy is already robust. Ghana, sub-Saharan Africa's first independent nation, is now a thriving democracy and one of Africa's most stable countries. Tanzania, Mauritius, Senegal and Mozambique also have burgeoning, multiparty systems.
Late last year, South Africa's two-term President Thabo Mbeki was voted out of the ruling party's top seat. In April, Botswana's president handed over power to an interim leader ahead of elections next year.
The number of "free" countries among the 48 nations of sub-Saharan Africa -- those with multiparty governance, civil rights and a free press -- has risen to 11 in 2008 from just three in 1977, according Freedom House, a U.S.-based group that tracks freedom around the world. The number of nations ranked as not free at all has fallen to 14 from 25.
Some of the recent democratic setbacks may come to look less like catastrophic defeats than stress tests. Challengers sued over the disputed results of the 2007 elections in Nigeria, and the courts eventually threw out the results for seven governors, the senate president and several other lawmakers. In Kenya, the incumbent president was forced to share power with his opponent after results were contested.
Keeping Leaders in Check
In a growing number of countries, including Zimbabwe, grass-roots democracy groups are working to keep their leaders in check. The Africa Progress Panel, an international assessment body chaired by former United Nations chief Kofi Annan, released a report this week crediting nongovernmental organizations and other civil-society groups with increasingly holding governments accountable.
"Democratic change is coming to the forefront faster than institutional change," said Tendai Biti, the Zimbabwe opposition party's secretary-general, at a recent panel on African governance in Cape Town, South Africa.
Last week, Mr. Biti was jailed upon his return to Zimbabwe and charged with treason. The opposition party says he is innocent. Tuesday night, the High Court rejected the opposition's bid to have him released. He remains in jail.
Despite the tense situation in Zimbabwe, Mr. Kututwa says his Zimbabwe Election Support Network plans to mobilize again in next week's run-off.
Government spokesman Bright Matonga says the network is biased toward the opposition. But "they were open and honest with the way they put the results together," he says, adding that the government plans to accredit them again. The network says it is nonpartisan.
Mr. Kututwa's network had long sent observers to monitor Zimbabwean voting, typically issuing reports documenting government interference. A long-time human-rights worker in Zimbabwe, Mr. Kututwa took over as ZESN's chairman in 2002. He watched from afar as democracy advocates used cellphones to transmit local results during elections in Sierra Leone in 2007. The results, which affirmed President Ernest Bai Koroma's narrow victory, calmed tensions in the post-war environment.
Mr. Kututwa resolved to do the same during Zimbabwe's 2008 presidential election. "We wanted to take our observation to the next level," he says.
In March 2007, Mr. Tsvangirai was arrested and beaten in police custody. The government said he had attacked police. Images of his gashed and swollen face brought international outrage, and neighboring nations demanded talks between the government and the opposition over how to ensure a fair vote. The talks fell apart, but they produced one key change in election rules: The government agreed that results from each polling station would be posted locally before they were sent to election headquarters to be tallied by the country's election commission.
It seemed a small concession at the time. Mr. Mugabe was confident of a win. His policies have turned the region's onetime bread basket into an economic basket case. The International Monetary Fund says Zimbabwe is in hyperinflation, and can't even make meaningful projections about the rate anymore.
But Mr. Mugabe is revered, at home and across Africa, as the father of an independent Zimbabwe, having liberated the country from white rule in 1980. His freedom-fighter credentials had long bolstered his popularity in the countryside, and he had cracked down hard on dissenters. He had never lost an election, although he had been accused by international observers and the opposition of rigging the 2002 presidential vote and 2005 parliamentary elections.
Posting the local results, Mr. Kututwa knew, would allow monitors to make their own count before any alleged rigging began in Harare.
Polling Sample
The network team settled on a technique known as "parallel-vote tabulation." The idea: Volunteers record local results from a sample of polling stations, and send them to a central database. Organizers then calculate a statistical projection of the total vote.
The method is simple enough to work in places with poor infrastructure, and it avoids the pitfalls of exit polling in oppressive regimes. The method isn't meant to replace an official count, but rather to serve as a barometer of the official tally's accuracy.
The counting method bolstered allegations of fraud in the Philippines' 1986 election. The vote, which had reinstated President Ferdinand Marcos, was later nullified after demonstrations that sent Mr. Marcos into exile. The method was also used later in elections in Malawi and Zambia.
By election day this March in Zimbabwe, 8,900 network volunteers had received official accreditation by the government to observe the voting. They spread out through Zimbabwe's bush to observe at 435 polling stations -- about 5% of the total in a country slightly larger than the state of Montana.
The stations selected came from all of Zimbabwe's 10 electoral provinces, and were based on population density. Voters had camped out at polling places as early as 1 a.m. on the eve of the vote. When they began casting ballots six hours later, ZESN's command center at the Holiday Inn started buzzing.
Organizers' cellphones lighted up with received text-messages, and fax machines creaked to life. The polls closed that evening. ZESN's teams reported final local vote counts to Harare by text message, satellite phones and fax. Some drove in their findings.
Shortly after the polls closed, Mr. Kututwa and his team had their projection. The group decided to wait for the official count. In the past, the country's electoral commission -- whose members are appointed by Mr. Mugabe's government -- announced official results around midnight. But that night the commission stayed silent.
Riot Police on Patrol
The following day, Sunday, came and went with no word from the commission. The opposition, which had conducted its own polling, claimed victory. Riot police patrolled the capital streets.
By late Monday, March 31, Mr. Kututwa decided his group couldn't wait any longer and called a news conference for 8 that evening.
The group's projections showed Mr. Tsvangirai winning 49.8%, just shy of the majority he needed to avoid a run-off. Mr. Mugabe captured 41.3%. A third independent candidate won 8%. The group determined the margin of error at a little over 2%.
Journalists, human-rights groups and governments around the world seized on the numbers. Rumors swirled that Mr. Mugabe was considering stepping down.
But the regime slowly regrouped. Four weeks after the ZESN news conference, armed Zimbabwean police raided the group's Harare office. Carrying a warrant to search for "subversive material," they carted away documents. A member of ZESN was beaten and his home burned, the group says.
The police also detained another member, questioning him for six hours. When he heard police were looking for him, Mr. Kututwa fled the country, though he returned days later.
On May 2, five weeks after Mr. Kututwa's news conference, the electoral commission announced its own results. They jibed with ZESN's figures -- up to a point. Mr. Mugabe received 43.2%, the highest number statistically consistent with ZESN's projection and margin of error, according to Mr. Kututwa. Mr. Tsvangirai received 47.9%, the lowest possible figure.
"Statistically, it's unusual," Mr. Kututwa says, but he felt validated anyway. "We still don't agree with the final results, but it's not [altered] as much as it could have been," he says. The group hopes to conduct another projection for the June 27 run-off.
Mr. Kututwa's project has inspired others. Ghana is respected as a model of democracy in Africa. President John Kufuor, after serving two elected terms, will step aside this year as two new candidates vie for his seat. Most observers predict a fair contest.
But E. Gyimah-Boadi, executive director of the Ghana Center for Democratic Development, and other advocacy groups plan to compute their own statistical projection for the December elections. The vote could be close, and the winner will likely emerge with only a slight majority.
"There will be a lot of room for dispute," Mr. Gyimah-Boadi says. "Which means, we'd better get it right."
--Margaret Coker in Cape Town, South Africa, contributed to this article.