“The way this crisis will be solved will effect the future of democratic elections in Africa.”
-Ivorian Official (unnamed, Time Magazine)
Africa's hope for a democratic future lies on the tightrope of West Africa, a region so fragile, that something so innocuous as a stolen election (innocious as a well-trodden path to the village well, in this part of the world) could shatter the fragile illusion, the delicate veneer, of stability that has quietly blanketed the most volatile of political regions for the last 5 years. The list of regional tragedies is long; Sierra Leone; Liberia; Guinea; the lives disrupted, the countless flows of refugees across the man made borders, the collectively tortured consciousness of waves upon waves of landless refugee, forcibly migrating at the whims of brutal military dictatorships and even more brutal rebel armies.
While democracy and democratic elections are certainly not a collective fix all for the regions ills, the freedom of democratic voice, the pluralistic opening of societies so long under the strong arm of repressive governments, represents a strong, positive current in the struggle for human rights and the struggle for human decency that must be guaranteed to all citizens of this world. And while democratic elections are focused on the bloodless transfer of power, they have often simply rolled out the red carpet for brutal military uprisings and prolonged power struggles.
The troubling aspects of the current scenario playing out in Cote D'Voire are two-fold; the first being the fact that this was once the crown jewel in the Francophone West African Empire; a shining example of post-colonial development, now reduced to ashes by ethnic and tribal divisions and a protracted civil war, due to be settled by this very democratic process, which has instead exacerbated the widening rifts. The second aspect is that in a region so fragile, the struggle threatens to draw in fighters and ethnic sympathies of neighbors, threatening a regional-destabilization in the process. Rampant unemployment and slow reconstructions in previously war-ravaged Liberia and Sierra Leone will not help this process.
African political leaders have not shied away from heavy reliance on ethnic sympathies when fanning the flames of conflict. The case of Cote D'Voire is no different. The leadership curse of Africa must be vanquished once and for all.
