The End of the Western Democracy Project in Africa

By Yusuf Bangura

The optimism of the 1990s, which saw a massive rollback of autocratic regimes in favour of electoral democracy, has given way to pessimism about democracy’s continued spread and consolidation. This paper examines the West’s democracy project in Africa, which gained ascendancy during the period of unipolarity and globalisation. It argues that the West’s infatuation with democracy has hit a dead end. The end of unipolarity and deglobalisation, selectivity in the use of political conditionality, and the messy record of democratic practices, suggest a reversion to the historical mean, in which realpolitik—or defence of security and economic interests–informs the West’s engagement with Africa. The paper concludes with a discussion of the crisis in the Sahel and suspension of sanctions on Niger’s military regime by the Economic Community of West African States to demonstrate the abject failure of the democracy project in that region.

Introduction

Concerns about democratic backsliding have in recent years attracted much debate among political scientists and institutions that track democracy’s global spread. The optimism of the 1990s, which saw a massive rollback of military and one-party dictatorships in favour of electoral democracy, has given way to pessimism about democracy’s continued spread and consolidation. Some writers have even pronounced the death or inevitable demise of democracy (De Chosal, 2017; Rosenberg, 2020). However, the dominant view, advanced especially by democracy-tracking institutions like Dem-V, Freedom House, and The Economist Intelligence Unit warn only of democratic backsliding or regression. At the same time, there has been a pushback by some political scientists (Little and Meng, 2024; and Levitsky and Way, 2023) who argue that the backsliding thesis is exaggerated. The spread of democracy, in their view, has flattened or stagnated, rather than regressed; and autocratic rule is not on the ascendancy globally.

Analysts may quarrel about whether democracy has flattened or regressed, depending on which data and baseline is used to measure regression or stability. However, Africa’s experience with democracy throws up serious concerns about stagnation and backsliding. A recent well-crafted book  Democratic Backsliding in Africa? by Arriola, Rakner and de Walle ( 2023) demonstrates that despite the big strides of the early 1990s, Africa’s democratisation was not as deep and extensive as Latin America’s or Eastern Europe’s, and flattened or stagnated by the end of the 1990s, with only a handful of countries attaining reasonably good levels of democratisation. Given the low levels of democracy in most countries at the end of the 1990s, data that show democratic stagnation should be worrisome, especially with the rise in cases of backsliding or the return of military rule in several countries.

Based on recent global and regional developments, this paper argues that the West’s infatuation with democracy in Africa has hit a dead end. The end of unipolarity (or growing influence of China and Russia), selectivity in the use of political conditionality, and the messy record of democratic practices, suggest a reversion to the historical mean, or rule, in which realpolitik—or defence of security and economic interests—unambiguously informs the West’s engagement with Africa. Democracy may continue to be projected as a core part of that engagement, but such a posture will ring hollow in the calculus of politics in the region.

We start by providing an overview of how unipolarity and globalisation aided the adoption of democracy as a global project—deviating from the long historical trend in which it played no role in the foreign policies of Western governments. In the second section, we highlight four policy instruments that underpin the West’s democracy project: funding of nongovernmental organisations, financing and monitoring of elections, support for governance reforms, and political conditionality. We argue that through these interventions, Western governments have become significant actors in Africa’s domestic politics, making it difficult to separate endogenous pressures for change and the Western democracy project.

The fourth section discusses the selective application of political conditionality, which has exposed the West’s double standards in the defence of democracy. In the fifth section, we discuss the end of unipolarity and deglobalisation, which has coincided with, and aided, democratic stagnation and backsliding. In the sixth section, we use the crisis in the Sahel and suspension of the sanctions imposed on Niger’s military regime by the Economic Community of West African States to demonstrate the abject failure of the democracy project in that region.

Unipolarity, globalisation and the spread of democracy

Even though electoral democracy emerged in some Western societies in the 19th century and was institutionalized in many by the first half of the 20th century, it did not define politics among nations. Right up to the First World War—from the Peace of Westphalia in the seventeenth century, which ushered in the European inter-state system, to the Concert of Europe that defined the conduct of international relations in much of the nineteenth century—European inter-state relations were governed by a narrow set of rules and balance of power system that aimed to reduce the incidence of war. Realpolitik—defined as the pragmatic pursuit of national interests, in which security and economic issues are paramount—was the key driver of international politics.

European states could do horrible things outside of Europe—such as enslave and colonise foreign peoples, assassinate or incarcerate opponents, and strike deals with despots—if it served the national interest, as defined by those in power. In other words, for much of world history, Western governments treated the international system as anarchical. Britain tried to use democracy to phase its withdrawal from its colonies in the 1950s and 1960s, while devising new arrangements, such as membership of the Sterling Area and Commonwealth (Bangura, 1983) to protect British interests. But support for democracy lasted only for a brief period. British governments worked with the newly independent countries when they were transformed into one party and military dictatorships.

That was the period of the Cold War when the Soviet Union provided an alternative model of development and politics to African leaders. In the era of bipolarity, realpolitik—in its most brazen form—trumped democratic or ethical values in the foreign policies of the big powers. Democratically elected leaders that leaned towards the Soviet model or threatened Western interests, such as  Chedi Jagan in Guyana, Patrice Lumumba in Congo, and Salvador Allende in Chile, were subverted, overthrown, or murdered. Even in Western Europe, the bastion of liberal democracy, the US used covert actions and threats of sanctions against the government of Italy from the 1940s to the 1970s, to prevent it from working with the Italian Communist Party (Njolstad, 2002).

France, the other colonial power in Africa, did not bother to implant democratic forms of government in its colonies. Treating them as extensions of France, it organised elections in which they sent representatives to the French National Assembly, and established a patron-client relationship with the new leaders as well as a monetary system that compelled them to deposit their foreign reserves in the French treasury and tie their currencies to the French franc—thus ensuring that French investments and commercial interests remained protected (Pigeaud and Sylla 2021). And Portugal, which was itself in transition from dictatorship to democracy in the 1970s, was chased out of its colonies by armed liberation movements.

The situation dramatically changed in the 1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and pressures for globalisation, which opened up the economies of most countries. The US became the only superpower, Russia was on its knees, and China was still feeling its way in the global system and building favourable ties with the West to boost its industrial and technological base.

This change in the global distribution of power represented an unprecedented turning point in which markets and democracy were hailed as the endpoint of history (Fukuyama, 1992)—suggesting that all countries were destined to be capitalistic and democratic. A large literature emerged on the links between democracy and development; and democracy and markets. However, most studies concluded that regime type is not a predictor of economic growth—economies may grow or falter under both democratic and authoritarian regimes, even though some believed that democracies tend to use labour more efficiently (Przeworski, 2000). Scholars concerned about the link between democracy and welfare development suggested additional institutions (such as social pacts and political parties that are embedded in broad social coalitions) to make democracy work for welfare or human development (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Stephen, 2007; Therborn, 1984; Stephan, 2015, UNRISD, 2010; Bangura, 2015). Policymakers largely ignored these studies as well as the literature on the social and economic requisites of democracy (Lipset, 1994, 1959; Przeworski , 2000). Instead, democracy, in and of itself, was embraced by the Western aid and foreign policy establishment as necessary for development. On the flip side, the liberalisation of markets was also seen as necessary for democracy, because it creates multiple, dispersed, and competing actors in the economy and society. These views on democracy, markets and development provided justification for the structural adjustment programmes that opened up the economies of Africa and Latin America in the 1980s and Eastern Europe in the 1990s.

Instructively, the market reforms and democratisation in Latin America and Eastern Europe were mutually constitutive—prompting some scholars to proclaim that citizens were ‘voting for reform’ (Haggard and Webb, 1994), despite sustained protests against cuts in social programmes and declining incomes. In Africa, however, the market reforms were implemented a full decade before pressures for democratisation intensified in the 1990s. Regardless, struggles for democracy in all three regions were endogenous. They represented a loss of faith in authoritarian regimes and demands for alternative systems of government. Some of the remarkable initiatives occurred in Francophone Africa, where seven sovereign national conferences, representing a wide range of political interests and civic groups, were held between 1990 and 1993 to debate new constitutions and timetables for elections (Nwaijaku, 2008).

The global democratic wave that accompanied these pressures was remarkable. Before 1990, only 66 countries were classified as electoral democracies by Freedom House. By 2001, however, 121 or 63% of countries were listed as electoral democracies (Freedom House, 2002). The Africa story was even more dramatic. There was a high level of regime change and competitive elections as military and one-party dictatorships crumbled or became discredited—seemingly defying the belief that the continent did not satisfy the social and economic requisites of democracy identified in the political science theory of modernisation. Apart from Swaziland, competitive elections of various quality were held in virtually all countries, independent newspapers multiplied in leaps and bounds, many countries set tenure limits on leaders, and the incidence of military coups dropped sharply in the 1990s. Indeed, before the recent backsliding, leaders in military fatigues had virtually disappeared from the African political scene.

Unchallenged in both the economic and geopolitical spheres, Western governments latched onto the democratic wave to reorganise the world in a democratic direction while pursuing longstanding strategic and economic interests. However, pursuit of the strategic goals, which often resulted in the use of force, remained paramount even in this new approach. A new book, Dying by the Sword: The Militarization of US Foreign Policy, by Monica Duffy Tuft and Sidita Kushi (2023), reports that the US has fought more wars after the Cold War, or the period of unipolarity, than in any other period since its independence in 1776: of the roughly 400 military interventions it has conducted, 25 percent occurred after the Cold War. The most well-known interventions were the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq where the US tried to do nation building and democracy—two classic cases of combining strategic interests and democracy promotion, with disastrous results.

 Policy instruments of the democracy project

To understand the impact of the Western democracy project in Africa, it is necessary to unpack its key policy instruments. These are: support for non-governmental organisations as agents of democratic change; funding and monitoring of elections to ensure credible outcomes; governance reforms to improve state effectiveness; and use of political conditionality to prevent governments from undermining democratic processes. The first three will be discussed in this section and the fourth subsequently.

Support for NGOs

Democratisation occurred in Africa after a decade of battles over market reforms, which brought great hardship to the populace, especially those with fixed incomes. The main actors that spearheaded resistance to the reforms were organised labour and professional interest groups, whose members experienced a sharp drop in living standards as currencies were devalued, subsidies were removed, social programmes were cut, and staff were made redundant.

Studies on democracy on European welfare states indicate that labour unions or organised interests were among the groups that governments worked with in building democratic systems in Europe. However, in Africa, Western governments and the multilateral financial institutions treated these groups with disdain, accusing them of rent-seeking or benefiting unduly from overvalued currencies and preventing the majority of the population, who are farmers, from getting good prices for their products (Bangura and Gibbon, 1992). They ignored the repression visited upon them by African governments in the implementation of the reforms (Mkandawire and Olukoshi, 1995; Beckman, 1992).

The West’s democracy project avoided, therefore, these groups and sought instead to support new actors that would improve the plurality of the civic space and serve as a countervailing force to governments. This led to a proliferation of non-governmental organisations on diverse issues–such as democratic development, the rule of law, election monitoring, human rights, gender rights, governance reforms, and corruption. A new phrase—‘development partners’, or, when used in the political field, ‘democracy partners’—replaced ‘donor governments’ and ‘donor-recipient relations’ in the lexicon that describes Africa’s relations with Western governments. It is estimated that by 2013, 16 percent of all ODA was channelled through NGOs (Development Initiatives, 2016).

It is important to stress that African NGOs have, in general, been effective in exposing governmental malfeasance and improving discourses on democratic governance. However, their lack of a membership base restricts their activities largely to the level of advocacy. They do take part in protests, but lack the capacity to coordinate and marshal mass actions, negotiate with authorities, or push through pacts that may advance the democratic project or popular interests in the political economy. Their ability to drive the democratic project is, thus, very limited (Banks et al, 2014).

Most may not survive if Western funds dry up or are suspended. Indeed, in environments with poor job opportunities, NGO work is a career job for many, requiring skills to meet donor requirements in preparing proposals and progress reports, which, critics have warned, leads to technocratisation. It raises concerns about how to balance the livelihood interests associated with fund-raising and commitments to democratic struggles. Governments that have strayed from the democratic path have exploited this problem. They question the link between external financial dependence and advocacy work, and have used sovereignty arguments (Rakner and de Walle, 2023) to control, ban or, in some cases, co-opt those that are critical of government actions.

Funding and monitoring of elections

The second instrument of the democracy project is the funding and monitoring of elections to ensure that they truly reflect the voters’ will. Africa’s transitions from authoritarian rule to electoral democracy were messy. Pro-democracy forces often faced incumbent governments that were reluctant to cede power or fund elections. To advance the democracy project, Western governments decided to allocate part of their aid programmes to electoral assistance, especially in low income, conflict-ridden countries. This was clearly a violation of the long-held belief that citizens should fund, through national budgets, elections if they are to own democratic processes.

It is estimated that a quarter of all ODA goes to the financing of elections-related activities (UNDP, 2023). Some countries, such as the US, through its Regional Fund for Democracy in Africa, and Germany, even have special funds for electoral assistance in Africa. German’s ‘Africa Election Fund’ is administered as a partnership with the UNDP. The UNDP also has a similar partnership with the European Commission–the EC-UNDP Joint Taskforce on Electoral Assistance–to support elections world-wide. One feature of Western funding of overseas elections is the role played by state-financed institutions, such as the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute, and the National Democratic Institute in the US; the Westminster Foundation in the UK; and Germany’s political party foundations (referred to as the Stiftungs). Most of these institutions are linked to domestic political parties and fund a wide range of elections-related activities overseas, including civil society groups, and political parties of their choice (Mathisen and Svåsand, 2002).

The funding of elections works in tandem with monitoring. This aids decisions on whether development aid should be suspended or maintained. The European Commission is the preeminent institution in Europe for overseas election monitoring. It deploys about 30 electoral missions per year across the world. Election monitoring by the US is carried out by its foundations: the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, and the Carter Center.

Studies on election monitoring highlight the inability of election monitors to prevent cheating, the lack of uniform standards to assess the quality of elections, and the tendency for different monitoring organisations to deliver different verdicts. Judith Kelley (2012) concludes in her report ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ that even though monitors can improve the quality of elections, they do not do this most of the time, and they are sometimes ‘biased and contribute to the false legitimization of governments.’

Susan Dodsworth (2018) is even more damning in her statistical study entitled ‘Double Standards: the verdicts of western election observers in sub-Saharan Africa’. Election observers, she finds, are less likely to report significant fraud in African elections than in comparable elections elsewhere. There is a tendency to condone flawed elections if they represent improvements in previous elections (referred to as ‘progress bias’), there is a risk of political violence, or strategic interests are involved. One glaring case is the result of Kenya’s 2017 presidential election, which Western election observers endorsed, but Kenya’s Supreme Court annulled because the process was not deemed to be sufficiently transparent or verifiable.

Governance reforms

Support for governance reforms is also a big part of the democracy project’s architecture. This is a huge area with many programmes, such as managerial reforms, combating corruption, reform of justice systems, and security sector reform. Although support for governance reforms coincided with the struggles for democracy, they were initially targeted largely at improving market performance (UNRISD, 2010).

In the 1990s, pro-reform advocates came round to the view that simply rolling back the state and liberalising markets would not deliver the robust growth promised by the reforms. The state had to be made effective, rule-based, corrupt-free and market-friendly. The logic of building such market-enhancing states was later applied to the political arena in advancing the democracy project. In other words, in order to sustain democracy, states have to be made effective, rule-based or impartial, and corrupt-free.

The managerial reforms involved introduction of private sector techniques in the recruitment, reward and promotion of staff, as well as in the delivery of services—such as employing senior staff on performance-based contracts, and contracting out services. Combatting corruption entailed funding of anti-corruption institutions, with top level staff incentivised with high salaries to insulate them from bureaucratic or external group capture. And reform of justice systems focused on enhancing the rule of law and property rights.

There was less support for the managerial reforms in Francophone African countries and more in countries with historical ties to the UK, where similar reforms were aggressively implemented in the 1980s and 1990s. However, there is little evidence that state capacity has significantly improved where the reforms have been attempted in Africa. The absence of sound monitoring systems, reliable performance indicators, and capacity to regulate private service providers encourage corruption and corrosion of the ethic of public service (UNRISD, 2010; Bangura and Larbi, 2006).

Nor have anti-corruption commissions and reform of justice systems substantially lowered the incidence of corruption or improved the rule of law. Despite 30 years of fighting corruption, the 2023 Corruption Perceptions Index shows that only five African countries—Seychelles, Cape Verde, Botswana, Mauritius, and Rwanda—are perceived as ‘less corrupt’ (i.e. scoring 50 or above in the index); the remaining 45 odd countries are perceived as ‘more corrupt’ (scoring below 50). Of the 48 countries listed as the most corrupt—the bottom two categories, with scores of less than 30—23 or about 48% are in Africa. The 2023 Rule of Law Index paints a similar dire picture: only eight African countries are listed on the top half of the index (0.5 and above, in an index of 0-1); the rest are below 0.5, suggesting weak respect for the rule of law.

Selective application of political conditionality

Political conditionality is arguably the key policy instrument in promoting the democracy project. Even before it became a strong feature of Western aid, some development economists and lobby groups had questioned the granting of aid to corrupt and unaccountable governments (Urvin, 2013). Political conditionality is currently used to reward, deter, or punish governments depending on whether they cooperate with, or backslide from, the democracy project. The idea of conditionality was initially restricted to market reforms. During the 1980s, the multilateral financial institutions laid down tightly monitored conditions—such as currency devaluation, subsidy removal, cuts in public expenditure, and price liberalisation—that governments must meet to access funds that had already been allocated.

Such conditions were structured in tranches or phases, with each phase setting out reforms that should be met before funds for the next phase are released. Funds are withheld if governments fail to implement the reforms of the previous phase. During the 1990s, political conditionality entered the aid relationship in an ex-post manner—it avoided the complex procedures of specifying democratic practices that should be met before aid was granted (Koch, 2015). Development aid would simply be withdrawn or suspended if a donor was not satisfied with the political behaviour of a country. The assumption was that governments would be deterred from derailing the democratic process if they knew that aid would be suspended.

However, there was a big shift towards ex-ante conditionality in the 2000s, starting with the US’s Millenium Challenge Account policy in 2004 (Maudsley, 2007). Under this policy, aid allocations are based on prior assessments of countries’ performances in 20 indicators grouped in three areas: ruling justly, investing in people, and encouraging economic freedom. The indicators on ruling justly address political rights, civil liberties, control of corruption, government effectiveness, rule of law, and freedom of information. Countries must obtain pass scores on the indicators developed in these areas before receiving aid. They may first enter the MCA programme through short term funding on limited projects; and graduate to the much larger, heavily funded and long-term programme, or ‘Compact’, after an elaborate review of performance on the 20 indicators.

Governments may be dropped from the programme after the first stage if the administrators are dissatisfied with their performance. This two-tier programme mimics the ex-ante and phased model of conditionality in market reforms, and tries to lock in governments on the path of economic and democratic change favoured by the US. The European Union copied this approach in 2008, when it introduced a Governance Incentive Tranche in which it agreed to provide extra aid totalling Eur2.7 billion to the Africa, Caribbean and Pacific Countries if they commit to delivering governance reforms (Molenaers, 2008). Under this programme, the EU prepares a Governance Profile in nine areas, and participating countries submit Governance Action Plans on how they will address priority areas in the Governance Profile. Political conditionality in this approach becomes an incentive for leaders to deliver good governance and democracy in order to benefit from additional aid.

There is broad agreement among scholars that political conditionality has been selectively applied in Africa (Fisher, 2014; Sorensen, 2013;). Especially after the early 2000s, when the so-called fight against terror assumed importance in the foreign policies of Western governments, security and economic interests have tended to weigh heavily in decisions on whether states should be sanctioned or denied aid for flouting democratic principles. This is the case whether the culprits are military regimes or civilian governments. It is not surprising that an OECD study (2022) on regime type and foreign aid found that despite the West’s policy of advancing democracy globally, a striking 79 percent of all aid was allocated in 2019 to countries classified as autocracies, and only 21 percent went to democracies. Strategic and other interests, rather than support for democracy, largely determine aid flows.

The EU’s handling of democracy promotion and security interests in Africa is instructive. Despite its support for the fragile democracies in the Sahel, in which the military has always challenged civilian authority, concerns about Islamist terrorism led EU governments to fund the military sectors of countries in that region, thus empowering the military, which eventually seized power in Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali. The contradictory effects of supporting democracy and security interests were also laid bare in February 2024 when a special counterterrorism unit that was created, equipped, trained and funded by the EU was used by the Senegalese government to violently suppress protests against the president’s suspension of the national elections (Al Jazeera, 2024).

The prioritisation of security has made it difficult for the EU to fully commit itself to its norm-setting democracy agenda. As the European Democracy Hub (2023) cogently observes, the EU sometimes severs ties with military regimes, but there are no clear principles that explain why relations are maintained in other instances. Sometimes, tough anti-coup messages are issued while diplomatic and aid ties are maintained. At other times, the EU breathes fire and wields the big stick. A few illustrations will suffice. The EU condemned the coups in Guinea in 2021 and Gabon in 2023, but did not sever ties with the military regimes. The EU’s responses to the military coups in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger are revealing. In Burkina Faso, the EU only suspended budgetary aid after the second coup of September 2022, which was judged to have derailed the first coup leaders’ democratisation plan of January 2022. The EU became assertive when the regime developed ties with Russia’s counterinsurgency Wagner Group. The EU also condemned Mali’s first coup of 2020 that toppled an elected leader but did not suspend aid or sever ties. It only imposed sanctions when a second coup that was seen as hostile to Western interests occurred in 2021. In the case of Niger–a major supplier of uranium to France (second largest supplier) and the EU (24 percent of EU’s uranium imports), and host to a US drone base–reaction to the military takeover in 2023 was swift and punitive. All development aid and military support were terminated, and some states worked with ECOWAS to threaten military intervention.

A similar, even worse, record of selectivity in the use of political conditionality can be observed in EU and US responses when civilian leaders change constitutions to extend their tenure or organise flawed elections. Since 1990, a number of African leaders have sought to extend or lift limits to their tenures by changing their constitutions. These include Alhassan Ouattara of Côte d’Ivoire in 2020; Alpha Conde of Guinea in 2020; Faustin-Archange Touadéra of Central African Republic in 2023; Teodoro Obiang of Equatorial Guinea in 2011; Paul Biya of Cameroon in 2008; Yoweri Museveni of Uganda in 2005; Dennis Sassou Nguesso of Congo-Brazzaville in 2015; Azali Assoumani of Comoros in 2016; Ismail Guelleh of Djibouti in 2010; and Gnassingbe Eyadema of Togo in 2002. Apart from the Comoros, where the EU and US suspended all aid programmes when the Constitutional Court and Anti-Corruption Court were closed, no action was taken against any of the other leaders who extended their terms.

Western governments have wielded the big stick or applied sanctions over electoral malpractices in three prominent cases: Zimbabwe, Côte d’Ivoire, and The Gambia.  The West imposed sanctions on Zimbabwe following the ZANU government’s decision to fast-track its land redistribution programme and irregularities in the elections of 2002 in which the Western-backed opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, claimed victory. Top ZANU officials and family members were targeted with sanctions and development aid was stopped. Western governments have been overly obsessed with Zimbabwe largely because the land reform programme affected white settlers, who had seized African land during colonial rule. It is important to note that Zimbabwe’s regime is not the most repressive in Africa. Despite ZANU’s authoritarian practices, Zimbabwe’s political space is more pluralistic and competitive than, for instance, Rwanda’s, a darling of the West—where its president, Paul Kagame, consistently secures more than 90 percent of the votes, restricts the press, tightly controls opposition parties, and haunts down leading opponents. Siri Gloppen et al (2023) correctly describe Zimbabwe as a ‘contested autocracy’. Rwanda’s autocracy, on the other hand, is hardly contested, yet it is not under any sanctions regime and receives an enormous amount of Western aid.

In Côte d’Ivoire, the EU imposed sanctions on Laurent Gbagbo’s government after he lost the elections of 2011 and refused to relinquish power to the winner, Alhassan Ouattara. With the backing of regional organisations, France, the former colonial power, invaded Côte d’Ivoire, toppled Gbagbo, and installed Ouattara, who was seen as a close ally. In the case of The Gambia, where the president, Yahaya Jammeh, also refused to transfer power to Adama Barrow, the winner of the 2016 elections, sanctions were imposed on Jammeh only after Senegal had forced him, through military intervention, to go into exile.

These three cases contrast sharply with the Sierra Leone elections in 2023, which were roundly condemned as fraudulent but did not elicit the same kind of response. The EU’s election observer mission called on the country’s election commission to release the disaggregated figures of the election per polling unit (which the commission refused to do), and issued a scathing report (2023), pointing out significant statistical inconsistencies or irregularities in the collation process, as well as a dubious census that allowed the government to depress the number of parliamentary seats in opposition areas and add seats in the government’s own traditional areas of support. However, the EU did not suspend aid or impose sanctions. Only the US froze the country’s application for aid under the Millennium Challenge Account. The EU was more concerned about getting the government and opposition party to work together and resolve the impasse.

New actors and actorness emerge in town

End of Unipolarity, deglobalisation, democratic stagnation and backsliding

Politicians everywhere make rational calculations about winning or retaining power based on prevailing structures of opportunities or constraints. Even though the record of political conditionality was already messy in the 1990s, the structure of incentives in the unipolar and globalising world still favoured some form of compliance with democratic principles. Most African leaders paid lip service to democracy in the 1990s and 2000s while using unsavoury techniques to influence electoral outcomes. However, challenges to unipolarity, principally by China and Russia—as well as deglobalisation—have changed the global structure of incentives for politicians intent on holding on to, or winning, power by undemocratic means.

Concerns about democratic backsliding have gained momentum in this unfolding global order. As The Economist (2023) reports, using the Google NGram database, the term ‘democratic backsliding’ appeared 6.4 times more often in books published in 2019 than in 2010. By 2019, the two conditions that helped to galvanise the global spread of democracy—unipolarity and globalisation—had weakened. Challenges to the US-dominated global order may have started with the Iraq war of 2002, which the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, and legal experts, including the chairman of the Iraq Enquiry, John Chilcot, branded as illegal. Prior to the invasion, Russia had cooperated with the US in voting for all Security Council resolutions on Iraq, and China abstained on only two in 1991. By a unanimous vote, the final resolution before the invasion censored Iraq for being in material breach of UN resolutions, and gave the Iraqi government ‘a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations’, but did not authorise the use of force if it failed to do so. The US’s decision to not seek UN authorisation for its invasion in 2003 caused it to lose support around the world, especially as its claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction—the basis for the invasion—proved to be false.

This, however, did not prevent the US in 2011, during the Arab Spring in the Middle East, to carry out air strikes in Libya and facilitate the capture and killing of Muammar Qaddafi. Russia decided to react when a similar attempt was made to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria. It intervened militarily in 2015 and bolstered Assad, sending a signal that the freedom enjoyed by the US to attack countries at will was over. A year before it intervened in Syria, in 2014, Russia had annexed Crimea; and, in 2022, went on to invaded Ukraine. The West reacted with punitive sanctions and military support for Ukraine. The unipolar world was over. Ukraine did not fall, and Russia is still a potent power, expanding its influence in Africa.

Operating in tandem with the challenges to unipolarity is deglobalisation—defined as a trend towards a less connected world in trade, investments and finance; the rise of powerful states, regional blocs, and border controls; and preference for local or regional solutions as opposed to multilateral agreements. While there were references to deglobalisation during the 2007-8 global financial crisis, discussion on this issue developed in earnest during Donald Trump’s presidency, when he slapped a number of tariffs on imported goods from China. Supply chain disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukraine war further intensified the problem. Manufacturers were forced to shorten their supply chains by bringing production, or sourcing inputs, closer to home.

Like the discussion on democracy, scholars are divided on whether the global economy has contracted (deglobalisation) or stalled (referred to as slowbalisation). Regardless, there is general consensus that the hyper globalisation of the 1990s and first decade of the 2000s, when world trade grew much faster than global GDP, is over (Jaax et al, 2022). The key point is the breakdown in the power configuration that had propelled globalisation’s rapid growth. China is now an economic juggernaut, rivals the US in many economic activities, and seeks to create its own global ecosystem—such as an alternative payments arrangement; different networks in trade, finance and investment; and alternative rules on foreign development assistance. Western governments feel threatened by this vision, and brand China as an antagonistic nation that should be constrained.

With a total trade valued at US$200 billion in 2019, China is now Africa’s largest trading partner (Stein and Uddhammar, 2023). Even as far back as a decade ago (between 2000 and 2014), China’s foreign aid—valued at US$350 billion—had almost caught up that of the US’s US$394 billion. Forty five percent of that Chinese aid went to Africa (Yushi et al, 2020). China still trails the US, UK and France on investment flows to Africa, but its investments on the continent are substantial—at US$44 billion in 2019, compared to US$78 billion, US$65 billion and US$53 billion respectively for the US, UK and France (Stein and Uddahammar, 2023).

It should be easy to imagine that the end of unipolarity and challenges to the US in the economic sphere have changed the incentives that influence calculations states make in domestic and global politics. Both Russia and China are autocracies—they do not attach normative values like human rights and democracy as conditions in dealing with foreign countries. Their foreign relations are driven largely by realpolitik. Therefore, weak states now have more options in navigating the trade, investments and aid fields without worrying about political conditionality; and can turn to Russia, which is a major arms supplier and security provider to many countries, for protection in the security field (Bangura, 2022). They may decide to reject the West’s lecturing on democratic norms in favour of stronger ties with China and Russia, or play one set of actors against another. This does not mean that the end of unipolarity and deglobalisation are the root causes of democratic stagnation or backsliding. African democratisation was never deep even in the 1990s. However, political actors who wish to play rogue may calculate that the West does not hold all the cards in the unfolding world order.

Four issues have been highlighted by scholars who argue that Africa has experienced democratic backsliding. The first is the growing incidence of military coups. There have been 23 recorded coup attempts in the last five years—many unsuccessful—and soldiers are currently in charge of governments in seven countries: Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Guinea, Chad, Sudan, and Gabon. The second is the tendency of civilian incumbents to extend or remove term limits stipulated in their constitutions. We listed nine such cases in the section on political conditionality. Thirdly, even though there are a few bright spots of credible elections, many elections are now routinely rigged in favour of incumbents. And fourthly, leaders increasingly resort to what has been described as lawfare or use of the courts to remove checks on how they govern and skew electoral contests in their favour.

However, a large dataset that tracks changes in the political status of countries is required to show whether there has been backsliding or stagnation. This is what Arriola, Rakner, and de Walle (2023) have done in their book Democratic Backsliding in Africa?, using data from V-Dem’s liberal democracy index. They make two important  points. First, the level of political liberalisation in Africa in the 1990s was much less than in Latin America and Eastern Europe. Although regular multiparty elections continued to be held, the process of democratisation stalled very early in most countries, and rights were only partially respected. And second, the average liberal democracy scores have remained the same, or stagnated, over a long period. In other words, whatever level of democracy that most countries attained in the mid-1990s has largely been retained. The handful of good performers—Botswana, Cape Verde, Ghana, Mauritius, Namibia, and South Africa—are still at the top; the extremely authoritarian ones—Angola, Chad, Eritrea, Equatorial Guinea, Rwanda, and Sudan—have remained the same; a few countries have improved their scores; and electoral democracy in a large number of countries continues to be muddled. However, despite the authors’ vacillation on backsliding, their Table 1 does clearly show that the annual changes in the V-Dem liberal democracy scores for African countries recorded more negative changes (backsliding) than positive changes between 2010 and 2020. Still, even a flat line or stagnation should be a cause for concern, given the low level of democracy at which countries have stagnated. Besides, changes in the global structure of incentives, which offer African politicians more options and connections, may make it easier now to reverse even the limited democratic gains of the 1990s.

The military coup in Niger, tragedy of ECOWAS, and end of the democracy project

It is, perhaps, in West Africa that the argument about backsliding and the abject failure of the democracy project can be most effectively made. In 2001, the 15-member Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) adopted a Protocol on Democracy and Good Governance, which, among a wide range of democracy-enhancing provisions, affirmed ‘zero tolerance for power obtained or maintained by unconstitutional means’. Under this Protocol, states are automatically suspended from the organisation in the event of a military coup or unconstitutional change of government. ECOWAS’s record in implementing this protocol has been generally poor, especially in the last five years. It has tended to adopt a more aggressive posture towards military coups than rogue civilian leaders.

As Aggad and Myandazi (2017) report, ECOWAS did nothing when, in 2002, Guinea Bissau’s president, Kumba Yalla, dissolved the country’s parliament and called for early elections against the constitutionally stipulated time; and it only sent a peace mission after Yalla was overthrown by the military in 2003. However, it dispatched a stabilisation force in 2012 and 2022 when the military again took over the reins of power. And ECOWAS imposed sanctions on Togo when the Togolese parliament, acting on instructions from the military, which is heavily dominated by Faure Gnassingbé’s Kabye ethnic group, elected Gnassingbé to succeed his father in 2005, instead of the president of the House of Assembly as stipulated in the constitution. Gnassingbé resigned, but contested and won the election organised by a pliable interim government. ECOWAS accepted Gnassingbé’s victory even though most observers deemed the election to be fraudulent.

ECOWAS was proactive in Niger in 2009 when the president organised a referendum to extend his tenure, dissolved parliament and the Constitutional Court, and called for fresh parliamentary elections. It suspended Niger’s membership and threatened military action, which was averted by a military coup. ECOWAS also took a strong stance against Gambia’s president, Yayah Jammeh, when he refused to cede power to the opposition leader, Adama Barrow, who won the election of 2016. Through Senegal’s leadership, it intervened militarily, and forced Jammeh to leave office. And when the military deposed Burkina Faso’s interim government that was tasked with organising elections in 2015, ECOWAS condemned the coup, and called for the restoration of the electoral process. However, it offered the putschists the option of contesting in the elections.

ECOWAS’s record in dealing with electoral malpractices and extensions of presidential terms by civilian incumbents has been extremely poor in the last five years. It failed to stop Alpha Condé in Guinea and Alhassan Ouattara in Côte d’Ivoire from running for elections for a third term in 2020. It has been a mere bystander in the standoff between Senegal’s president, Macky Sall, and opposition forces, over Sall’s repression of leading opposition figures and attempt to extend his stay in office. And ECOWAS issued muddled interim reports on Nigeria’s and Sierra Leone’s 2023 elections, which election observers branded as highly flawed. It has yet to release final reports on those elections.

Note: Excludes Mauritius in ‘Rest of Africa’ because incumbent parties lost elections even before the 1990s

wave of democratisation

ECOWAS’s poor performance in enforcing its Democracy and Good Governance Protocol takes on greater significance when seen from a comparative perspective. West Africa experienced arguably more far-reaching democratisation than other African regions in the 1990s. Virtually all West African countries introduced presidential term limits; and as Table 1 shows, incumbent parties have been defeated 26 times in 12 (75%) countries. For the rest of the continent—excluding Mauritius, where power alternation between parties was common even before the 1990s—incumbent parties have lost elections in only Zambia, Malawi, São Tomé, Lesotho, and Seychelles. Even in Botswana, Namibia and South Africa, which rank reasonably well in global democracy indexes, incumbent parties have not been defeated in elections.

Given the number of times that incumbent parties have been defeated in West Africa, a case can be made that the region has experienced serious backsliding in recent years, as can been seen in Table 2. Four countries are currently ruled by military regimes, two have extended term limits or lifted them, three have engaged in fraudulent or restrictive electoral practices, two are unstable or experiencing a constitutional crisis, and only four have governments that can be classified as electoral democracies. One striking point about Table 2 is that eight of the poor performing countries had, at least on one occasion, held elections in which incumbent parties were defeated. The biggest reversal has been in the Sahel, where the military has taken power in three countries—Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger—that have been battling with jihadist insurgency.

                    Table 2: Democratic backsliding in West Africa

Concerned about the export of jihadist terrorism to Europe, Western powers became deeply involved in supporting the security sectors of those countries. France took the initiative in 2013, when it launched Operation Serval and, with the support of ECOWAS ( which was slow to deploy its own AFISMA troops), successfully prevented Islamist terror groups operating in Northern Mali from overrunning the country. Buoyed by that success, it launched Operation Berkhane as a counter-terrorism force for the Sahel, and encouraged five of the Sahel states—Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali, Chad and Mauritania—to form the G5 Sahel and partner with France to combat jihadists in the region. The EU became involved in this programme under its Common Security and Defence Policy, and established a Regional Coordination and Advisory Cell in Mauritania to coordinate its activities. The US also, in 2019, built a drone base in the south of Niger as part of its own counter-terrorism activities.

Operation Berkhane and the US drone base proved woefully ineffective in stopping the terrorist attacks. The people of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger became hostile towards France and accused it of prolonging the war. In 2020, the military leaders in Mali asked France to leave the country and invited the Russian mercenary group, Wagner, to provide security. Burkina Faso followed suit in January 2023, and Niger in July 20023. Anti-French feelings were sky-high; protesters burnt the French flag and attacked French property, including its embassy in Niger. Operation Berkhane had to be shut down. Even the UN peacekeeping force that replaced the French and ECOWAS troops in Mali in 2013 was also disbanded in 2024. The three Sahel states have formed, instead, a mutual defence pact—the Alliance of Sahel States. The Senegalese development economist, Ndongo Samba Sylla–a keen observer of events in that region–sees the military uprisings as a rejection of the neocolonial Françafrique system (Sillah, 2024).

The setback in Niger, however, was a bitter pill. The EU, led by France, and the US decided to make Niger their last stand in combating the tidal wave against Western interests. They collaborated with ECOWAS, with which the EU had signed a five-year financing agreement of €212 million in 2021, to overturn the coup by triggering the anti-coup mechanism, which calls for automatic suspension from the organisation. Under the leadership of Nigeria’s Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who had only been in office a few months after a dubious election that even the EU election observer mission criticised as lacking transparency and undermining public trust in elections, ECOWAS proceeded to slam the most punitive sanctions ever in the region. These included land, sea and air blockades; suspension of all trade; freezing of Niger’s assets in the regional central bank and commercial banks; and suspension of all lending from regional development banks. Nigeria also cut power supply to the country.

ECOWAS gave the military regime a one-week ultimatum to reinstate the ousted president, Mohammed Bazoum, or risk military intervention. It convened a meeting of ECOWAS chiefs of defence staff in Ghana, where it finalised plans for the deployment of an ECOWAS Standby Force. The EU, France, Netherlands, Canada, the US and the World Bank supported ECOWAS’s aggressive stand; and the European countries, the EU and World Bank suspended their aid programmes. The US took a softer approach by pausing only some of its aid. It did not declare the change of government a coup because it wanted to protect its drone base and maintain security ties with the new leaders. Describing the change of government as a coup would have required it, under US law, to suspend all transactions with the regime. The military leaders dug their heals and mobilised the population against ECOWAS and Western powers, who were branded as imperialists bent on destroying Niger and destabilising the subregion. Mali, Burkina Faso and Guinea gave support to Niger and announced that an attack on Niger would be seen as an attack on all four countries.

There was a groundswell of opposition to military intervention within Nigeria, especially in the North, which not only shares borders with Niger but also ethnic and cross-border family ties. Muslim clerics, civil society groups, and opinion leaders pressured the government to reconsider its position. The Nigerian Senate even passed a resolution rejecting the ECOWAS intervention plan and called instead for a political solution. Critics argued that military intervention would have a spillover effect on Nigeria’s already fragile security situation in which jihadist groups and bandits continue to roam freely. Many wondered how Nigeria, which in the past saw France as an adversary and spoiler of West African integration, ended up pushing French and Western interests in Niger. Tinubu and ECOWAS caved to the popular pressure. The threat of military intervention petered out, but the sanctions remained in place. And in January 2024, Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso announced their withdrawal from ECOWAS. They formed an alternative organisation, Alliance of Sahel States—accusing ECOWAS of deviating from its founding principles and being controlled by foreign powers. This was a huge blow to the integrity of ECOWAS. Even though the three countries account for only a small percent of ECOWAS’s population and GDP, the land area they occupy is much larger than the combined size of the other countries. ECOWAS could not afford to lose them.

The sanctions were devastating. However, they did not serve their intended purpose of either getting the regime to willingly agree to ECOWAS’s demands, or pushing the Nigérien people to force the military to accede to the demands and end the suffering. The people, it seems, have stuck with the regime and perceive ECOWAS and the West as the problem (Silla, 2024). The three countries have been drawn closer to Russia; its Wagner Group operates in all three countries and has recently fully integrated the Group into its security system under a new name—the Africa Force (Mind, 2024). The failure of the sanctions and worries about a splintering of the organisation, forced Tinubu and ECOWAS to unilaterally lift the sanctions in February 2024. This was an extraordinary climb down, or turning point in ECOWAS’s, and by implications, the West’s democracy agenda. It means that the Protocol on Democracy and Good Governance is dead and buried. No regime will now be suspended, sanctioned or invaded for an unconstitutional change of government. The lesson is clear: ECOWAS has been unable to combine its work on peace building, which some scholars perceive as a success (Sesay, 2020), and democracy promotion. It is even doubtful that it will be able to sustain peace in the region without a democratic content, since most of the problems that threaten peace and security border on violations of rights and flawed elections. ECOWAS cannot be effective in advancing democracy when its most powerful member, Nigeria, which accounts for about 52 percent of its population and about 63 percent of its GDP, seems incapable of organising credible elections.

Conclusion

Democracy has always been messy in Africa. Still, the structure of incentives associated with the West’s dominance of the global economy and geopolitics in the 1990s and 2000s encouraged even rogue regimes to pay lip service to democratic principles. Soldiers yielded to pressure and organised elections when they seized power. However, challenges to unipolarity and deglobalisation have offered new opportunities to rogue regimes in weak states, making it difficult for Western powers to impose their will on such regimes.

The West’s global democracy project has always been selective, as security and economic interests get in the way of the norm-setting democracy agenda. However, the end of unipolarity has brought out in bold relief the abject inconsistencies in that agenda—it is now impossible to ignore the big elephant in the room, which is that the West’s external relations are driven primarily by interests other than democracy. Confronted by China and Russia–unrepentant autocracies–Western governments will behave autocratically in the world system. Realpolitik, without the trappings of democracy, will guide the unfolding world order. ECOWAS’s U-turn in the Niger crisis is a sobering lesson on how this is being played out.

This is not to suggest that the end of the West’s democracy project is the end of democracy in Africa. Countries that have made significant progress in consolidating democracy are likely to remain democracies, and may be joined by others where pro-democracy forces are strong enough to roll back authoritarian trends. Endogenous pro-democracy forces, however, face a new challenge: they can no longer rely on Western or regional bodies to sanction civilian or military regimes that flout democratic principles unless if such regimes threaten Western interests. Scholars working on politics in Africa may have to revisit the political science literature on the social and economic requisites of democracy, which highlighted income levels, organised interest groups, a large middle class, civic activism, and inclusive political institutions as necessary for the sustainability of democracy (Przeworski, 2000; Lipset, 1994; 1959). Poor countries may experience democratisation, but may struggle to consolidate it if democracy does not deliver development or improve living standards.

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The Nyon, Switzerland based author is accessible via Bangura.ym@gmail.com