Democratic resilience in Africa: Lessons from 2024 elections

By Danielle Resnick and Landry Signé, Brookings, November 12, 2024

Before the end of 2024, 22 African countries will have held some form of electoral contest, either for president, national legislators, or local leaders. As of November, this record year for elections across countries with vastly different levels of political pluralism has resulted in some outcomes that were already foregone conclusions, such as Kais Saied’s landslide victory in Tunisia. Yet in other cases, voting outcomes were more surprising, with the potential to reshape political landscapes in new ways.

Most surprisingly, the ruling Botswana Democratic Party (BDP), which has continuously ruled the diamond-rich country since independence in the 1960s, was ousted in elections at the end of October. Earlier in the same month, a new party called PODEMOS came second in Mozambique’s polls and displaced RENAMO, which has been the main opposition party since 1992. And in May, South Africa’s elections pushed the African National Congress (ANC) into a coalition government for the first time since 1994.

While elections are not equivalent to democracy, they do represent a critical juncture to assess the robustness of a country’s institutions, its commitment to the rule of law and political inclusion, and a barometer of citizens’ main policy priorities. And such assessments are particularly needed in Africa, where democracy still remains the most favoured form of government according to public opinion (66% of Africans prefer democracy, while 80% reject the one-man rule) but is perceived by citizens as woefully underperforming.

The slew of military coups in the region between 2020-2023, which were relatively rare in Africa just a decade before, have been a sobering reminder of democratic fragility. Reflecting on this intense election year, several important lessons emerge on factors that either reinforce or undermine democratic resilience. These include the interplay between local and national politics; the role of judiciary, legislative, and anti-corruption institutions in providing executive oversight; and the untapped potential of civil society.

The local-national nexus

Local elections in Africa rarely receive attention from international election observers and frequently suffer from low voter turnout. However, they are often the entry point by which most opposition parties begin to build credibility as a governing party with the population. In Senegal, for instance, the opposition party African Patriots of Senegal for Work, Ethics and Fraternity (PASTEF) and its larger coalition, Free the People (Yewwi askan wi), won a majority of local councils in the 2022 local elections, helping to create a springboard for the coalition’s 2024 victory in the presidential elections.

Because of the potential for local elections to create opportunities for opposition parties, several countries, such as Angola, continue to postpone holding them despite constitutional requirements to do so. On the other hand, however, Chad has remained committed to holding local elections for the first time later this year, enabling citizens across 125 urban communes to select their municipal councilors. There are critical links with national legislative processes here, too: like several other francophone countries, municipal councilors in Chad will form part of the electoral college that elects two-thirds of the country’s parliamentarians.

In countries where local elections are not held concurrently with national ones, they can also be an important bellwether for how national elections will be organized and help identify potential vulnerabilities in advance. In Mozambique last year, municipal elections needed to be re-run due to blatant irregularities perpetuated by ruling party Frelimo to regain opposition strongholds. Not surprisingly, allegations of electoral fraud have again resurfaced in this year’s Mozambican presidential election.

In Tanzania, next month’s local elections are already becoming highly contentious due to violent crackdowns by the ruling Party of the Revolution (CCM) on the main opposition party, Chadema, which has included several arrests as well as the suspicious death of a high-ranking Chadema party official. This deterioration of civil liberties and political pluralism within councilor and village elections should be raising alarms in advance of the country’s 2025 presidential elections when the stakes will be even higher.

Moreover, the supervision of these elections by a presidentially-appointed ministry rather than an independent electoral commission raises legitimate concerns regarding how free and fair the outcomes will be. For these reasons, how local elections are conducted and whether the outcome is respected is just as relevant for democratic health as national president and parliamentary contests.

The critical role of oversight institutions

Elections, however, are episodic. In between going to the voting booth, citizens need to be assured that their leaders are committed to the public good. This requires investments in, and respect for, institutions that mitigate excessive concentration of executive power and help uphold the rule of law. Such institutions are mechanisms of horizontal accountability—exercising checks and balances over the executive branch—and include legislatures, judiciaries, independent electoral commissions, and auditing and anti-corruption agencies.

In recent years, the judicial branch has become especially important for horizontal accountability. For example, 2017 marked a turning point for the Supreme Court of Kenya when it decided to annul the results of the presidential elections due to irregularities, even after the electoral commission had declared the incumbent as the winner. This trend of judicial independence and transparency in Kenya continued with the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision when, after thoughtfully analyzing allegations of irregularities, it upheld the election results, despite opposition over the results from the outgoing government.

Echoing this trend, public demand for democracy in Kenya continued to rise over the 2011-2021 decade per Afrobarometer surveys, including presidential accountability to courts (+12 points) and Parliament (+19 points) and preference for an accountable government over a government that “gets stuff done” (+21 points). These data indicate citizens’ continued preference for having strong horizontal accountability mechanisms. Malawi’s constitutional court judges similarly exerted independence in the country’s 2019 elections while in 2024, Senegal’s constitutional court overturned former president Macky Sall’s efforts to delay elections.

Like elsewhere in the world, legislatures and audit agencies are equally important accountability institutions, especially in the domain of public finance and security. The latter are two areas where, if not checked by the legislature, the executive can overstep and exert too much discretion in the use of public resources. For instance, Mozambique’s “Tuna Bond” scandal, which resulted in the former president and finance minister taking on more than $2.2 billion in debt without any knowledge or approval by parliament, loomed large in the October 2024 elections.

In Ghana, too, which is negotiating an IMF bailout and faces elections in December of this year, economic mismanagement is at the forefront of electoral campaign. Ghana’s executive branch has pursued excessive borrowing without parliamentary approval, and the parliament has failed to act on several reports of financial irregularities by the Auditor General.

With adequate oversight, budgets can become more transparent and financial malfeasance can have consequences. For instance, Namibia’s Financial Intelligence Centre uncovered $650 million in bribes that Namibian politicians had been accepting in exchange for granting an Icelandic company fishing quotas. The consequences of this “Fishrot Scandal” are expected to significantly dent the fortunes of the ruling party, SWAPO, at the polls this November.

Similarly, the Kenyan parliament recently removed the deputy president from office following an impeachment trial over charges related to corruption and money laundering, among other allegations. These examples highlight that the efficacy of horizontal accountability ultimately requires concurrent action by multiple oversight actors.

Unfortunately, however, financing for these oversight institutions is quite low. As seen in the figure below, donor allocations for legislatures in Africa have declined precipitously since the late 2000s, falling from $52 to $15 million in constant terms. As resources decline, finding more targeted use of extant financing for parliamentary strengthening is key, including bolstering the efficacy of parliamentary budget offices.

Bolstering civil society

Diagonal accountability, whereby civil society organizations (CSOs) use protests, research, advocacy, and information dissemination to keep governments responsible and responsive, is just as important as horizontal accountability. The July 2024 protests in Kenya offer a vivid example of how civil society organizations effectively protested and placed pressure on the legislature and president to eventually withdraw a finance bill that would have raised taxes on essential products. Kenyans leveraged technology to mobilize their opposition to the bill that they perceived as an unaffordable cost burden levied by a government that Kenyans feel have not translated taxes into public services effectively.

Similarly, protests organized by CSOs in Ghana over the rising cost of living and environmental degradation from illegal mining are galvanizing voters in the country’s pre-electoral period. Increasingly, local CSOs in Africa are also playing an even more pivotal role than international observers in monitoring the integrity of elections.

Diagonal accountability is fundamental in African countries that are experiencing “constitutional coups,” which are often characterized by executives amending constitutions to extend or eliminate term limits. Since 2002, fourteen African countries have eliminated or extended presidential term limits or expanded presidential powers, including several that held elections in 2024, such as Rwanda, Togo, and Tunisia. Massive protests by CSOs in Tunisia this year against Saied’s authoritarian power grab through a rigged constitutional amendment had little impact. By contrast, in Senegal, civil society activists successfully mobilized last year against Macky Sall’s attempt to run for a third term.

These divergent outcomes indicate that CSOs’ capabilities to exert diagonal accountability are strongly tied to an environment that is already relatively amenable to civil liberties. Crackdowns on civil society organizations, including criminalization of civil society activists, smear campaigns, surveillance, and prohibition of funding, have been found to be both a symptom of, and a prelude to, democratic decline. This suggests that for democracy and governance practitioners, it will be key to calibrate support for CSOs according to the broader enabling environment in which they are operating.

Conclusions

Identifying the degree to which local elections, oversight bodies, and CSOs are pivotal to Africa’s diverse democratic trajectories is a key objective of an exciting forthcoming Brookings project on the state of democracy in Africa in collaboration with the Center for Democratic Development in Ghana and the Institute for Development Studies in Kenya. The project aims to learn from both recent episodes of backsliding and resilience across the continent, including lessons from the range of 2024 electoral outcomes.

This will be complemented by in-depth case studies from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, and Zimbabwe to uncover the distinct drivers that shape disparate democratic experiences. In doing so, the project aims to shed new light on opportunities for democratic strengthening by regional, continental, and international partners and how those opportunities need to be properly aligned to local conditions.

AUTHORS

Danielle Resnick: Nonresident Fellow - Global Economy and Development

Landry Signé: Senior Fellow - Global Economy and Development, Africa Growth Initiative

Disclaimer

The opinion expressed in this paper is that of the author and does not necessarily reflect that of CEMAS Board.