South African countries and members of SADC, Botswana and Mozambique, conducted elections during the same period but embraced different futures.
The former has solidified the electorate’s trust in the election regime, while the latter has confirmed the voters’ worst fears that the elections were pathologically stolen!
This article investigates why Botswana emerged from the election season as a stronger, more united nation while Mozambique, despite holding elections, is sliding into anarchy and lawlessness!
Elections are designed to resolve legitimacy issues and performed superbly for Botswana but floundered for Mozambique.
Before Botswana conducted its election, there were considerable apprehensions about whether she would reject the people’s will and declare results that did not capture the electorate’s will, as embodied in the ballot boxes.
Botswana opted for a peaceful transfer of power, keeping her country intact.
Mozambique went into the election bogged down by past mistrust of massive electoral rigging and a leadership uneasy to confront her murky past.
The Mozambique regime failed to assure the electorate that the election would be free, fair and verifiable because the election regime was controlled by the rulers of the day.
There was no effort to reform the election legal terrain to ensure a regime that would guarantee a free, fair and verifiable election.
When Botswana declared her results, the voters were satisfied that all votes were correctly counted and tallied, and nobody attempted to alter the voters’ will, which was well captured in the ballot boxes.
READ RELATED: Turning Point for Botswana: Could This Election Redefine Democracy in Africa?
Mozambique, determined to take the electorate through the same discredited electoral system of governance, left themselves open to criticism that the rulers of the day chose to grab power by unlawful means notwithstanding the electorate’s will.
The chief problem is that the electorate loses faith in the electoral system, which can become a flashpoint for civil unrest and require gratuitous extrajudicial means to curb it.
Borrowing from both the Bangladesh and Kenyan Gen-Z, violent demos ensued after long-held suspicions that their countries were treating them as second-class citizens.
In Bangladesh, a new discriminatory law segregated the Gen-Z against government jobs, where a third of all jobs were allocated and reserved for the children of freedom fighters!
In Kenya, politicians’ reckless pronouncements that Kenyan cake was being distributed based on how they had voted in the last election broke the camel’s spinal cord.
Kenyans began collecting and verifying recruitment data that established beyond reasonable doubt that Kenya has its own owners, and Gen Z was not one of them.
Perceptions of alienation compounded with massive poverty and hopelessness of securing meaningful jobs pushed the Gen-Z to the streets, venting out their anger and frustration and demanding a new social contract that would guarantee fair treatment to all before the institutions of governance.
Kenya’s solution to the ruptured fracas was to patch up a quick political expediency that chilled out ethnic tensions without addressing the economic fallout among the youth. Temporarily, Kenya
is at peace with herself, but the undercurrents are still menacing because what forced the Gen-Z to roll out in historical numbers has not been addressed. Government jobs still have eyes and ears.
It is still “whom you know rather than what you know” to secure employment. A long list of tribal connections to employment in public services has been prepared and circulated on the internet, reminding Gen Z that they are not part of Kenya or, at best, second-class citizens in their backyard!
The Kenyan government has tried to create new jobs through microfinancing, the construction of flats sprawling all over the country, surfing for overseas employment for its people, and retraining to improve job-market-oriented skills.
Still, these measures have not convinced Gen Z that their future is guaranteed. A government of national unity, at best, invokes ethnic pride but, at worst, reminds Gen Z that Kenya is still a nation ruled by tribal fiefdoms that care least about Gen Z’s socio-economic plight.
The Kenya coalition government’s task in the next election will be perplexing. They must persuade poor youth to hold their peace, knowing that once bitten, twice shy.
Mozambique of today is not what one comrade Samora Machel purposed to forge.
This is anything but a just and equitable society. Samora Machel and Frelimo fought yesterday for independence from the Portuguese. Like most African political parties, Frelimo has her owners these days, and the rest of the citizens are its subjects.
This is now a country where an investigative journalist is shot dead for his voyeurism initiatives against a sitting president. Public accountability was thrown in the backseat long ago, and leaders are above the law to do whatever they want while encountering no retaliatory accountability.
This is a country where natural gas exploration and exploitation are pursued with very little regard for human rights.
Mozambique is now where affected parties are removed by force without consideration of their next livelihood.
It is a country where soldiers shoot a naked woman, upload it on YouTube, and not even a sham investigation is ordered.
Civil service employment is given to those with political, business, and national security clout in this country.
The civil service is plagued by overemployment, but nobody reads evil there since the beneficiaries are forbidden in the ruling class.
With unemployment soaring and zero possibility for let-up, the youth have lost all hope of overcoming poverty through government policies which they deem harsh, excessive and discriminating.
So, the youth distrust their government and look up to the opposition to sort out their economic mess through the power of the ballot box.
With the opposition elbowed out of power in an election Gen-Z perceives as stolen, their hopes for a better future have waned.
Deprived of access to power, the youth feel they have only one way to reform their broken system of governance: enabling social unrest as a weapon to get their voice heard.
The authorities have responded with both soft and hard power. Plastic bullets and live ones have been used to quell the clamour for political reforms.
Like in South Africa during Apartheid, civil disobedience over time led to major political reforms because of the costs inflicted on the economy.
At a certain point, such costs become unbearable. When the government cannot collect sufficient taxes to run its basic functions, all the coalitions that supported the government become the next casualties and are forced to enjoin calls for fundamental change.
Will Mozambique slide into chaos, lawlessness, and civil unrest before dawning on its rulers? Will a rewriting of the nation’s social contract stand a chance to melt the political impasse?
Botswana was in an excruciating dilemma. On the one hand, abrasive elements within the government urged rejection of the ballot box verdict. Still, wisdom prevailed that it was not in the country’s best interest to walk that path of poverty and perdition.
Witnessing firsthand how the Boer regime capitulated before ferocious resistance and the economic pain that accompanied it was probably sufficient to instil sobriety over apocalyptic inclinations.
With the electoral trust safeguarded, Botswana, unlike Mozambique, has no political upheavals standing in her way to distract her from leaping into the future without being dishevelled by the consequences of electoral malpractices.
African nations will be deceiving themselves if they descend on the path of disregarding the genuine wishes of their people to preserve the interest of the power wielders since the economic pain of disorderliness will disrupt whatever gains secured in protecting the status quo that is an aversion of building a just and equitable society.
It is a stark choice between ergatocracy and autocracy. Regrettably, the latter, not the former, is often chosen to preserve personal fleeting interests!
