Political, economic, and security governance

This blogpost will be updated regularly (and reposted) to reflect evolving electoral reality in Liberia. 

Liberian electorate will on October 10 go to the polls to elect a new president and 73 representatives for a six-year term. Final results will be announced 15 days later on October 25, according to Liberia’s National Elections Commission (NEC) election calendar.

How significant is the 2017 general election?

The 2017 general election is historically important for a number of reasons:

Incumbent President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf is constitutionally unqualified to seek a third-term and she shows no sign of reneging on her promise to step down in January 2018;

The last time a sort of democratic transition took place was in 1944, which makes the October 10 election the country most significant and consequential election in over 70 years;

And although President Johnson-Sirleaf is not on the ballot (her vice is), the October 10 election could be a referendum on her party’s 12 years of governance.

Will the election commission deliver a free, fair and credible election?

The current commission head by Chairman Jerome G. Korkoya has successful hosted a number of free, fair and credible by-elections and a Special Senatorial Election, despite (of course!) technical and financial constraints. 

But of recent Chairman Korkoya has been mired in a legal controversy over his purported U.S. citizenship, which is incompatible with Liberia’s immigration and naturalization laws.

Nonetheless, the National Election Commission (NEC) is on course with the implementation of the 2017 election calendar.

Will the National Election Commission enforce the Code of Conduct?

Liberia’s 1986 Constitution calls for a Code of Conduct (COC) for public officials and employees of government. But, due in large part to the country’s intermittent 14 years of civil war, this constitutional mandate was not enacted until 2014.

By 2015, however, the constitutionality of the COC - specifically the controversial Part V, Sections 5.1 and 5.2 which sort of “bans” certain category of public officials from actively participation in political activities - was challenged by a potentially affected party. The Supreme Court in its March 2017 ruling upheld the constitutionality of the Code of Conduct, albeit nothing that the law “suffers grave language or textual deficit.” 

In addition to the Code, the residency and domicile  clauses of the 1986 Constitution are likely to be challenged and contested by potentially affected parties if enforced by NEC. 

Enforcement of regulations and statues remains a huge challenge, hence it remains to be seen whether the COC will be adhered to or enforced. 

How many candidates? 

There are at least 21 registered political parties in Liberia, according to the NEC’s website. But it is expected that  no more than 10 political parties will put up presidential candidates.  

Who are the candidates?

A combination of a few old and many new political actors are campaigning to succeed Africa’s first democratically elected female head of state, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.

Prominent among the old political actors are Sirleaf’s vice Joseph Nyumah Boakai of the governing Unity Party (UP), George Weah of the Coalition of Democratic, Charles Brumskine of the Liberty Party (LP), and Prince Johnson of the Movement for Democracy and Reconstruction (MDR).

Notable new presidential contenders are Alexander  Cummings of the Alternative National Congress (ANC), Benoni Urey of All Liberian Party (ALP), J. Mills Jones of the Movement of Economic Empowerment (MOVEE), and MacDella Cooper of the Union of Liberian Democrats (ULD).

Recent polls (see here, here, and here) put Boakai, Weah, and Brumskine ahead of the presidential pack.

How are the campaigns using social media? 

Most of the presidential contenders are utilizing social media to among others take jab at one another and carry events (such as endorsements, primaries and rallies) live on Facebook.  

MacDella Cooper of the ULD, to name but a few,  has an active social media present as well as Joseph Nyumah Boakai of the UP, George Weah of the CDC and Charles Walker Brumskine of the LP.

How important is ethnicity in the 2017 elections?

The Congo-Country divide is a trending issue in the 2017 elections, with one party accusing the other of propagating the divide between the settlers (commonly known as Congo people) who founded the Republic in 1847 and the non-settlers (i.e., Country people) who were met on the ground in the 1820s. 

Regional factor and vote-rich county politics are also in play as presidential hopefuls such as Charles Brumskine, Alexander Cummings and George Weah picked their running mate from the strategic, vote-rich counties of Nimba and Bong.

The governing UP presidential hopeful, Joseph Boakai, is yet to select his running mate.

How are the political parties funding their campaigns?

According to the New Elections Law of Liberia and NEC’s 2017 regulations and guidelines, those of “Liberian nationality or origin” regardless of residency “shall have the right to contribute to the funds and election expenses of any political party or candidate.” 

But such funding shall not exceed $2, 000, 000,  $1, 500, 000, $600, 000 and $400, 000, respectively, for president, vice president, senator and representative.

If current spending levels continue, the opposition Liberty Party is poised to outspend all political parties including the governing Unity Party.

Will there be post-election violence?

Probably not. Or perhaps. But if the previous three nation-wide elections (2005, 2011, and 2014) are any guide, nothing of significant proportion as is typically seen in a post-election violence setting could occur in Liberia.

Despite the “president for life” syndrome in some countries, electoral democracy in Africa is flourishing.

Electoral democracy - by which I mean “a system in which citizens, through universal suffrage, can choose and replace their leaders in regular, free, fair, and meaningful elections” - really began to take hold in Africa during the last decade of the twentieth century. And although the so-called president for life syndrome is gaining traction in some countries, each year, more and more African countries elect new leaders and retire old ones. Nigeria, Tanzania, Benin, Ghana, and Gambia are five most recent examples which come to mind. 

Yet, as one observer calls it, the “Africa’s leaders for life syndrome” is evading and, most often, squashing constitutional constraint on term-limits, leading notable scholars to conclude that democracy is in retreat or, at least as Larry Diamond of Stanford University puts it, in recession. The African Center for Strategic Studies (ACSS), a think-tank at the National Defense University, points out that “While a number of African countries have succeeded in upholding term limits over the past two decades, leaders in more than 20 countries effectively do not face restrictions on their time in power.” For example, heads of state in Equatorial Guinea, Angola, Zimbabwe, Cameroon, and Uganda have either evaded or squashed their countries constitutional term limits, hence, extending their stay in power for more than three decades (See Figure 1 below). 

As Figure 1 above shows, about ten African leaders have either evaded or squashed their term-limit restrictions, staying in power for 21 years on average. In addition, Figure 1 also reveals that eight of the ten countries where term limits have been squashed are in Central Africa, and Southern Africa is the “sub-region with the strongest adherence to term limits” follow by the West Africa sub-region, and, finally, “term limits for leaders in North and East Africa largely remain weak or absent,” according to the ACSS.

But, despite the bleak democratic outlook in Central, Eastern and Northern Africa, the trend in majority of the continent’s 54 sovereign countries (especially in Southern and Western Africa) is flourishing, as the map of Africa showing constitutional term limits for African leaders above shows. 

Democratic governance, and transitions, in Southern Africa has over the decades been peaceful and stable, not so much as in Western Africa. But the successful conduct of relatively free, fair, and meaningful elections in 2015 and 2016 is reversing the West Africa trend for the better. In 2015, for example, the election of President Buhari ended Nigeria’s People Democratic Party 14-year rule. Also, 2016 witnessed important democratic transitions in Ghana and The Gambia. Whereas in the former, a sitting president lost his reelection quest to a third-time presidential contender, in the latter a dictator who had been in power for over two decades and vowed to rule for a “billion years” lost a reelection to a business man.

Moreover, four countries on the continent will host elections in late 2017: Rwanda on August 4, follow by Kenya on August 8,  in late August by Angola where long-time President Eduardo dos Santos is not seeking reelection, and Liberia on October 10. 

The election in Liberia on October 10 will be the country most significant and consequential election in over 70 years. This is because President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Liberia’s internationally celebrated Nobel Peace Prize laureate president, is constitutionally not eligible to seek a third term and has vowed to turn over the reign of authority to a democratically elected president in January 2018, which, as is expected to take place, will consolidate Liberia’s nascent electoral democracy. (The last time a sort of peaceful and democratic transition took place was in 1944 when President Edwin Barclay was succeeded by President William V.S. Tubman who would go on to rule the west African nation for 27 years.)

Public-private partnerships, trade and investment, along with official development aid are key instruments for closing Sub-Saharan Africa’s infrastructure gap.

The economic case for investing in infrastructure projects is strong, but the political case is, at times, not strong enough. Perhaps because, as they say, politics trumps economics. But things and times are changing (think of China’s one belt, one road initiative, a hugely important infrastructure ingenuity that is poised to physically connect Asia, Africa and Europe by road and rail).

In “Taking the Politics Out of Development,” Keyu Jin of the London School of Economics, aptly notes the importance of China’s one belt, one road initiative (OBOR): “efficient infrastructure enhances productivity, fosters investment, and lowers the costs of trade.” Professor Jin goes on to write that “With effective channels for the exchange of goods and well-connected information networks, growth accelerates, economic opportunity increases, and inequality narrows.”

Unfortunately, Africa, most especially Sub-Saharan Africa, is lagging behind the rest of the world in terms of infrastructure quantity, quality and access, according to a new report by Africa’s Pulse, a World Bank biannual analysis of the state of African economies.

Two examples are indicative of the scale and magnitude of Sub-Saharan Africa’s infrastructure gap: Liberia (my own) has about 6,000km of road network, of which less than 16 per cent (1,000km) is asphalted. In South Sudan, the world’s youngest country, David Shearer, the head of the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) puts the country infrastructure challenge best in a recent BBC Hardtalk interview: “There is 200km of tarmac road in South Sudan - 200km in a country the size of France.”

Despite Sub-Saharan Africa’s (SSA) wide infrastructure gap, low road and railway densities and electricity access, telecommunications access has “improved dramatically: the number of fixed and mobile phone lines per 1,000 people increased from three in 1990 to 736 in 2014, and the number of Internet users per 100 people increased from 1.3 in 2005 to 16.7 in 2015,″ according to the report. Moreover, innovative solutions (such as the U.S. government Millennium Challenge Corporation part-financing of the rehabilitation of Liberia’s Mt. Coffee Hydro and, now, China’s one belt, one road initiative including the recently dedicated $3.8bn Mombassa-Nairobi standard gauge railway in Kenya) to closing the infrastructure gap are taking place on the continent.  

Going Beyond Aid, an important new book by Justin Lin and Yan Wang, is at the crux of financing infrastructure development projects such as the MCC and the OBOR initiative in SSA. But to attract these massive infrastructure projects, Sub-Saharan Africa, as the report points out, would need “robust institutional and regulatory framework,” a surmountable challenge a la strong political will and leadership. 

Nonetheless, the growth benefits of closing Sub-Saharan Africa’s infrastructure quantity and quality gap, the Africa’s Pulse report notes, are “potentially large:”

Catching up to the median of the rest of the developing world would increase growth in GDP per capita by 1.7 percentage points per year, and closing the gap relative to the best performers would lift this growth by 2.6 percentage points per year. Closing the gap in electricity–generating capacity yields the largest potential benefit, and substantial gains also arise from narrowing the gap in the length of the road network.

Let’s get to work Sub-Saharan Africa by increasing public spending on both hard and soft infrastructure projects, but, perhaps most important, by harnessing the power of the market via creative and innovative financing mechanisms such as PPPs and OBOR-style initiative, a sure path to sustainable peace and prosperity(?).

To be future-read the 54 sovereign, independent nation-states of Africa must foster resiliency by investing in institutions, infrastructure, and knowledge.

  St. Louis - Since 1997 the U.S. National Intelligence Council publishes every four years an unclassified Global Trends Report, “a forward-looking document to aid policymakers in their long term planning on key issues [such as globalization, demography, and the environment] of worldwide importance.”  

This year’s report, the sixth in series and in 20 years, is aptly subtitled, Paradox of Progress. A few examples of the paradoxes are illustrative of the report’s sentiment: Although we cross borders physically and digitally, we are “pushing each other away;” although technology has greatly improved quality of life, it has reduced the numbers of jobs in certain fields and displaced workers; and, finally, although, states are still major actors in the international system, non-state actors, individuals, NGOs, INGOs and terrorist groups, wield more power than ever before, the report notes.

So, what do these paradoxes say about the near future, i.e., the next five years?

For the next five years, the report warns that tensions within and between countries will rise. Here, the story is not too unfamiliar:

“Global growth will slow; just as increasingly complex global challenges impend. An ever-widening range of states, organizations, and empowered individuals will shape geopolitics. For better and worse, the emerging global landscape is drawing to a close an era of American dominance following the Cold War. So, too, perhaps is the rules-based international order that emerged after World War II. It will be much harder to cooperate internationally and govern in ways publics expect. Veto players will threaten to block collaboration at every turn, while information “echo chambers” will reinforce countless competing realities, undermining shared understandings of world events. “

But the NIC’s report also speculates on three alternative future scenarios that could respond to the above outlook: Islands, Orbits, and Communities. In Islands, which is at the national level, governments will face increasing challenge “in meeting societies’ demands for both economic and physical security as popular pushback to globalization increases, emerging technologies transform work and trade, and political instability grows,” all of which, as the report notes, “might tempt some [governments] to turn inward, reduce support for multilateral cooperation, and adopt protectionist policies, while others  find ways to leverage new sources of economic growth and productivity.      

At the regional level, in the scenario of Orbits, regional and competing powers will exert “their own spheres of influence while attempting to maintain stability at home,” which could either “reinforce stability and peace” or “further exacerbate tensions.”      

In the third future scenario, Communities (which is at the transnational level), the paralysis at the national, regional (and international) levels will see the rise of local governments and private actors as major hubs of power, providing more and more public as well as private goods and services.

The key take away from Global Trends: Paradox of Progress is the need to foster opportunities as well as challenges through resilience, because, after all, an Africa that is future-ready is the Africa that simultaneously invest in institutions, in infrastructure, and in citizens’ knowledge. Take heed Africa -- Liberia, South Sudan, and others.