Consociative Democracy

Maybe we should think about this fact:
The governments and the laws they make are not respected by the people ; so that these countries are not true states.

Most African people do not understand the idea of a moral person. A ‘moral person’ here means a group of people (such as a government, a business company, etc) which has a separate existence from the individual people in the group, who are only in it temporarily.

People think that the President IS the government. This belief is encouraged by the fact that the President is elected directly by the people. While this appears to be democratic, in Africa it hides from the people that the President is only a part of government of the country. So people think the President is the legal owner of government property.

People in African cultures do not usually understand that laws should apply equally to everyone. Their culture is based on customary rules—which differ from one region to another—and these rules give different rights and obligations to different people, depending upon the person’s importance and his occupation.

The idea that a law applies to everyone, to millions of people, seems to them very strange. To make matters worse, the laws are made in the far-away capital They live in local communities which give them their most important rights and obligations. So they do not feel that they have to obey laws which come from outside their own ethnic group. They think that it is normal, with help from people they know, not to obey the laws.

In Europe the situation is generally different, and democratic government based on majority rule has become common. There, industrialisation and the development of cities have killed community solidarity. A strong class consciousness has replaced community solidarity. This class consciousness is based on the conflicting interests of different social classes (manual workers, tradesmen, government employees, people in the liberal professions, investors, etc.). These social classes can be seen as horizontal layers of the population.

For a hundred years the driving force of democracy has been the opposition of two conflicting interests :
a ‘free market’ without government interference, favoured by some, against attempts, by others, to reduce the inequalities which the free market produces. Because of this democratic struggle, the people see the government and the laws it makes as being legitimate.

There is nothing like this in African culture. There, solidarity unites people within vertical divisions of the population. These divisions are based on blood relationships, real or imaginary, which result from a shared regional culture, and on the traditional obligations resulting from help received from others. People of many different social classes are united within these vertical divisions.

The national conventions of the 1990s resulted in democratic reforms. These were only small changes, because majority democracy gives power to the party with the majority of seats in parliament. This causes bad feelings in other parties.

In practice, despite the existence of ‘political’ parties which are ethnically-based, the wealth and power of the state are in the hands of one particular ethnic group, while the other groups are forever denied these things. So the minority groups will always dispute the legitimacy of the government and of the laws which it makes.

However, there are ways to give legitimacy to government. One possible solution is federalism :
one can give the most important powers to ethnically-based regions, and at the same time throw away the wrong idea that a strong central power is necessary for quick nation-building.

French-speaking African elites have always rejected federalism because it is different to the French system of government ; and also because they do not want to leave the capital and go back to their ethnic regions. When they go back to the old-fashioned cultural society from which they have escaped, they lose their personal independence.

Non-Majority Democracy

Another possible solution is non-majority democracy of the kind that has existed for many years in some European countries, such as the Netherlands, and also in Belgium and Switzerland. This form of government has been studied by the American political scientist Arend Lijphardt, who has called it ‘consociative’ democracy.

For many years, Dutch society has been divided into four vertical ‘pillars’ which are mainly cultural. These ‘pillars’ are: the Catholics, the Calvinists, the Socialists and the Liberals. Each of these ‘pillars’ contains people from all the different social classes. For Dutch people, their cultural identity is more important in organising their collective life than their social class.

Dutch society is very stable because it has made its cultural divisions part of the system of government: political parties say openly that they represent a cultural division and not a particular class ; a method of proportional voting is used in the parliamentary elections ; and the government does not contain people from only one political party. The government is a wide coalition of different parties: the number of people from each party in the government is in the same proportion to the total as the proportion of its members in parliament. The government, in which there is a strong spirit of consensus, is like a roof which sits on top of and joins together the ‘pillars’ which are the different communities.

In Africa, five things are needed in order to share power like this:

1. A parliament whose members are elected in such a way that the number of members of parliament from each ethnic group is proportional to its population.
2. A coalition government whose members are from the different ethnic groups, in proportion to their number of seats in parliament.
3. The sharing of government money—and the sharing in the management of public services—between the different ethnic groups in the same proportions as above.
4. The right of veto of the minority ethnic groups ; this makes it necessary for everyone to agree unanimously before a decision can be made. Traditionally, this search for consensus is common in African societies.
5. Some autonomy for each ethnic group in managing its own affairs

To introduce consociative democracy, some favourable conditions are necessary :

1. A population that is not too big ; not too many ethnic groups ; and each ethnic group based mainly in one region. This is the case in most African countries where there is not a lot of mixing of ethnic groups, even in the capital cities. There, regional populations are mostly of the same ethnic group, even if it contains a number of sub-groups (as with the Bamileke peoples of the Cameroon, or the Sara peoples of Chad).
2. A tradition of settling disputes by consensus. In African cultures decision-making by consensus is usual. Traditional education discourages individual opinion and no ethnic group will think of disputing agreements decided upon by its elders after they have debated the matter.
3. The educated elites from the different ethnic groups must have a shared concern for the national interest, over and above inter-ethnic rivalries. Members of African elites have often spoken, in private, of their wish to escape from the obligations they have within their ethnic communities. They do not like their community ties, unlike European visitors who sometimes idealize the community ties because they do not see the difficulties they can cause to people who want to ‘get ahead’ and because they feel that these ties are a good thing which they have lost in their own countries.
4. Despite the ethnic divisions, national consciousness must develop among the ordinary people. The opposite has generally been the case since the 1960s, because, since independence, bad feelings between different ethnic groups have been made worse by disputes for the privileges handed out by the state. However the beginnings of a shared national identity can be found in sports competitions, in the claiming of—and pride in—a shared national identity, in the acceptance of the nation’s borders, and in identifying with a long-term head of state, or even a shared belief in an ideal world.
5. The government should be protected from being annoyed too much by parliament, although it should not be protected from all motions that criticize it. This is in order that the government can be a place for sincere and free negotiation between ministers from different ethnic groups.
6. There must be political parties that have strong support in their ethnic group. This gives them the right to represent their group. The only thing that now needs to be done is to give official recognition to the present situation. Since the time of the national conventions, the political parties, which before that had been too many, have tried to unite around one important person in each ethnic group.
7. The President should be chosen in a way that prevents him from holding all the power. He should be elected by a limited number of people, such as Members of Parliament and delegates from local councils. It is also possible to change the President every year, as is done in Switzerland. The President’s job is to represent the country ; while it is the job of the government, and not of the President, to govern the country.

Democracy requires people to recognize openly the conflicts that exist in their country between its different groups.

Majority democracy, which prevents the minority from exercising power, requires a solid democratic culture and an accepted ‘social contract’.

It seems that consociative democracy is suited to present-day Africa, because it allows the elites from the different ethnic groups to exercise consensual power.

This is a simplified version of a translation of an article on the difficulties of multi-ethnic states in Africa. The article, by Thierry Michelon of the University of the Antilles & Guyana, was published in the French monthly review Le Monde Diplomatique, December 2003.

More precise translation