Pathemata Mathemata

(English version -- des collègues nigérians m'ont persuadé de passer au bilinguisme)

The attempted coup in Benin prompted reactions across West African public opinion that neatly illustrate the fault line which has emerged in the region between Authoritarians and Democrats—a division brought into sharper focus, in particular, by the succession of coups in the Sahel. It is not a clean or rigid divide, but a blurred and shifting one, whose underlying meaning nonetheless becomes clearer at certain moments, when events exert sufficient pressure to force positions into the open. Until now, the momentum had been on the Authoritarian side. After their setback three decades ago, when the democratic wave swept away the military regimes of the Sahel and forced the remaining authoritarian governments to dilute their acrid brew with a sweetening dose of democracy and liberalism, Authoritarians appeared consigned to a long period in the wilderness, forced to bide their time and swallow their frustration. Yet, as so often, the reality was more complex than this narrative suggests.

Authoritarianism and democracy are best understood as methods rather than as regimes in the strict sense. They are methods situated along a spectrum of how power is exercised—power here needing to be distinguished from the management of socio-political interests. The exercise of power belongs to politics; the management of socio-political interests belongs to governance. Power, of course, is itself an interest—but it is a personal or factional one, and it is generally presented as a means rather than an end. Socio-political interests, by contrast, are impersonal and general: they are the interests of a profession, an economic sector, a social group, and so forth. The former typically reflects the interests of a party or a clan; the latter concern society at large.

The more authoritarian methods prevail in politics, the more authoritarian a regime becomes; conversely, the more democratic methods are practised, the more democratic the regime will be. Method is both cultural and institutional—or, if one prefers, both informal and formal. It is entirely possible to have institutions that are formally democratic operating within an informal climate dominated by authoritarian practices. The reasons for such outcomes are complex. In some cases, they arise from the emergence of an authoritarian faction within formally democratic institutions—this is, arguably, what we are witnessing today in the United States. In other cases, the result stems from democratic institutions being imposed upon an authoritarian faction, as happened in parts of Africa in the early 1990s—only for that faction to resist, with varying degrees of success.

One might think, for example, of the various regimes in Central Africa, which have generally succeeded in short-circuiting such institutions and draining them of any real substance; or, in West Africa, of Togo—which appears almost like a Central African regime transplanted into a West African setting—or of Burkina Faso under Blaise Compaoré, whose tactics ultimately failed in October 2014. Far rarer are cases in which authoritarian institutions nonetheless allow for the exercise of democratic methods, even to a limited extent. As I write this, no genuinely convincing example comes to mind.

At times, an authoritarian management of political power can be defended by reference to an effective management of socio-political interests. Many people—and not in Africa alone—perceive a causal link between authoritarianism and good governance. This was precisely the argument advanced by the first generation of post-independence leaders when they dismantled the democratic institutions and methods that had been tentatively experimented with during the final years of colonial rule, in both British and French territories. Development, they claimed, required unity of action; and such unity could only be achieved through the authoritarian exclusion of those unwilling to subscribe to it. These leaders thus constituted an early version of what might be called authoritarian developmentalism, a model now most clearly embodied by Rwanda’s Paul Kagame.

In Benin, Patrice Talon—who is more of a development doctrinaire than West African politicians usually are—has taken this path in an ambiguous manner. In a country long governed by democratic methods and untouched by the kind of violence that brought a warlord such as Paul Kagame to power, he could not act with Kagame’s radical brutality. Instead, he opted for what might be called an “iron fist in a velvet glove”. Many Beninese sensibilities, however, have felt above all the iron fist. Under Talon, Benin has experienced governance successes that did not even seem imaginable under previous governments—driving transformations that are perhaps more striking to people like myself, who travel through the country at long intervals, than to those who live there and experience them only gradually and almost imperceptibly, except when they hurt.

In the particular context of Africa, where the principal instrument of governance—the state—is generally very weak, both in its level of organisation and in the skills and ethics of its personnel, such changes tend to be brought about more through politics than through the state apparatus itself. Yet the impact of political manoeuvring, which always carries an element of illegitimacy and division, is more sorely felt than that of administrative routines. It must also be said that, in many cases, the political opposition is no less to blame than those in power. The latter are, of course, more visible and naturally command greater means of action, which places them more squarely in the spotlight. But I recall hearing a Nigerien minister during the democratic period explain that he would gladly have brought members of the opposition into his administration; unfortunately, once in place, their sole concern was to find ways of sabotaging his work in order to serve their own camp.

One should not, in any case, expect opponents, once they reach power, to behave with greater integrity or with more respect for the rules of the game. In Benin, many opponents, unable to devise a strategy capable of beating Talon at his own game, came to dream of military intrusion as the ultimate remedy for their frustration. Yet their failure was due less to Talon’s actions as such than to their own shortcomings as politicians. The true measure of their incompetence lies in their inability to generate mass popular support and to build a broad activist base that Talon would have been forced to take seriously. By contrast, they should be compared with PASTEF in Senegal, whose leaders succeeded in mobilising a sufficiently large and feisty base of activists and citizens to withstand a hostile head of state with murky ambitions. They should also be compared with the politicians of the central Sahel, particularly in Niger and Burkina Faso, who remained trapped in petty party manoeuvring and relied too heavily on the logic of electoral fiefdoms, while neglecting the deepening and mass expansion of activist mobilisation. As a result, when the moment came, they were swept aside like chaff by the military, without provoking the slightest ripple in public opinion. Had Talon been overthrown in Benin, I would wager that the fate of the Beninese political class would have been identical: those who fantasised about military rule were, in reality, fantasising about their own political demise.

To return to my argument, Authoritarians are those who reject the democratic method, or who have never truly embraced it; Democrats are those who support it.

One point should be noted at the outset: these two categories exist only within what might be called the political public—that is, the relatively thin layer of citizens who take an active and sustained interest in political life, to the point of holding clearly defined ideas and attitudes that set them apart from the wider population, which the American publicist Walter Lippmann once described as the bewildered herd.

Most members of this gregarious herd follow the current set in motion by whichever segment of the political public happens to have the wind at its back; yet, at the same time, it is their ill-defined impressions and vague, somewhat blind reactions that determine the general atmosphere weighing upon what members of the political public can reasonably expect. In advanced systems, the political public is kept informed of these underlying shifts in the general mood through opinion polls and other surveys that are produced and published with great regularity, allowing its members to adjust their messages and strategies accordingly. In Africa, by contrast, the political public has to rely on guesswork and is all too often caught off guard.

And yet the stakes could hardly be higher, for the differences between democracy and authoritarianism are existential.

Democracy is a moral regime; authoritarianism is a moralising one. The former rests on political virtues, the latter on depoliticising prescriptions. This makes the method of the former both more demanding and more dignified, and that of the latter simpler, but also more ignoble. Democracy’s very complexity works against it, not least because it contains a kind of contradiction between its moral foundations and the practical implications of its institutional organisation.

The democratic method was something new in Africa, since, from independence onwards, most countries had experienced only a variety of authoritarian modes of rule. Those who entered political life under newly-adopted democratic rules of the game at the beginning of the 1990s had, for the most part, been shaped by conditions in the authoritarian era. This does not mean that they were, by that fact alone, ipso facto authoritarians: on the contrary, many of them became radical democrats precisely because they had suffered from authoritarian practices. Nevertheless, this long history of authoritarianism did not train the political public—and still less the general public—in the procedures of the democratic method, and above all in its central driving force: debate. (This is so even though the sense of debate lay at the very heart of the original political formation of premodern Africa, the small-scale political communities run by a municipal regime.) Debate does not imply harmony; on the contrary, it exists only because there is, within society, a natural disharmony of interests and passions—one that must nevertheless be governed in such a way as to minimise harm to the members of the polity and thus maximise their engagement.

Such an undertaking requires, on the part of those engaged in it, the democratic virtues of tolerance, humility and introspection—in short, forms of moral gentleness that are indispensable when one must reconcile so many divergent and opposing tendencies and thus learn to live together with the least possible friction. Yet the institutional superstructure of the democratic regime derives from a very particular history—Anglo-Franco-American—which adds to debate a competitive mechanism designed to arbitrate between the debaters in terms of victory and defeat. Unsurprisingly, debate is transformed at this level into competition, even into a sheer scramble for advantage—things that call for qualities precisely opposed to the democratic virtues. To win, after all, it is better not to be overly tolerant; a certain measure of arrogance seems necessary; and one is well advised not to probe too deeply into one’s own intimate feelings and convictions. And, of course, there is vanishingly little chance of keeping one’s hands clean at all times.

Add to this contradiction the fact that, unlike authoritarian systems—where the principle of the prince’s secret prevails, and where, even if you uncover that secret, it is in your own interest not to speak of it—almost everything is exposed to public view in a democracy, in the name of transparency and freedom of the press, which are institutional cornerstones of the regime. It follows that, even though democracy is the regime of dignity—that is, one in which citizens, endowed with rights, expect their leaders to be respectable, even exemplary—it is also the regime that generates the greatest degree of contempt for those leaders, since they can scarcely conceal their failings, to which citizens are far more sensitive than under any other type of regime.

It is possible to be a successful political leader for reasons that citizens may legitimately respect, despite all the pitfalls and minefields of this system. But this requires a personality of a particular calibre – an idealistic temperament – which would struggle to emerge and thrive in a political society where the state apparatus is so weak (and therefore offers little protection) and the authoritarian tradition is so longstanding. (As to the weakness of the state and the weight of the authoritarian tradition, one need only bear in mind that public media, which form part of this apparatus, become, in most countries, the exclusive property of whichever faction comes to power, despite regulations ostensibly designed to guarantee fair access. This is a legacy of the authoritarian era, which treated the state apparatus as an appendage of the ruling party—hence the notion of the party-state—or, as the case may be, of the junta in power.)

Given all this, it may even seem surprising that the democratic method has taken root so firmly in Africa. Outside the Western world and Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa is the region that has embraced it most consistently. And despite the fact that it has often struggled to implement it effectively, democracy remains the declared norm of political organisation towards which African states are expected to move, in line with their international commitments and institutional affiliations. In November 2000, Mali’s president, Alpha Oumar Konaré, steered through the adoption of the “Bamako Declaration”, which called for democracy to be made inseparable from the Francophonie, a move that sub-Saharan African states endorsed almost reflexively. Reservations came only from Vietnam and Laos, which said they had nothing against democracy—so long as it did not include… multipartyism. (One clause of the Declaration stated that democracy goes hand in hand with multipartyism, and that the opposition must enjoy a clearly defined status, free from any form of ostracism.)

Caught between the complexities and internal tensions of democratic rule and the authoritarian political instincts inherited from the past, the democratic method has ultimately disappointed disenchanted public opinion in most African countries where it has been applied, even as it continued to inspire strong hopes in countries still under authoritarian rule. In those where democratic processes did take hold, a diffuse and somewhat naïve yearning gradually emerged among the wider population for a system that would be simpler, cleaner, and more efficient than this apparent mess.

This kind of yearning is by no means unique to Africa; it can also be found in Western countries, where it is commonly labelled populism. Such sentiments reject the elites—above all the political class, seen as the primary source of poor governance (in the United States, it is tellingly referred to as “the swamp”)—and tend to fasten onto a scapegoat: immigration in the West, imperialism in Africa. In both cases, the scapegoat is framed in identitarian terms. In Western nativist narratives, immigration from the South is cast as an “invasion”; in African anti-imperialist discourse, relations with the West are portrayed as a form of “occupation.” (Because of the specific structure of the Western narrative, I have always found it questionable that French commentators are so keen to lump right-wing populism together with a supposed left-wing populism—meaning Jean-Luc Mélenchon and LFI. Mélenchon may indeed wish to be a populist, but in the current climate, he simply cannot be one.)

This shift in the political climate favours the Authoritarian camp. As noted earlier, Authoritarians operate within a moralising rather than a moral political vision, one that simplifies political problems through the imposition of depoliticising prescriptions. A genuinely moral stance, by contrast, rests on the arduous cultivation of political virtues, not on the conviction that one possesses moral truth and need only impose it on everyone else through prescriptions that foreclose political debate—that is to say, the very core of civic life in a democratic setting.

For Authoritarians, there exists a “moral” doctrine—ideological, in reality—animated not by virtues to be acquired and cultivated, but by rules to be applied and obeyed. Debate gives way to a single, unanimistic discourse; and instead of debaters, we find self-appointed holders of the only truth confronting those they regard as traitors or, at best, as obstacles to be fought rather than debated, and eliminated rather than persuaded. The situation is indeed simplified, since politics itself disappears. The ideal leader for such aspirations is therefore the military chief, for the Barracks, unlike the Public Square, is a place governed solely by command and obedience, by blind respect for hierarchy, where martial law, not civil law, is applied to every lapse and every act of dissent.

One can thus understand the applause that greeted Pascal Tigri’s attempted coup in Cotonou among what amounts to the African equivalent of what the French call the fachosphère. The exultation and euphoria were such that many of its members refused to accept that the operation had failed. Among the commenters on the YouTube video that broadcast Patrice Talon’s address announcing the survival of his regime and of civilian government in Benin, many went to great lengths to argue that it was an AI-generated fake, in order to deny—if only for a few more hours—a dispiriting reality. Strangely enough, many of these voices were not Beninese at all (there were even a few Anglophones), and therefore had no personal stake in the affair—an indication, in itself, of the intensity of authoritarian fervour across the continent.

On the other side, Democrats have found it difficult to defend Patrice Talon, because the way he has exercised power appears to them to sit uneasily with the principles of orthodox democratic rule. Their dilemma is that, while Authoritarians defend their cause with passionate intensity, Democrats would rather devote themselves to the slower, more demanding and seemingly far less stirring task of improving and reforming democratic practice within their countries. That task requires them to confront civilian leaders who are often themselves part of the problem that needs to be addressed. While this endeavour does have its moments of inspiration, these are rarely foregrounded—for reasons that would themselves merit closer examination.

In any case, this task could have continued, at its somewhat lethargic pace—more talk than action, more mimetic routines than innovations genuinely tailored to African issues—without posing any serious danger, had the climate of public opinion not shifted so decisively in favour of the Authoritarians. Yet, through forms of misunderstanding that are hardly surprising in such a climate, the Democrats’ reform-minded criticism (the “let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater” kind) can easily be confused with the Authoritarians’ radical critique (for whom the baby belongs in the gutter just as much as the bathwater). In this way, Democrats become the objective allies of their ideological adversaries and, through the often more indignant than constructive expression of their frustrations, they help to reinforce the anti-democratic mood that now permeates public opinion across the continent—at least in those countries that are attempting to practise democracy. (This is worth noting: the most enthusiastic congratulations addressed in the African press to Benin for its lucky escape came from… Bamako.)

The Democrats, moreover, somewhat deserve the criticism I directed earlier at politicians in the Sahel (and in Benin): they lack grassroots activism and fail to organise in ways that would allow them to influence the masses. They appear, as economists would put it, to have conceded the market. It may well take further unhappy events to jolt them more forcefully into awareness—and in this respect, I would wager that there are no more sincere Democrats in West Africa today than those who continue to adhere to this political method in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger. As the Greek saying has it, pathemata mathemata: “my pains are my teachings.”