These are not the best times for democracy in many African countries. The earlier unconstitutional move by Senegalese President Macky Sall to unilaterally postpone the country’s election a few weeks to the scheduled date in a bid to keep him in office longer than the constitution allows shows how far off democracy has fallen on the continent.
Even though the country’s constitutional council overruled Sall, 44-year-old opposition candidate Bassirou Diomaye Faye eventually claimed the victory over former Prime Minister and Sall’s anointed candidate, Amadou Ba and was sworn in following the election that was held on March 24, the unrest that followed the President’s move led to the death of at least three citizens and the arrest of dozens of protesters including many opposition leaders, an avoidable and unacceptable cost for democracy.
“The Head of State will without delay carry out the consultations necessary to organise the presidential election as soon as possible,” a statement by the country’s presidency read, indicating Sall’s intention to obey the ruling of the constitutional council.
The President’s decision to obey the reversal order by the constitutional council is welcome but his attempt to deny Senegalese their democratic right has implications that cannot simply be overlooked. Before now, Senegal was considered a regional model of democracy and a beacon of stability on the continent. While many, including the country’s opposition and civil society organisations, have hailed the reversal, if anything, Macky’s move, which must be treated in the same light as other military interventions in democratic affairs on the continent, underscores questions about the strength of the country’s democratic institutions.
For instance, after security forces acting on Sall’s orders stormed the country’s parliament and removed some opposition lawmakers, it backed the President’s undemocratic suspension of the election until December 15. Simply put, Senegal’s democracy was saved by the seven members of the constitutional council who approved the reversal.
But if lessons from across the Sahel are anything to go by, democracy can not rely on the goodwill of a few to do the right thing to survive because while some, like Senegal’s constitutional council, would do the right thing, many will not. While Sall’s attempt in Senegal may have failed, it highlights there are cracks in Senegal’s democratic machinery that must be mended. Otherwise, it’s only a matter of time before the country joins the rest of the authoritarian party in West Africa and the Sahel.
In West Africa and the Sahel, A Democratic Question Lingers
Democracies in West Africa and the Sahel are engrossed in a battle for their survival, and it appears they are losing. Since 2020, there have been nine coup d’etats across the region, five of which were successful. The most recent of these was the August 30, 2023 removal of President Ali Bongo of Gabon in a palace coup, putting an end to his family’s 55-year hold on the country’s leadership since its independence. The coup in Gabon occurred just a few weeks after the July 2023 removal of Nigerien President Mohamed Bazoum. Before Niger, Military officials had taken political control of Guinea, Burkina Faso and Mali.
No doubt, these coups are condemnable as they represent the obliteration of the people’s democratic will. Still, beyond that, there’s a pattern of similarity in the questions that democratic leadership in these countries had failed to answer leading up to their removal. For instance, the four countries where these coups were successful in West Africa are ranked among the ten countries with the worst human development index (HDI) (see Table 1).
Table 1: Nine of the bottom ten countries on the Human Development Index are in Africa, 4 of which have recently witnessed a coup.
Similarly, a core responsibility of the government by virtue of its social contract with the people is safeguarding lives and properties. However, data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project indicates that these 4 countries, which have experienced coup attempts recently, have also seen their security situation worsen in the last decade or so – see Figure 1.
Figure 1: Violent attacks in Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Guinea 2010-2022
Aside from the failure to meet basic standards of good governance, the majority of these countries are also engaged in moves that undermine the strength of their respective democracies. For instance, in Guinea, former President Alpha Condé changed the constitution to enable him run for a third term in office, a move that did not sit well with eight out of every ten Guineans. Some would argue that the President’s move was in itself a form of coup.
In the case of Mali, where two coups occurred within the space of nine months, the country’s elected President, Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, was removed on the heel of a series of three-month protests over irregularities in the conduct of the country’s parliamentary elections. In Burkina Faso, trust in the government had declined before the coup. Citizens could no longer feel the dividends of democracy as cases of corruption and nepotism continued to fester.
Across these countries, one thing is obvious: the failure of democratic institutions laid the foundation for the emergence of military juntas, and a similar pattern of questions exists in a number of countries in a region where democracies continue to hang on to threads of hope and sheer goodwill. The impact of this decline in democratic leadership is evident in the reality that many African countries face today. A major area where this impact will be very telling is technology, not just because it has proven to be a tool for political mobilisation for Africans but also because of its potential to strengthen electoral processes.
Authoritarian Regimes and Digital Repression
In recent years, technology has become an integral part of democracy because of the pivotal role it plays in entrenching democratic principles. For example, social media platforms have served as a rallying point for several political actions geared towards protecting citizens’ interests. A good example is Twitter’s central role in Nigeria’s 2020 EndSARS protest against police brutality.
But beyond this, digital technology has an even bigger role in democratic societies through its potential to improve election administration, a puzzle that African countries in the region seem almost incapable of solving. A relatively successful experiment — in spite of its flaws — in Nigeria shows that there is so much more that democracies in the region can achieve through increased technology use for election than otherwise. But as democratic leaders make way for authoritarian voices, this becomes an uphill, if not impossible, task.
First off, the primary areas where technology plays a critical role in deepening democratic participation are already under threat in Africa, and the decline of democracy will only make things worse. For instance, at least eight African countries restricted access to the internet or specific social media applications in 2020. This follows a pattern that spiked in 2019 when the continent recorded 25 cases of partial or total internet shutdowns, according to Access Now.
This pattern of suppression against internet usage in Africa continues to date. In 2023 alone, at least 8 African countries imposed restrictions on internet access for citizens between February and August alone, with all these cases being in response to protests or political unrest. Perhaps more importantly, studies have shown that the pattern of repression in African countries is not random. A study by Surfshark indicates that in Sub-Saharan Africa alone, 29 instances of all reported cases of Internet censorship since 2015 were election-related, the highest in the world. This study also showed that overall, a third of African countries had restricted internet access during elections.
Beyond these primary issues, the dangers this represents become even more concerning because undemocratic tendencies in democratic spheres have extended beyond suppressing internet usage during elections to frustrating election technology to overturn the will of the people – as witnessed in Kenya, festering hacking concerns in Ghana, and leaving citizens with more questions than answers in Nigeria. In the Nigeria case, citizens, especially young people, trooped to the polls on election day with high hopes for the potential of the Result Viewing Portal (IReV), which the electoral body introduced to transmit results of exercise in the polling unit to a dedicated portal. This failed to happen as discrepancies were recorded between results in hundreds of polling units and what was uploaded on the portal.
Elections and the AI Wave
What all this means is that while countries like the United States and Estonia have started experimenting with blockchain technology to deepen electoral integrity, the relatively weak ‘electiontech’ readiness across the African region will be sacrificed on the altar of expediency by authoritarian regimes in the region. This is even more concerning because of the important role that newly emerging technologies, specifically artificial intelligence (AI), can now play in elections.
In 2023, the AU high-level Panel on Emerging Technologies (APET) identified the significant role AI can play in resolving the challenges of poor voter engagement and low voter turnout confronting elections in the continent. This submission is not far-fetched. Across the continent, various initiatives have emerged, largely at the civil society level, doing exactly this. An example of this is the Voter Turnout Project, a Nigerian-based non-profit that deploys AI to identify unregistered citizens qualified to vote across the country, create a connection with them and provide them with a simplified explanation of the procedure to register. Similarly, iVerify, another Nigerian platform leverages AI to confront the wave of election-related misinformation to ensure voters make decisions based on reliable information.
For various reasons, especially its potential to carry out predictive analysis of voter behaviour and process large amounts of political information or news, the role AI plays in African elections is expected to continue to rise. But as this happens, the rise of authoritarian regimes means AI can also be used as a tool to subvert democracy through large-scale disinformation campaigns and deep fakes, the manipulation of election administration, and increasing state surveillance.
This reality must be acknowledged because the quality of acceptable democratic norms and electoral standards for AI tools is shaped by the interest of those who encode or facilitate it. This can enable the use of these products to suppress political dissent, which will further undermine democracy and institutional stability across the continent. An example of this is Uganda, where the government employed an integrated AI surveillance system powered by Huawei with invasive features like facial recognition, social media monitoring, and license plate readers to clampdown on citizens protesting the undemocratic actions of the Yoweri Museveni administration, leading to the arrest of over 836 protesters.
Similarly, equipment purchased to strengthen the defence capacity of military systems has been used against those they were meant to protect. For instance, at least 15 African countries have purchased Bayraktar TB2 drones, an unmanned combat aerial vehicle. In Ethiopia, the TB-2 drones were deployed by state forces leading to the death of at least 300 civilians within 16 months.
Conclusion
In 2022, a survey by Afrobarometer across 34 African countries showed that the majority of Africans believe in regular, honest and open elections as a tool to guarantee their interest. Still, less than 50 per cent of them feel elections in Africa help voters achieve this. This indicates that as electoral integrity on the continent diminishes, the lack of institutional trust, often weaponised to secure legitimacy by military leadership, will continue to rise.
For democracy in the region to stand a chance against this wave of military coups, active players must ensure electoral technology, a critical tool for honest and open elections, and other digital platforms that enable citizens to actively participate in the political process, are not suppressed.