Engendering Democracy in Africa

Women, Politics and Development

Niamh Gaynor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000597066
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book investigates women's political participation in Africa. Going beyond the formal institutions of electoral politics, it explores a range of spaces where everyday politics take place, at national and at local levels.

In recent years there have been significant improvements in the number of women elected to parliament in Africa. However, there is little indication that this is translating into better developmental outcomes, and indeed there is mounting evidence that it could in fact help to bolster some authoritarian regimes. Starting from the premise that politics is a far broader project than securing a seat in national or local legislatures alone, this book explores the opportunities for women's political participation across a number of informal spaces where women and men gather, organise and interact in a more regular and systematic manner. Combining insights from political science, sociology and feminist theory and drawing on detailed cases from the Congo, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria and Rwanda, it examines how power in its multiple dimensions circulates across a range of everyday political spaces, while drawing attention to the links between domestic gender inequalities and the global political economy.

Inviting scholars, practitioners and activists to broaden their focus beyond formal electoral institutions if they want to support women to become more politically active, this book provides fresh insights into major issues at the heart of African studies, development studies, gender and development, democratisation, and international relations.

1 Engendering democracy in Africa Beyond numbers

DOI: 10.4324/9781003147879-1

The last three decades have seen significant improvements in the number of women elected to parliament. At 25 per cent, the proportion of female parliamentarians in Africa¹ is almost on a par with the global average of 25.6 per cent, and women currently hold over 30 per cent of seats in national parliaments in ten African countries (IPU, 2021). Rwanda leads the way with more women than men in national parliament (61.3 per cent) and South Africa has 45.8 per cent, while Mozambique, Namibia and Senegal have more than 40 per cent respectively (IPU, 2021). Although definitive figures are difficult to source, it appears that this pattern is being mirrored at subnational, decentralised levels also (IDEA, 2021).

There is a general consensus that this increased political participation at both national and local levels is a good thing, both in terms of democracy and in terms of development. Analysts and commentators have argued that increased numbers of women in formal politics and in decision-making, most notably as they rise beyond a 30 per cent threshold, are likely to lead to increased levels of development resources being channelled into areas of strategic interest to women (Devlin and Elgie, 2008; Chen, 2010; Dahelrup, 2013). These more optimistic views are tempered somewhat by empirical evidence emerging from Africa however. Some analysts point to the fact that many of the countries making the greatest progress in women’s political participation are making far less progress in terms of democracy. It is argued that, contrary to engendering and promoting democracy, increased numbers of women within governing regimes can help authoritarian leaders bolster those regimes while weakening political opposition (Goetz and Hassim, 2003; Burnet, 2008). Moreover, with some rare exceptions (see, for example, Westfall and Chantiles, 2016; Clayton and Zetterberg, 2018, on public health spending specifically), women’s increased presence does not appear to be translating into more equitable developmental outcomes at national or local levels either.

Although Africa is home to some of the world’s fastest growing economies, gendered inequalities persist and are widespread. More than half of the female population is food insecure (UN, 2019) and the region has the highest maternal mortality ratio in the world (UNICEF, 2019). While some progress has been made in moving towards gender parity in education at all levels, fallout rates among female students remain high (World Bank, 2020). Women remain concentrated in low-paid, precarious work, including the informal sector (World Bank, 2020), and high rates of gender-based violence persist (UNFPA, 2019; Muluneh et al., 2020). Moreover, as evidence from the 2008 global economic recession, the Ebola virus and the Covid-19 pandemic – just three in a series of shocks and crises which has beset the region over the last two decades – indicates, women are consistently more adversely affected than men in the wake of global shocks and pandemics (see Cohen, 2010, on the impacts of the 2008 global recession; Korkoyah and Wren, 2015, on the impacts of Ebola; Wenham et al., 2020 and the UN, 2020, on the effects of Covid-19).

This brings us to the core focus of this book. While increased numbers of women in political institutions are, in theory, expected to result in increased equality in outcomes, in practice this does not appear to be the case. Women’s representation and participation in these fora, while important, is, it would appear, not enough. While others have explored why this is so, in this book I explore what more is needed. I do so from two points of departure. This first is that politics are not the sole preserve of formal institutions. In addition to and at times despite these, politics take place in and through deliberations, negotiations, bargaining and trade-offs that characterise multiple interactions in everyday life. While the focus of much of the literature and political activism to date has been on formal institutions, in particular at national levels, much of what takes place at these levels appears distant and somewhat detached from many women and men’s everyday lives. My focus moves to a range of more informal spaces where women (and men) gather, organise and interact in a more regular and systematic manner in order to explore the opportunities they afford for political influence and how or indeed if they interact with more formal political institutions. While the argument that we need to move beyond formal political institutions is not new (see Cornwall and Goetz, 2005, for example), there are, to my knowledge, few, if any, systematic empirical explorations of alternative spaces where politics take place and the opportunities they afford for engendered participation in development discussions, plans, policies and programmes at local as well as at national levels. In this book I draw on a range of specific cases, including those from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria and Rwanda, to uncover and explore a number of these alternative spaces and the opportunities they provide for engendered political engagement.

My second point of departure is that the regression to a localised ‘add women and stir’ approach which underpins many and programming interventions in the fields of both development and women’s political participation is insufficient. As others have cogently argued, gendered marginalisations (which affect both women and men) are both symptomatic and constitutive of the globalised capitalist system which, interacting with national and local development discourses and policy, depends upon women’s low-paid productive and unpaid reproductive labour, resulting in further inequalities (Elson and Pearson, 1981; Pearson, 2014). Yet, much of the analysis of the impact of women’s political participation ignores this broader context and focuses on so-called ‘women’s issues’ alone (for example, in the areas of healthcare, land rights, inheritance rights, gender-based violence and so forth). Moreover, despite much talk of intersectionality and gender mainstreaming, many development initiatives aimed at supporting women’s political participation remain similarly limited in scope and ambition. Treating women as a homogenous category, training programmes and supports largely aim at adding them to existing exclusionary institutions rather than challenging and transforming these. The wider globalised material and political relations that govern the distribution and use of resources, entitlements and authority within and beyond these institutions are often ignored. I argue that a focus on and engagement with this broader globalised structural basis for so-called ‘women’s issues’ is necessary, and that this can take place outside of as well as within formal political institutions. A critical engagement with the literatures on both democratisation and gender and development (GAD) underpins this.

Engendering democracy: Beyond fragile and authoritarian states

Much has been written about the challenges of democracy in postcolonial and post-conflict Africa (Ake, 1996; Clapham, 1996; Bratton and van de Walle, 1997; Brown, 2014). Initially heralded with great optimism with the wave of multiparty elections from the 1990s forward, commentators are now generally more subdued in relation to its prospects (Diamond et al., 2016; Stoddard, 2017; Powell et al., 2018). On the one hand, a growing authoritarianism is apparent in recent years. This is evidenced in both the resurgence of so-called ‘third term’ challenges in many countries, including violent suppression of public protest and dissent and, more recently, in excessively harsh and repressive state responses to Covid-19. On the other hand, a number of states are associated with chronic violence and insurgencies. As local elites collude with international resource entrepreneurs in predatory and violent cycles of extraction and exploitation, chronic violence and large-scale humanitarian displacement and migration ensue, with so called ‘fragile states’ appearing to have lost all control and legitimacy vis-à-vis their populations (Prunier, 2009; Reno, 2013).

Democracy, in this conceptualisation, with its focus on pluralist competition, elections and parliamentary institutions, implies liberal democracy. However, given both the history and the dynamics of political and social life in Africa, it may be unfair to expect so much from this imported model. Three factors merit some consideration in this regard. First, historically, liberal democracy remains very new to African states. Most countries only gained their independence from colonial rule in the 1960s, with some even later. As many analysts have pointed out (see, for example, Clapham, 1982; Bayart, 1993; Mamdani, 1996), during the colonial period African territories were administered, not governed. Colonial rule was generally through coercion, not consent, with a policy of ‘divide and rule’ leading to dangers of ethnic tensions and irredentism at independence. Moreover, as Mamdani (1996) reminds us, during the colonial period African people were treated as subjects, not citizens. There was no tradition of a social contract and the concept of community was much stronger than that of national identity. Consequently, the newly independent states eschewed pluralism, considering it would only deepen existing ethnic divisions. As late as 1988, the continent was dominated by one-party systems (29) and military oligarchies (10) (Thomson, 2004: 230). Opposition parties were outlawed in most states and the political norm was for a highly personalised executive to govern through tightly controlled one-party structures. Liberal democracy was largely rejected for the first three decades of independence. Patronage politics and ‘economies of affection’ dominated, whereby politics took place through informal networks and structures based on the core principles of “whom you know is more important than what you know” and “sharing personal wealth is more important than investing in economic growth” (Hyden, 2006: 72).

Yet, in the wake of the fall of the Berlin wall and pressures from Western donors, the 1990s saw a wave of ‘democratisation’ in the form of a move to multipartyism and competitive elections. In just ten years, liberal democratic models came to dominate, with the number of multiparty states across the continent rising from just nine in 1988 to 45 in 1999 (Thomson, 2004: 230). Given the myriad of problems that continue to beset liberal democracies in the West, many of which are in existence for several hundred years, it appears unrealistic to expect a smooth (or even relatively so) transition to liberal democracy in just 50–60 years in Africa. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, the competitive Westminster model lies very much at odds with how social and political life is conducted in many places in Africa. As Julius Nyerere, the first President of Tanzania, famously asserted, democracy rests on “Africans talking until they agree” (Nyerere, 1961). This suggests that more deliberative forms of debate, discussion, bargaining and negotiation might prove more suitable to development policymaking within African contexts than the overtly combative, competitive modes which underpin Western liberal democratic traditions. Of course, the limitations of such deliberative models need to be acknowledged – most notably questions around who the ‘Africans talking’ are, who they represent and how they do so as well as what they are and are not ‘talking’ about.

Second, in many African contexts, as elsewhere in the world, formal institutions are rarely the place where development policies are decided upon. In real life politics and policymaking, policy is generally the result of discussions, debates, deliberations, bargaining and negotiation which take place elsewhere, often in parallel institutions, both formal and informal. African polities thus comprise a complex array of local, decentralised structures, some modern, some traditional and many a hybrid of the old and new. Understanding how power circulates and politics operates and how gender relations play out within and around these is key to identifying opportunities for effective, transformative engagement.

And third, it is worth remembering that Western liberal states from their conception forward are highly gendered. Women were never included in the original social contract and were never part of liberal states’ democratic projects. As Horn (2015: 323) has noted:

although the liberal definition of citizen appears “unsexed”, it is in fact built on a Western male model where (some) men, as property owners, formed the basis of the public sphere – the privileged space of politics. Women, on the other hand, were incorporated into the private sphere through the marriage contract as wives subservient to their husbands, rather than as individuals.

This largely continues to be the case, as evidenced in women’s continued under-representation in political and economic spheres in liberal democracies thr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Engendering democracy in Africa: beyond numbers
• 2 Why engender democracy: gendered inequalities in development
• 3 How to engender democracy: the 4W framework
• 4 Looking East: Africa’s Lion economies and national development planning
• 5 Seizing and transforming local spaces: the politics of decentralisation
• 6 NGOs, the media and the public sphere: evolving arenas for political participation
• 7 Community associations, adaptive chieftaincies and the public sphere: local politics of capture, compliance and contestation
• 8 Conclusion: lessons, tensions and reasons for hope
• Index