The existential crisis of opposition parties in African electoral politics

Opposition politics in Africa is often a pendulum that swings from pain to despair in five-year circles. The run up to elections is characterised by the giddy excitement of possibility and the optimism of victory against incumbents that are often tired and reviled, weighed down by corruption and incompetence.

But winning an election is often like trying to storm a stone castle. The castle is surrounded by a moat full of hungry crocodiles, some of which have spent many years trying to find a way to sneak in. Inside the castle, archers unwilling to lose their somewhat vantage positions in the service of the king, stand in the turrets, ready to rain down arrows to keep the invaders at bay.

Every so often, the invaders are able to bring battering rams and break through the castle gates and take power. Most times the advantages of incumbency – supported by the self-interest of the archers – are simply too embedded and insurmountable.

But it is in the barren years without elections that most opposition parties suffer most. Left to lurk outside the walls of the castle in the open, the opposition remain vulnerable to the archers who are able to pick them off at will with their well-aimed arrows. The rest of the damage is done by hunger, which forces many of them to try and find ways – any way possible – into the castle, and into the jaws of the crocodiles in the moat.

The National Unity Platform is in the latest cohort taking this undergraduate course of Political Attrition 101 and it is increasingly clear that the political party has not learned much from the difficulties of the Forum for Democratic Change before it.

There are two primary challenges. The first is that NUP ran its campaign on the premise of #WeAreRemovingADictator.

This was catchy and galvanising, but it also had the potential of falling short and smouldering like a wet firework, especially after the dictator and his archers poured boiling oil down the walls of the castle. How do you galvanise your supporters if you fail to remove the dictator?

The second, then, is how to transition from a revolutionary movement in the manner of which NUP campaigned, to an evolutionary political party developing structures and articulating alternative policies? And how do you keep your hungry members from the temptation of crawling towards the castle under the cover of darkness?

This is the dilemma that NUP now faces. Many of the politicians elected under its banner, in Parliament and outside it, had no ideological affinity to the party to begin with and were united, partly by the need to remove a dictator, and in many cases, by the need to remove the dictatorship of poverty and need from themselves.

With a churn rate of almost 70 percent in Parliament, many of the NUP MPs know that they will not return to the House, regardless of how well they debate or how loudly they vocalise the needs of their constituents. It is not even the NRM they need to worry about, but others in need who can’t wait to have a go at the next election.

This is also true of lower-level party officials like councillors, some of whom have been queuing up to meet high-ranking government officials for handouts, regardless of the directives from the party leaders.

It is in this barren land outside the castle walls that NUP now finds itself, and with two difficult choices. One is to continue trying to organise as a formal political party and lead the opposition while suffering the kind of attrition and internal divisions, organic or sponsored, that FDC suffered before them. The more the party tries to whip its elected members into line, the more likely it is to lose them to the poachers in NRM watching carefully in the long grass.

The other is to return to street-level organisation as a generational movement to remove a dictator and a dictatorship and keep the fire burning long enough to force the issue, or at least maintain momentum into the next election. This path is strewn with violence and many party supporters are weary and just want to get back to eking a living. Those who think winning an election as an opposition party in Africa is hard should try keeping one together in the lean years between elections. The moat is full of crocodiles!

Mr Kalinaki is a journalist and  poor man’s freedom fighter. 
[email protected]; @Kalinaki