How Critical Is Democracy In A Multipolar World

Hello. Welcome back to Conversation with Stephen Kamugasa. This is the fifth and final podcast episode in our Genocide series. Today's guest is Dr. Nic Cheeseman, a political scientist and professor of democracy and international development at the University of Birmingham, specializing in democracy, elections, and African politics. Nic read politics, philosophy and economics at the University of Oxford and then received an M.Phil and D.Phil from

the same university. He was elected a Cox Fellow at New College but left in 2006 to take up the position of Associate Professor at Jesus College, Oxford. He served as the director of Oxford's African Studies Centre before moving to the University of Birmingham in 2007 to become a professor of democracy and international development. In 2022, he became the inaugural director of the university's new Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability

and Representation, CEDAR. Professor Cheeseman is the recipient of many awards, recognizing his exceptional scholarship, and the most recent is the Josiah Mason Award for Academic Advancement at the University of Birmingham. He is also the author of many notable books, the most prominent being Democracy in Africa, Successes, Failures, and the Struggles for Political Reform. In this episode, we discuss the topic, how critical is democracy in a multipolar world? Dr. Nic Cheeseman, welcome.

Thanks, it's great to be here. The name Cheeseman is unusual. You are the only person I know named Cheeseman. A quick search on the internet showed that it is rooted in ancient Anglo-Saxon culture, It is a name for someone who worked as a maker or seller of cheese. The surname Cheeseman literally means cheeseman. Early recordings of it can be traced back to the Assize Rolls for 1260 in Cheshire, England in the United

Kingdom. Nic, please tell us something about your family background with special reference to your childhood. And how did your childhood experience colour your appreciation of reality in relation to your work as a professor of democracy?

Thanks, well it's great to be here and thanks for looking up the family history, that's interesting. I think it's often difficult to work back and to work out how you ended up where you are. You can go back and find certain key moments in your personal history. What explains why I've had so much of an interest, passion for, and relationship with countries in Africa, particularly places

like Kenya and Zambia over the years. I could go back to my undergraduate at Oxford University with a great professor there, Gavin Williams, who was really important when I arrived at university to me and really inspired me to study Africa, which was one of his great passions. Then you could go back a little bit further. I spent time in Africa in between a number of African countries, in East Africa and Southern Africa, in between doing my A-levels and going to university. you could

go back a little bit further. My mother actually spent some time in West Africa doing some of the research for her own studies many years ago before that. So there was, I guess, a sense of travel and adventure that I might have picked up on when I was younger. The idea that actually the interesting things in the world are not necessarily you know, in the UK. And if we go all the way back, you know, my grandmother on my mother's side was actually born in South Africa very briefly

before coming back to the UK. So there's lots of sorts of connections that you could kind of go back to over the years to suggest where the research would end up. But I think a lot of it is also, you know, luck. I was very close to going to Cambridge to study Wittgenstein and philosophy, and then at the last minute decided I actually wanted to study something that I thought would have a more immediate impact and be more immediate to the kind of challenges that the world

was facing. And that pushed me in a more political direction. And then the combination of that and some of the great professors and scholars we had in Oxford pushed me towards African politics. And then I worked with my PhD supervisor, Dave Anderson, who was a great expert on Kenyan politics. That's how I ended up in Kenya. And obviously then, I've essentially been following Kenyan politics

as closely as I can ever since. So I think there's a lot of serendipity and a lot of luck, as well as some kind of crucial turning points that maybe we could point back to. In the introduction of your book, Democracy in Africa, you write on page one the following, and I quote, those who depict sub-Saharan Africa as a hopeless continent are often unaware that the region contains two countries that have enjoyed uninterrupted multi-party politics since independence, Botswana and

Mauritius. Indeed, states in which elections have not led to civil conflict or political disorder are typically overlooked in favour of cases in which the body count makes for more eye-catching headlines. Why, in your opinion, do people view Africa as a hopeless continent?

Well, that line, of course, Hopeless Continent, I was notorious because it was put on the front cover of The Economist magazine. And so one reason why I used that particular term is to evoke that front cover, which I think caused some consternation and some controversy when it was used. In some ways, I think it's understandable. I think we see the media in general rushing to cover conflict

more quickly than they cover peace. It's the thing that will be more absorbed and more desired by audiences around the world, and there's a kind of motor there of public appetite and the need to you know, get column inches and the need to secure advertising that we understand in the media. I think in the African context that's often overlaid with, you know, a relatively limited understanding

of Africa. Often certain stereotypes are inherited from colonial rule, some of them racist, many of them misleading, that compounds that sense of the media searching for those stories. And so it's often true that you'll see that even really good pieces on Africa that are more nuanced, that are more reflective, won't be the ones that get most shared on

social media and devoured. So I think it's a broad combination of the kind of ranges of information and media that have been produced over the years, the stereotypes that they've generated, and then the kind of competitive nature of media reporting. All of that has generated quite a misleading understanding of what happens. Now that's of course not to say that a lot of those stories aren't true. I mean there are countries that have experienced horrible wars horrible conflict.

There were a lot of countries in which democracy has struggled to get off the ground. But that is only one side of the coin, and that other side of the coin is really important.

Not only because it's important to understand those countries in Africa as well, and a lot of the lenses that we're given traditionally—conflict, ethnic politics, neopatrimonialism—don't help as much in those countries, but also because I think if we want to reverse and decolonize how Africa is understood, those stories are really important for challenging those assumptions and those oversimplifications.

On page 11 of your book, under a subheading neo-patrimonial rule, you write the following, and I quote, it has become a cliché to note that one of the barriers to establishing democracy and strong states in Africa is the prevalence of neopatrimonial rule, yet

the term is often misunderstood and misapplied. Neopatrimonialism is not simply a synonym for corruption, rather it refers to the collision between pre-existing patrimonial forms of political organization and the modern colonial state. Nic, Please define for us, in a language an ordinary person can clearly understand,

the true meaning of democracy. And why, with special reference to recent protests in Kenya, does a clear understanding of neopatrimonial rule help us better appreciate challenges facing democracy in Africa? Wow Stephen, that's four massively difficult questions in one sentence. So that's a big challenge you're laying down for me here, but I'll try and meet it and do you justice.

When it comes to democracy, obviously we all have a slightly different understanding and a different belief about what democracy is and should be. Some people would give us a very sort of limited definition. They would say, you know, free and fair elections to select the government. Other people would use the famous, you know, one-liner, government of the people, for the people, etc. We would have a number of different sort of very limited

definitions like that. Others then, of course, if we were to think classically about people like Alexis de Tocqueville and others, would put in there not just a kind of political equality, in other words, one person, one vote, but more than that, a kind of understanding that democracy needs to be underpinned by a degree of social equality. That if one man is rich enough to be able to buy another man, democracy is never going to function

well. And so particularly in the European variation, there's often a thinking that democracy is not just one person, one vote. It's also about a certain level of social and economic inequality which enables that system to work and that set of things together constitutes democracy. The other thing that I think is important to consider is whether or not we believe that democracy should protect

the Rights of minorities. So on the one hand you could have a majoritarian version of democracy that says whatever the majority want goes. That's one version of democracy.

Or you could say that democracy is actually fundamentally about creating a system of checks and balances that prevents anybody within a country from being manipulated for the ends of other people, and protects the Rights of citizens of different genders, of different sexualities, and of different minorities, and that we understand therefore democracy in a sense as a kind of system

of protection. Where I would be personally, and it's not where anyone else necessarily has to be, but my vision for democracy is that bigger vision, that vision that delivers a degree of social equality, that vision that protects the Rights of minorities. To me, when we think of democracy, we think of what we want democracy to achieve, for me, democracy is valuable because of how it does those things. So I would be in favor of strong checks and balances to protect

minorities and other groups. I would be in favor of a democracy that is focused on trying

to bring about a certain kind of social equality. And I would be someone who would say that if we went and saw a democracy that neither protected those Rights or created a situation in which there was a degree of social equality that we would then be talking about a very poor quality democracy or not a democracy at all. So you asked then a second question, and your second question related to neopatrimonialism.

Now, I say in the book, and in other work I've done in a 2018 book for Cambridge University Press on Institutions and Democracy in Africa, one of the things I say there is that there's been too much use of the term neopatrimonialism in studies of Africa. It's been, in many ways, the dominant framework through which people have seen Africa academically for

a long period of time. And the idea of neopatrimonialism is roughly this, that you have a kind of set of political cultures that are rooted around say ethnicity or the charisma and family position and ties of a particular leader and their location within a community and that those ties and that way of thinking about power is not about elections or a meritocratic bureaucracy. It's about, for example, it might be something that connects more to

the idea of monarchic rule. In other words, kings and queens or chiefs and traditional leaders. You have your position by the way that you were born into it within society, not necessarily because you were chosen by the people. So the idea in neopetrimonialism is that that's one way of organizing power

in politics. Another way is what we might think of as the kind of modern state, where you have a centralized bureaucracy, people are promoted on the basis of meritocracy, the best people get the jobs at the top, and you have the government selected on the basis of free and fair elections in which every individual votes on the basis of their own self-interest, and everyone gets an individual ballot. It's not a group recognising a leader

because of how they were born. It's a set of individuals voting for their favourite candidate in a competitive process. The idea of neopatrimonialism, the central thesis, is that colonial government attempted to implement in Africa this modern, bureaucratic, meritocratic, election-based state. Although, of course, colonial government itself was very repressive and often didn't introduce forms of political participation until the

very end of the colonial period. But that the state that was introduced at the end of the colonial government and was supposed to govern independent Africa would look like

this. That was the vision. but it didn't work, it didn't take, you might say, because it was not consistent with or complementary to the existing set of understandings and beliefs of people within society, and that effectively those formal institutions were wiped away didn't work as intended because people operated on the basis of these other more traditional patrimonial values and forms

of politics. In other words, the leader of the country wasn't checked by Parliament, wasn't checked by the judiciary, wasn't voted in and out by citizens because that way that they gained their authority and the way that citizens understood their role was on the basis of a really different kind of political

logic. Now, what I argue in a lot of my work is that that idea often leads people to say that African politics doesn't have meaningful political institutions, that leaders operate without checks and balances, that we see a series of princes or philosopher kings or leaders who operate without constraint. And therefore, we can almost ignore the role of political institutions in the way that

we analyze politics in Africa. And actually, every time we've gone to look at it, you know, we see that the institutions that are in place matter in really important ways, whether we're talking about, you know, the legacy of a kind of French legal system or British legal system, whether we're talking about countries that operated one party states or military regimes, However, we're talking about systems that have more or less levels

of decentralization. All of these differences turn out to actually have quite significant importance for the way that politics actually operates today. So one of the things I consistently say to my students is, you know, it might not always be as easy to see exactly how institutions are shaping politics, but they are. And it's really important not to assume that all countries are neopatrimonial, or that this form of politics is equally true

across the continent. So just to give you one example, one of the things that sometimes happens out of a kind of neopatrimonial framework is that people will say, Ah well, because of neopatrimonialism we get weak institutions, because of weak institutions we get corruption, so all African states are really corrupt. But in reality we know that there are some states that have been historically much less

corrupt. Botswana would be a good example, despite having diamond wealth, has historically been much less corrupt, historically been much less neopatrimonial than other countries which fit the model better. So again, the danger of that model is that if we apply it in a one-size-fits-all way, we do a lot of violence to the flexibility of the variation and the different experiences of different countries in Africa. The final bit of your question brings us to Kenya and the protests

that we've seen. And there, of course, I

think what you could say is that, in a sense, we do see a bit of a clash between the demand of people for democracy and accountability and a government that delivers and a system that, in some ways, still is operating on the basis of some of those neopatrimonial logics. So we, in a sense, have the clash between the two, not neopatrimonialism completely dominating against other forms of politics, but actually the interaction and competition

between those. Why do I say that? Well, one of the things we obviously saw in Kenya where we had youth-led protests was Kenyans coming out, very many young Kenyans coming out across ethnic lines to demand that their government do a number of things better. One, tackle

corruption and reduce corruption. Two, get rid of the finance bill, which was very upsetting for a lot of people because it significantly increased a range of taxes and they'd already had a number of fees increased by the government. So the cost of living was getting much higher.

But there were also complaints, you know, among the protesters about, you know, different kinds of government failures over many years, failure of government to invest economic funds and loans well, a tendency, you know, to focus too much on the position of the president and not to have good enough quality people in terms of cabinet secretaries, cabinet ministers, in other words, and so on. So there were a range of different complaints

that were there. And many of those complaints related to, in one way or another, complaints about lack of inclusion in politics and about accountability. So you could read a lot of those complaints as being a bottom-up demand from younger people for a better quality democracy to deliver them better quality development and economics. And that was the kind of challenge that was being pushed on, a system that has failed to deliver, partly

because it still has a lot of those elements of patrimonial politics operating at the top. One of the things I think is really interesting coming out of that Kenyan experience is, to what extent are we going to see more of that in the next 10 years? We know that African countries have very large youth populations. We know that we have processes of urbanization that are bringing people together. across ethnic lines, we know that we see significant improvements in education in a number of

different African countries. So one of the things I'm really interested in is, is that changing the way that citizens think about themselves and the state? Is it changing the way they think about what the government delivers to them and owes them? And is it changing the way they're thinking about how

they want to engage politically? In other words, are we going to see a new group of young people in urban areas operating not on the basis of their ethnic identity and voting for their ethnic leader, but for the person who will deliver on their particular agenda? And are we going to see them being more assertive and more demanding of government in ways that push accountability and reduce

corruption? Now that would be a really exciting prospect, but of course, you know, we've only really seen one round of protests in Kenya. There were maybe some echoes of those protests in Nigeria and Uganda, but they were driven by very different forces as well. So I think one of the big questions for me for the next 12 months is, was the Kenyan experience a one-off or is it actually a structural change that we will start to see playing out in a growing number of countries?

Speaking of democracy in Africa, You write on page 19 of your book the following, and I quote, the average African country is at least twice as diverse as New York or London.

And the number of small ethnic groups in countries such as the DRC, Nigeria, and Uganda would have made it impossible to design polities that would have been both ethnically homogeneous and large enough to be viable It's therefore unsurprising that African states grouped together a range of different communities with a little sense of a common identity and that subsequent intercommunal relations were often characterized more by mutual suspicion

than by a sense of solidarity. Is it true that the colonial powers believed in the idea of tribe and the Africans gave them tribes to believe in? And how critical is tribal identity in modern African politics, where the idea of democracy is a pressing issue? That's a fantastic question. It's also another challenging one. So let me see if I can now rise to the challenge. I think it's a really good point that we need to think very carefully about the question of how were states designed

and how were national borders drawn. and then the question of the implications of that for the present day. One of the points I'm trying to make there in the book is that people will often say, well, the colonial government created this problem by, for example, drawing arbitrary borders that didn't make sense, that created countries of a number of different ethnic groups in the same place.

And that's true, and there are many things we can lay the blame at the doors of colonialism and I've written about the way that forms of European colonialism predisposed African states to what I've called a form of fragile

authoritarianism. But it's also true, as you were pointing out there in that quote, that actually in many countries we see a high number of ethnic groups, and that in order to design countries that were mono-ethnic, in other words, that only had one ethnic community in them, you would have had to create hundreds and hundreds more states, many of which would have been landlocked, many of which would have been too small to actually be feasible in terms of producing

economically enough to sustain themselves. The challenge of creating effective political systems and building political relations between ethnic groups is not one that can be resolved by designing new borders. It has to be dealt with another way. And that brings me to the question of how people have

tried to manage ethnicity and the implications of that. Now I think it is true that colonial governments believed in tribes. They tended to have quite racist assumptions about peoples and to have assumptions about the hierarchy of peoples. And they would often assume that groups that looked whiter or looked more European in one way or another would potentially be closer to Europeans, and in their racist worldview, those would be closer allies than people who didn't, and so on. So they did

believe in tribes. They believed in the idea of people who had been in the same tribe for hundreds of years, millennia. And they constructed forms of government on that basis. And in doing so, they institutionalized a lot of the differences between groups, a lot of the differences between different people who spoke different languages, as a result of those assumptions. In many cases, we know those assumptions were not true. We know that actually there were communities

that often intermarried. We know that identity shifted. We know that in some cases, for example, people spoke different languages, that sometimes languages were not actually barriers. That in some cases, different groups spoke the same language or aspects of the

same language. we know that there was quite a lot of migration and mobility around in pre-colonial Africa, and that traditional leaders who were, for example, too repressive, or seemed to be too abusive, or seemed not to offer any protection to people, often experienced people migrating and leaving their territories in search for other areas.

And because Africa, in that situation, if we go back now to the 1700s and 1800s, was a continent in which we had vast amounts of land and at that point not as many people, that this kind of form of migration was a way of escaping from authoritarian, dictatorial thought systems in some cases. So the reality on the ground was much more complex, much more fluid, much more nuanced. but the colonial

government fixed that in many cases. Classic examples, of course, being in countries like Rwanda, creating identity cards that would state people's identity and ethnic group

on them. Or, for example, in Zambia, Daniel Posner has shown only translating key educational or religious materials into so many languages, which essentially then means that people need to use those languages if they want to gain access to those education and those resources, or risk being left behind and so all of a sudden you see a significant shift in the sorts of languages that people

are speaking. So colonial governments really, through creating a more rigid system, enabled the strengthening of ethnicity and tribe. Now, again, this is an important point of terminology. Colonial governments would have

referred to tribes. Some African citizens today refer to tribes, but often academics and researchers prefer to refer to ethnic groups because tribe has colonial connotations, and using the term ethnicity and ethnic group is a way of sort of signaling that you understand that to an extent, you know, tribe is an inventive, created term that is deeply contested. Now, you asked a particular point there about to what extent did colonial governments believe in tribes and Africans gave them tribes to

believe in. And there is a great degree of that. There's really important research by people like Leroy Vale and others who suggest that there's a lot of local entrepreneurialism in this period. I've been in the archive in Kenya, in the National Archive, and seen letters from different ethnic groups asking to have a paramount chief recognized by the colonial government because they believe that that's going to be a way of extracting

more resources. So in other words, communities that didn't necessarily always historically recognize a paramount chief, didn't recognize a central authority, weren't classic tribes in that sense, trying to become more like that because that's the avenue of securing

more resources. So one of the things we see during the colonial period is this kind of creative co-production of the idea of a tribe as a political unit in a way that in many countries didn't really exist beforehand, but of course in some countries had done. And so that's the sort of legacy that colonial government leaves for post-colonial Africa. Now, the extent to which that legacy remains

is partly about the extent to which post-colonial governments have played upon those divisions,

have played divide and rule politics. So classic examples here would be to compare, say, Tanzania where historically, under Julius Nyerere, the first president of Tanzania, you had a situation where there was a strong emphasis on national culture, on the use of Swahili as a lingua franca, on certain common symbols that could bring people together, a focus on teaching civic education, and therefore creating the idea that there were Tanzanians, not people of different ethnic

groups, and that being a very strong focus throughout Nyerere's time in power. Then you could compare that to somewhere like Kenya, where under Jomo Kenyatta you have more of a survival of the fittest model. Ethnic groups are expected to look after themselves. The state doesn't provide so much. There's less of a focus on building a cohesive national identity, and you see ethnic competition ravine politics over resources.

Those two different ways of managing ethnicity create very different types of societies. In Tanzania, ethnicity is much easier to manage, doesn't play such a central role in politics, doesn't create so many divisions, hasn't been a source of election violence. And in the Kenyan context, all of those things

have come to pass. So we see, in other words, the ways in which leaders manage ethnicity and manage different ethnic groups is really important to the extent to which ethnicity continues to be a major driver in African

politics today. Now, one of the things that's then maybe worth saying just at the end of that is that one of the sad things about identity politics, which can be quite divisive and can generate instability and conflict, is that it doesn't tend to take that much to mobilize that into politics, to get people to be afraid of each other, to get people to be suspicious. But it takes a long time

to get it out. In other words, if you have an episode of ethnic violence, if you have an episode of a leader of one group demonizing another, it then can often take quite a long time to actually be able to mobilize that out of politics in order to be able to actually go back to a situation in which those tensions and those divisions are much less pronounced.

And that's one of the great challenges I think we're still facing, that even in countries where governments that play divide and rule have been replaced, it takes a long time and really strong proactive policies to reintegrate people and to build back that sense of a more harmonious, consensual national identity.

In chapter three of your book, where you turn your gaze on transition, you write on page 91 the following, and I quote, in contrast to Kenya and Tongo, The independence of political institutions in South Africa had not been wholly undermined by neopatrimonial politics. Of course, power was abused and apartheid, and the regime was often closed and opaque, with the secretive Afrikaner Broederbond, also known as Afrikaner Brotherhood, wielding

great influence behind the scenes. But South African leaders operated under real constraints. Nic, how significant are independent institutions to political transition? That is, the peaceable transfer of power from one leader to the next. And what is your recommendation for fostering such institutions in support of democracy in Africa?

So yeah, institutions are critical, 100% 47 new counties with directly elected governors critical to the ability to actually manage a transition from one government to the next, to the ability to constrain leaders. It's all about those institutions. So do we have strong legislature? Do we have a strong and independent judiciary? Do we have a strong and independent electoral commission? But of course, The fact that you have those institutions and that they're strong and independent also

depends on a number of other factors. So for example, do we have strong public support for those institutions that protects them if the government decides to try and manipulate them? Do we see, as we were talking about a moment ago, the attempt to subvert those institutions by using patrimonial strategies and so on? So aspects of political culture, aspects of social norms come in here as well.

But yes, absolutely. The most important factor here to look at, in my opinion, is the extent to which those institutions are independent. and can therefore check the power of the government in a genuine way. And where we see that that's the case, transfers of power become much more feasible. And where transfers of power are much more feasible, you start to see, for example, competitive politics, the breakdown of the ability of one party and one leader to dominate politics. And

that's a really good thing in general. In general, in African countries, we see leaders who stay in power for longer becoming more corrupt, becoming more likely to manipulate elections, less likely to deliver to their people. So being able to get rid of a leader when he's performing badly, even if the next leader doesn't perform great themselves, is still a benefit over having to have that leader be there and become president for

life. And of course, one of the really worrying things we've seen over the last 20 years is an increased number of presidents trying to set themselves up as presidents for life, for example, by removing presidential term limits in the case of people like Yoweri Museveni in Uganda, removing age limits as well as term limits to make sure that they can stay effectively until they die in office. So those institutions are absolutely critical. How do we build them and foster them and

strengthen them? That's one of the big multi-million dollar questions. If we could answer that easily and effectively, we could transform the state of democracy around the world. One of the challenges we face is that building good institutions is one of the most difficult things that there is to do. So one of the things that we really need to think about is how do we creatively create stronger institutions in countries where they don't exist Right

now. And that's really difficult, you know, we have to be very clear about how big a challenge that is. We have seen it done though in recent times in some African countries, I would say that the Judiciary in Malawi is stronger than it was 30 years ago and has been emboldened, for example, to reject the election result in 2019, becoming one of the only courts in the world to reject

the election of a sitting president. The Kenyan Supreme Court, of course, before the Malawian one, set that precedent in 2017 in validating that election. And we see in Kenya that in response to post-election violence and a political crisis that challenged the legitimacy of the regime in 2007-2008, we then get the political elite accepting a new constitution which introduces devolution,

and senators. We see the creation of that Supreme Court, and we see a process of judicial vetting that actually vets many of the judges and removes some of the worst offenders from the previous regimes in terms of corruption and bias in decision making. And so we get a judiciary and a Supreme Court, that the people have more confidence in, which then enables that judiciary to nullify the election in 2017 and to take the wrath of the government, which was deeply unimpressed and unhappy

about that decision. So in a country like Kenya, despite all the challenges that I talked about earlier when I talked about the problems in the government of President Ruto and the protests of young people, If in a context like that, that difficult, that challenging, we can see significant institutional innovation, the creation of new institutions such as devolution in the Supreme Court, processes of cleaning up those institutions that have actually meant that they perform

better. They're not ideal. There are still challenges to the way that devolution works, to the way that the judiciary works. But that clear improvement and progress demonstrates that this is possible. I think the question then for a lot of us is, what are the exact conditions that enable that to come about?

In the Kenyan context, perhaps, it was the political elite realizing the extent to which they brought the country to the brink, that men accept a constitution that perhaps they wouldn't have accepted otherwise, combined maybe with the fact that the president of the time, Mwai Kibaki, was in his second term in office, and therefore wasn't standing for election again, and therefore was willing to introduce reforms that would bind future

leaders but would not bind himself. And perhaps those two things were particularly important. Now, of course, that's a really interesting conflation of events that enabled the institutional strengthening to happen in Kenya. The challenge is that we don't see those things a lot of the time. And of course, we don't want to see one of them. We don't want to see the conflict and the instability. that we saw in Kenya. So how do we actually bring about those changes in countries where we don't

see that violence? Well, going back to what I was saying before, one thing that does seem to be really important is that these kind of changes are often more likely to be brought in by a president who's leaving power and doesn't plan on being there forever. President Kibaki in the Kenyan context. So perhaps one of the things again that that takes us back to is the importance of defending presidential term limits and having leaders who know that at a certain point they won't

be in office. And that then generates a greater opportunity in the final period of those leaders being in office to generate the kind of reforms that would actually strengthen and make more independent electoral commissions and judiciaries moving forwards. Turning to chapter four of your book, entitled Exporting Elections, International Actors

and the Era of Democratic Dependency. You're Right on page 109, thus, and I quote, following decades of failed interventions around the world, European and North American donors were desperate for a success story by presenting Uganda as a client guinea on which international aid programs could be tested, Museveni offered donors a chance to show that their policies would have worked if only they had been implemented

correctly. Thus, Museveni committed his government to talking about and tackling HIV-AIDS at a time when most African governments were refusing to recognize and respond to the danger posed by the pandemic. He also embraced the advice of IMF and World Bank, accepting economic liberalization as the price of preventing political liberalization. Please talk to us about why the donor community felt compelled

to put their relationship with Museveni above the need to democratize Uganda's political landscape. And do you think Western donors were naive about Museveni, with special reference to an open secret that is his long-running project to create a presidential monarchy in Uganda?

I think donors both European and North American donors at the time felt that they needed a success story, somewhere they could point to that was doing well, partly in order to show that their programs could be effective, partly because demonstrating that aid could work helped to make the case for aid back home. And of course, one of the challenges for donors is to justify why scarce resources should be spent abroad rather than on taxpayers needs domestically. So that's a factor that

was playing in. I think Museveni also carefully manipulated Uganda's history of instability and conflict to tell donors that there would be more instability and violence if they forced him to democratize too quickly. And that was perhaps another factor in the back of donors' mind, that they didn't want to force a process and therefore generate instability and then be responsible for the instability

that resulted. I think there's also a fact that Museveni has just been very clever at manipulating people's perceptions of him. We roll the videotape forwards a little bit from the period I was describing there to

the more recent period. He's gone from being willing to be one of the only African leaders to talk about HIV-AIDS to now being a leader who has supported, for example, international missions in other countries by providing Ugandan troops in situations where actually those missions have ended up being fairly dependent on Ugandan troops. He's also been a supporter of Western policies and programs

around anti-terror operations. And again, in all of those ways, he's consistently ingratiated himself with governments around the world. And that has then led them to mute their criticism of him. Did he fool them? I'm not sure he necessarily always fooled them. I think in some cases they understood who they were dealing with and they made trade-offs. They traded off Ugandan democracy against

stability, development, and so on. I think perhaps where they made the biggest mistakes was, as you say, to one, fail to understand what would happen in the end, which is that Uganda's economy would begin to struggle, that Museveni would end up lacking genuine innovation, that his desire to be a president for life would stop political change and therefore prevent economic revitalization, and that Museveni would become a big part of the problem rather than the solution.

I think they also perhaps failed to understand how strategic Museveni was and how he would very quickly abandon them if it was in his interest to do so. And of course, one of the things we've seen in the last couple of years is Museveni increasingly distancing himself from his former Western allies and increasingly talking positively about governments like the one in Russia. So I think this is

unique to Uganda. Uganda was a particularly good example of this process, but it's something that we've seen in other countries as well, where, for example, Rwanda would be a good example, where the British government until recently had a plan to send refugees to Rwanda, which then led the British government to have to imply that Rwanda was safe. And of course, that flies in the face of some of the advice the British government itself

has received and given over the years. So this kind of process of leaders understanding,

Paul Kagame and Rwanda being very good at this as well, how to impress donors, claiming to be good on performance, then meeting donor priorities in terms of whether it's refugees, migration, economic policy, security, and then using that to essentially insulate themselves from global criticism for the lack of democracy, that's something that we've seen in a number

of different places. I think the most striking example of it for me is that in Uganda, when we've seen significant human Rights abuses, so the arrest of Bobi Wine when he's an opposition candidate in the election, the arrest of Kizza Besigye before Bobi Wine as the main opposition candidate, you know, the brutality that was meted out to Bobby Wine supporters at the last election, many of whom, you know, were beaten, some were killed, some were tortured, some we still don't know what happened

to them, that there wasn't a stronger, more powerful, you know, international outcry about those abuses which were just flagrant explicit, there for everybody to see, not in any way disguised. And that really is a problematic situation, not just because it lets down people in Uganda, who want to see a better quality democracy, more accountability, more inclusion, but also because it sends a signal around the world that the international

community is not acting consistently. And I think that evidence of hypocrisy and inconsistency is one of the things that gives ammunition to authoritarian leaders. It's one of the things that they now point to as evidence that people shouldn't listen to international and Western criticism when it comes to democracy. Because they will say, they're talking about democracy here, but did you notice that they didn't do it in Saudi Arabia? Did you notice

they didn't do it in Uganda? Did you notice they didn't do it you know, and the examples might go on to include Gaza and the Middle East and so on. And that sense of inconsistency and hypocrisy is slowly eroding any moral high ground Western states, you know, may

have once had. So I think Uganda is a really good example, not just of how those competing priorities can play off and undermine the promotion of democracy in an individual country, but also how that process can then complicate the credibility of Western donors when it comes to promoting democracy and development more broadly.

The title of our podcast is How Critical is Democracy in a Multipolar World? Now, on March 27th, 2024, Nic Westcott, a professor of diplomacy at Soares University, London, published a comment on your website, Democracy in Africa, entitled, As the Opposition Wins in Senegal, Is Democracy in Africa Really Backsliding? He wrote the following, and I quote, In 2023, Xi Jinping launched China's Global Civilizations Initiative, its Global Development Initiative, and a Global Security

Initiative. Like the old Belt and Road Initiative, these are designed to reorient the world towards China, in this case ideologically rather than physically. While their substance remains vague, The initiatives provide an alternative to the Western norms embodied in the UN, its multilateral institutions, and the multiple charters and agreements

promulgated under its auspices. They are an integral part of efforts to reframe the debate from one of democracy versus authoritarians to the global South and its reliable friends in the global East versus neo-colonialist exploitative West. The latter narrative is gaining traction in Africa, boosted by the Gaza crisis, where Western countries are often seen hypocritically as quick to condemn Hamas, but slow to criticize the huge death toll Israel has inflicted on Palestinian

civilians. Nic, in the context of our podcast theme, How critical is democracy in a multipolar world? Do you also think that democracy may one day flourish on the continent of Africa? Put another way, are there any bad democracies? I think there are. And I'm broadly speaking optimistic about the future of Africa. And the reason for that is partly what we talked about a moment ago when we talked about what

we've seen recently in Kenya. We see young people who have been brought up with elections, who are used to being able to choose who's in power. And let's not forget that Kenya has had two transfers of power. We could quibble over whether President Ruto winning was a real transfer because he was deputy president before. But We've essentially had two elections in which the candidate the

president wanted to win didn't win. So we've got countries like that, that people are starting to get used to having a say, Malawi, Zambia, where people are used to being able to vote out the president, Gambia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and where the belief in being able to speak your mind and being able to choose your leader is very powerful. and

very vibrant. And I think in those societies leaders can try and shut that down, they can try and intimidate civil society, they can try and intimidate the media, but that impulse of wanting to have a say and expecting to have a say in politics will continue.

And so I think one thing we'll see in the authoritarian states of Africa, for example the new military hunters after the coups in West Africa, But also, you know, some of those authoritarian states in southern and eastern Africa is that they will continue to face significant challenges because people in those countries want to live in a democracy. And we know that. We know that from the Afrobarometer

data. So broadly speaking, I am positive and hopeful that long term processes of education, economic growth, rising middle class, urbanization will create stronger opportunities to foster that impulse and to turn it into more democratic

institutions and processes. I'm also aware though that that's going to be a very long-term process and the governments and leaders will try and manipulate it, they will try and manipulate how urbanization works, they will try and move citizens around the country to prevent the formation of pro-opposition or pro-democracy urban blocs and we will see support from China and Russia in some cases enabling authoritarian states to commute human Rights abuses and so it's going to

be a long-term process and a long-term struggle. But I do believe that over the longer term, that struggle in the very long term will lead to a more democratic set of societies, because I believe fundamentally that that's

what people in those societies want. In terms of the situation globally, I think you're absolutely Right about the points you make about the West and the way that the West is seen to be hypocritical, and the way that that then plays into a kind of language of decolonization and of the role of the West in colonizing and human Rights abuses and so on. All of that comes together as a very powerful package which is well used by, for example, the Russian government and its allies.

I do think, though, in time that one of the things that people will start to see is that

the Russian government is very similar. That we actually will start to see, for example, people in West Africa whose governments are now in league with Russia and for whom their resources are being exploited both to keep governments in power and to satisfy the demands of Russia, will start to see Russia in a similar way that they previously saw France as actually part of the problem sustaining authoritarian and unresponsive governments,

rather than as a form of solidarity. So it's not in that sense that I'm much overly optimistic about people coming back to Western governments and once again realigning themselves that

way. It's more in terms of my optimism that I think people will become much more critically aware of the problems of engaging with Russia and China in the way that some countries have been and that that will then lead to another backlash and one of the things that that will do is bring people back to the idea that actually, you know, being too much in debt to any global power is an unhelpful position and that they need to take control

of their own political systems. And as I say, that what they want in most cases from the survey data we have is to be able to make those systems more democratic and more inclusive and more accountable. As democracy totters in a multipolar world, what keeps you up at night?

Almost everything, Stephen, especially as I get older, almost everything keeps me up from my own aches and pains all the way through to what we've seen over the last 10 years. We've seen a rise in digital manipulation. We've seen rising authoritarian innovation.

We've seen greater influence from authoritarian states, whether we're talking about Turkey, Iran, China, Russia, you know, a much broader range of states than people often recognize, you know, all the way through to the new mechanisms that are being used to manipulate civil society, the spread of anti NGO legislation, you know, in the wake of Russia's foreign

agent law. there are so many things that keep me awake at night and i do think the situation we face globally is much more challenging now than it even was ten fifteen years ago so despite my kind of broad optimism of the longer term i'm also very worried about all of these short term struggles and i think one of the things that you know those of us who care about and are interested in democracy and equality and fairness and freedom you know need to do is to come together to make

sure that everybody is aware of how great the challenge is and that that longer term more inclusive more peaceful and prosperous future is only going to be possible if we actually start to see real mobilization of pro-democratic forces around the world. And finally Nic please advise our listeners where they may find your book Democracy in Africa. You're very kind Stephen. Well people could find that book Democracy in Africa and also

a newer book How to Rig an Election. They're in all good bookstores but particularly you could find them on Amazon. Many of my chapters and my journal articles I make freely available on a website called ResearchGate so if you go to Nic Cheeseman on ResearchGate you can get a lot of my information and publications for free. And I try and make that as accessible as possible. So please head there. I'd also head to any good bookstore and you should

be able to get a copy of those books. And thank you very much for an interesting conversation. Dr. Nic Cheeseman, thank you very much for being a guest on this podcast. This podcast was brought to you by the Kamugasa Challenge in partnership with Democracy in Africa. Democracy in Africa is a platform dedicated to building a bridge between academics, policymakers, practitioners and citizens. We dedicate this podcast to this podcast episode to the Right Reverend Dr Alan Wilson, the former Bishop

of Buckingham. Thanks to his willingness to take risks as a leader, he put himself forward to play the guinea pig and help launch conversations with Stephen Kamugasa as a first guest. the Right Reverend Dr. Alan Wilson died suddenly and unexpectedly on February 17th, 2024. We are taking a short break and we'll resume service in the new year with a brand new series on leadership. The first episode in the leadership series is entitled, Why Great Leadership Will Make

You Question Everything. An interview with Ms Sally Percy, an experienced business journalist and editor who specializes in writing about leadership and management. The podcast will go live on February 10th, 2025. If you enjoyed this podcast, please support us by subscribing to Conversation with Stephen Kamugasa through your favorite podcast app. Thank you very much for taking the time to listen to this podcast. Until next time, goodbye.