A week in posts

Verity

Angela Merckel doesn't want Obama giving a speech at the Brandenburg Gate. She says it's a national monument and not a backdrop for foreign electioneering.

Good for her!

Sam Akaki

Now Gordon Brown has also failed in Africa too, as expected.

Very few people must have seriously taken Mr Gordon Brown’s claims that Mugabe was more threatening to British and world peace and security than global warming, soaring food and oil prices, credit crunch, economic meltdown and teenage murders, which saw a record five young people dead in one day last Friday.

Yet, astonishingly, the only “tangible” success which Gordon Brown brough back from the G8 meeting in Hokkaido, Japan, was a deluded belief, which he told parliament, was that the G8 leaders had “unanimously” agreed to support a UN resolution imposing tough sanctions against the “criminal cabal” that now rule Zimbabwe.

Yesterday, China put that delusion to rest when their UN ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, said UN sanctions, as demanded by Mr Brown would have taken the UN beyond its mandate by "artificially elevating them to the level of a threat" to international peace and security.

But why should Mr Brown single out Zimbabwe, which he claims is ruled by criminal cabal for UN sanction as punishment for rigging election, which is routine across Africa?

Six month ago, in Kenya, President Mwai Kibaki changed the presidential poll figures and sparked off the worst violence since the Mao Mao rebellion of the 1950. Over 1500 people were killed and 600,000 displaced.

In April 2004, the outgoing president Olesgun Obasango said the election was a matter-of-life-and-death before handing power to his anointed successor, Mr Umaru Yar’Adua.

In October 2006 in the Republic of Congo, the presidential lection was decided in a bloody gun battles between the forces controlled by President Joseph Kabila and his vice president professor Pier Bemba. In November 2005, three months before the presidential elections in Uganda, president Museveni arrested his main challenger Dr Kizza Besigye and charged him with rape, terrorism and treason. And during the May 2005 elections in Ethiopia, government forces short and killed 140 opposition leaders and their supporters, and locked up over 100 members of Parliaments who had refused to take up their seats in parliament because of rigging and violence.

Is Mr Brown going to call for UN sanction on these countries next time the hold elections, which are also bound to be rigged followed by violence? Thankfully, he will not have to make the decision because he will not be Prime Minister.

In any event, it has taken the United Kingdom over 300 years to practice and perfect liberal democracy which we have in this country. Even after 300 years, Mr Brown recently won the vote on the 42 days detention without charge only by bribing the support of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP)

It is therefore foolish for Mr Brown to expect Africa, which is only 50 years old politically (Zimbabwe is 28 years) to have mastered imported western liberal democracy.

No amount of UN sanctions will impose western liberal democracy on Africa. Only a systematic and painstaking development of independent state institutions will. Currently, all over Africa, not in Zimbabwe, presidents are also the supreme institutions of state, personally controlling the judiciary, the army, police, prisons, state intelligence, the Central Bank, the civil service and the electoral commission in their respective countries. That is why they are able to steal fund, abuse human rights and rig elections with impounity

Sam Akaki
Democratic Institutions for Poverty Reduction in Africa (DIPRA, London