Michela Wrong

Africa’s election aid fiasco

It’ll take more than mobile phones and biometrics to make Africa’s elections fair and trusted

The development industry is as fashion-prone as any other. Fads come and go. There are a few giveaways when it comes to spotting them. Deceptive simplicity is one indication. The idea should have a silver-bullet quality, promising to cut through complexity to the nub of a problem. Even better, it should be a notion that can be rolled out across not just a country, but a region.

Covering the Kenyan elections, which climaxed with the inauguration last week of Uhuru Kenyatta as the country’s fourth president, I suddenly realised I was watching a fad hitting its stride: the techno-election as democratic panacea. We’ll see it again in Mali’s elections this summer.

Like most of these trends, it is premised on the best of intentions. Like many of them, sadly, it has the potential to create a fresh host of problems, wasting millions of dollars in donor funding, because it makes the classic mistake of confusing symptoms with causes.

When the Cold War ended in 1989, it was the beginning of the end for a generation of African Big Men propped up by Moscow and Washington. Multiparty elections hit the continent with a vengeance. What was delivered ended up being a lot less than promised. Dictators brazenly repackaged themselves as democrats and either effortlessly won many of these contests — owning the mass media and controlling the security forces helped — or else smoothly passed the baton to hand-picked acolytes.

But those days have passed. In a growing number of African countries, elections are bitter, close, and can actually end up overturning administrations. So the mechanisms of the polls themselves have come under unparalleled scrutiny, both from those bent on rigging and those determined to see some resemblance between public opinion and eventual outcome. Hence the technological craze. In Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Nigeria, Zambia, Malawi, Rwanda, Senegal, Somaliland and Ghana, electoral commissions have all recently introduced biometric technology — which recognises fingerprints and facial features — to draw up new electoral registers.

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