Confronting democratic recession in West Africa: Role of media

The first part of the keynote address at the opening of the 2022 Edition of the West Africa Media Excellence Conference and Awards (WAMECA), organised by the Media Foundation for West Africa, 18-19 October, 2022, Alisa Hotel, Accra, was published yesterday, October 24, 2022.

It is recognised that political conditions, developments and their manifestations may not appear the same in all our countries.

However, all of our countries running on multiparty systems share in common the key features of the ‘democracy capture’.

These key characteristics involve: Under a façade, a screen, of popular support, there is a distortion of democratic politics so that the system favours an elite with privileges over the majority of the population; the elites maintain a stranglehold over state institutions and resources, and by so doing dominate society, leading to weakening democratic institutions, poor quality governance and social and economic backwardness; the elite promote decline of democratic institutions by preventing the creation of a political culture that sustains democratic principles, institutions and processes; cronyism, such as the promotion or appointment of unqualified allies of the executive; or nepotism, such as the appointment of family and ethnic members into offices of responsibility; control over state-owned enterprises by ruling or incumbent party leadership for rewarding party loyalists with appointments to management and other positions.

This facilitates providing jobs exclusively to party members, and serves as channels of directing funds from state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to party coffers for election campaigns.

On a daily basis, ‘Democracy Capture’ involves weakening, compromise and corruption of the rule of law and fosters a culture of impunity whereby people close to power or who benefit from the privileges of power are not prosecuted or punished when they breach the law. According to the study, the concept ‘state capture’ is a subset of the broader phenomenon of ‘democracy capture’.

And the processes involve a nexus of the same actors, namely: the president and close family members; top leadership of the ruling party, and sometimes together with the leadership of the opposition parties; religious leaders; a cabal of business people; and in some countries big chiefs and traditional leaders.

The process, which ends up hollowing out the essence of democracy, involves control of the electoral process by capturing the elections management body.

These elites take control of political parties, the judiciary and sections of the civil society. The executives co-opt and manipulate the legislature, turning it into a rubber stamp which they use to approve presidential nominees, approve international loans and agreements, and approve dubious bills.

In some extreme cases, executives have used such a caricature of legislature to overturn constitutionally mandated presidential term or age limits. It has been observed by other African scholars that: “In the contemporary world, multiparty political systems are generally regarded as the most reliable systems for the promotion, development and institutionalisation of democracy.

The multiparty model lies at the heart of the tradition of modern liberal democracy. Its central advantage is that, in modern capitalist society, it permits the co-existence of contrastive and openly competitive views of how social life should be ordered without suffocating relatively inferior constituencies.

It is the structure, par excellence, of political pluralism in modern bourgeois society. While it certainly has weaknesses, on balance, the multiparty system has more to offer us today than any other system we currently have in use.

The masses of Africans, acknowledging the values of multiparty system of governance, struggled for constitutional reforms.

Today, however, the ruling elites in our countries are working hard to betray this trust.

For, it is the political parties and their leaderships that are the principal enablers of ‘democracy capture’, with rampaging corruption borne of insatiable greed and abject disdain for patriotic feeling towards their countries and peoples.

It is becoming clearer and clearer by the day that, as the Centre for Democratic Development (CDD) study sums up, today’s “political leaders have an ambiguous commitment to democracy”. Today’s political parties are not founded on ideas of democracy.

If they expressed such ideas at all at their founding, they have quickly abandoned all such ideals in favour of motives and schemes of self-enrichment and the material privileges of power by the leaders and their cronies in the nexus of social forces benefitting from the

‘Democracy capture’.

One African social scientist has observed that: “Too many African political parties are actually cliques and aggregations of personalities. Political philosophy and ideology is kept on short rations. Dispute and debate in the absence of ideas and philosophically grounded positions degenerate invariably into personality squabbles. Political positions are frequently based on patron-client relations, with the clients serving at the beck and call of the political grand patron.”

Instead of serving as organisations for the mobilisation of people to promote democracy and development, the parties today are, by and large, becoming liabilities in that direction.

What often makes the situation seem doomed is that, from country to country, it is rare to encounter factions within political parties striving to reform their organisations to restore in them ideas and ideals of democracy and social progress.

How does it manifest in the media realm; how does the media fare under these conditions; the state of the media today: media under democracy capture.

Media, democracy, recession

Now let us turn our attention to the core subject of our presentation, that is, the media and democracy recession. How do the media fare in the conditions of ‘democracy capture’? What is the state of the media and media/press freedom?

Do the media promote, resist or suffer from ‘democracy capture’? What can or must the media do to arrest, reverse, combat ‘democracy capture’ and contribute to a restoration of the values, principles and institutions of democracy.

The independence and freedom of the media are among the first targets of forces of authoritarianism and dictatorship. In order to perpetuate and maintain their control over society and democratic institutions, the capture of the media becomes an important factor in the processes of ‘democracy capture’.

In the case of the media, the main objective is to control and manipulate public opinion. The methods involve cooperation and repression, carrot and stick means, so to say. The leading political forces invest in their own media houses. Nowadays, the traditional form of party-owned media is generally out of fashion.

Wealthy party leaders and or their allies in business or in the media set up radio and television stations and newspapers. In a number of countries, through the control of media and communications regulatory bodies, ruling parties manipulate licensing processes to have monopoly control allocation of broadcasting facilities, for example.

By so doing, the political parties bastardise the essence of media pluralism and diversity, and downgrade professionalism, by tilting ownership to party propaganda interests.

Individual journalists of high standing are co-opted by appointment to boards and senior management positions in key state institutions or SOEs. Some are wooed by inclusion in government delegations to international conferences and fairs as incentives to favour ruling parties and governments.

Critical media and opposition voices are silenced by a plethora of means. Undemocratic but dormant laws on the statute books are raked up and applied.

New legislation ostensibly designed to protect the public, such as anti-cyber-crime and anti-terrorist laws, are recent examples.

Depriving obstinate critical media of government advertising is a common tool of punishment. On the other hand, channeling volumes of such advertising to particular media houses is a way of buying and maintaining control of editorial independence.

Above all, deployment of violence by state security and by militias and vigilante groups against political rivals and critical media organisations contribute to creating an environment of fear and a culture of silence, which smothers expression of viewpoints unpalatable to leaders of ruling parties and governments, their allies and cronies.