In 2004, sixteen multiparty elections--from Guinea-Bissau to South Africa and from Mozambique to Ghana--will be held across Africa. This year and for the foreseeable future, the African continent will probably account for a plurality of the elections held across the world. This is a remarkable development for the most impoverished continent in the world, where a substantial portion of the population lives below the global poverty standard of one dollar per day.

Indeed, for the first time--after a century of colonialism, the failed political experiments of the 1960s, the long period of authoritarian rule in the 1970s and 1980s, many of the six hundred and eighty million people of Africa have the possibility of designing their own political institutions to rule themselves. This truly momentous second independence is one of the great dramas of our time. If, in the long-term, the Africans are successful, the worldwide democratic community will be significantly enlarged, hundreds of millions of people will be empowered, the Muslim world will gain a significant number of democracies, and conflict between states may be significantly reduced. Failure would mean that dozens of political systems will continue to be destabilized, with all that implies for conflict, declines in the life chances of millions, and state failure. The stakes are extremely high.

I will focus on the opportunities and challenges posed by the wave of democratization that has swept across Africa since 1990. Many of my observations will be preliminary as these new political experiments are still very young and we lack first-hand empirical observations of how many of these systems work beyond the notations of election-day observers. And it should go without saying that Africa is a complex continent made up of more than forty countries which provide important exceptions to almost any generalizations.

The Fall of the Old Order

From the mid-1960s, when the political systems hurriedly adopted in the rush to decolonize began to fail, to the late 1980s, by far and away the most popular political system in Africa was the one-party or no-party state led by an authoritarian ruler who come to power through control of the single party or through a coup d’état. Indeed, in 1990, although Africa was considered a highly unstable continent, it had the longest ruling leaders on the continent. Nyerere, Houphouet-Boigny, Kaunda, Banda, Mobutu, Bongo, Eyadema, and others often had very problematic economic records but had managed to stay in power. Only four countries (Botswana, Gambia, Mauritius, and Senegal) managed to sustain multiparty systems for long periods of time. The first transition via elections in Africa occurred in the island country of Mauritius in 1982. It was not until 1990 that there was a transition via elections on the African continent.

It appeared in the late 1980’s that Africa was set for a long period of authoritarianism. Certainly, most of the academic literature, which I contributed to, focused on the weaknesses of the authoritarian state but did not believe that there would be systematic change in the type of regimes that characterized most African countries.

And then the Wall fell down. Between 1990 and 1994, thirty-one out of forty-one countries that had not had multiparty elections in the recent past held them.[1] Almost a dozen autocrats were voted out of office. Today, most countries have regularly scheduled elections and the de jure one-party state is almost extinct.

Nor was the dramatic fall of authoritarianism limited to elections, as consequential as they must be. There has, for instance, been a revolution in the media across much of Africa. In the late 1980s, most countries still had one or two government controlled newspapers and the state almost always had control of the broadcast spectrum for radio and television. Today, most countries have several privately owned newspapers, there is private television across much of the continent, most countries receive a wide variety of satellite news programs from Europe and America, and, most consequentially for Africa given widespread poverty and the rural base of much of the population, there are now some private radio stations.

The democratic revolution that has swept across Africa cannot, of course, be explained without reference to similar events across the world. Although the precise reasons for the collapse of authoritarianism vary, the following factors were present in most countries:

• The collapse of the Berlin Wall de-legitimized authoritarian rule and the soft African socialism that was the default ideology across much of the continent. For instance, the return of Tanzanian students from the East German ideological school in East Berlin because that country had gone out of business had a huge effect on Tanzania and East Africa generally.
  
• The economic failure of most African countries meant that, by the early 1990s, authoritarian regimes in some countries were not even able to pay their police and soldiers. As a result, when there were very nascent democratic protests against regimes, oftentimes the guardians of the state were driving taxis, growing corn on the side of the road, or more generally, not interested in protecting their masters. Equally important, the patronage networks that many authoritarian regimes had created in the 1970s and 1980s to stay in power began to crumble because the leaders had simply run out of money. (This is one of the reasons that forensic accounting so seldom finds the money that authoritarians steal. In the last years of their rule, they usually have run down the state so much that they have to invest their ‘own’ capital to stay in power).

In this regard, it is important to place emphasis on the failure of states rather than of the power of democratic movements. While there were certainly Africans everywhere who wished for democracy, the protests for democracy were still nascent when the states began to crumble because of the rulers’ own failures. To borrow from Hannah Arendt, African democrats did not so much seize power as find it lying in the streets.

In fact, the process of democracy creation and state failure in Africa are linked. Some states that failed still managed to segue to some kind of democratic moment because there were enough people to pick up the pieces and transform the regime. In other countries, including Somalia, the old regime fell but there was deadlock amongst the likely inheritors. As they fought amongst themselves, the state fell into complete disrepair.

• The particular example of South Africa was also vitally important to changing the environment for authoritarianism in Africa. The continent had, of course, been united in its condemnation of the abuses of the white minority regime. However, after F. W. De Klerk released Nelson Mandela in February 1990, many across Africa realized that the apartheid state was actually moving faster on democratization than their own countries.
  
• The international environment also changed, although direct western pressure for democratization is only a small part of the story. Most western political efforts in Africa in the early 1990s were expended on promoting economic reform. In many ways, the donors played catch-up throughout the decade given the surprising pace of African democratization. It was critical that the donors began changing the incentives for those who might challenge democratic regimes by stating that aid would no longer be given to those who overturned a regime that was popularly elected.
  
• Finally, there was significant pressure from a variety of African communities for democratization. In the early days, there is no doubt that the primary motivation was ‘to throw the bums out’ but the very preliminary polling evidence we have suggests that African populations generally are very supportive of democracy.[2]

The Difficulty of Establishing the New Democratic Order

Of course, Africa would not, in general, seem to be fertile ground for democracy. Most African countries are very poor, with many having per capita incomes below $500. In general, countries that have democratized have done so at a much higher levels of income. The poverty of African countries makes democracy very difficult as the struggle for power and the struggle for wealth focus on control of the state as the ultimate prize because there are so few resources in the private sector. African countries are also often divided along ethnic and regional lines and sometimes face simmering conflicts about what used to be called ‘the national question.’ Most countries also have long borders with unstable nations and are often imperiled not by what they have done but what their neighbors have failed to do. Many African governments also face the possibility of an armed insurgency fed by grievances, the ability to live off the land, and armed with weapons easily available on the international market. Indeed, one of the dramatic changes in Africa is in the military balance between armies and society. At independence in the 1960’s, most African militaries were little more than mechanized police forces but they had a monopoly on the guns in their society. Today, there are guns everywhere in Africa and some militaries find themselves simply outgunned. Finally, while the global economy presents many opportunities for African countries, the ability of terrorists, narcotic traffickers, private military contractors, and other mischief makers to take advantage of the ungoverned space in Africa is a continual threat to all countries.

Almost fourteen years into the second wave of democracy on the African continent, it is possible to make some generalizations about where democracy is headed. Given how hard it is for leaders to cede power generally to the people and specifically to their opponents when they lose, there is no doubt that in the next decade or more, a significant number of the democratic experiments in Africa will fail outright. This is hardly a surprise. Indeed, the history of many now well-established democracies (France would be a good example) is of repeated failure until institutional innovation and changes in popular attitudes solidified democratic rule.

At the same time, there is no doubt that some African countries that are not democratic will adopt consequential multi-party electoral systems in the future. Someday, Robert Mugabe will not be present and there is no doubt that this now impoverished country will join the ranks of countries where elections are consequential.

The net result is that for the foreseeable future, multiparty elections, of admittedly varying quality, will characterize the majority, probably the vast majority of African countries. Several factors support this conclusion:

• First, democracy has won the intellectual argument in Africa. In the 1960’s there were principled arguments made by leaders like Julius Nyerere of Tanzania that democracy was not appropriate for Africa because it was too conflictual or violated precolonial norms of community solidarity. In the 1970s, arguments of hard socialism imported from the Soviet Union were also popular across much of the continent. Today, only President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda is making a significant argument against multiparty democracy and he has had very little resonance across the continent. Indeed, his own country will probably embrace multipartyism at some point in the future. As they say in baseball, "you cannot beat someone with no one."
  
• Second, the international environment has turned strongly against those who overturn democracies. African countries had been extremely respectful of each other’s sovereignties and remain concerned about any outside interference in what they regard as their own internal affairs. However, the African Union--the successor to the Organization for African Unity--has now made it clear that African countries will ostracize those who overthrow elected democracies. African countries are far more ambivalent about interference with existing autocrats--witness the reluctance to pressure Mugabe in any serious way--but existing democracies receive strong support from most of the continent.

International donors have also made clear that overthrowing an elected leader is a red line that should not be crossed. This is a sensible policy: while it may be very difficult to pressure countries into adopting a particular type of regime, demanding that leaders respect popular wishes that have been enshrined is reasonable.

While multiparty elections will characterize most African countries most of the time in the next few years, the elections that occur across Africa do vary enormously in quality and import. Of the 2004 elections,

• The October vote in Cameroon lacked credibility in key areas [3] and led to the not very surprising re-election of the incumbent Paul Biya who has ruled as an old-time African autocrat.
  
• The South African elections in April confirmed the consolidation of democratic practice in a land previously associated with grievous human rights abuses but the seventy percent margin that the African National Congress led by Thabo Mbeki won suggested that there was not yet a viable opposition.
  
• The elections in October in Guinea-Bissau returned the PAIGC, the old Marxist national liberation movement to power.
  
• The May elections in Malawi returned the ruling party to power but the bid by President Muluzi to amend the constitution so that he could have a third term in power was abandoned after popular demonstrations.
  
• The December elections in Mozambique will be heavily contested and may lead to victory of the opposition of the opposition RENAMO if the government actually allows a free and fair vote.
  
• The elections in Botswana that were just held have returned the ruling party to power in light of its excellent economic record and its robust, albeit belatedly, response to AIDS.

Such is the diversity of results in only one-third of the elections to be held this year.

The content of African elections is also often very problematic. There is seldom much policy debate as leaders seek to be elected on the basis of their own charisma and appeals to different groups. Despite the poor economic circumstances of most African countries and the dire threat of AIDS, neither economics nor the virus are often discussed. All parties are poorly organized, seldom having much of a branch structure outside the capital and major towns. The opposition, without recourse to the resources that the party in power has had for many years, is often a particularly ramshackle affair.

Beyond elections themselves, many of the democratic institutions in most African countries are far from the democratic ideal. Parliaments are just trying to organize themselves and often cannot provide any effective counterweight to the executive. The courts are extraordinarily weak; judges are sometimes corrupt, seldom well-paid, and often unable to access the simplest library resources. The police and military are often badly resourced, corrupt, and distracted from their primarily missions of providing internal and external security by the political ambitions of their leaders and rivalries within their ranks. Finally, the desperate economic situation that countries find themselves in causes most policy to be continually crisis-driven and more than a few countries find themselves constantly battling against man-made or natural disasters that threaten the very institutions that they are attempting to nourish.

As a result, elections have probably been institutionalized in Africa but democracy has not, at least not yet. This story can best be illustrated by some comparative statistics from the annual Freedom House survey. According to Freedom House, in 1973, twenty-eight out of thirty-nine countries in sub-Saharan Africa were ‘not free,’ only nine were ‘partly free’ and two were ‘free.’ By 2003, the ‘not free’ category was no longer the most popular; indeed, only sixteen of forty-eight countries were in this category. Instead, the most popular category was the ambiguous ‘partly free’ basket which had increased from nine to twenty-one over thirty years. Eleven countries were now regarded as ‘free,’ a sharp increase from the two of thirty years ago but not yet a plurality of all nations.[4]

It is likely that a significant plurality, if not an outright majority, of African countries will remain in the ambiguous position for many years to come. A few countries may indeed establish institutionalized democracies in the next decade. A non-trivial number of countries may also fall off the democratic map entirely. However, the majority of those that have routinized elections will probably continue with those elections, even though they will often be less than free-and-fair and will have democratic institutions--including parliaments, courts, political parties, and media--that often function in only the most mediocre manner because of a shortage of resources and skilled personnel. Outside shocks in the form of resource busts, increase in the price of imports, and instability from within and without will also challenge the imposition of democratic practices. Countries will have elections but the fundamental democratic achievement of convincing everyone that everyone else will play by the electoral rules of the game when contesting power will remain out of reach. Ambiguity, achievement and failure, hope and disgust, will all characterize these nascent democratic experiments.

I think that this is an optimistic scenario. I am arguing that African countries will emerge from three decades of authoritarianism and will have routinized elections in a rather short period of time, certainly by the historic record of Europe. Many of these countries will improve the quality of their democracies in the next decade, again a very fast rate of improvement compared to Europe. Here I hope to introduce an element of historical time into our analysis recognizing that, even with information moving faster than ever before, complex social processes take time.

The Democratic Tasks Ahead

The great questions therefore facing the majority of African countries are how will these incomplete democracies work, what are the signs that they are progressing, and what, if anything, can outsiders do to help with their further consolidation.

Certainly, one important sign of progress for the nascent democratic experiments in Africa is if they begin to show signs of developing their own democratic theories which can guide further institutional experimentation. In all democracies, the overwhelming majority of adults can vote but there the similarities end. Even European democracies are vastly different. For instance, in the United Kingdom, parliamentarians are elected to represent geographically defined districts, there are two major parties organized around class differences, power is centralized in London (although this is somewhat less true than in the past), and referendums on even critically important issues (e.g., the euro) are not used. In Switzerland, to take the opposite case, parliamentarians are elected on a party list system, a large number of parties reflect regional linguistic and religious differences, power has been decentralized to the cantons, and referendums are used on a regular basis. Both systems work because they reflect the institutions have been adapted to the particular political, social, and historical circumstances in each country.

Countries are helped to understand what institutions are appropriate to them by the development of democratic theory that can guide their institutional development. For instance, Madison’s insight that the sheer geographic size of the new United States could be harnessed to resolved the disputes of factions was a critical insight, not least because it provided a roadmap to federalism and away from the confusion that the founding fathers felt because thousands of years of political theory had told them that only small polities could be democratic.

As of yet, there has been little democratic theory developed in Africa. Many countries, especially in francophone Africa, are using the same basic institutional structures that they originally inherited in the 1960s. Anglophone countries have moved further, especially since many have adopted an executive presidency, but this usually occurred during the period of authoritarian rule. There have been a few exceptions. Perhaps the most important is the Ethiopian decision to grant provinces the right to secede. Although Ethiopia can in no way be considered a democracy at the moment, its formal recognition of group (since the provinces are defined by ethnic identity) rights to self-determination was a monumental step in a continent where almost all efforts have been directed to shoring up state integrity. The South African constitution also has some significant innovations, notably an indirectly elected executive president, the Constitutional Court, and a variety of protections for individual rights. The South African constitution also provides a limited right to self-determination although it has yet to be fully defined.

Beyond these countries and a few other limited examples, there is little innovation. At the present time, Africa lacks its Madison, or the many Madisons that will be necessary for each country to develop a particular democratic mix that could allow them to become fully fledged democracies.

Why has there been little innovation? Certainly, it is very early. Democratic theory often takes decades to develop, another reason to be patient with the slow political progress south of the Sahara and to not be surprised by failure. The intellectuals who might contribute most to the development of truly indigenous forms of democracy are often so poorly paid in their university jobs that they have to drive taxis to feed their families. Others have fled their countries entirely and are no longer able to contribute.

Finally, and perhaps most controversially, the precolonial heritage probably offers Africans little on which to base their democracies and they therefore cannot rely on historical precedents. It is true that some, but by no means most, precolonial polities had some tradition of the men gathering around to discuss major issues but this was seldom institutionalized and the procedure to pick those who were actually in charge was hardly democratic. In addition, no one has been able to explain how these small group discussions could be scaled up to the level of even a small nation-state. Some countries, notably Uganda, held thousands of meetings to discuss the constitution and these practices certainly resonate with the past but rule in Uganda has been a top-down affair. Perhaps not surprising, Bratton, Mattes, and Gyimah-Boadi conclude in their pioneering study of African public opinion that, "Most Africans interviewed do not wish, even if it were possible, to return to a traditional system of governance."[5]

The second set of issues around which African democratic practice can be judged will be the resolution of those problems that democracy brings. Indeed, several profound political issues were more or less buried in the avalanche of authoritarianism that covered the continent starting in the late 1960s. These are issues that all democracies have to confront at some point but they will be especially poignant because the Africans are trying to build democracies and nation-states at the same time.

The first constellation of issues raised by democracy concerns the nature of the polity itself. African nationalists relied on the right to self-determination in the short struggle against colonial rule after World War II. After achieving independence, they were confronted with a problem: if subnational groups were to also rely on the right to self-determination, the new states might be torn asunder. In a rather audacious legal maneuver that demonstrates how the weak can mold the international legal agenda, the Africans and others in the developing world had the right to self-determination redefined so that it only applied to ‘blue-water’ rule; that is, independence from a power separated from its colony by an ocean. Groups ruled by a capital several hundred miles away could not rely on the same right to self-determination.

This was a clever maneuver but not one which will survive democratization. Already, we are beginning to see in some countries groups reassert themselves given the democratic right to organize. For instance, it is questionable how long Nigeria can survive given the profound splits that are developing between the Islamic north, where many states now say that they are adhering to sharia law, and the rest of the country. Indeed, the slow motion disintegration of Nigeria is one of the most important developments in Africa and one which policymakers in the next administration will have to confront. The right democratic formula might bind the disparate groups in Nigeria together in a more profound union but, at the moment, the groups that seek to undermine federal rule have the freedom to organize but not the need to commit to the federation. Similarly, if the tabled Sudanese peace agreement is ever signed, the South will be given the right to secede in a few years. Whether a future government in Khartoum would actually allow the country to be divided is unclear. Most African countries will not face secessionist pressures and it may well be that most countries will become more viable if the right institutions are developed. However, it does not seem unreasonable to predict that in a minority of countries efforts to finally define the polity will lead to profound pressures to change the arrangements that were inherited from the colonialists.

The typical American suggestion given centrifugal ethnic pressures is some sort of federalism. The decentralization of political power to subnational units may indeed be part of the solution for some African countries. However, federalism is based on the assumption that the subnational units will have something to tax in order to support their political autonomy. Yet, in most African countries, the overwhelming percentage of revenue is derived from royalties on raw material exports and taxes on international transactions, monies that flow directly to the central government. The potential autonomy of any subnational unit will obviously be curtailed if it is still highly or completely dependent on the central government for fiscal subventions. For instance, any notion that real federalism would be realized in South Africa was quickly subverted because most economic activity occurs in only three provinces and the other six are completely dependent on the central government for funds. In Africa, as everywhere else, those who have the gold make the rules.

At a more micro-level, democracy will inevitably raise questions around citizenship. There were citizenship riots in the 1960s in West Africa when the advent of independence suddenly caused people to define some groups as foreign, even if they had been in the territory for many years. Citizenship questions are particularly difficult to resolve in Africa because the long continental history of migration combined by the relative newness and porousness of many territorial boundaries makes it very difficult to determine where grandparents, or sometimes even parents, were born. Conflict over citizenship has already propelled violent disputes in Côte d’Ivoire and Democratic Republic of the Congo. Indeed, it has become a something of a staple in African politics to try to get your opponent declared a foreigner. The pinnacle of this ridiculousness was when Kenneth Kaunda, undoubtedly the father of modern Zambia, albeit an inattentive and highly dysfunctional parent, was declared not to be a Zambian.

One of the profound challenges to African countries will therefore be to formulate citizenship rules and practices that are appropriate for their multicultural politics. This will be a difficult task. However, it would be a clear sign of the consolidation of African democracies if they were able to go beyond the citizenship laws that they inherited from their former white rulers (the most common origin of citizenship laws in Africa today) to develop practices appropriate for their own situations.

African countries will also have to manage their incomplete democracies while attending to the enormous agenda associated with complete economic reform. There was an interesting argument in the 1980s and 1990s about the timing and sequencing of reforms and whether economic and political reform should proceed on a parallel or serial basis. That debate is now largely academic (to use an unfortunate pejorative) because African countries are doing both. It may have been better if African countries had a more solid material base undergirding them before diving into democratization but it is also the case that many economic reforms could not be attempted until the old authoritarian leaders were overthrown. Kenya is a good example of a country where democratic pressures to oust the old regime also jump-started economic reform. More generally, the best predictor of economic reform is that it will not occur under long-standing regimes because leaders who have developed a particular way of ruling, and rewarding specific constituencies through patronage, cannot be expected to adopt reforms which will lead them to political suicide.

The complexities of implementing economic reform in extremely poor countries while trying to consolidate democratic reforms cannot be underestimated. The overload on policymakers is significant as they do not have the time, administrative cadres, or political capital to meet the political and economic agendas. We have also seen the development of political business cycles in some countries where the run-up to elections have prompted budget-busting pay increases to civil servants and teachers.

There is no easy way out of the conundrums posed by simultaneous political and economic reform. One sign that African governments are advancing is if they are finally compelled to explain what they are doing with their economies to their citizens. Democracy, despite its profound western origins, has a good name in Africa and leaders are quick to indicate that they want to belong to the worldwide democratic club. Capitalism does not have a good name in Africa, because the tremendous ideological baggage from the slave trade and colonialism is still too great. Thus, even leaders who have taken enormous risks implementing market-based reforms do not frame those initiatives in a way that can be more generally communicated to the population. For example, Jerry Rawlings of Ghana, who slayed what had correctly been called a vampire state,[6] called his program a revolution but never mentioned capitalism. It is therefore imperative that the democratization of capitalism proceed.

There are many other aspects of political economy that will be contentious during the decades in which these dual reforms will play out. One area that deserves to be highlighted is property rights over land. In Zimbabwe, as is now well-known, Robert Mugabe’s seizure of white land to redress the racial imbalances of the past has led to the destruction of agriculture in that country and, it is critical to note, the impoverishment of millions of Africans. There are land imbalances due to the colonial past that cause land to be maldistributed elsewhere, notably in South Africa, Namibia, and Kenya. More importantly, land tenure throughout most of Africa is a mess: title to land is often unclear as some mishmash of colonial efforts to demarcate the land, socialist efforts to collectivize the land, and special deals for a privileged few cause title to be unclear for a great many of the majority of Africans who still make their living off the land. Addressing this situation through the creation of viable property rights to the land would be a significant development that might accelerate investment while demonstrating that the new political systems can insure important rights.

The third general area where African countries must make significant progress is professionalizing their security agencies, including the police, the military, and the intelligence services. The fundamental paradox of democracy is that a state must have a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence but at the same time be willing to give up much of its power to the citizenry. It takes a very tough state to make a tender democracy. Of course, the early democracies in Africa often failed because the militaries took over. Professionalizing militaries so that the norm of civilian supremacy is clear would be helpful to Africa’s democrats. More importantly, however, African democracies are threatened by lawlessness, crime, the spillover of rebel activity from neighboring countries, and terrorists. It is imperative that the security services work better so that the security situation of individual countries can be improved. Democracy is not going to flourish if people feel that they cannot turn to the state for security.

Roles for Outsiders

What can western countries and specifically the United States do in the face of this extraordinary African agenda? From my remarks, it should be clear that I view African democratization as largely an internal process. Western communities can probably do more on the economic side where the necessity of creating a more open international economic environment--especially by reducing agricultural subsidies and other trade barriers that African countries face and by providing limited amounts of economic aid and technical assistance--can help with economic growth. So much of the work on the political side has to do with leaders developing democratic practices and institutions appropriate to their own situations that only a modest western impact can be expected.

The western approach to African democratization should therefore be modest and with full appreciation of the problems that these countries face in trying to do something almost without precedent in human history. Westerners should expect that African democratization will take a long time and that there will be many twists in the road. Western countries should also expect that African political and economic reform will be asynchronous. That is, in the most optimistic case, sometimes there will be more progress on the economic side and sometimes more on the political side. Sometimes, and remember that this is the positive scenario, there may be no progress in a given area for a long period of time. I believe that the United States should continue to engage and support African countries as long as they are making important progress somewhere, either in the economics or politics, or security, because it is probably too much to ask for progress to be uniform. Thus, I believe that the American decision to aid Uganda in the 1990s, when it was making significant economic reform but not doing much politically, was correct. Of course, countries that are engaged in significant human rights violations should not be rewarded if they make economic progress but this is an unlikely scenario.

Finally, western countries must be careful about the agendas that they suggest to African countries. I very much hope that African countries will adopt pro-growth economic reforms, make their economic management more transparent, create working democracies, including addressing all of the issues I note above, protect the environment, solve AIDS, improve the plight of women, develop prosperous civil societies, fix their education systems, fix their health care systems, repair their infrastructure, and combat terrorism. Many in Africa feel that it is necessary to address all of these priorities. However, western countries, including the US, have to be careful about what they ask of African governments because leaders will continually have to make difficult decisions about how to deploy their capabilities and political capital.

I therefore believe that the Millennium Challenge Corporation’s approach of identifying countries that are doing well according to a group of transparent indicators and then providing them relatively untied support is the proper approach. I regret, however, that the U.S. still seems profoundly ambivalent about security sector reform in Africa. More aid is going to African militaries to improve their peacekeeping functions but we have to recognize that properly functioning police, military, and intelligence agencies are probably as important to the immediate workings of African democracies as education systems, although far more attention has been given to the schools.

The attempt of African countries to democratize will indeed be one of the great dramas of the twenty-first century. Six hundred and eighty million people across four dozen countries are beginning the difficult process of designing political institutions and norms that will allow them to exercise power in a democratic manner. That there will be many failures along the way is almost a banal prediction. What is important is to sift through the inevitable setbacks to see if some progress is being made on the critical issues that will allow for institutionalized democracies to emerge in future decades. The United States cannot decisively affect the democratic trajectories of countries but we can try, in suitably modest ways, to help foster democracy and be appreciative of what is being accomplished under extraordinarily difficult circumstances.

References

1. Jibrin Ibrahim, Democratic Transition in Anglophone West Africa (Senegal: Codesria, 2003), p. 2.

2. Michael Bratton, Robert Mattes and E. Gyimah-Boadi, Public Opinion, Democracy, and Market Reform in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 74.

3. See the report by the Commonwealth Observer Group on the 11 October 2004 Cameroon elections.

4. Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2003. Found at: http://www.freedomhouse.org/research/freeworld/2003/charts.pdf.

5. Bratton, Mattes and Gyimah-Boadi, p. 80.

6. Jonathan H. Frimpong-Ansah, The Vampire State in Africa: The Political Economy of Decline in Ghana (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1992).

Jeffrey I. Herbst is a professor of politics and international affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. His e-mail is Herbst@Princeton.Edu.