SADC still not ensuring democratic elections in the region

Something similar is happening in Madagascar where President Hery Rajaonarimampianina seems to be trying to disqualify his two strongest likely rivals in elections due in November or December.

He has passed new electoral laws which would probably prevent two former presidents, Marc Ravalomanana and Andry Rajoelina, from running on grounds of their tax or other legal problems.

Ironically – because after all Rajoelina toppled Ravalomanana in a 2009 coup – the two former bitter rivals joined forces on Sunday to demonstrate against the electoral laws in the capital.

Police violently dispersed their supporters with live ammunition, killing at least two. That made SADC sit up at last and take notice.

And so at the Luanda summit the leaders decided to reactivate former Mozambican president Joaquim Chissano – who had been appointed as its special envoy after the coup – to urgently return to the country to mediate a resolution.

Chissano’s unpopular solution between 2009 and 2013 was the “ni-ni” option – to discourage both Ravalomanana and Rajoelina from running in the 2013 elections which Rajaonarimampianina won.

Even if that had made sense at the time, it doesn’t now. It’s provoking instability. Yet SADC’s attitude, despite having clearly decided who the candidates should be back then, is that it can’t tell Rajaonarimampianina he must allow Ravalomanana and Rajoelina to run this time.

“I don’t think SADC can decide or not who is a candidate,” said a SADC official. Yet that is what it should have done some time ago, as this crisis has been brewing for months.

Piers Pigou, a consultant to the International Crisis Group, says SADC is now reaping the bitter fruits of having taken its eye off the ball in Madagascar in 2014 when it prematurely closed its office there.

Wolters says SADC has “taken the path of least resistance on the most acute crises and seems to have caved in to incumbency again, both in praising preparations for elections in Zimbabwe and especially in the DRC where the extended electoral crisis has cost the lives of many protesters and has heightened acute humanitarian needs”.

“For SADC to take DRC propaganda about electoral preparations at face value is a sign that it is not yet ready to take the steps necessary to improve the quality and credibility of elections in the entire SADC region,” she says.

Too often it takes an outbreak of violence for SADC to pay attention to glaring deficits of democracy and elections. Yet if it had the ears to listen, those deficits would be stridently sounding the early warning alarm bells of impending violence.

By Peter Fabricius for ISS Today

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