Fifty-seven years ago, almost to the month, celebrated Kenyan political scientist, Ali Mazrui observed that “for some reason, a disproportionate number of the historic acts of violence in Africa since independence have tended to happen in the months of January and February.” He had good reason for this.
In January 1961, the Belgians and the Americans arranged to hand over to Moise Tshombe in Katanga, Patrice Lumumba, the inconvenient post-colonial Prime Minister of the country now known as the Democratic of Congo. The following month, the world learnt about the brutal fate that befell Lumumba. The Congo and, indeed Africa, have both paid a heavy price for those events.
Togo’s first president, Sylvanus Olympio, was killed in January 1963.
Two years later, in January 1965, Pierre Ngendandumwe, Burundi’s Prime Minister, was assassinated.
In the year before the assassination of Ngendandumwe, meanwhile, Uganda’s, John Okello, led the overthrow of Sultan Jamshid bin Abdullah in the very bloody Zanzibar Revolution. America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) would later record with clinical economy that the effect of the revolution was that “the Arab regime of Zanzibar vanished in a single day as its leaders fled, died or were interned.”
The year after the assassination in Burundi, it was the turn of Nigeria’s Prime Minister, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa together with the regional premiers in the Northern and Western regions. The following month, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah was overthrown while on his way to see Mao Tse Tung in Beijing, China.
Professor Mazrui never provided a dispositive answer to his question whether there is “any special reason why the opening months of January and February from year to year should have had such a disproportionate share of Africa’s great acts of turbulence.” Instead, he offered a telling insight, arguing that these events were the fallouts of the search for two forms of legitimacy essential to the trajectory of Africa after the colonial experience. One was the legitimacy of the state, and the other was the legitimacy of regimes or of rulers.
Nearly six decades later, these twin problems of state and regime legitimacy continue to afflict African countries, although the ways in which different countries now respond to them have arguably made our collective African Januaries a little more interesting.
In many countries, elections – rather than assassinations – have become the chosen path. In 2024, the people defenestrated ruling parties in Botswana, Ghana, Senegal, and even South Africa.
Namibia’s ruling party edged a contest that produced the country’s first female president in an act of political survival for the ruling SWAPO that may have postponed its day of electoral reckoning.
Of course, some of the elections during the year re-enacted familiar scenes from a discredited part in Africa’s history.
Tunisia’s election in October 2024 was arranged to re-select law professor and incumbent President Kais Saied, with 90.7% of the votes cast. It was like a scene from the period before the Arab Spring.
Since the turn of the millennium, however, most of Africa’s elections have been increasingly decided by court judges, not voters. In the latest example, in Mozambique, the ruling FRELIMO party procured a judicial validation of an election widely seen as heavily rigged in its favour. A country already ravaged by a murderous insurgency in its northern region of Cabo Delgado and a destructive cyclone must now live with self-inflicted ungovernability. The Botswana Democratic Party (BDP), in power since independence in 1966, made a different choice when the people rejected it.
Judicial involvement in elections is not without high risk to the judges involved, or the political stability.
To deliver their judgment nullifying the rigged presidential election in 2020, the Malawi Defence Forces arranged to clothe all five judges of the Constitutional Court of Malawi who sat on the case with bullet-proof vests.
In the same year, by contrast, the ruling party in Mali chose to steal through the courts 31 seats won by the opposition in parliament. The result was an uprising that led first to the dissolution of the Constitutional Court, and later the overthrow of the government in a military coup.
