When Washington chooses not to comment on democracy, authoritarians and their backers fill in the silence.
Democracy is in increasingly short supply in Africa, but it remains a hot topic of conversation. If the Trump administration thinks it has opted out of this discourse, it should think again.
Consider the latest developments in Cameroon. Since 1982, Paul Biya has been the President of Cameroon. Last year, he was declared the winner of deeply flawed elections at the age of 92, giving him a mandate for an eighth term in office. For years, Cameroonians and friends of the country have been frustrated with the ailing Biya’s insistence on maintaining power at any cost, and simultaneously worried about what kind of leadership transition might eventually unfold. The country has held regular elections, but they are neither free nor fair, and in the lifetime of most citizens, there has been no model for a rule-governed transfer of power. Ambitious would-be successors have bided their time for decades, waiting for their chance to assume the top job in a country where power and access to economic opportunity have been centralized. A power struggle could easily become violent.
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President Biya rarely musters the strength to appear in public, but he and his inner circle have found the will to double down on maintaining control. Last weekend, both houses of parliament suddenly passed legislation establishing the post of deputy president, which has not existed in Cameroon since 1972. That deputy is to be appointed by Biya, not elected, and is to serve out the rest of Biya’s seven-year term if the President is unable to fulfill his role.
The new arrangement is quite a change from the previous constitutional provisions, which would require the president of the Senate to assume the presidency in the event of a vacancy at the top, but only briefly while new elections were organized. Now, instead of the possibility that the post-Biya era would be determined by voters, provisions are in place to ensure that Biya’s preferences prevail even after he is gone.
Citizens of Cameroon are so accustomed to their leadership’s high-handed tactics that many had no trouble believing a hoax circulating online claiming the president’s son had been named to the deputy position. Prominent among the outraged online commentators were the prolific social media posters who never miss a chance to blame shadowy “western” forces for Africa’s ills, and to proclaim that the very notion of democracy is a discredited sham. As one put it, “this is the kind of democracy that the West approves for Africa.”
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That subset of commentators are the same people who lionize Burkina Faso’s Russian-backed junta leader, Ibrahaim Traore, who told journalists this week that “democracy is slavery.” Traore’s taste for power–he has scrapped political parties and abandoned any talk of elections in the future–is not so different from Biya’s, though it comes in a much more youthful, camera-friendly package. The red-beret sporting Traore has not driven out the radical extremists he ostensibly seized power to fight, nor has he protected civilians from atrocities carried out by those extremists and by his own forces. Yet the authoritarian spectacle in Cameroon is used by some to buttress support for the authoritarian regime in Burkina Faso.
When Secretary of State Marco Rubio instructed U.S. diplomats to refrain from commenting on the integrity of elections abroad, it was part of a broader pivot in U.S. foreign policy that frames disinterest in democracy and governance as a virtue. This interpretation of realism requires not just working with whoever holds power, however they attained it, but also studiously ignoring manipulation, intimidation, and electoral fraud. But this week’s developments in Cameroon and Burkina Faso illustrate how easily silence is interpreted as approval, and how this policy choice lets others assign motives and preferences to the United States that suit their agendas.