Locusts are small creatures measuring approximately 0.5 to 3 inches long and weighing 0.07 ounces that belong to the grasshopper family. The average lifecycle of a locust is three to six months. In normal circumstances they are solitary but can change their behaviour and become gregarious under certain conditions. During the dry season, they tend to swarm together in the scant patches of vegetation. The swarming causes serotonin to release into their central nervous system, promoting rapid movement, giving them appetite for a more varied diet leading to their rapid spread.

The onset of rains brings with it an increase in lush vegetation, favouring the rapid increase of the insects and triggering their gregarious phase during which the desert locust can be devastating, consuming its weight in food in a day. In each square kilometre of a swarm there can be as many as 40 million individuals capable of destroying in day enough food to feed more than 35,000 people.

Towards the end of 2019, the East African region experienced an invasion of desert locusts of a scale not witnessed in the region in decades. The desert locusts descended on farmland in Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia in their hundreds of millions.

According to scientists, two cyclones in 2018 — Cyclone Mekunu in May and Cyclone Luban in October — caused massive rainfall in the Arabian Desert, a factor that facilitated the breeding of desert locusts. The rains were enough to create ephemeral lakes in the desert, a favourable breeding ground for desert locusts. It is believed that this phenomenon is likely to have enabled the formation of three generations of locust deserts, increasing the number of the swarming locusts 8,000-fold.

As is the nature of the desert locust, the swarms began to migrate and by the summer of 2019 they were crossing the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden into the Eastern Africa countries of Ethiopia and Somalia. The desert locusts continued to breed for several months, with the autumn rains experienced in the East Africa region — capped by cyclonic storm Pawan, experienced in December of 2019 and responsible for rainfall in Somalia — triggering another reproductive cycle of the desert locusts.

The swarms of locusts continued to grow and arrived in Kenya towards the end of December 2019, rapidly moving through the northern and central parts of the country. By the end of January 2020, Kenya was experiencing the worst locust invasion in 70 years. So intense were the infestations — which moved through the neighbouring countries of Eritrea and Djibouti, finding their way to northern Tanzania and northeast Uganda in mid-February — that they posed a serious risk of food insecurity in the region.

The impact of the locust invasion was severe and continues to be felt to this day. In as much as Kenya has made significant steps in combating desert locusts infestations, new infestations continue swarming into the country and farmers in the north and in some parts of central Kenya continue to grapple with the huge losses caused by the invasions.

According to reports by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), about 20.2 million people in the Eastern Africa region faced acute food insecurity in 2020 alone, a condition that was worsened by the desert locust infestations and the Covid-19 pandemic. Further, according to the FAO, desert locusts have the potential to affect 20 per cent of the earth’s land and put into jeopardy the livelihoods of a tenth of the world’s population.

As explained at the beginning of this article, the desert locust has the potential to destroy in one day food that can feed over 35,000 people, threatening a country with food insecurity. But while this might be the immediate impact of a desert locust invasion, infestations have other long short- and long-term effects.

It is said that a healthy nation is a productive nation. However, locust invasions have the potential to nullify this statement in less than a week of their landing in a region. The recent and ongoing wave of locust infestations has driven families and vulnerable groups into poverty and hunger, a situation that has been worsened by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Desert locusts have the potential to affect 20 per cent of the earth’s land and put into jeopardy the livelihoods of a tenth of the world’s population.

Desert locust infestations are not only a threat to crops but they also threaten the survival of livestock. The FAO reported that in Ethiopia alone, an early assessment of the impact of the wave of locust invasions showed that more than 5,000 square miles of pastureland and 800 square miles of cropland were destroyed. The infestation also caused the loss of over 350,000 metric tonnes of dry grains and cereal, resulting in over one million people experiencing hunger and needing food aid.

A nation that is not food secure is a nation that is not secure at all. Hunger and poverty contribute to increased crime in a country, driving people to engage in all manner of vice in an effort to survive.

Food insecurity is also a leading cause of increased government borrowing in a bid to alleviate the suffering of the population. The borrowing, which is meant to cushion the nation from the effects of the invasion and other resultant challenges, leads to a ballooning national debt and a high cost of living. Locust invasions also seriously affect a country’s export earnings which has a direct effect on previously planned expenditures. Locust infestations also tend to derail the development agenda of a country as it is forced to put scheduled plans on hold in order to deal with the invasion.

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How then can a country deal with locust infestations to guarantee its food security and avert the challenges associated with such invasions? Biological methods of pest control are safest, both for the environment and for humans. However, biological methods of desert locust control may not be effective, especially in cases where swarms are involved.

The most commonly used biological method of pest control is the use of a predator to eliminate the pest. However, the challenge with this method is that it cannot be effective in controlling large swarms of locusts as they can easily fly away from their predators. Another challenge is that locusts barely stay put for more than a day or two since they are constantly looking for food and therefore cannot be easily contained and controlled.

A nation that is not food secure is a nation that is not secure at all.

The other option of locust control would be to use of nets to capture swarms. However, this method of control can only be effective on a small scale since large swarms of locusts can fly above and past the nets.

Scaring the swarms away is yet another method of locust control. However, it can only be implemented in small areas since scaring the pests away only drives them to the next available vegetation for them to devour.

Consequently, the most effective method of controlling  large swarms of desert locusts is to spray organophosphate chemicals in small, concentrated volumes using aerial sprayers, vehicle-mounted sprayers, or from knapsack or handheld sprayers in smaller areas.

However, spraying chemicals to control locusts also has adverse effects on nature and on living organisms. For instance, while the use of the Metarhizium biopesticide was found to be 70 to 90 per cent effective in the control of locusts, with no measurable impact on non-target organisms, this is not the case with other chemical formulations that wipe out both the target and non-target organisms, immensely impacting the ecological balance.

During the recent wave of locust invasions experienced in Kenya and the larger East African region, the FAO has collaborated with the local and national governments to mitigate the spread of these swarms to other areas by spraying pesticides both on the ground (to kill any eggs or nymphs) and aerially in areas where it is safe to do so. Research is ongoing to develop formulations that have the least impact on non-target organisms.

Notably, the FAO is working closely with 51 Degrees Ltd. to bring the desert locust situation under control using a hotline system integrated with tracking software, trained scouts, and aircraft. The EarthRanger system captures and transmits locust sightings and movements, making it easier to control the warms. Initially developed to track poaching, the method has been yielding positive results in locust control in Kenya.

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Planning by governments is essential in ensuring that a country is not caught off-guard by infestations in the future. Having mitigation measures in place to reduce the impact of locust infestations on a country’s economy is crucial.

Locusts are an important part of the grassland ecosystem as they stimulate nutrient cycling and play a crucial role in food chains. As such, governments should think of balanced ways to control these insects while at the same time maintaining the much-needed balance in the ecosystem. Controlling the locusts ensures that a country enjoys food security and also averts other challenges brought on by locust invasions.

While biological control may prove hard to implement, especially where large swarms of locusts are involved, the government can come up with other safe control mechanisms that do not affect the environment and ecological balance. For instance, finding a way of preventing swarms of locusts from landing on crops as they migrate can be a good way to ensure that a country’s food security is safeguarded.

Planning by governments is essential in ensuring that a country is not caught off-guard by infestations in the future.

Additionally, investing in research to better understand the biology of locusts, their breeding habits and migratory patterns, and applying the ecological niche modeling approach to predict the breeding sites of locusts can be very useful in controlling these insects. Institutions such as the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE) in Kenya have been at the forefront in researching better ways to combat locust infestations using this approach.

The model proposes the use of historical datasets of the breeding patterns of desert locusts in the Middle East and in the Sahel region to predict the probability of locusts breeding in the East African region. This type of research identifies the desert locust breeding hotspots and better prepares a country to combat the menace. Through such an approach, the government can come up with a cost-effective, site-specific, and targeted management of crawling hoppers before they become gregarious adults, thus minimising the risk of an outbreak.

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This article is part of The Elephant Food Edition Series done in collaboration with Route to Food Initiative (RTFI). Views expressed in the article are not necessarily those of the RTFI.

In the early weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, the government announced, with great fanfare, that Kenyatta University students had invented a ventilator that could help with patient treatment. The Trade and Industrialisation Cabinet Secretary, Betty Maina, and Health Cabinet Secretary, Mutahi Kagwe, visited the students and lauded the local innovation in response to the pandemic.​

A year later, the media announced that the ventilators were not yet ready for use because the machines had not gone through the necessary approvals. ​The CSs, whose job is to facilitate innovations such as these, had little to say. Betty Maina pleaded that she was “also concerned that the process had taken us that long”, as if she did not have the authority as the Cabinet Secretary to find out where the bureaucracy had stalled. And as if to console Kenyans, she cited Personal Protective Equipment (PPEs) and masks as some of the locally manufactured items being used by medical workers.

The theatre was annoying, yet so familiar. For every innovation made by Kenyans, one obstacle constantly stands in the way: government bureaucracy. The popular explanation is that government officials are so corrupt that they will block local innovation unless it allows the officials to siphon money through avenues such as bribes and tenders. Another common narrative is that the government is shooting itself in the foot in its efforts to industrialise Kenya.

I want to suggest here that these responses miss the root of the problem. The fate of the ventilators is just a snippet of what has been happening in Africa for the last four centuries. The truth is simply this: global capitalism has always intended that Africa never industrialises. For the last four centuries, Europe has put in place infrastructure to ensure that industrialisation never happens. Furthermore, I want to suggest that industrialisation is NOT progress, and therefore, we should not aspire to it in the first place.

As Walter Rodney told us in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Europe began this underdevelopment of Africa through the transatlantic slave trade, which extracted the skills and energy of Africans to build the Americas and Europe. During colonial rule a few centuries later, European governments collected and exported diverse forms of African knowledge, artefacts, archives and biodiversity, thus suppressing the growth of African technologies and knowledges in areas like smelting, dye making, fabric weaving, architecture and medicine. Intellectual innovations, such as in theology, were shut down by criminalising people like Elijah Masinde and Simon Kibangu or declaring them mentally insane. In Kenya, independent schools started by Africans were shut down. In Cameroon, colonial authorities suppressed African orthographies, such as the one commissioned by King Ibrahim Njoya of the Bamum.

The truth is simply this: global capitalism has always intended that Africa never industrialises.

The message was simple: innovation was never to come out of Africa. As the colonialists paid lip service to development and civilisation, their actions demonstrated a determination to keep Africa confined to being a source of raw materials. The African minds and hands which could have been engaged in industrialisation were sent to endure brutality in the mines of southern Africa and the plantations of the Congo, and the few Africans who went to school were subjected to a mind-numbing education that turned them into bureaucrats to facilitate the extraction of African resources. The contradiction was maintained by a racist ideology which depicted Africa’s stagnation as a problem with Africans themselves, and which preached that ideas and creativity were not profitable or relevant to African life.

This suffocating system was unsustainable, because maintaining violence ate into the profits which the European bourgeoisie extracted from the colonies. The brutality of the colonies was also becoming politically problematic in the metropole, where the European public was now receiving news of what their governments were up to in the colonies.

But more importantly, as Frantz Fanon explains in The Wretched of the Earth, Europe was now saturated with manufactured goods and the European bourgeoisie, true to its voracious character, was desperately seeking new markets. European bureaucrats of the state therefore reluctantly relinquished control of the colonial governments. And conveniently for them, colonial schools had raised a small enough African bourgeoisie who could defend the continued extraction by European capital but also open up Africa as a market for European goods.

So, as the white faces disappeared from the colonial institutions, imperialism left behind two pillars for ensuring that Africa never industrialised.

One was the economic weapons of sanctions and debt traps. As Fanon reminds us, the beginning of decolonisation signaled to Europeans in Africa to withdraw the capital which they had built on the backs of Africans. The retreating Europeans also destroyed the facilities they had constructed, and after that, they used economic coercion to ensure that Africa remained stuck where the colonialists had left her.

The second weapon against Africa’s industrialisation was the African bourgeoisie itself. Due to the education system they had gone through, accompanied by the political compromises which reduced freedom to simply Africans replacing Europeans while the colonial state remained intact, the African professionals and politicians were incapable of creativity, production or work. Fanon argues that this reality, compounded by the economic stagnation imposed by the West, made the African bourgeoisie accept the role of being “the conveyor belt of capitalism”, mired in mimicking the “negative and decadent aspects” of the Western bourgeoisie.

The decadence of the bourgeoisie includes a notoriously voracious greed which consumes everything in its wake, especially that which has not fully developed or matured. The bourgeoisie capitalises on ideas for their public relations value and prevents the maturing of those ideas, or treats the raw innovation of Africa’s youth as materials for extraction by foreign venture capitalists. These days, this suppression of African innovation goes under the banner of approvals, licenses, or as “quality” and “standards” norms drafted elsewhere.

That is the fate to which the poor young Kenyans at Kenyatta University were subjected. And they are not alone. A more horrifying illustration of the Kenyan bourgeoisie’s hatred for innovation comes from a story I heard a few years ago at one of the few locally owned innovation hubs. According to this account, one of the members of the hub produced a prototype. Shortly afterwards, he received two hostile guests. One was the Kenya Revenue Authority demanding taxes, and the other was his area MP threatening him with death should he develop and publicise the prototype.

Another example comes from the education sector with which I am most familiar. Teaching staff are subjected to stifling control and surveillance by the central government in the name of “international” benchmarking and competitive graduates. In pre-tertiary education, teachers are blocked from adopting innovative pedagogy or curriculum through drastic system replacements and the constant surveillance of examinations and performance management.

These tools have now multiplied with the Competency Based Curriculum, where children will be subjected to increased nationwide assessments, and where the curriculum includes even instructions on daily learning activities. In tertiary education, institutions are subjected to inspections, examination procedures are policed from Gigiri, and curriculum requires government approval for as little as introducing new units. This system of control is based on Euro-American models but is camouflaged under the banner of “quality assurance”, which is a term adopted from industrial manufacturing.

Evidently, Western capital is assured of support from the African bourgeoisie in suppressing innovation on the continent. To hide this truth, the Kenyan elite calm our nerves with performances like that of Betty Maina and Mutahi Kagwe at Kenyatta University, singing about industrialisation from the hymnals provided by the UN, the World Bank and their bevy of consultants who make money lying to Africa that it can industrialise. This reality is propped up by a racist narrative which implies that Africa must always follow in the path of the West because we don’t know better.

And yet, the trajectory of Europe and America shows that the gospel of industrialisation being preached to poor countries is not followed in Euro-America itself. The West, especially the United States, has de-industrialised to undermine its own citizens who had successfully fought for better working conditions through their unions. From the time of Reagan, followed by agreements such as NAFTA, American industries broke up their factories and scattered the pieces among various poor countries, to as to avoid the labour and environmental regulations of the US and to take advantage of poor countries where such regulations were weak. Today, major American brands do not own factories. Rather, they rent their brand names and logos to factories in poorer countries, an absurdity which has been explained in detail by Naomi Klein in her work No Logo.

The capitalist priests of industrialisation have themselves never intrinsically cared for manufacturing. Their main goal is, and has always been, cheap profits at the people’s expense, whether the people are cultivating on plantations, running factory machines or being exploited in the colonies. As Eric Williams famously told us in Capitalism and Slavery, plantation slavery in the New World did not end due to the moralism of abolition and the weapons of the American Civil War; rather, the Euro-American capital had no use for slave labour after it had developed machinery that produced goods faster than slavery.

The exploitation of human beings did not end with the abolition of slavery; it simply migrated to the cities. Factories lined the pockets of the American and British wealthy through terrible working conditions, the poverty of depression and the humiliation of living in quasi-prisons called workhouses. Moreover, the African labour that produced the raw materials was no longer in the Americas but now in the motherland itself, thanks to colonisation.

The West, especially the United States, has de-industrialised to undermine its own citizens who had successfully fought for better working conditions through their unions.

By the same token, the rebellions of the plantations transferred to the factories. The end of the 19th and the beginning of the early twentieth centuries were characterised by some of the bravest and costliest fights for unionisation and labour rights in the US and the UK. While we are told about the industrialists to whose philanthropic foundations we must write for grants for research and cultural work, we are not told about the Haymarket Strike, or the rise of Jim Crow laws, race riots and lynchings to prevent the solidarity of workers across race, and to constantly subvert black American economic prosperity.

But just like a spoiled brat, Anglo-American capital soon became disinterested in industrialisation. With the neoliberal turn, Reagan and Thatcher famously crushed the unions with a brutality that is barely discussed publically. In the decades that followed, Euro-American capitalists threw their white working classes under the bus, excited them with false narratives blaming their misfortunes on immigrants, and increased the amount of bureaucracy and military surveillance, thus creating the rabid armies that would sweep Trump and Boris Johnson into power.

In Kenya, public sermons on the need to industrialise are notoriously silent on this parallel history of industrialisation. The Kenyan youth naively celebrate prospects of industrialisation as possibility for employment, having not been exposed to the reality of backbreaking work and precarious employment (popularly known as kibarua – contract labour).

Africa must grapple with the human cost of industrialisation over the centuries. We must not be seduced into avoiding the question of whether industrialisation is really the path to progress, even though China is willing to help Africa industrialise rather than behave like Euro-America which constantly places booby traps in the path of African innovation and industrialisation.

With industrialisation preached as religion, questioning it is literal blasphemy. But a number of reasons lead me to commit this blasphemy.

As a middle class, urban Kenyan, I am often amazed when I am in the kitchen and I see how much packaging I throw away. Everything from spices to salt is packaged in some paper or plastic container. We drink tea with milk from cows we do not see, brewed with tea leaves which we do not grow.

On our shelves are books and papers we have accumulated over the years. Many are government documents, receipts and certificates that are supposed to prove that we have done what we have done. Many of these documents and reports would be better off in a library where they can be catalogued and we can consult if we need to.

In Kenya, public sermons on the need to industrialise are notoriously silent on this parallel history of industrialisation.

Our phones are built to deteriorate quite fast, and the new models do not significantly improve our lives. They simply give us more cameras, games and apps to play with.

With all this “progress”, we are bombarded with more information as we become less knowledgeable. We are becoming physically less healthy because of relying on food that is not locally produced. We are now sitting in traffic longer while our government borrows loans to build roads in the air, instead of building infrastructure to make cycling and walking easier, or building tramways for travel over longer distances.

More annoying is the fact that many times products are marketed to us as essential, only for them to gather dust after a short period of use.

All this packaging, junk and isolation is produced by industrialisation.

The foundation of industrialisation, therefore, is not technology, as we’re taught to believe. It is alienation. Alienation from ourselves, from each other, from our environment and from reality. Industrialisation requires amnesia and detachment from the being human, to the extent that we accept the lie that to be dehumanised and to ruin the planet is “progress”.

So what is the alternative to industrialisation?

We need a society that ends alienation, alienation from what we consume, who produces it, and from each other. We should be able to buy food from farmers we know. We should be able to go to a producers’ market or a farm on a regular basis to buy food in season, and grow a few regulars at home. We should shop with containers which will be refilled every time we go to the market, rather than always throw away yet more unnecessary packaging.

We should have libraries so that we don’t have to keep buying more and more books. We should have spaces for concerts, festivals and regular occasions to meet and know each other. As a teacher who loves sewing and knitting, I should be able to earn a living while splitting my time between having conversations with young people in my house and making clothes to sell. My creativity and knowledge should not be policed by people in the lush suburbs of Gigiri who do not care who I am and whom I teach.

And without industrialisation, there would be no need for surveillance to control our bodies and minds, which means no meaningless bureaucratic jobs, less paper waste on bureaucratic documents, less corruption, and less misery of sitting at a desk from eight to five.  We would not need to make children spend the whole day in school because parents would be free to pick them up.

A de-industrialised world would give us less illnesses, would make us pollute the planet less, and would give us time to be with ourselves, our families and our communities. It would make us more creative and hopefully, happier. We would experience travel not as the harassment we now know, but as a series of adventures like the ones reflected in our folk tales, of meeting new people and either settling as new communities or returning home.

The foundation of industrialisation is not technology. It is alienation.

By contrast, all that industrialisation does is to voraciously consume the planet and our humanity in useless and brutal pursuits. Industrialisation packs people in cages called plantations, factories, mines, offices, schools and prisons. Initially, the zombie owners of the cages harvested whatever the caged human beings produced. Now they have added a new layer to their greed: they collect rents on money, patents, buildings and risk. This system is justified culturally by a media that celebrates the owners of the cages and disparages the caged. To maintain this madness, the US and the UK dedicate their resources to manufacturing weapons and occupying human talent with surveillance. The US notoriously holds a quarter of the world’s prison population behind bars for profit and the post-Brexit UK is now beefing up its nuclear arsenal.

Unfortunately, this madness is being mimicked by African leaders with no sense of irony. Ghana, a major site of export of kidnapped Africans during the Middle Passage, is considering a repeat performance of the evils of the prison industrial complex. Kenya’s president has just commissioned a weapons factory to profit from African wars, even as the aforementioned ventilators are yet to receive approval and as the lack of ICU beds and oxygen cylinders is killing Kenyans.

And this is not an invitation for escape to rural life. Rural life may give us a reprieve from the toxicity of urban life, but it remains embedded in the colonial logic of extraction and exploitation. In any case, the vulture capitalists are coming for rural areas too, under banners such as conservation, protecting wildlife from Africans and seed and food colonisation.

Euro-America is miserable. To echo Fanon, it has never stopped talking of humanity, while it increases and securitises its industrialisation of humanity. Africans should not thoughtlessly follow the path of industrialisation when industrialisation is not working in the West and has always dehumanised Africans. The West has constantly sabotaged industrialisation in Africa anyway. As Fanon, and later Thomas Sankara said, we must invent a new future. Fanon’s final words in his last book (with my modifications) are very much worth repeating:

We now know the price of suffering humanity has paid for every one of Europe’s spiritual victories. Come, comrades, the European game is finally over, we must look for something else. We can do anything provided that we do not ape Europe, provided that we are not obsessed with catching up with Europe. Europe has gained such a mad and reckless momentum that it has lost control and reason and is heading at dizzying speed towards the brink from which we would be advised to remove ourselves as quickly as possible.

​Let us decide not to imitate Europe; let us tense our muscles and brains in a new direction. Let us endeavour to invent humanity in full, something which Europe has been incapable of achieving. What matters now is not a question of profitability, not a question of productivity, not a question of production rates. No, it is not a question of back to nature. It is the very basic question of not dragging humanity in directions which humiliate humanity. If we want to respond to the expectations of our peoples, we must look elsewhere besides Europe. We must make a new start, develop a new way of thinking, and endeavour to create a new humanity.

In recent months it has felt like election rigging has run riot.

Citizens killed, beaten and intimidated and election results falsified in Uganda. Ballot boxes illegally thrown out of windows so their votes for the opposition can be dumped in the bin in Belarus. Widespread censorship and intimidation of opposition candidates and supporters in Tanzania.

So what do ordinary citizens make of these abuses?

If you follow the Twitter feed of opposition leaders like Uganda’s Bobi Wine, it would be easy to assume that all voters are up in arms about electoral malpractice – and that it has made them distrust the government and feel alienated from the state. But the literature on patrimonialism and “vote buying” suggests something very different: that individuals are willing to accept manipulation – and may even demand it – if it benefits them and the candidates that they support.

Our new book, “The Moral Economy of Elections in Africa” tries to answer this question. We looked at elections in Ghana, Kenya and Uganda over 4 years, conducting over 300 interviews, 3 nationally representative surveys and reviewing thousands of pages of archival records.

Based on this evidence we argue that popular engagement with democracy is motivated by two beliefs: the first is civic, and emphasises meritocracy and following the official rules of the democratic game, while the second is patrimonial, and emphasises the distinctive bond between an individual and their own – often ethnic – community.

This means that elections are shaped by – and pulled between – competing visions of what it means to do the right thing. The ability of leaders to justify running dodgy elections therefore depends on whether their actions can be framed as being virtuous on one – or more – counts.

We show that whether leaders can get away with malpractice – and hence undermining democracy – depends on whether they can justify their actions as being virtuous on one – or more effective – of these very different value systems.

Why morality?

We argue that all elections are embedded in a moral economy of competing visions of what it means to be a good leader, citizen or official. In the three countries we study, this moral economy is characterised by a tension between two broad registers of virtue: one patrimonial and the other civic.

The patrimonial register stresses the importance of an engagement between patron and client that is reciprocal, even if very hierarchical and inequitable. It is rooted in a sense of common identity such as ethnicity and kinship.

This is epitomised in the kind of “Big Man” rule seen in Kenya. The pattern that’s developed is that ethnic leaders set out to mobilise their communities as a “bloc vote”. But the only guarantee that these communities will vote as expected is if the leader is seen to have protected and promoted their interests.

In contrast, civic virtue asserts the importance of a national community that is shaped by the state and valorises meritocracy and the provision of public goods. These are the kinds of values that are constantly being pushed – though not always successfully – by international election observers and civil society organisations that run voter education programmes.

In contrast to some of the existing literature, we do not argue that one of these registers is inherently “African”. Both are in evidence. We found that electoral officials, observers and voter educators were more likely to speak in terms of civic virtue. For their part, voters and politicians tended to speak in terms of patrimonial virtue. But they all had one thing in common – all feel the pull of both registers.

This is perfectly demonstrated by the press conferences of election coalitions in Kenya. At these events, the “Big Men” of different ethnic groups line up to endorse the party, while simultaneously stressing their national outlook and commitment to inclusive democracy and development.

Over simplification

It is often assumed that patrimonial beliefs fuel electoral malpractice whereas civic ones challenge it. But this is an oversimplification.

Take the illegal act of an individual voting multiple times for the same candidate. This may be justified on the basis of loyalty to a specific leader and the need to defend community interests – a patrimonial rationale. But in some cases voters sought to justify this behaviour on the basis that it was a necessary precaution to protect the public good because rival parties were known to break the rules.

In some cases, malpractice may therefore look like the “right” thing to do. What practices can be justified depends on the political context – and how well leaders are at making an argument. This matters, because candidates who are not seen to be “good” on either register rapidly lose support.

Nothing demonstrates this better than the practice of handing out money around election times. Our surveys and interviews demonstrated that voters were fairly supportive of candidates handing out “something small” as part of a broader set of activities designed to assist the community. In this context, the gift was seen as a legitimate part of an ongoing patrimonial relationship.

But when a leader who had not already proved their moral worth turned up in a constituency and started handing out money, they were likely to be seen as using handouts to make up for past neglect and accused of illegitimate “vote buying..”

This happened to Alan Kwadwo Kyeremanten in Ghana, a political leader so associated with handing out money that he became popularly known as Alan Cash. But Cash has consistently failed to become the presidential flagbearer for his National Patriotic Party. We argue that this is because he failed to imbue gifts with moral authority. As one newspaper noted at the time:

Alan Cash did not cultivate loyal and trusted supporters; he only used money to buy his way into their minds not their hearts.

The problem of patrimonialism

A great deal of research about Africa suggests – either implicitly or explicitly – that democratisation will only take place when patrimonialism is eradicated. On this view, democratic norms and values can only come to the fore when ethnic politics and the practices it gives rise to are eliminated.

Against this, our analysis suggests that this could do as much harm as good.

Patrimonial ideals may exist in tension with civic ones, but it is also true that the claims voters and candidates make on one another in this register is an important source of popular engagement with formal political processes. For example, voters turnout both due to a sense of civic duty and to support those candidates who they believe will directly assist them and their communities.

This means that in reality ending patrimonial politics would weaken the complex set of ties that bind many voters to the political system. One consequence of this would be to undermine people’s belief in their ability to hold politicians to account, which might engender political apathy – and result in lower voter turnout. In the 2000s, as many as 85% of voters went to the polls, far exceeding the typical figure in established Western democracies.

The same thing is likely to happen if the systematic manipulation of elections robs them of their moral importance – signs of which were already visible in the Ugandan elections of the last few months.

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This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.