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Why can most African countries not host peaceful elections?

9 Mar 2009 14:423 commentsBizLike
Kenya had reports of arson and violence in the aftermath of its 2008 elections and live media coverage was banned during the crisis.

Prior to the results from Ghana's run-off elections being revealed in 2009, NDC supporters reportedly converged on the election headquarters demanding that Akufo-Addo or Mills be declared the victor, but riot police and armed soldiers were called in to keep the peace.

Zimbabwe's 2008 presidential election was rife with accusations of fraud and ballot rigging after the first round of results were only released a month later. The period following the first round was marked by political violence.

Just last week Joao Bernardo Vieira, president of Guinea-Bissau, was shot dead by soldiers and yet the country's citizens went on the next day with business as usual, barely mourning their fallen leader.

Granted, every African country has its own economic and socio-political backgrounds that are the cause and effect behind these digressions.
Why can most African countries not host peaceful elections?
 
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Henry
Elections come from the West-
"The strongest survive" is the traditional African method of selection. Elections are a modern western invention which have to still infiltrate into Africa. Posted on 9 Mar 2009 15:46
Afrowave
Unless we sort out our past, our future is determined-
Have you noticed that that Europe is after 2 World wars and the USSR breakup is ethnically divided?

Have we realized our early years in Independence and our promising leaders were casualties of the Cold War?

Why hasn't America signed the ICC treaty?

We have to put our past into perspective.
How did African countries get their borders?

When the colonial powers could no longer push their imperial objectives, political independence came to the "Third World" but not social-economic freedom. When the "Cold War" ended the majority of "proxy wars" and Apartheid wars in Africa ended.

The generation of African Leaders who took over power at Independence had to tow the Western dictates or be replaced-violently. Here we must blame the collaborating African leaders and their "global power" partners.

The infamous African dictators were allowed to run their countries like their back pockets so long as multinationals were given cheap access to much needed raw materials for western development.

In turn it produced peoples who could not challenge these "authorities". Once these leaders became entrenched, the Cold War ended and the multinationals got a "conscience", suddenly "multipartism and SAPs" became the new catch phrase.

We currently have borders that don't make sense, with "democracy" on foreign terms totally disregarding "democracy on African cultural terms" and multipartism funded by Western interests.

In countries with "White Africans", the problems are impunity starting in colonial times, land inequality skewed favourably towards the ruling elite once White now Black with the same cultures and laws and now increasing gaps between the haves and have-nots.

Now South Africa is going into the same history while we look on. The majority of the "native" Africans have become poor as a class of "newly rich" has appeared and are now going to take the country through the same history as in Kenya and Zimbabwe.

And you are asking most African countries not host peaceful elections? Posted on 9 Mar 2009 19:32
peaceful elections-
its becase of povety anyone knows that a hungry man is an angry man Posted on 10 Mar 2009 13:46
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