Regional Outlook : Africa Moves Fitfully Toward Democracy : Nigeria’s election fiasco typifies problems of entrenched leaders, unrest and mistrust.

NAIROBI, Kenya —  Looking back on it now, Gen. Ibrahim Babangida’s scheme for the perfect democracy in Nigeria, Africa’s largest country and long an example for the continent, seemed a little too perfect.

He created two parties and wrote their platforms--one a little bit right of center, the other a little bit to the left. To keep the process spanking clean, he decreed that no former politicians or military coup-makers, including himself, could run for office. And he turned down plenty of nominees before the parties selected two candidates who met his exacting standards.

Finally, after three delays, Babangida allowed the country to go to the polls last month. The only problem was that the voters elected Moshood K.O. Abiola, from the left-center Social Democratic Party, while Babangida had favored Bashir Tofa, from the right-center National Republication Convention.

Babangida tossed out the election results and, after several days of rioting and an army crackdown that left up to 100 Nigerians dead, he promised to create an interim government. Then he changed his mind, calling new elections for Aug. 14 and tossing in two new rules that disqualified both Abiola and Tofa.

Babangida still promises to hand over power to civilian rule on Aug. 27, the eighth anniversary of the coup that brought him to power.

But Africa’s biggest experiment in democracy, one being watched by nervous leaders across the continent, has lost all credibility, both at home and abroad.

“My suspicion now is that he really doesn’t want to hand over power at all,” said Larry Diamond, an African affairs specialist at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. “He’s hoping that this thing will implode again, and give him an excuse to stay on. It’s pathetic, really. The man is just inventing the rules as he goes along.”

Nigeria’s troubles follow a tide of democracy that has surged across Africa in recent years, changing the face of the world’s poorest continent.

Since 1990, 11 of black-ruled Africa’s 48 nations have seen democratic changes of government--rare events, indeed, during the first three decades of independence. In 10 other countries, incumbent rulers have managed to hold their crowns in new democratic elections.

But the transitions have been far from smooth. Growing democratic movements still battle powerful, corrupt and entrenched leaders. A downward economic spiral continues. And even new political legitimacy has failed in many countries to stem civil unrest, some of which is sponsored by the old, democratically deposed regimes.

In the typical African country, the average citizen has discovered that his vote has so far brought precious little new freedom and even less prosperity.

A new government in Zambia, though one of the continent’s more stable, resorted to the time-honored tool of martial law to protect itself against coup plotters earlier this year. Opposition leaders have come to power in Congo and Niger, only to be pummeled by violence and military rebellions.

Former dictators were recently returned to power in widely boycotted elections in Burkina Faso, Djibouti, Gabon, Mauritania and Cameroon. And even in countries where the opposition has participated, voting often has been marred by allegations of fraud.

Kenya’s president, Daniel Arap Moi, coasted to victory last December in his country’s first multi-party elections in 25 years--but not before he had used his powers to manipulate the campaign and divide his opposition. Now, as Kenya sinks ever deeper into economic crisis, Moi’s commitment to democracy remains questionable. The media still are regularly under attack and Moi’s police still run roughshod over his opponents.

“I’m mildly encouraged that some progress has been made in Africa, but I’m very discouraged that it hasn’t been smoother,” said Pauline Baker, an African affairs analyst at the Aspen Institute in Washington.

“People tend to think you can just flick a switch and hold an election--and then everyone can go home and not worry,” Baker added. “But Africa has been so burdened, and the deck stacked against it for so many years, that it would be naive to assume the transition can occur quickly or smoothly.”

Across Africa, the transition appears to have been easiest in smaller countries, such as the island states of Cape Verde and Sao Tome and Principe and the tiny republics of Benin and Burundi.

Before 1990, only five African nations were democratic. Today, 26 countries, or more than half the continent, have at least nominal democracies. And 15 more have promised, with varying degrees of sincerity, to hold free elections.

But the larger and more powerful nations, especially the bellwether states of Kenya and Nigeria, have found the going rough.

African “big men,” determined to retain their hold on power in countries where corruption is rife, are loosening their grip, but finger by finger. Their promises of democratization sound hollow and it is clear that, like Nigeria’s Babangida, few are really ready to relinquish the perks of power.

Political analysts at the Carter Center of Emory University in Atlanta, which tracks emerging democracies in Africa, think the continent has backslid on the promise of democratization in the past year.

African leaders are increasingly using their powers “to destabilize, discredit and, where necessary, bludgeon the forces demanding democratic renewal,” the center said earlier this year.

Nigeria has become a clear example of what happens when the forces of democracy confront a ruler’s shaky commitment to that principle.

Babangida’s attempts to manipulate the transition alienated many in his country even before the June 12 elections, in which just 30% of the electorate voted. Lack of faith in the process turned out to be well-founded when Babangida voided the results, despite international declarations that the voting was free and fair.

The landslide victory of Abiola, a millionaire businessman, seemed a perfect compromise for Nigeria’s ethnically fractured electorate. The predominantly Muslim north has controlled the country since independence from Britain. Although Abiola is a Yoruba from the south, he also is a Muslim. And many saw him as a conciliator for the country’s 90 million people, who are divided into 250 ethnic groups and speak nearly 400 languages.

Babangida has called new elections, and ordered the parties to choose new presidential candidates. The campaign is to begin this Saturday.

But Abiola’s party has promised to boycott the voting.

“The sun does not rise two times a day, and you cannot be made to rewrite an examination you have already passed,” Abiola said. “I have already been given the mandate to lead a civilian administration for the next four years. Ignoring such a mandate will mean clear betrayal of the people’s wish.”

Abiola even challenged the new elections in court, but Babangida promptly suspended all court hearings until after the new round of voting.

At stake in Nigeria is more than a single country’s democracy. The country, home to one of every four Africans, is one of the continent’s most influential nations.

“What happens in Nigeria is going to be fundamentally important for the future of democratization in Africa,” said Diamond, the Stanford analyst. If Nigeria gets away “with this rape of the democratic process,” he added, “it will lead other African authoritarian regimes to think they can get away with perversions of the democratic process, so long as they make some gesture in the way of multi-party competition.”

Meanwhile, hopes of democratic rule fade daily in other parts of Africa.

Zaire President Mobutu Sese Seko continues to rule by fear and favor, defying world pressure and confounding even small moves toward democracy.

A popular uprising in Somalia drove the hated Mohamed Siad Barre from office and from the country, but the resulting anarchy and famine brought an unprecedented occupation by tens of thousands of U.N. troops. The country is years away from democratic rule.

Angola’s elections last year, deemed free and fair by international observers, were shattered when guerrilla leader Jonas Savimbi, unwilling to accept defeat, dragged the country back into civil war.

In Liberia, one of only two African countries never formally colonized by a Western power, rebels murdered the hated dictator, Samuel K. Doe, only to push the country into anarchy. Liberia’s three main militias and the ineffectual interim government have reached a tentative peace pact, but democracy remains years away.

Many African experts worry that international pressure on Africa to institute political reform is being relaxed. France, in a change of policy under the new conservative government, has balked at making progress on democracy and human rights a condition of aid.

Alain Juppe, the French foreign minister, said recently that African nations shouldn’t rush into democracy. The evolution should be “at its own pace, with its own constraints . . . and without hasty elections,” he said.

African experts remain deeply divided on the underlying cause of Africa’s difficult transition to democratic rule and its prospects for the future.

Author Robert D. Kaplan has blamed it on the absence of a modern political culture in Africa.

“My fear is that what lies beyond the stabilizing presence of the last ‘big men’ is nothing, simply nothing, and that Liberia and Somalia are merely the first to fall,” Kaplan wrote recently in the New Republic. “African culture, in a modern political sense, is simply dysfunctional.”

However, other analysts note that sub-Saharan Africa is a diverse region, with more than 800 different ethnic groups in 44 countries. Of those nations, only Somalia and Liberia have slipped into anarchy. Without democratization, even more might have fallen, they say.

“Africa is on the edge of the abyss,” said Diamond, the Stanford analyst. “The advent of real democracy in Africa might bring more noisiness and combativeness, but fundamentally it would be a much better avenue for bringing about a more legitimate political order and preventing the descent of these countries.”

Most African countries are worse off than they were at independence in the late 1950s and early 1960s. War and famine are primarily to blame. Although it has only 14% of the world’s population, Africa has had one-third of the armed conflicts and produced half the world’s refugees, according to the Carter Center.

Many Africans blame the halting transition to democracy on the West, for first creating colonies that suppressed indigenous African development, and later for supporting dozens of dictators as a hedge against Communist expansionism on the continent.

And some analysts, including Paul Mavima, a political scientist at Zimbabwe University, suggest that the experiment with democracy will not work until Africa’s autocrats are truly converted.

“People have been largely freed from dictatorships but is the cost worth it?” Mavima said in a recent interview with Reuters news service. “Multi-partyism is not working in Africa . . . because political leaders embraced the concept only because of threats by the West to cut aid.”

But other Africans see little alternative. Ted Maliyamkono, director of the Eastern and Southern Africa Universities Research Project, based in Tanzania, thinks democracy, with its provisions for protecting individual and group rights, is the continent’s only hope.

“If we don’t accept democracy, what else do we have?” Maliyamkono said.

Signposts of Democracy

Democracy has had its ups and downs in sub-Saharan Africa over the last few years. Among the latest developments:

MADAGASCAR: First-ever democratic elections in February ousted President Didier Ratsiraka.

NIGER: Power was peacefully transferred in March to Mahamane Ousmane, the first democratically elected president.

BURUNDI: Melchior Ndadaye was elected president in June, giving majority Hutu ethnic group its first president ever.

MALAWI: 63% of voters in June said they favored multi-party democracy. But President H. Kamuzu Banda wants to remain to control the transition.

GUINEA BISSAU: President Joao Bernardo Vieira this month set first democratic elections for March, 1994.

NIGERIA: Gen. Ibrahim Babangida’s government tossed out the results of multi-party elections in June and has rescheduled them for next month.

TOGO: Often-postponed presidential elections are set for Aug. 25. Gen. Gnassingbe Eyadema’s bid to continue as president has touched off street violence. SOUTH AFRICA: President Frederik W. de Klerk, with opposition figures, set April, 1994, for the first multiracial democratic elections.

Scorecard for Sub-Saharan Africa

A rough guide to the status of democracy in various nations:

* MULTI-PARTY DEMOCRACIES

1) BENIN: Following riots inspired by economic collapse, former dictator Mathieu Kerekou defeated in March, 1991, ballot, by Nicephore Soglo.

2) BURUNDI: Melchior Ndadaye elected president in June, defeating military ruler Maj. Pierre Buyoya and giving the majority Hutu ethnic group its first president.

3) CAPE VERDE: Free legislative and presidential elections in 1991 ended 15 years of one-party rule.

4) LESOTHO: Kingdom’s military rulers relinquished power in April after the long-exiled Basotho Congress Party won democratic elections.

5) MADAGASCAR: Albert Zafy trounced President Didier Ratsiraka in the country’s first democratic elections in February.

6) MAURITIUS: Multi-party democracy since independence from Britain in 1968.

7) NAMIBIA: Multi-party elections held in 1989 after 23 years of war between South African rulers and black nationalist guerrillas. Independence declared March 21, 1990.

8) SAO TOME AND PRINCIPE: Free elections in 1991 ended one-party rule.

9) ZAMBIA: Following 27 years in power, President Kenneth D. Kaunda in 1991 handed country over to Frederick Chiluba, winner of Zambia’s first multi-party elections.

* SHAKY MULTI-PARTY DEMOCRACIES

10) COMORO ISLANDS: President Said Mohamed Djohar won multi-party presidential election in 1990, but opponents charged fraud. Junior army officers tried and failed to overthrow him in September, 1992.

11) CONGO: President Pascal Lissouba, an opposition figure who spent years in exile, won the first multi-party elections in August, 1992. But violence has gripped the country.

12) MALI: Alpha Oumar Konare won a 70% majority in first multi-party elections last year, ending 23-year dictatorship of President Amadou Toure.

13) NIGER: Military rebellion faces Mahamane Ousmane, who became country’s first democratically elected president in March.

* NOMINAL MULTI-PARTY DEMOCRACIES

(opposition parties legal, but have not won the presidency or legislative control):

14) BURKINA FASO: President Blaise Compaore, who assumed power after a 1987 coup, won widely boycotted presidential election in 1991. His party also won first multi-party parliamentary elections last year.

15) BOTSWANA: There are more than eight opposition parties, but all elections since independence from Britain in 1966 have been won by the Botswana Democratic Party.

16) CAMEROON: President Paul Biya was re-elected with less than 40% of vote in first multi-party elections in October, 1992. Sharply criticized by foreign observers.

17) DJIBOUTI: President Hassan Gouled Aptidon was re-elected in May to fourth six-year term in multi-party elections boycotted by leading opposition party.

18) GABON: President Omar Bongo’s party won bare majority in National Assembly in 1990 when forced to hold first multi-party elections in 22 years.

19) GAMBIA: President Dawda Jawara, ruler since independence from Britain in 1965, won fifth term in April, 1992. His party holds a large majority in parliament.

20) GHANA: Flight Lt. Jerry Rawlings, who came to power in 1981 coup, elected civilian president in November, 1992, in multi-party ballot marred by fraud and threats of violence.

21) IVORY COAST: President Felix Houphouet-Boigny declared controversial winner in first multi-party elections in 1990.

22) KENYA: President Daniel Arap Moi retained power last December, winning first multi-party elections in 25 years. Government used police, media and electoral machinery to undermine opposition.

23) MAURITANIA: President Sid Ahmed Ould Taya, brought to power in 1984 coup, officially won 1992 multi-party elections that German observers criticized as far from free and fair.

24) SENEGAL: Last presidential election, in 1988, marred by fraud charges. Opposition parties legal since independence in 1960, but all elections won by ruling Socialist Party and its predecessors.

25) SEYCHELLES: President France Albert Rene reelected last week in first multi-party elections since independence from Britain in 1976, defeating James Mancham, whom he ousted in 1977 coup.

26) ZIMBABWE: Opposition parties legal and resentment growing over economic downturn, but President Robert Mugabe’s ruling ZANU-PF party remains in power.

* ENCOURAGING CHANGES:

27) ETHIOPIA: Transitional government, in power since popular uprising drove out dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam in 1991, plans to hand over power next year to constituent assembly.

28) MALAWI: In June referendum, 63% said they favored multi-party democracy. But President H Kamuzu Banda, head of only legal party, wants to control transition.

29) MOZAMBIQUE: New constitution ended one-party rule after 15 years of civil war. Moves toward multi-party elections are beginning.

30) SOUTH AFRICA: President Frederik W. de Klerk and opposition figures set April, 1994, for first multi-racial democratic elections.

* TOO EARLY TO TELL:

31) ANGOLA: President Jose Eduardo dos Santos won last year’s first democratic elections. But guerrilla leader Jonas Savimbi, promptly restarted civil war.

32) CHAD: President Ibriss Deby, who ousted Hissene Habre in 1990, now a figurehead while Prime Minister Fidel Moungar manages the transition to free elections, date unset.

33) EQUATORIAL GUINEA: One-party government of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo has promised democracy but is moving at a snail’s pace. Legislative elections set for Sept. 12.

34) ERITREA: Former province of Ethiopia voted for independence in May. New transitional government has promised to set up multi-party system but no timetable.

35) GUINEA BISSAU: President Joao Bernardo Vieira announced this month that first democratic elections will be held next March.

36) LIBERIA: In 1990, Rebels killed brutal dictator Samuel K. Doe. Three main militias and interim government reached tentative peace pact this month, but free elections seem far away.

37) NIGERIA: Gen. Ibrahim Babangida’s government tossed out results of multi-party elections in June and has rescheduled them for next month. Regime still promises a return to civilian rule by Aug. 27.

38) SIERRA LEONE: Military government continues after April, 1992 coup that ousted Major General Joseph Momoh. But Capt. Valentine Strasser has pledged to return power to civilians within three years.

39) TOGO: Often-postponed presidential elections now slated for Aug. 25. Gen. Gnassingbe Eyadema promised to rein in hisunpopular army, but his bid to continue as president has touched off street violence, forcing 230,000 to flee the capital.

* PROBABLY NOT SERIOUS ABOUT REFORM:

40) CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC: Multi-party elections delayed three times since October, 1992, by President Andre Kolingba, who has cracked down on protestors.

41) GUINEA: Government of military ruler Lansana Conte’s government postponed nation’s first multi-party elections, originally set for last December. Now promised for later this year, though no date announced.

42) TANZANIA: Ruling Revolutionary Party of Tanzania promised political reform, but government has not set date for democratic elections. Opposition parties legal.

43) RWANDA: Sole political party remains President Juvenal Habyarimana’s National Revolutionary Movement for Democracy and Development.

44) UGANDA: President Yoweri Museveni, who came to power 1986 military coup, says one-party rule will continue to year 2000. October elections scheduled to choose constitution-writing body, which will decide whether to hold a referendum on multi-party democracy.

45) ZAIRE: President Mobutu Sese Seko, suspended a transitional legislature last December. He has prevented an opposition-led government from functioning as the country slips into anarchy.

* ACTIVELY RESISTING CHANGE:

46) SUDAN: nominally democratic government overthrown by Muslim fundamentalists in 1989 under Lt. Gen. Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, who then banned all opposition groups.

47) SWAZILAND: King Mswati III controls elected Parliament and has outlawed most political opponents.

* IN ANARCHY:

48) SOMALIA: In 1991, rebels drove President Mohamed Siad Barre from country, which is now under control of U.N. troops. No new, legitimate government authority established.