Tyson's ECOWAS Occasional Journal - Politics in West Africa

  A number of ECOWAS countries have been in the news in recent months for attacks on press freedom. The map above shows the Reporters Without Borders 2021 rankings for West Africa. The best ranked countries in the region are Ghana (30th) and Burkina Faso (37th). The worst are Nigeria, Benin, and Guinea (109th). Benin had the most dramatic fall, from ranking 91st in 2019 to 114th in 2021. Mali, on the other hand, rose from 112th in 2019 to 99th. Some examples: In June President Buhari of Nigeria  banned Twitter , and the parliament attempted to pass a law that "would allow the government to jail journalists, fine newspapers up to 10m naira ($20,000) or close them for up to a year if they publish “fake” news. ... the latest efforts to push through the law come just weeks after Nigeria’s government banned people from using Twitter, and amid increasingly heavy-handed restrictions on broadcast media. Last year Nigeria fell five places (to 120th out of 180) in a ranking of pr...

  Here are some excerpts from my WaPo Monkey Cage post about Benin's election in April. Benin has become less and less democratic since Talon won the presidency in 2016.  Benin continues to slide toward autocracy Benin’s April 11 elections have many analysts increasingly concerned that the country is following a recent pattern of democratic decline in Africa. ... The details of Benin’s slide toward autocracy fit a distinct pattern outlined in “ How Democracies Die ,” a comprehensive analysis of how democratic underpinnings cease to function. Authors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt point out that, unlike the dramatic revolutions or coups that once displaced democracies, in recent decades, democratic regimes tend to succumb via marginal changes, including “legal” reforms such as laws regulating elections and the media. Other political scientists refer to this process as “ authoritarianization .” Levitsky and Ziblatt identify four key indicators of authoritarian behavior, ...

In the 2019 legislative elections in Benin, a new electoral code and some decisions in the politicized bureaucracy and judiciary resulted in all opposition parties (and some pro-government parties) being disqualified from the ballot, so the only two parties to compete were two new pro-President Talon parties.  The 2020 municipal elections  did include one opposition party, the Forces Cauris pour un Bénin Emergent (FCBE), but they only won enough seats to control around 7 mayoral offices, and the new electoral code requires 16 sponsors (mayors or National Assembly delegates) to be qualify as a presidential candidate. So this seemed to be a block-by-block strategy to set up an effectively uncontested presidential election this year. 

You can read the whole thing at the Washington Post's Monkey Cage (someone at WaPo decided to anglicize the country's name). Here are a few excerpts: The challenges of the Ivorian 2020 elections have their roots in conflicts that began 30 years ago, when Ouattara and Bédié were rivals to succeed Félix Houphouët-Boigny , the country’s first president. ... The run-up to the 2020 presidential election appeared to promise further democratic progress, as continued economic prosperity laid the groundwork for stability. A new constitution adopted via a 2016 referendum removed the Ivoirité restriction and included a presidential two-term limit. In March, Ouattara made good on his promise not to seek a third term by designating Prime Minister Amadou Gon Coulibaly as the RHDP coalition’s presidential candidate. ...

After my post on president age , it struck me that in just 2 years, three of the 15 presidents ran for a 3rd or 4th term. That seems like a lot, since presidential term limits (usually 2) are one of the continent's democratic successes.  Presidential term limits are particularly important in "presidential regimes" in which the president is both head of state and head of government. In semi-presidential regimes , where the prime minister is head of government and answers to both the president and the legislature, presidential term limits might play a different role. The president is already constrained to a greater degree by the legislature, and prime ministers generally don't have term limits, so term limits on the presidency might not be as high-stakes.  So I thought it would be interesting to look at the status of term limits in presidential and semi-presidential ECOWAS countries separately. (There are currently no parliamentary regimes in the region.) Shugart and ...

Wow, I haven't posted on here about Togo since 2017 . That's not good! Since then, there have been 3 elections and a constitutional amendment.