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.