Political Parties in Africa: Challenges for Sustained Multiparty

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Political Parties in Africa: Challenges for Sustained Multiparty Democracy
across ethnicity and region (Southall 2005). Generally, however, this is an area in
which the evidence so far is still, by and large, anecdotal, although the general trend
shows that there is more party competition, with the exception of dominant-party
states, than there was for example during the first two multiparty elections in most
African countries.
4.5 Party coalitions and networks
With the democratic renaissance of the 1990s, those political parties that were banned
during authoritarian rule have been resurrected and new ones created. With the
exception of the 16 African countries that are ruled by dominant-party systems (see
Table 4.2), the majority are multiparty or two-party systems. One contributing factor
is that the number of political parties in each country has increased dramatically,
with fewer dominant-party states as a result. The awakening of ethnicity which was
suppressed during the outburst of synthetic nationalism during the 1950s and 1960s
has also meant that the post-1990s political parties are not less ethnically inclined
in their orientation than their pre-independence predecessors. In some countries
the proliferation of political parties has meant the demise of the so-called national
political parties (e.g. KANU of Kenya, the United National Independence Party
(UNIP) in Zambia, etc.); in others it has strengthened the old guard and enabled
them to retain or stage a comeback to power (e.g. the Revolutionary State Party
(Chama Cha Mapinduzi, CCM) in Tanzania).
Although they are at the embryonic stage, African party-to-party coalitions operate
at four levels—national, pan-African, regional and global party-to-party partnership.
The following are examples of each of these four trajectories.
4.5.1 National party coalitions
Coalitions as forms of party-to-party-partnership are common to all countries, and
are political mechanisms for aggregating interests and reaching a middle ground in
order to form the government in situations where no single political party wins the
majority of parliamentary seats. In the severely divided societies of Africa, party-toparty
becomes an important vehicle for national integration. In this sense, partyto-party
partnership enables political parties to articulate their programmes and
interests and through dialogue create ideological affinity beyond the ethnic, cultural
and linguistic group. The integrative role of national party-to-party partnership is
also relevant to regional party-to-party partnerships; it supports regional integration
and interdependence between regional and sub-regional political entities.