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Research and analysis on Africa
The Military and Democratisation in Niger
By: Jibrin Ibrahim, Centre for Research and Documentation, Kano, Nigeria
In 1987, Seyni Kountché, the military ruler of Niger died, ending one of the most tyrannical periods of political rule in Africa. Six regime changes were to occur in quick succession. First, in 1989, from military dictatorship to the Second Republic, which lasted for only three months. Then the Sovereign National Conference was convened in 1991 and transitional institutions were set up. Next came the Third Republic and democratic institutions in 1993, which was overthrown in January 1996 by the coup d'état of Bare Mainasara. In July 1996, Mainasara imposed a new Constitution and organised presidential elections signalling transition to another regime. Finally, in April 1999, General Mainasara was assassinated and there was another return to military rule. The new regime is however engaged in a rapid programme of return to democratic rule and it is expected that an elected regime will be sworn in on 31 December 1999.
The rebirth of authoritarianism
On 27 January 1996, Col. Ibrahim Bare Mainasara carried out a coup d'état that ended the turbulent but promising life of the Third Republic. The international community objected strongly to the intervention by the military and intense pressure was put on them to return to the barracks immediately and allow democratic institutions to sort out the problems that had emerged. The pressure was maintained until Mainasara brought forward the transfer date to civilian democratic rule from December to July 1996. The coup was well received in many circles in the country and had initial popular support because many people were fed up with the political quarrels of the political parties. However, it did not take long for elation with military rule to turn to disgust. Immediately after the coup, the army and security services started arresting journalists and politicians who were critical of military rule in general and Mainasara in particular.
Most political observers in Niger were of the view that drastic institutional changes were necessary if their country's democracy was to survive. Four days after coming to power, the junta called a National Forum, which came up with the idea that the way forward was to change the Constitution to a presidential type in which the President's powers could not be easily contested. Secondly, the electoral code was to be changed to a first past the post system so that it would be easier for one party to emerge with a clear majority. The new Constitution was approved by 90 per cent of voters in the referendum, although only 35 per cent of the electorate voted. Presidential elections were announced for 7 July 1996. Col. Mainasara promoted himself to General and then announced his intention to contest for the presidency as an independent candidate, despite his earlier promise to relinquish power.
In April, Mainasara changed the electoral code so that he would not be obliged to resign from the army to contest for an electoral office. He set up local support committees for himself while political activities were banned and his rivals were held in detention. While his major rivals were still under house arrest, he established a High Court of Justice with jurisdiction to try former office holders for crimes committed while in office. Although News from the Nordic Africa Institute 3/99 6 the Court did not sit, it was a permanent threat to his rivals.
The July 1996 election is popularly known as the "electoral coup d'état" as distinct from the "military coup d'état" that took place six months earlier. It is the story of an electoral farce. On 6 July, the Government announced that the impending presidential elections would be spread over two days instead of the 7 only. In the evening of the first day of voting, the Regime announced that it had abolished the Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI) because they had leaked results to the press indicating that Mainasara might not win the elections. That night, a new organisation, the National Electoral Commission (CNE), was established to take over the elections. The army was called in to collect the ballot boxes and take them to town halls where the votes were counted in secret by the new CNE. Analysis by the American National Democratic Institute revealed that on the first day of voting, General Mainasara had 29 per cent of the votes cast with a voter turnout of 61.6 per cent; on the second day, Mainasara's votes jumped to 72 per cent with a 92 per cent turnout. The following day, CNE declared him the outright winner on the first round with 52.2 per cent of the votes.
The excuse of constitutional crisis
The December 1992 Constitution that established the institutions of the Third Republic is very similar to the Constitution of the French Fifth Republic. It is a semi-presidential one, which means that the President needs parliamentary support to govern through the Prime Minister that he has appointed. When the President loses the support of Parliament, he is obliged to follow one of two options. Either he dissolves the National Assembly and orders new elections or he accepts cohabitation. This system is difficult to operate as has been witnessed in France itself.
The central idea is that the President presides and the Prime Minister governs, and that is ambiguous. Constitutionally, the President has powers to appoint the Prime Minister and the government. The President is the chief of the army and has powers to direct the country's foreign policy. At the same time, the Constitution defines the Prime Minister as the Head of the Government, which he/she has powers to direct, conduct and co-ordinate.
The Nigerien Third Republic was a promising democratic experiment. Numerous elections were conducted successfully during that period. An alliance of progressive parties, the AFC, won the elections. The ruling coalition was able to maintain its cohesion for only about one year. Eventually, the ruling coalition lost an election and the opposition party took over power. A serious constitutional crisis developed between the President and the Prime Minister.
The problem was not with the tenets and the texts of the semi-presidential system, but with the principal political actors. In any case, the actors were not given sufficient time to seek for solutions, as a democratic system cannot be built in just two years. Our conviction is that had the military not intervened, the political class would have eventually learnt that they needed to compromise and negotiate in their own self-interest. The army, under the leadership of the then Col. Mainasara, needed a pretext to justify taking over political power and seized the opportunity when it presented itself. The most important element in the erosion of democracy in Niger was not the quarrelling among the political class. It was the nature of the economic crisis and the character of international economic pressure that made democratic decision making irrelevant and/or impossible.
The SAP in Niger
Niger is a land-locked country dependent on uranium exports; the economic crisis started in the late 1970s with the decline in uranium revenues (from 18.9 billion CFAF in 1978 to 11.9 billion in 1981). The state then took significant loans from the international market to finance a rapidly growing budget deficit. As uranium revenues continued to fall, the country's current public deficit continued to rise. Servicing the debt soon resulted in a budget crisis and a balance of payments deficit. The IMF and the World Bank moved in 1983 to provide funds to cover the shortfall and help pay for servicing the debt. A full-scale structural adjustment programme (SAP) was signed in 1986, bolstered with a public sector adjustment programme in 1987.
The fundamental assumption underlying SAP was that smuggling would be curtailed along the 1,500 km Niger/Nigeria border. Instead, the incidence of smuggling increased. The fact that the Nigerian Naira was massively devalued, and the CFAF Franc was not, meant that Niger's competitiveness, even of its established exports of cowpeas, cotton and cattle, was eroded. The funds made available for investment were used mainly to cover operating costs and civil service perks. Although SAP was not working at the economic level, it was imposing a lot of hardship at the social level.
The hardship imposed by the first phase of SAP (1983-87) did not provoke any social agitation because the extremely repressive Kountché regime in power was feared by the population. SAP was strongly contested in its second phase 1987-90, under the rule of General Ali Saibou. In 1990, the IMF announced its dissatisfaction with Niger's compliance with SAP measures and called for tougher measures including reductions in the civil service, a government hiring freeze and privatisation of public corporations. Mass protests by students and workers led to the political crisis that precipitated the Sovereign National Conference.
During the debates of the Sovereign National Conference (SNC) in 1991, delegates concluded that SAP had failed, despite warnings from IMF and World Bank officials, who had addressed the delegates as observers, that there was no alternative to SAP. The SNI set up a fifteen-month transitional government to conduct public affairs before elections and then drew up a guidance document "Cahiers des Charges" spelling out its mandate. The transitional government was specifically instructed to devise an alternative programme. The cutting off of funds from the international financial institutions meant that the transitional government was crippled.
The AFC Government of Mahamadou Issoufou of 1993 inherited a backlog of 16 billion CFAF in unpaid salaries and 14 bil lion CFAF in unpaid obligations to suppliers. Issoufou promised to pay salaries and student bursaries regularly but he could not keep this promise. In early 1994, the Government was forced to accept the devaluation of the CFAF with no prior consultation with labour and the situation deteriorated rapidly. The unions fought for adjustment of salaries and price controls to counter the inflation that followed. In response, they found a Government that could not even pay salaries regularly. The central labour organisation USTN embarked on a series of strikes. The Issoufou Government responded by passing anti-labour legislation.
A basic question has been posed by the implementation of SAP in Niger. What was the use of democratic struggles and democratic decision-making processes if it was impossible to implement policies that went against the dictates of international financial institutions? Clearly, the real problem in Niger is the total incapacity of the state to evolve an alternative economic policy to what has been dictated by the Bretton Woods Institutions. By 1994, uranium production had declined to less than 10 per cent of GDP and produced only 11 billion CFAF (about $5 million) in revenues, 25 per cent of total export earning leading to an unmanageable debt service ratio of 80 per cent of fiscal receipts and 59 per cent of export value.
On 14 June 1996, three weeks before the electoral coup d'état, General Ibrahim Bare Mainasara signed the new SAP agreement. The accord was essentially the same SAP programme that had been agreed to by General Ali Saibou in 1990, contested by democratic forces, rejected by the Sovereign National Conference in 1991, re-negotiated by the various governments of the Third Republic, resisted by democratic forces and finally sealed by "democratically elected" General Mainasara. Why struggle for democracy if popular decisions can so easily be thwarted?
Repression and democratic struggles
Immediately after the electoral coup d'état of July 1996, the eight leading political parties in the country established a democratic front to organise resistance against the new dictatorship - Front pour la Restoration et la Défence de la Démocratie (FRDD). The FRDD exposed the manipulative and fraudulent nature of the presidential elections and insisted that Mainasara should vacate the presidency. From mid 1996, they organised numerous pro-democracy demonstrations throughout the country together with trade and student unions.
The response of Mainasara was to reconstitute the police state in Niger and make increased use of "unidentified armed men in military jeeps", to intimidate people. In April 1998, the FRDD once again called for the resignation of Mainasara and organised demonstrations all over the country. In Niamey, over 3,000 students joined the demonstrations. The former Prime Minister Hama Amadou and eight other FRDD leaders were arrested and armed men were sent to machine- gun the house of Ali Sabo, the FRDD co-ordinator in Niamey.
In spite of repression, the press refused to be intimidated so in 1997, the Mainasara regime enacted a "liberticide" press law, which stipulated that all journalists must be re-registered and defined new conditions for registration including a clean police record and a university degree or five years continuous journalistic practice. It also prohibited publishing or broadcasting messages that were offensive to the President. In May 1998, ten newspapers were closed allegedly for non-payment of taxes. The forces for democracy in Niger sustained an intense struggle against dictatorship for almost three years. It has been easier to organise resistance on the political front than on structural adjustment.
The current situation
On 9 April 1999, General Ibrahim Bare Mainasara was assassinated at the military wing of Niamey Airport by his trusted presidential guards, under the leadership of Lieutenant- Colonel Mallam Wanke, who took over as President. Col. Wanke described the death of Mainasara as an unfortunate accident but immediately justified the coup as a sacrifice that had to be made for the greater interest of Niger. He added that it was done in consultation with political parties and civil society. Although numerous countries con demned the coup, the leaders of the country's political parties travelled round the region with Wanke to convince neighbours that the new regime should be supported as the best path to democracy. The wide support that Wanke received within the country was based on the belief that unlike Mainasara, he would keep the promise of transferring power to an elected civilian regime.
The Wanke coup took place the day after opposition political parties had issued an ultimatum to Mainasara to resign or they were going to make Niger ungovernable. This followed the cancellation by the Supreme Court of numerous local government elections that had been won by the opposition. The elections had been held in February 1999 and once again, units of the army had disrupted counting in certain constituencies where opposition parties had won. The victory of the opposition in the elections had demonstrated that Mainasara's three-year tyrannical rule and repression of the opposition had not enabled him to establish political hegemony in the country. It was the cancellation of these elections that angered the parties and created a favourable climate for the coup d'état.
Col. Wanke established a 14 man National Reconciliation Council, which drew up an eight-month programme for returning the country to constitutional civilian rule. A Constitutional Review Commission was set up and it recommended a return to the semi-presidential constitution that had been so vilified during the Third Republic. The revised Constitution was adopted in a referendum. Presidential and legislative elections are to be held in November and December 1999 and the elected regime will be sworn in on 31 December 1999. If Wanke does hand over on that date, it will be clear that it was not a military vanguard that returned Niger to democracy, it was the three-year struggle by the country's political class and civil society against Mainasara's military dictatorship.
Dr Jibrin Ibrahim
Centre for Research and Documentation
Kano, Nigeria
e-mail: ceps@kano.rcl.nig.com
In 1987, Seyni Kountché, the military ruler of Niger died, ending one of the most tyrannical periods of political rule in Africa. Six regime changes were to occur in quick succession. First, in 1989, from military dictatorship to the Second Republic, which lasted for only three months. Then the Sovereign National Conference was convened in 1991 and transitional institutions were set up. Next came the Third Republic and democratic institutions in 1993, which was overthrown in January 1996 by the coup d'état of Bare Mainasara. In July 1996, Mainasara imposed a new Constitution and organised presidential elections signalling transition to another regime. Finally, in April 1999, General Mainasara was assassinated and there was another return to military rule. The new regime is however engaged in a rapid programme of return to democratic rule and it is expected that an elected regime will be sworn in on 31 December 1999.
The rebirth of authoritarianism
On 27 January 1996, Col. Ibrahim Bare Mainasara carried out a coup d'état that ended the turbulent but promising life of the Third Republic. The international community objected strongly to the intervention by the military and intense pressure was put on them to return to the barracks immediately and allow democratic institutions to sort out the problems that had emerged. The pressure was maintained until Mainasara brought forward the transfer date to civilian democratic rule from December to July 1996. The coup was well received in many circles in the country and had initial popular support because many people were fed up with the political quarrels of the political parties. However, it did not take long for elation with military rule to turn to disgust. Immediately after the coup, the army and security services started arresting journalists and politicians who were critical of military rule in general and Mainasara in particular.
Most political observers in Niger were of the view that drastic institutional changes were necessary if their country's democracy was to survive. Four days after coming to power, the junta called a National Forum, which came up with the idea that the way forward was to change the Constitution to a presidential type in which the President's powers could not be easily contested. Secondly, the electoral code was to be changed to a first past the post system so that it would be easier for one party to emerge with a clear majority. The new Constitution was approved by 90 per cent of voters in the referendum, although only 35 per cent of the electorate voted. Presidential elections were announced for 7 July 1996. Col. Mainasara promoted himself to General and then announced his intention to contest for the presidency as an independent candidate, despite his earlier promise to relinquish power.
In April, Mainasara changed the electoral code so that he would not be obliged to resign from the army to contest for an electoral office. He set up local support committees for himself while political activities were banned and his rivals were held in detention. While his major rivals were still under house arrest, he established a High Court of Justice with jurisdiction to try former office holders for crimes committed while in office. Although News from the Nordic Africa Institute 3/99 6 the Court did not sit, it was a permanent threat to his rivals.
The July 1996 election is popularly known as the "electoral coup d'état" as distinct from the "military coup d'état" that took place six months earlier. It is the story of an electoral farce. On 6 July, the Government announced that the impending presidential elections would be spread over two days instead of the 7 only. In the evening of the first day of voting, the Regime announced that it had abolished the Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI) because they had leaked results to the press indicating that Mainasara might not win the elections. That night, a new organisation, the National Electoral Commission (CNE), was established to take over the elections. The army was called in to collect the ballot boxes and take them to town halls where the votes were counted in secret by the new CNE. Analysis by the American National Democratic Institute revealed that on the first day of voting, General Mainasara had 29 per cent of the votes cast with a voter turnout of 61.6 per cent; on the second day, Mainasara's votes jumped to 72 per cent with a 92 per cent turnout. The following day, CNE declared him the outright winner on the first round with 52.2 per cent of the votes.
The excuse of constitutional crisis
The December 1992 Constitution that established the institutions of the Third Republic is very similar to the Constitution of the French Fifth Republic. It is a semi-presidential one, which means that the President needs parliamentary support to govern through the Prime Minister that he has appointed. When the President loses the support of Parliament, he is obliged to follow one of two options. Either he dissolves the National Assembly and orders new elections or he accepts cohabitation. This system is difficult to operate as has been witnessed in France itself.
The central idea is that the President presides and the Prime Minister governs, and that is ambiguous. Constitutionally, the President has powers to appoint the Prime Minister and the government. The President is the chief of the army and has powers to direct the country's foreign policy. At the same time, the Constitution defines the Prime Minister as the Head of the Government, which he/she has powers to direct, conduct and co-ordinate.
The Nigerien Third Republic was a promising democratic experiment. Numerous elections were conducted successfully during that period. An alliance of progressive parties, the AFC, won the elections. The ruling coalition was able to maintain its cohesion for only about one year. Eventually, the ruling coalition lost an election and the opposition party took over power. A serious constitutional crisis developed between the President and the Prime Minister.
The problem was not with the tenets and the texts of the semi-presidential system, but with the principal political actors. In any case, the actors were not given sufficient time to seek for solutions, as a democratic system cannot be built in just two years. Our conviction is that had the military not intervened, the political class would have eventually learnt that they needed to compromise and negotiate in their own self-interest. The army, under the leadership of the then Col. Mainasara, needed a pretext to justify taking over political power and seized the opportunity when it presented itself. The most important element in the erosion of democracy in Niger was not the quarrelling among the political class. It was the nature of the economic crisis and the character of international economic pressure that made democratic decision making irrelevant and/or impossible.
The SAP in Niger
Niger is a land-locked country dependent on uranium exports; the economic crisis started in the late 1970s with the decline in uranium revenues (from 18.9 billion CFAF in 1978 to 11.9 billion in 1981). The state then took significant loans from the international market to finance a rapidly growing budget deficit. As uranium revenues continued to fall, the country's current public deficit continued to rise. Servicing the debt soon resulted in a budget crisis and a balance of payments deficit. The IMF and the World Bank moved in 1983 to provide funds to cover the shortfall and help pay for servicing the debt. A full-scale structural adjustment programme (SAP) was signed in 1986, bolstered with a public sector adjustment programme in 1987.
The fundamental assumption underlying SAP was that smuggling would be curtailed along the 1,500 km Niger/Nigeria border. Instead, the incidence of smuggling increased. The fact that the Nigerian Naira was massively devalued, and the CFAF Franc was not, meant that Niger's competitiveness, even of its established exports of cowpeas, cotton and cattle, was eroded. The funds made available for investment were used mainly to cover operating costs and civil service perks. Although SAP was not working at the economic level, it was imposing a lot of hardship at the social level.
The hardship imposed by the first phase of SAP (1983-87) did not provoke any social agitation because the extremely repressive Kountché regime in power was feared by the population. SAP was strongly contested in its second phase 1987-90, under the rule of General Ali Saibou. In 1990, the IMF announced its dissatisfaction with Niger's compliance with SAP measures and called for tougher measures including reductions in the civil service, a government hiring freeze and privatisation of public corporations. Mass protests by students and workers led to the political crisis that precipitated the Sovereign National Conference.
During the debates of the Sovereign National Conference (SNC) in 1991, delegates concluded that SAP had failed, despite warnings from IMF and World Bank officials, who had addressed the delegates as observers, that there was no alternative to SAP. The SNI set up a fifteen-month transitional government to conduct public affairs before elections and then drew up a guidance document "Cahiers des Charges" spelling out its mandate. The transitional government was specifically instructed to devise an alternative programme. The cutting off of funds from the international financial institutions meant that the transitional government was crippled.
The AFC Government of Mahamadou Issoufou of 1993 inherited a backlog of 16 billion CFAF in unpaid salaries and 14 bil lion CFAF in unpaid obligations to suppliers. Issoufou promised to pay salaries and student bursaries regularly but he could not keep this promise. In early 1994, the Government was forced to accept the devaluation of the CFAF with no prior consultation with labour and the situation deteriorated rapidly. The unions fought for adjustment of salaries and price controls to counter the inflation that followed. In response, they found a Government that could not even pay salaries regularly. The central labour organisation USTN embarked on a series of strikes. The Issoufou Government responded by passing anti-labour legislation.
A basic question has been posed by the implementation of SAP in Niger. What was the use of democratic struggles and democratic decision-making processes if it was impossible to implement policies that went against the dictates of international financial institutions? Clearly, the real problem in Niger is the total incapacity of the state to evolve an alternative economic policy to what has been dictated by the Bretton Woods Institutions. By 1994, uranium production had declined to less than 10 per cent of GDP and produced only 11 billion CFAF (about $5 million) in revenues, 25 per cent of total export earning leading to an unmanageable debt service ratio of 80 per cent of fiscal receipts and 59 per cent of export value.
On 14 June 1996, three weeks before the electoral coup d'état, General Ibrahim Bare Mainasara signed the new SAP agreement. The accord was essentially the same SAP programme that had been agreed to by General Ali Saibou in 1990, contested by democratic forces, rejected by the Sovereign National Conference in 1991, re-negotiated by the various governments of the Third Republic, resisted by democratic forces and finally sealed by "democratically elected" General Mainasara. Why struggle for democracy if popular decisions can so easily be thwarted?
Repression and democratic struggles
Immediately after the electoral coup d'état of July 1996, the eight leading political parties in the country established a democratic front to organise resistance against the new dictatorship - Front pour la Restoration et la Défence de la Démocratie (FRDD). The FRDD exposed the manipulative and fraudulent nature of the presidential elections and insisted that Mainasara should vacate the presidency. From mid 1996, they organised numerous pro-democracy demonstrations throughout the country together with trade and student unions.
The response of Mainasara was to reconstitute the police state in Niger and make increased use of "unidentified armed men in military jeeps", to intimidate people. In April 1998, the FRDD once again called for the resignation of Mainasara and organised demonstrations all over the country. In Niamey, over 3,000 students joined the demonstrations. The former Prime Minister Hama Amadou and eight other FRDD leaders were arrested and armed men were sent to machine- gun the house of Ali Sabo, the FRDD co-ordinator in Niamey.
In spite of repression, the press refused to be intimidated so in 1997, the Mainasara regime enacted a "liberticide" press law, which stipulated that all journalists must be re-registered and defined new conditions for registration including a clean police record and a university degree or five years continuous journalistic practice. It also prohibited publishing or broadcasting messages that were offensive to the President. In May 1998, ten newspapers were closed allegedly for non-payment of taxes. The forces for democracy in Niger sustained an intense struggle against dictatorship for almost three years. It has been easier to organise resistance on the political front than on structural adjustment.
The current situation
On 9 April 1999, General Ibrahim Bare Mainasara was assassinated at the military wing of Niamey Airport by his trusted presidential guards, under the leadership of Lieutenant- Colonel Mallam Wanke, who took over as President. Col. Wanke described the death of Mainasara as an unfortunate accident but immediately justified the coup as a sacrifice that had to be made for the greater interest of Niger. He added that it was done in consultation with political parties and civil society. Although numerous countries con demned the coup, the leaders of the country's political parties travelled round the region with Wanke to convince neighbours that the new regime should be supported as the best path to democracy. The wide support that Wanke received within the country was based on the belief that unlike Mainasara, he would keep the promise of transferring power to an elected civilian regime.
The Wanke coup took place the day after opposition political parties had issued an ultimatum to Mainasara to resign or they were going to make Niger ungovernable. This followed the cancellation by the Supreme Court of numerous local government elections that had been won by the opposition. The elections had been held in February 1999 and once again, units of the army had disrupted counting in certain constituencies where opposition parties had won. The victory of the opposition in the elections had demonstrated that Mainasara's three-year tyrannical rule and repression of the opposition had not enabled him to establish political hegemony in the country. It was the cancellation of these elections that angered the parties and created a favourable climate for the coup d'état.
Col. Wanke established a 14 man National Reconciliation Council, which drew up an eight-month programme for returning the country to constitutional civilian rule. A Constitutional Review Commission was set up and it recommended a return to the semi-presidential constitution that had been so vilified during the Third Republic. The revised Constitution was adopted in a referendum. Presidential and legislative elections are to be held in November and December 1999 and the elected regime will be sworn in on 31 December 1999. If Wanke does hand over on that date, it will be clear that it was not a military vanguard that returned Niger to democracy, it was the three-year struggle by the country's political class and civil society against Mainasara's military dictatorship.
Dr Jibrin Ibrahim
Centre for Research and Documentation
Kano, Nigeria
e-mail: ceps@kano.rcl.nig.com