African Parliaments Research Articles

Introducing digitalisation to strengthen evaluation systems for democracy in African parliaments

ABSTRACT African parliaments are a unique institutional context for evidence use, and processes for digitalisation have specific implications for how evidence systems can contribute to democracy. While African parliaments have organisational features that make introducing technology challenging, they also hold significant promise for using digitalisation as a tool to strengthen democratic governance both within parliaments themselves, and also across the executive. This article shares experiences introducing a research management tool in two African parliaments, and reflects on what it means for the role evaluation plays in strengthening democracy. This is through looking at the technical components of digitalisation, the contextual components, and the political and values driven elements of the parliamentary context. This article describes these components, and reflects on their implications for the way democratic evaluation is understood in a context of African governance.

Purpose-Built Parliament Buildings and the Institutionalisation of Parliament in Lesotho and Malawi

AbstractLargely inspired by western donor good governance agenda, the current African parliaments literature has overlooked the significance of new parliament buildings that have been constructed by China and tends to place a premium on appraising the performance of parliaments and parliamentarians in executing their legislative, representation, oversight and constituency support. While understanding how parliaments perform is important and necessary, it does not sufficiently address all the ways in which these parliaments are establishing themselves as sustainable political institutions. By disregarding the new parliament buildings, the literature potentially undermines prospects of a wider understanding of the development of African parliamentary institutions. This article leverages the Chinese government donated parliament buildings in Lesotho and Malawi to make a theoretical and comparative case for the utility of discussing the concept of African legislative institutionalisation through and in juxtaposition to, the parliamentary built environment. I find that although there are stylistic and operational differences, the new parliament buildings in Lesotho and Malawi have provided a bespoke parliamentary built environment, enabled the expansion of a cohort of public officials working on legislative business and facilitated the procedural activities of the institution.

From evidence to values-based decision making in African parliaments

Monitoring and Evaluation discourse in Africa has evolved to focus on building systems at a national level. While this systemic approach has many advantages, its implementation often runs up against the uncomfortable reality that governments have complex incentives to use evidence, and this evidence can equally contribute to decision making that is neither development-focused nor democratic if values are not part of the conversation. Much of the literature on public-sector reform focuses on evidence-based policy making. While relevant, it does not reflect on values, and this article will argue that acknowledging the central role values play in interpreting evidence is critical to effective national evaluation system building. To make this argument, this article will present and discuss vignettes from the parliaments of Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe that illustrate the pivotal role values have played in interpreting and acting on evidence in a parliamentary context. Finally, it makes a case for the discourse about evidence-based policy making to consider values-based policy making as an appropriate lens for parliaments to acknowledge and engage with the complex landscape of the politics of evidence.

How are Women in African Parliaments influencing health outcomes?

This paper examines the question of how women in parliament are impacting health outcomes in African countries. One of the basic functions of parliaments is budgeting and by evaluating the impact of female parliamentarians on public expenditure on health we can determine if their impact on health outcomes comes from this fiscal responsibility of parliament. The effect of percentage of women in parliament on health expenditure in the next year was analyzed using regression analyses while controlling for GDP, HIV rate and Maternal Mortality was determined. We conclude that women in parliament influence health outcomes by increasing budgetary allocation to health.

Contribution of a network of parliamentary committees of health to the ecosystem of evidence use in African parliaments

Despite growing interest in evidence among parliamentarians and some emerging literature on evidence use in decision making in parliaments, there is still a notable gap in knowledge on the ecosystem of evidence in parliaments. This paper seeks to contribute to filling this gap by discussing the contribution of a loose regional network, the Network of African Parliamentary Committees on Health (NEAPACOH), to the evidence ecosystem in African parliaments. Although the network was not set up to strengthen evidence use, its mechanisms for realising its goal of strengthening parliamentary committees of health to effectively tackle health challenges in Africa provide an opportunity for understanding how such networks are contributing to strengthening the weak evidence ecosystem in African parliaments. The authors have been involved in the work of the network and therefore use this network for this study purposively. Data were gathered through document review and 34 in-depth interviews with parliamentarians, parliament staff and development partners. Results show that, in a context of weak institutional support and technical capacity to enable evidence use in African parliaments, the network’s activities respond to some of the key barriers hindering parliamentarians from using evidence, including: limited access to evidence, complexity of evidence, weak capacity to understand evidence, and weak/lacking linkages with researchers/experts. Apart from generating demand, providing evidence, building capacity for increased evidence use, and linking MPs and researchers/experts, the network creates a sense of competition among countries by requiring countries to make commitments and report progress against the commitments annually, which provide impetus for action.

Political Literacy for Women’s Empowerment in Botswana: A Feminist Perspective

<p><em>This article serves to illuminate that Botswana’s political landscape in the last 49 years has been very dramatic in the trend of women’s visibility in cabinet and parliament. Post independence trends indicate non-existence of women in the first Botswana parliament, a gradual increase in the number of women in parliament during the 1990s, ranging from 5 to 8, and a sharp collapse in the last decade to only 6 in 2</em><em>014 (Botswana Gazette, 2014)</em><em>.</em><em> </em><em>Women, just like men, need to be groomed to be politically literate and aggressive to make a transition and compete with their male counterparts for parliamentary and cabinet seats. Women’s political illiteracy and history of being invisible in Southern African parliaments, particularly the highest decision-making organ of the Government of Botswana, is evident, based on numbers. Politics has remained a male province, with very few women as cabinet ministers or members of parliament. </em></p><p><em>Based on an analysis of trends in the political landscape in Botswana, political ethnography, historiography and the Critical Third World Feminist Theory, the authors argue that lack of political literacy and patriotism are major sources of women’s failure to make it to parliament. These pose implications for accelerated role of Adult Continuing and lifelong education of women in politics to raise their level of political literacy.</em></p>

Civil War and Trajectories of Change in Women's Political Representation in Africa, 1985-2010

In recent decades, the expansion of women’s political representation in sub-Saharan Africa has been nothing short of remarkable. The number of women legislators in African parliaments tripled between 1990 and 2010, resulting in African countries having among the highest rates of women’s legislative representation in the world. The dominant explanations for this change have been institutional factors (namely, the adoption of gender quotas and presence of proportional representation systems) and democratization. We suggest that existing research has not gone far enough to evaluate the effects of one powerful structural change: the end of civil war. Using Latent Growth Curve modeling, we show that the end of long-standing armed conflict had large positive impacts on women’s political representation, above what can be explained by electoral institutions and democratization alone. However, post-conflict increases in women’s legislative representation materialize only after 2000, amid emerging international and regional norms of women’s political inclusion. In countries exiting armed conflict in these recent years, women’s movement into national legislatures follows a trajectory of social change that is much faster and more extensive than what we observe in other African countries.

‘What is wrong with a woman being chief?’ Women Chiefs and Symbolic and Substantive Representation in Botswana

Across the globe women are accessing national legislatures and executives in unprecedented numbers. Over the last 25 years several African countries have led the way in women’s representation in parliaments and, more recently, in cabinets. At the same time, governments and foreign donors are increasingly focusing on the role of traditional leaders in local-level politics as states democratize and decentralize across the continent. Once considered hopelessly undemocratic and patriarchal, traditional leaders are more recently viewed in many African countries as one half of a viable and effective hybrid system at the local level. In addition, whereas the role of chief has been largely the preserve of African men, African women are increasingly asserting a right to become chief. This article, using Botswana as a case study, suggests that the increased presence of women in national legislatures and executives may be having a symbolic representation effect on African women who are insisting that they too may access political power, even in positions formerly unavailable to them, such as chief. This article further suggests that, like their women counterparts in African parliaments, once they gain access to political office, women chiefs may substantively represent women’s interests, in venues such as a House of Chiefs and in their communities.

Weak legislatures, failing MPs, and the collapse of democracy in Mali

The sudden collapse of Mali's democracy in 2012 revealed the fragility of the state's legitimacy and authority. This article argues that the decay of democracy was linked to the weakness of the country's legislature. Malian MPs collectively failed to scrutinize an increasingly discredited executive and parliamentarians typically operated in isolation from the vast majority of citizens. As a result, rising levels of popular discontent were rarely channelled into the formal political process, and the interests that did enter the political arena were largely restricted to the personal support networks and electoral constituencies of individual MPs. The prevalence of these particularistic interests undermined collective parliamentary scrutiny of matters of national interest. By demonstrating the link between these failures and the collapse of Mali's democracy, this article contributes to the expanding body of literature examining the limited role of African parliaments in processes of democratic consolidation. In doing so it confirms the challenges that executive dominance poses to democratization, while highlighting the importance of representative legislatures to Africa's democracies.

Parliaments and Citizens in Sub-Saharan Africa

In Sub-Saharan Africa, elected multiparty assemblies have existed on average for no more than two decades. The following analysis seeks to comprehend and evaluate the links between citizens and their elected parliaments in 18 African countries with a particular focus on Mozambique and South Africa. It aims to address some of the scepticism, both within and outside these institutions and countries, surrounding the relationship between parliaments and citizens under these socioeconomic contexts. It does so by explaining the overall political and socioeconomic context of African multiparty parliaments and their citizens followed by a discussion of citizens' access to parliaments and, lastly, of citizens' perceptions of parliaments using a combination of descriptive, comparative and analytic techniques.

‘Let there be a Balance’: Women in African Parliaments

It has been 25 years since the National Resistance Movement took power in Uganda and ushered in an era of women's increased presence in African legislatures – at first in east and southern Africa and eventually beyond. In 2008, Uganda's neighbor Rwanda became the first country in the world to have more women than men in a chamber of parliament. In mid-2012, eight African countries were among the top 30 countries worldwide in terms of women's presence in a single or lower house of parliament. Across the continent one country after another has taken measures to increase women's presence in the national legislature. This article provides an update on these developments within sub-Saharan Africa. In particular, the article seeks to evaluate women's descriptive, substantive and symbolic representation in African parliaments in the last quarter-century by reviewing a growing literature. Despite the remarkable gains that have been made by women in national legislatures across the continent, Africa's accomplishments in this arena are little known – in contrast to those from other parts of the world. This article, in surveying and synthesizing the literature, seeks also to make those accomplishments better known.

Parliaments in Africa: Representative Institutions in the Land of the ‘Big Man’

This paper analyses the perceptions among survey participants, of African parliaments and presidents and examines their citizens’ attitudes towards the coexistence of these two institutions. It aims to determine the way citizens rate their parliaments compared with their presidents. It further seeks to answer the question of whether Africa remains the continent of the ‘big man’, where absolute power lies with an individual, feeding clientelistic relationships. In the decades following the transitions to independence, most of the continent was marked by a proliferation of monoparty regimes; in many cases, these were almost one-man regimes. A majority of the leaders symbolised, at an early stage of independence, the birth of the nation itself. Many times these presidents have sought to extend their incumbency perpetually. However, over the last two decades this scenario has changed considerably. Monoparty parliaments have been replaced by multiparty parliaments and executives, and presidents have found themselves needing to share their leadership of the nation with parliamentarians. Not much is known about how these emerging parliaments have been operating, but the little that is known tells us that they have faced a lack of institutionalisation and still struggle to assert their independence from strong executives. It is therefore reasonable to expect that parliaments will be perceived as dormant institutions in the public eye.

News and Briefs

The following brief items are outlined: connecting African parliaments and citizens through innovative ICT applications: the Africa4all parliamentary initiative; Highlights of the 2nd International Conference on Electronic Participation – ePart 2010; and the new research roadmap for ICT-enabled governance, from the CROSSROAD project.

The legislatures in Africa: A trajectory of weakness

The paper examined the historical underpinnings of the under-development ofrepresentative institutions in Africa. The author noted that notwithstanding its worldwideprevalence, the legislature had been involved in struggles for political power and relevance across political systems. Specifically, he viewed the African parliaments as products of specific historical experiences, notably of colonialism and militarism, that not only stultified their growth and development but also left legacies that continued to constrain their capacity to serve as effective checks on the ever-growing powers of the executive arms of post-independence governments. Accordingly, the legislatures of Africa had not been placed in vantage positions akin to those of their counterparts in the advanced democracies, and their capacities as effective agents of limited government were seriously constrained. In the circumstances, the workings and challenges of representative institutions in Africa had to be understood within the context of the historical forces that shaped and continued to shape their emergence and contemporary relevance. It identifiedpeople-centred constitutional re-engineering, more proactive posture on the part of legislators themselves and capacity-building supports as the irreducible minimum for strengthening the legislatures and creating responsive and citizens-friendly environments for sustainable democracy and good governance in Africa. Key words: Legislature, colonialism, military rule, African politics.

Parliaments and the enhancement of democracy on the African continent: An analysis of institutional capacity and public perceptions

While modern parliaments in Africa receive little attention in the scholarly literature, they are drawing considerable attention from the international donor community. Since the early 1990s, when many African countries resumed multi-party elections and democratic practices, legislative strengthening programmes have become an important part of international democracy assistance. Despite these programmes, our knowledge about Africa's current parliaments remains limited. They seem to be widely regarded as potential agents for democratic change but whether national legislatures are in fact enhancing the quality of democracy on the African continent is far from clear. This study discusses two important issues that lie at the heart of the democracy-enhancing potential of Africa's current parliaments: their institutional capacity and the way they are perceived by the citizens they represent. After a brief review of the existing literature on legislatures in Africa, the essay first considers whether they have the institutional capacity to fulfil a meaningful role and provides a detailed description of the autonomy of parliaments in 16 selected countries. It then turns to the way Africans perceive and evaluate their parliaments. Do citizens see their legislatures as valuable institutions? Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for the prospects of African parliaments becoming agents of democratic change.

African Parliaments: Between Governance and Government

African Parliaments: Between Governance and Government

PARLIAMENT AND THE POWER OF THE PURSE: THE NIGERIAN CONSTITUTION OF 1999 IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE

With Nigeria's transition from military rule to democratically elected government in May 1999, a new constitution took effect. The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999, establishes a framework for democratic governance on the basis of a presidential system of government, with a twochamber National Assembly, and organizes Nigeria as a federal republic. Soon after the new constitutional framework came into effect, it was thrown into the spotlight during a dispute between the president and the National Assembly that caused a four-month delay in the passing of the federal budget for the 2000 fiscal year. The conflict revealed that the executive and legislative branches of government were actively engaging with, and testing, their respective powers and roles in budgetary matters under the new constitution. As President Olusegun Obasanjo remarked: It was perhaps to be expected that at the beginning of our search for the meaning and form of a true republican democracy, mistakes would be made, and extreme positions would be taken by those involved in this search.' The National Assembly, on the other hand, has insisted that its input is desirable to match the budget more closely with developmental needs.2 Moreover, the National Assembly claimed that the executive implemented a mere 30 per cent of the 2000 budget, a figure the federal government put at 64 per cent.3 Despite hopes that the executive and legislative branches would be able to restore a cordial relationship, the budget process continues to attract controversy. The active engagement of the Nigerian Parliament4 with the budget is rather unusual compared with other countries on the continent. Many African parliaments to date have done little more than to rubberstamp the executive's expenditure and taxation proposals. But there are signs that this situation is chaning. A number of African parliaments are currently reviewing their role in the budgetary process, and are beginning to argue for more proactive involvement.