Leaders are struggling to adapt
tion parties struggle to gain a foothold in the countryside — at least, outside of the home area of their leader.
The advantages this gives to the government are compounded by the fact that rural areas are often given a disproportionate number of parliamentary seats. In turn, this helps to explain both why opposition parties do better in urban areas than rural ones in most African countries and why elections in Africa rarely lead to transfers of power.
Things will be very different in an urban-dominant continent because controlling the flow of information will be more difficult. Whereas rural areas continue to receive the majority of news and information via the radio — despite the recent growth of WhatsApp — urbanites have access to newspapers, television channels and social media.
Governments are therefore likely to struggle to control urban voters unless they are willing to make a huge investment to boost their capacity to censor and control the media, police public space and monitor political activity.
3) Rise of populist leaders
There has been a lot of talk about populism in Africa, which is strange because, as political scientist Nicolas van de Walle recently remarked, in reality there are few successful populist leaders on the continent. Michael Sata of Zambia was clearly a populist in terms of his rhetoric and campaigning style, and the Economic Freedom Fighters’ Julius Malema is doing a good impression of one in South Africa today. But that is pretty much it.
Kenya’s Raila Odinga is often described as a populist but his manifestos reveal the policy concerns of a social democrat. And while it is true that his campaigns have populist elements and have coalesced over popular grievances against the government, these are constrained by the centrality of ethnic solidarity to electoral appeal.
One reason that more leaders have not adopted populist strategies is it is not clear that you can win elections on the basis of populist appeals alone. But this calculation is changing every day. Research by political scientist Danielle Resnick demonstrates that populist messages resonate most powerfully in low income urban areas.
This is significant because rapid urbanisation, combined with the failure of most governments to provide adequate jobs and accommodate for new urban residents, means that the number and size of slums on the continent is increasing year on year, creating a larger potential support base for populist leaders to mobilise. In time, this will create the conditions under which populism can represent a viable alternative to ethnic politics, and will result in the emergence of a many more leaders in the shape of Sata — and Wine.
4) Greater decentralisation
If governments fail to tame urban residents and populist leaders emerge across the continent, we are likely to witness growing tensions between ruling parties and their critics. One side-effect of this is likely to be stronger demands for urban self-government.
While countries like Kenya and Nigeria have already devolved power away from the national level, on the whole African political systems remain highly centralised. If a new generation of urban populist leaders choose to mobilise their supporters around the need for more powerful municipal governments with the capacity to pursue local solutions to local problems, this may start to change.
Governments are suspicious of decentralisation because it threatens to undermine their hold on power. But there is also a well-documented pattern in which leaders facing increasingly robust opposition agree to allow rival parties to wield greater power at the local level in an attempt to deflect pressure for a transfer of power at the national level.
This occurred in Mexico in the 1980s and 1990s, and more recently in multiparty Kenya. If urbanisation strengthens the hand of opposition parties, we are likely to see an increasing number of governments make similar trade-offs moving forward.
5) End of urban/rural divide
One of the most interesting predictions about the way that urbanisation will change African societies is that the physical distance between urban and rural areas is likely to fall in the next 10 years. In addition to the emergence of “urban corridors”, the expansion of regional towns will see them increasingly encroach on the countryside. Along with the flow of remittances from urban workers to their rural kin, and the greater sharing of news and information that will occur as a result of the further expansion of WhatsApp, Twitter and Facebook, this will further erode the urban/rural divide.
The literature on this topic provides us with a valuable warning not to overstate the extent or significance of this divide at present. We already have examples of countries like Zambia where some rural residents share the concerns of their urban counterparts as a result of histories of urban-rural migration and shared narratives of exclusion. But such cases are not that common: if the changes predicted come to pass, the chances are that in time they will go from being the exception to being the norm.
The future
Exactly how these trends play out will depend on the rate of urbanisation and how governments choose to manage this process. Africa features a remarkably varied set of political systems, and so urbanisation will set in motion a variety of trends across the continent.
Ruling parties will have to decide whether to use reform or repression to respond to the challenges that urban expansion will generate. Because repression is expensive, and will be resisted by opposition parties and civil society groups, this response is most likely in countries in which authoritarian governance is entrenched.
It is in countries like Uganda, Chad and Cameroon, where the security forces are regularly used to settle political disputes, that there is the greatest risk that urbanisation will trigger greater political conflict and — in the short-term at least — democratic backsliding.
By contrast, in states that are more open and democratic, such as Botswana and Namibia, larger towns and cities should lead to increasingly competitive elections and, in time, democratic strengthening.
In this way, urbanisation will contribute to the continent’s growing democratic divide.