Seduced by the siren of power sharing

Apr 06, 2010 Letters

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Dear Editor,
Undoubtedly, there are people in this society who genuinely advance the cause of power sharing; and in their quest to reach this end, they want to replace the existing political structure with unproven aspects of consociationalism; it is like throwing out the baby with the bath water.
My input here is not to dismiss these people’s proposal, but it is just that these people ignore or may be unaware of the challenges that power sharing presents. We need to ascertain, too, whether these challenges would be more politically-cost-effective than the challenges to the existing political system. I contend that the pushers of the power sharing proposal(s) need to address these challenges that I address in today’s Perspectives.
In previous communications, we spoke about self-interested politicians’ voicing incessantly what they want; and that they should let the people decide whether or not they want power sharing; especially as they believe that power sharing is a panacea for society’s ills. Next, we showed how power sharing enthusiasts use only one type of power, omitting the use of a full accounting of power to peddle the power-sharing phenomenon; we referred to this as conceptual favouritism.
And then we noted that notwithstanding its attractiveness, power sharing continues to experience failures through discontinuities and interruptions in Ethiopia, Angola, South Africa, Tajikstan, Israel, Bosnia-Herzegovina, among others. And I continue to surmise that if Israel did not have its continuous coalition governments, perhaps, today, we could have seen a two-nation state in the Israel-Palestine mayhem!
Effective power sharing is rare, but where it exits, it can block strategic policy formulation and implementation, as in the Israel/Palestine perennial conflict, among other scenarios.
For this reason we have to ask, why is effective power sharing so rare? Apparently, power sharing is a strategy for taking power, and we will consummate agreements when it is convenient to so do. Nonetheless, the fact of the matter is that power sharing is not a proven method of conflict resolution and governance.
Let us now examine some challenges to power sharing, drawing on Professor Spears’ work in Africa. First, power sharing gets in the way of the preference for total power that competitive national elections present. If party leaders develop the mindset that they could win an election, then there are few enticements that will attract them to the power-sharing table.
Second, some minimal and superficial form of power sharing may emerge if party leaders hold the view that power sharing would work against their opponents who are part of the agreement; then the proponents’ motive is disingenuous. Power sharing requires mismatched persons and groups to work together, people with years of experience of vitriolic condemnations of each other; this mismatch makes power sharing untenable. And even where this inclusion of ‘others’ within a government may be the right thing to do, these ‘others’ will still have to follow the lead of the party that initiated the cooperative agreement. In Somalia, clan leaders Ali Mehdi and General Mohamed Farah Aidid did just that; they took in a few clan representatives or friendly warlords in their governments; but these arrangements had no ‘bite’.
Third, power sharing could be a trap where inclusion could bring increasing factionalism within a scenario where some people experience exclusion. And there is danger lurking where some groups experience this exclusion; the 1993 Arusha Accords on Rwanda flopped partly because exclusion of the Hutu-dominated Committee for the Defence of the Republic took action to guarantee the Accords’ failure.
Fourth, in spite of the view that power sharing may bring forth mutual benefits, its prerequisite that one party must surrender some power may place that party in jeopardy, given the zero-sum power framework lurking in the shadows. Juvenal Habyarimana’s Hutu-dominated government offered concessions to the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front, concessions that did not go down well with Habyarimana’s own party folks.
Fifth, the fact that power is fluid and shifts from one interest group to another, may entice all power shareholders to strategize to bolster their power capacity. Spears puts it this way that there is hardly any time when it is all at once in the interests of power shareholders to endorse any agreement.
And sixth, there are differential degrees of commitment to a power-sharing agreement by virtue of different ideologies, moderate to extreme interests, compromise, and even a perception of betrayal by some constituents when the agreement reaches consummation.
We need to address these challenges, for any introduction of the power-sharing proposal without any amelioration to these challenges, will lead.
Prem Misir

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