Why East African elections tend to be violent?

 

 



East Africa experiences violence in almost every election cycle. elections are means of choosing a new leader and they are expected to happen in a peaceful way. But Most countries in East African Community(EAC) enter election period every 5 years or 7 years. This helps them to renew the authorities at lower level as well as at higher level like presidential elections. This patriotic undertaking  tends to occur unfortunately in hostile environment in most of East African countries. is it possible to rectify the situation in order to host stable elections?

EAC is comprised of 8 countries with constitutions which requires elections to renew leaderships. These are democratic states not monarchies. It is a very diverse region with a very unstable history since independence of most those fore-mentioned countries. countries like Burundi and Rwanda experienced a very unstable period which left their societies very divided and Uganda went through a brutal military dictatorship while kenya and Tanzania and others have been government under one party for a long time. All this circumstance contribute to unstable elections overtime.

unstable elections are caused by different causes. The prevalent cause remains lack of transparency in organised elections. In situation where the population does not trust in the organised election, it leads to protests. in certain instances the elections are forged which leads to wrong numbers depicting the votes of the population. As a results, the population is unsatisfied and it starts engaging in violent activities to vent their anger. It is rare to experience elections in most East African countries without cases of violence.

For every rule, there is always exceptions. in recent years, the African democracies are becoming mature. therefore the occurrence of violence is slowly reducing.the democracy in these states are still young which means that it is gonna take time to have proper checks like in other mature democracies. Tanzania and Rwanda are the two states with slightly peaceful elections in the recent years . on day of election, it is quiet and the citizens of these countries can place their votes without hearing gun shots. however it does not mean that these elections are open and fair.

In conclusion, as these democracies grow, the state of their election processes will improve as well. however, in the meantime, it is imperative to come up with appropriate decisions to improve the existing situation. like most of these countries have improved their economies in the past few decades, it is possible to develop working democracies with working elections.  

 

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