Mediaboss Marketing

It began as a road rage incident between the president and opposition leader of Zambia, a southern African country once seen as a beacon of democracy.

Two political convoys were speeding along a perilously narrow rural road on April 8 when the opposition leader, Hakainde Hichilema, refused to pull off to let President Edgar Lungus caravan roar past a move that landed him in jail facing treason charges and a possible death sentence.

Observers of African politics see Hichilemas arrest as part of a troubling trend in several nations in sub-Saharan Africa.

Video of the roadway incident shows the two convoys headed in the same direction, the presidential train of vehicles in the rear. As Lungus convoy tries to pass, police vehicles with lights flashing and sirens blaring occasionally dart toward Hichilemas convoy, apparently trying to intimidate his convoy to move over.

Hichilemas convoy refuses to budge, but Lungus convoy squeezes past anyway as Hichilema supporters shout invective.

On Friday, Hichilemas case was adjourned for 15 days and he remains jailed, with no bail allowed in treason cases.

Zambia is a member of the small club of African countries that have seen two democratic transfers of power, a sign of strengthening democracy. But under Lungu, his vocal critics say, progress has been whittled away. Media and political freedoms are under attack and the independence of the Constitutional Court has been compromised, they charge.

Another opposition leader, Chilufya Tayali, was arrested last month for a Facebook post attacking police over Hichilemas arrest. Others were detained for trying to visit Hichilema in prison, after authorities banned anyone from seeing him.

Even Zambias revered elder statesman founding President Kenneth Kaunda was turned away when he tried to visit. South African opposition leader Mmusi Maimane was denied entry to Zambia on Thursday.

Zambias backslide is worrying because it demonstrates how swiftly fragile democratic gains that took decades to cement can be destroyed. The African Union, the continental leadership body, has proved strong on protecting leaders from coups, but weak on presidents who undermine democratic institutions, like the media and courts, or overturn constitutional term limits, according to critics.

Even some African Union figures have expressed concern about presidents who cling to power for decades. In December, outgoing African Union commissioner for political affairs, Aisha Abdullahi, said the group needed to dig beyond the surface of regular elections and remain engaged on what happens before, during and after elections.

She added, There is also a worrying trend on the continent where incumbents harass opponents in the lead-up to and during elections, and use other practices such as manipulation of electoral timetables to disadvantage the opposition.

Sub-Saharan Africa, with 50 countries and just under a billion people, is one of the worst regions for democracy globally. In 2016, just 12% of countries in the region were ranked as free by Freedom House, a pro-democracy watchdog, compared with 20% in 2014.

After democratic advances in the 1990s and early 2000s, many countries in Africa have regressed in recent years, according to Freedom Houses report on sub-Saharan Africa. Heres a look at other nations and how they are attempting to quash dissent.

For posting an opinion on Facebook, you can be charged with terrorism and jailed.

Ethiopias Federal High Court on Thursday sentenced an activist and former opposition party spokesman, Yonatan Tesfaye, to six years and three months in jail after Facebook posts about protests in the Oromia region in 2015.

After a violent crackdown on the protests, Tesfaye posted that the government was using force against the people instead of using peaceful discussion with the public.

Another opposition leader, Merera Gudina, and more than 20 other opposition figures and activists have been jailed and face terrorism charges over the protests in Oromia.

Ethiopias longtime muzzling of dissent has had a devastating effect on opposition members and human rights defenders who are completely prevented from exercising their right to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly, Amnesty Internationals Michelle Kagari said last year, after opposition figures were beaten and forced to appear in court wearing only their underpants.

The Congolese government arrested dozens of pro-democracy activists, journalists and musicians in March 2015, including Fred Bauma and Yves Makwambala, who had launched a youth activist movement called Filimbi.

They have since been released from prison, but Bauma and Makwambala still face charges of terrorism and insurrection.

Protests erupted last fall when it became clear that President Joseph Kabila, whose term was to end in December, had no intention of leaving the presidency. Kabilas government banned opposition protests, and 66 people were killed in a violent crackdown on protests in September.

Kabila still holds on to power by repeatedly failing to organize elections a policy opponents call glissement, or sliding.

Ugandan academic and activist Stella Nyanzi was arrested and jailed last month for describing President Yoweri Museveni on her Facebook page as a pair of buttocks and his wife as empty-brained. She was released on bail after an international outcry by human rights defenders, but faces two charges of cyberharassment.

Prosecutors are demanding that Nyanzi, a feminist academic and writer, undergo psychiatric tests to evaluate her sanity.

Museveni, who has ruled Uganda since 1986, insists his people want him to stay in power. He claims the opposition is made up of wolves ready to tear Uganda apart should he leave.

Opposition figures were repeatedly arrested in the lead-up to elections last year in which Museveni won another five-year term, his fifth.

Opposition leader Kizza Besigye, who came in second in the election, was arrested and charged with treason after rejecting the result, claiming fraud and calling on supporters to protest.

In Rwanda, President Paul Kagame has quietly steamrolled all opposition figures over the last decade.

A two-term presidential limit has been ditched and Kagame will face little opposition when he runs for a third seven-year term in August.

As soon as Rwandan businesswoman Diane Rwigara announced in May her intention to run against him, photographs of her sprawled on a couch in the nude appeared on the Internet. Her campaign was quickly in ruins.

Another Kagame opponent has ended up in prison. Opposition leader Victoire Ingabire was barred from running in elections in 2010. She was arrested that year and sentenced to 15 years in jail for terrorism, genocidal revisionism and provoking divisionism.

Some government opponents have vanished without explanation.

In March last year, opposition activist Illuminee Iragena disappeared as she was on her way to work as a hospital nurse. Amnesty International believes that Iragena was tortured and died in custody, based on information from sources close to the case.

If she is in detention, her whereabouts should be immediately revealed and she should be charged or released. If she has died, the circumstances of her death must be promptly and thoroughly investigated and the authorities should make public the outcome of any such investigation, said Sarah Jackson of Amnesty International in March.

There have been a number of recent cases of disappearances and this sets a worrying stage for the upcoming presidential elections in August. The failure of the authorities to provide answers contributes to the chilling environment for the political opposition in Rwanda, she said.

Another opposition figure, Jean Damascene Munyeshyaka, disappeared on June 27, 2014, and has not been heard from since.

On New Years Day that year, one of Kagames harshest critics, Patrick Karegeya, was found strangled in a South African hotel room. His killers were never tracked down.

Other dissidents have been attacked, and Rwandan authorities have been accused of hunting down dissidents and trying to assassinate them. Rwandan authorities reject the claims.

In a recent interview with Francophone Africa news site Jeune Afrique, Kagame rejected criticism of his government. Too many givers of lessons, too many arrogant Westerners drunk on their own values claim to define on our behalf what freedom means to us. They consistently label us as not free, he said.

Burundi has been mired in violent conflict since President Pierre Nkurunziza defied the constitutional limit on a third term in office, despite widespread opposition in 2015. He took office swearing his opponents would be crushed by God after an election criticized by the United Nations and the U.S. State Department.

More than 210 people, many of them young men from opposition neighborhoods, disappeared between October and January, according to the United Nations. Amnesty International reported that dozens were shot to death by security forces in a crackdown in December. In January, 22 bodies were found.

Most opposition figures have fled the country, while many others who opposed Nkurunzizas third term have been arrested or killed. A U.N. report last September verified 564 executions mainly of journalists, activists and opposition supporters and detailed torture and rape of government opponents.

The presidents spokesman, Willy Nyamitwe, said the U.N. investigators were lazy and the report was biased and based on flying rumors and gossip.

robyn.dixon@latimes.com

@RobynDixon_LAT

Read more:
The day road rage led to a treason charge in Zambia, as democracy falters in Africa - Los Angeles Times

Its so easy! Trump constantly said during his 2016 election campaign. And, indeed, his particular idea of democracy may sound simple: the people rule. But that populist cry from both the left and the right has driven some of the more unsettling elections of our times.

As the masses protest against elites,calling them too intellectual, too liberal, too neoliberal, too cosmopolitan, too whatever, candidates such as Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen imbue themselves with the authority of the people and declare themselves the representatives of the 99 percent.

But modern democracy has always been connected to the interests of these so-called elites. As the American historian Edmund S. Morgan writes in his book Inventing the People (1989), Sober thought may tell us that all governments are of the people, that all profess to be for the people, and that none can literally be by the people.

Germanic tribes in their forests and the Greeks in their city-states may have voted collectively on public policy. Being few enough to fit into a public square, they could communally process their problems.

Such plebiscites are not possible today. There are too many people, and our problems are too complex.

Adrian Sulc/Wikimedia

That makes representative democracy, in which citizens elect people whose job is to manage diverse interests, the most effective form of government. It works not in spite of but because of restrictions such as the separation of powers and checks and balances.

Since the Enlightenment, elites have helped develop the system many voters seem to take for granted today. Theyve done so for pragmatic, political, idealistic or self-interested reasons, seeking to promote, install, defend and reform democratic ideas and practices or represent citizens in parliaments.

Around 1800, this class of people began to gain more influence in the U.S. and in Europe, as they realized how important it was for the state to win over citizens.

After an electoral turnout of five percent in 1813, French clerks assumed that no one would object to abolishing the right to vote. In a young United States, political parties lured unwilling citizens to the polls with threats, money or alcohol.

By the early 19th century, though, reformers in Prussia and elsewhere were already launching a top-down effort to herald voting as a privilege to spark the public spirit. In journals and flyers, educated people intensely debated the ideas of equality and participation, urging people to vote and warning against demagogues.

Wikimedia CC BY

These elites also called for expanding the right to vote and for protecting free polling. Over the course of the early 19th century, municipal ordinances introduced across Prussia ultimately gave suffrage to almost three percent of the population (this was quite a lot back then, on par with Americas four percent enfranchisement).

In the 19th century, elections also served as a governance tool. Each vote was as a census in miniature. Over decades, those who went to the polls were registered, their lands valued, their tax burden defined. Men became accomplices of the state apparatus through the simple act of voting.

Educated, newspaper-reading elites may have been abstractly debating the parliament and the right of co-determination back then, but most people still struggled with problems such as hunger and scarcity.

Lacking the resources for cultivating participatory ideals, they expressed their needs through protest, leading to Europes 1848 revolutions.

Napoleon III, emperor of France from 1852 to 1870, who was quite an expert in public relations, realized that the gem of popular approval would look great in his imperial crown. So he set up elections as a spectacle, handpicking candidates and forcing his subjects to vote for them.

German Journal Hermann Luders

Around 1870, the US, Germany and several other countries enacted universal male suffrage. Again, this was mostly driven by elites interested in deepening democratic practice.

But it was not universally popular. The U.S. had just finished a bloody civil war in 1867 when its government extended the right to vote to all male citizens. Most white people fiercely opposed this move, and they said so at referendum, even in the supposedly more enlightened North.

It was an elite bloc inside the Republican Party that pushed for military enforcement to defend the right to vote for black citizens in the south.

As in other elite-driven enfranchisement efforts, motivations here were mixed: one of the Republicans goal surely was to be reelected. Still, their efforts helped usher in the short period of relative black empowerment known as Reconstruction from 1865 to 1877.

Likewise, Germans have their elites to thank for getting the right to vote in 1867. Otto von Bismarck, like other statesman of his era, saw universal (male) suffrage as a cornerstone of nation-building and believed that a strong centralised state would help him apply German egalitarian aspirations to all citizens.

Citizens, for their part, found voting more attractive because it would help define their nation-state and establish them as equals. Foundational national pride motivated men to go to the polls, to pay taxes, even to die as soldiers.

Obviously, elites did not act as a unified bloc in expanding voting rights in the U.S. and Germany, and many upper class citizens resisted these changes.

For Americans, race has always been a cleavage among white people, regardless of class. When malicious voting restrictions quickly disenfranchised African Americans in the 1890s, their introduction was thanks in no small part to elites who had embraced new racist thought with vigor.

Some of these were likely the same educated liberals who helped introduce polling booths and secret ballots to contribute to the ideal of a free and fair election. Deepening democracy was and remains a meandering, contradictory process.

Alfred R Waud/Wikimedia

People were also more educated and generally better off than they had been 50 years earlier, giving them time and the wherewithal to read newspapers and engage in politics. This, too, is part of democracys complex history: without education and relative prosperity, its hard to effectively exercise the vote.

Recent events such as the Brexit vote and President Donald Trumps win have demonstrated the appeal of a foreshortened, populist understanding of democracy. History tells us that this notion democracy as unchecked people power is a myth. And in the sprawling modern world, it is now an impossibility.

Democracy, when it works, has always been in part an elite project.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Read the original here:
We Can Hate 'Elites' But They Helped Build Modern Democracy - HuffPost

It is sad that many Nigerians today talk glibly about the possibility of a coup or of military intervention in politics. They make it seem as if this democracy is something we can exchange for something else. We need to be reminded, as we celebrate democracy day 2017, how we got to this very moment, and how precious democracy is to us as a sovereign people. From 1966 to 1999 (with the short break of civilian rule from 1979 1983) the military dominated the political landscape in Nigeria. It was eighteen years ago yesterday when our country returned to civilian rule.

The military practically overstayed their welcome. The first military coup in Nigeria was in January 1966, followed by the counter-coup of July 1966, and then the civil war of 1967-70 which turned Nigeria into a military theatre more or less as the Federal forces engaged the Biafran secessionists in a fratricidal war that resulted in the loss of more than a million lives, starvation and the tearing apart of the Nigerian fabric. The military would remain in charge of Nigeria and its affairs for more than 30 years in total, and it is worth remembering that virtually every successful coup was welcome by the people.

It was thought particularly in the 70s that the military had a role to play in many developing countries in Africa to ensure stability and national discipline. The civilians who took over from the colonialists in Nigeria and Ghana, to cite two close examples, proved worse than their predecessors, and hence the usual argument for military intervention was corruption, and the need to keep the country together and check the excesses of the civilian rulers. Military rule was perhaps closer to what the people had known traditionally and also under the colonialists. Kings or feudalists who did not tolerate any form of opposition, or free expression governed the traditional communities and likewise, the colonial masters were dictators. The military continued in that tradition. In-fighting among the emergent military elite and the competition for power eroded discipline and resulted over the years in more coups.

To be fair, military intervention in Nigerian politics yielded some positive dividends and created a leadership cadre, and indeed till date, the influence of the military in Nigerian politics, as seen in the transmutation of many military officers into professional politicians, remains a strong factor in the making and unmaking of Nigeria. But by 1990, with the global wave of democratization, glasnost and perestroika, the collapse of the Berlin wall, and the greater emphasis on human rights, and the rise of civil society, the Nigerian public began to subject the military to greater scrutiny than was hitherto the case.

After a fashion, every military government presented itself as a corrective regime, with the promise to hand over power in a short while to civilians. By 1986, the Babangida administration after a year in office had launched a political transition program, beginning with the establishment of a 17-man Political Bureau. In 1989, the ban on political activities was lifted. The military junta would later ban these existing political parties and create its own parties, the Social Democratic Party and the National Republican Convention.

This seemingly endless transition program and increased civil society activism merely drew more attention to the military and its record in the public sphere. The people began to demand an inevitable return to civilian rule. They complained about the human rights abuses of the military, the apparent domination of power by the Northern elite, the marginalization of other groups in Nigeria, and the spread of injustice and inequities.

When a Presidential election was held on June 12, 1993, and the SDP candidate, Chief MKO Abiola won the election- an election that was adjudged to be free and fair, Nigerians felt that the hour of their liberation from military rule had come. But the Babangida administration refused to announce the final results and subsequently, it annulled the election. It was a disastrous moment for the Nigerian military and the administration. It also marked the beginning of a national crisis that dragged on for six years. The Nigerian people were inconsolable. In the course of the crisis, General Ibrahim Babangida had to step aside, handing over power to an Interim National Government (ING), which was soon shoved aside by General Abacha. Between 1993 and 1999, Nigeria had three different leaders: Chief Ernest Shonekan, General Sani Abacha and General Abdusalami Abubakar.

The ensuing struggle for democracy was long and momentous. Progressive Nigerians and the civil society turned against the military. The South West declared that it had been robbed. MKO Abiola fought for his mandate. The international community ostracized the Abacha government. Nigeria became a pariah nation. The media was in the forefront of the struggle, and many journalists were jailed, hounded into exile, publishing houses were set ablaze. Anyone who criticized the soldiers was framed for one offense or the other and thrown behind bars.

The progressive forces insisted that the military must go. Never Again, the people chorused. There had been no other moment like that in contemporary Nigeria. The martyrs of that peoples revolution were the ones that died, including Chief MKO Abiola who died in Abachas detention camp, the many innocent persons who were shot by the military, and everyone who suffered one major loss or the other. The heroes were the valiant men and women who stood up for democracy and justice and opposed military tyranny. The villains were the soldiers who trampled upon the peoples rights, and their opportunistic agents in civil society. On May 29, 1999, Nigeria returned to civilian rule. It was the day of our countrys second liberation, liberation from the years that the locusts ate.

In the month of June, there would be another historic date for Nigerians, that is June 12, a definite milestone in Nigerian democracy even if the Federal Government has been largely in denial since 1999. MKO Abiola deserves to be honoured post-humously not just selectively by states in the South-West but by the Nigerian Government as a kind of restitution, and by this, I mean a formal declaration, for record purposes, that he was indeed the winner of that June 12, 1993 election.

This brief excursion to the recent past is important because it is so easy to forget. I have met young Nigerians who have never heard of Chief MKO Abiola. In a country where history is no longer taught in schools, that should not be surprising. The Nigerians who were born in 1993 are today out of university, and many of them may never have experienced military rule. They were still children when their parents fought for this democracy. Whoever makes the mistake of even remotely suggesting any form of return to military rule is an enemy of the Nigerian people. Such persons would be taking this country back to 18 years ago and beyond.

Whatever may be the shortcomings of our democracy, this system of government has served the Nigerian people well. We may worry about the form or the shape, or the character of our democracy, the opportunism and imperfections of the professional political class, or the weakness of certain institutions but all told, this is a much better country. The best place for the military is to function under a constitutional order and to discharge its duties as the protector of national sovereignty. Any soldier who is interested in politics should resign his commission, and join a political party, politics being an open field for all categories of persons, including ex-convicts, prostitutes and armed robbers. I find the auto-suggestion of military intervention gross and odious. It is regrettable that those whose duty should never in any shape include scare-mongering were the ones who started that nonsensical discussion in the first place.

For the benefit of those who do not know or who may have forgotten, we once lived in a certain country called Nigeria, ruled by the military, where the rights of citizens meant nothing. The soldiers were our rulers. They were above the laws of the land. The people were their subordinates. They called us bloody civilians. The media was not free. Your insistence on free speech could land you in jail. Under the guise of enforcing discipline, the military treated the people as if they were slaves. Everything was done with immediate effect!, including the suspension of human rights.

Today, democracy has given the Nigerian people, voice. There is a greater consciousness of the power of the people, as well as the need to hold persons in power accountable. The electoral process is still imperfect, but the people are now supremely confident of their right to choose. But not all our problems have been solved. For example, exactly 50 years ago today, the late Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, hero of the Biafran Revolution, led the people of the Bight of Biafra on a secession move out of Nigeria.

He said: you, the people of Eastern Nigeria, Conscious of the Supreme Authority of Almighty God over all mankind, of your duty to yourselves and prosperity; Aware that you can no longer be protected in your lives and in your property by any Government based outside Eastern Nigeria/Believing that you are born free and have certain inalienable rights which can best be protected by yourselves. Unwilling to be unfree partners in any association of a political or economic nature Now, therefore, I, Lieutenant-Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, by virtue of the authority and pursuant to the principles recited above, do hereby solemnly proclaim that the territory and region known as and called Eastern Nigeria together with her Continental Shelf and territorial waters shall henceforth be an independent sovereign state of the name and title of The Republic of Biafra

In other words, the people of Eastern Nigeria no longer felt free or protected or respected inside Nigeria. They opted out. In the Ahiara Declaration of 1969, Ojukwu summed it all up as follows: When the Nigerians violated our basic human rights and liberties, we decided reluctantly but bravely to found our own state, to exercise our inalienable right to self-determination as our only remaining hope for survival as a people.

The civil war ended on January 12, 1970 but 50 years since the declaration of secession by the people of Eastern Nigeria, Igbos are still protesting about their relationship with the rest of Nigeria. But significantly, they are not the only ones complaining. Farmers are complaining about pastoralists, indigenes about settlers, Christians about Muslims and vice versa, women about men, men about women, youths about the older generation, the people of Southern Kaduna are unhappy, other Northern minorities too, the people of the Niger Delta have been unhappy since the Willink Commission of 1957/58, the other over 400 ethnic nationalities that are not recognized in Section 55 of the 1999 Constitution are also wondering whether they are truly part of this unionBasic human rights and liberties are still being violated.

Nigeria remains a yet unanswered question. Democratic rule may have opened up the space, but our country still suffers from a kind of hang-over. The people are free, but they are today everywhere in chains: politically, economically and ethnically. This is the sad part of our democracy, but the best part are the many lessons that the people are learning about the meaning, the nature and the cost of the choices that they make or that they have made.

Visit link:
Democracy, Biafra And A Sense Of History By Reuben Abati - SaharaReporters.com

The political leader of the Movement for Economic Empowerment (MOVEE), Dr. J. Mills Jones has said that democracy as a form of government does not have meaning when those who are governed are hungry.

As a result he said Liberians must not choose their leaders out of fear in October elections because they now have the capacity to select new leaders with track record to be able to build a new nation for the betterment of the country and the people.

Speaking at the Christian Literature Crusader Church Leaders Summit at the Trumpet Baptist Central Church in Ganta, Nimba County recently, he said Liberians should not be complacent with the decisions they will make to ensure that the capacity to build a new nation is not undermined.

Dr. Jones, defending his partys theme of hope, said Liberia is still a land of possibilities that can only be realized if the people vote into office the right leadership to break away from the past.

He made reference to the theme of the summit, Leading in a time of transition, and said for the church, transition is a constant challenge, growing out of humanitys continuous march on the highway of modernity.

One could argue that the day the church settles down in the sea of stability will be the beginning of an existential stretch to the church as an institution and more importantly as a place of hope to sound the gospel of Jesus Christ to all peoples, Dr. Jones said.

He said the same is true for the state because the leadership of a nation must not only be prepared to deal with the challenges of change but must also be agents of change.

Dr. Jones quoted the late reggae king Bob Marley and challenged Liberians to emancipate their minds from mental slavery, because no one would do it for us. He said it is about time Liberians break with the past and do things that would reflect how long Liberia has been an independent country.

By July this year, he said, Liberia will be 170 years old as a sovereign nation, adding that he regrets that Liberias age does not positively reflect on the countrys development, because it is a historical fact that the country lacks visionary leaders, which has held it back.

This is one of the enduring lessons of history and it is a lesson that the people of Liberia must accept and acknowledge because it is the scarcity of visionary leadership over the long period of our history that has led to the sorry state of our country today, he said.

Speaking to the Christian community, Dr. Jones took consolation in the Bible, and though he did not give the specific quotation, he said a nation without vision is a recipe for the destruction of that nation.

Probing the conscience of his listeners on why Liberians have become so immune to development as compared to neighboring countries, Dr. Jones said: it is good leadership that gives vision to a nation and this is why I continue to say and to make the argument that leadership matters.

He explained MOVEEs determination to make a difference and to ensure social cohesion, economic development and the enjoyment of peace and stability, if elected.

Dr. Jones returned to the subject of tribal politics and admitted to his audience that he came from a humble background, and said MOVEE understands that our people in the towns, cities, and villages are interested in a countryman but want to get out of poverty, and poverty has no tribe. Therefore, we offer not divisive politics but vibrant and visionary leadership with a track record.

I hear people say that this is a time for the so-called countryman to become president, but only a dull man can come up with such for a change. This is a talk that will lead us down the road to nowhere, he said.

Meanwhile, Dr. Jones warned Liberians about those politicians who show up at every election not because they want to change the conditions of Liberians but to change their own conditions. They are the politicians who have started to sell the future of Liberia to outsiders. MOVEE has been constantly empowering the businesspeople, farmers and others, because democracy doesnt mean much when the people are hungry.

Follow this link:
'Democracy Meaningless When The People Are Hungry' - Liberian Daily Observer

Since its first conception, the idea of a liberal democracy has never been a settled one. Debate has raged. Churchill was cynical, the best argument against democracy is a 5-minute conversation with the average voter, while Plato was wary, dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy. And yet, in broad terms even democracys most dismissive critics who live behind her shield do not want to go back to the bad old days of kingdoms and dictatorships.

In recent times we have seen how fragile this shield of freedom can be, with the rise of populist leaders such as Trump and Le Pen in the West, and the attempt by Park Geun-Hye to seemingly take South Korea back to the 1970s. This fragility is something we must constantly be aware of and exercise vigilance to protect the freedoms we cherish. To do this we must remember democracy has no finish line, it is a constant journey, and one that we walk with the aim of bringing the North Koreas of this world alongside us somewhere in the distance.

Since Parks removal from office and Moon Jae-ins victory in the election, the Western press has been quick to praise South Korea, the Washington Post leading with the headline South Korea just showed the world how to do democracy, and there has been much talk of the spirit showed by this young democracy. This praise is deserved but I also find it slightly patronizing.

As mentioned above these, if you like, old democracies are at risk of being hijacked by nationalistic and isolationist agendas and cannot rest on their laurels any more than South Korea can afford to in the coming years.

Indeed in my country, the UK, one of the oldest democracies, we are just starting to feel the early effects of our rash decision to leave the EU, again brought on by nationalistic fervor and false promises from conceited leaders. Next month the UK will hold another general election (the second in two years) in which the much-criticized Conservative Party who delivered Brexit is expected to win a huge majority and consolidate their position, mainly due to a spineless opposition.

Three major votes in the space of 25 months which will have changed the face of my country forever, and probably not for the better. Perhaps too much democracy is indeed unhealthy for a nation? The squabbles over how to manage it persist.

Perhaps Korea does indeed have things it can learn about its democracy from the problems suffered by these so-called advanced economies. However it is not so straightforward, cultures, language, people, differ. We cannot easily choose a strategy for developing a democracy for country A simply because it worked for country B. But despite this, the debate on democracy has over the centuries been a productive if not necessarily a conclusive one. And so it was pleasing to observe two fundamental principles for maintaining a healthy democracy being put into practice in the first few days of Moons presidency.

The first of these is the importance of education. As US President F.D. Roosevelt acknowledged, education is the key safeguard of democracy, democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely.

One of Moon Jae-ins first acts as president was to abolish the widely despised state history textbooks whitewashing the Park Chung-hee dictatorship and reducing the efforts of pro-democracy activists to mere footnotes. It is widely accepted that the younger generations in Korea have a much more liberal outlook than the older generations and this cynical attempt to reverse this trend has rightly been stopped in its tracks. Education, especially unbiased state education is key. This is especially so in Korea where it can act as a counterbalance to the education received from a largely conservative-dominated media, which brings me to the second principle, freedom of the press.

The differences between the two pictures were stark. In the first image, reporters sat sedately, subdued even, expressions sullen, their hands in their laps, perhaps they were attending a lecture. In the second picture, hands were raised, reporters sat forward in their chairs, eager to be called.

The first picture was of one of Parks rare press conferences at Cheong Wa Dae. Questions prearranged, answers scripted, no surprises, follow the script please. The second scene was at one of Moon Jae-ins early press conferences since becoming president. Watching the second press conference one could almost feel the wave of elation amongst the journalists in the room. We can ask questions! We can ask our own questions!

Without a free and open press, it is difficult for people to form informed opinions and contribute to the debate, contribute to the democracy. From debate come solutions. I have faith that President Moon will do a lot of good for Korea, but will he make mistakes? Of course he will, no one is perfect, (already I implore him to rethink his attitude toward LGBT people). But those mistakes must be held up in the light so the country can learn from them, get over them, and improve. They should not be hidden, buried or simply never be spoken about, as was the modus operandi of the Park government. Its lack of accountability proved a fertile breeding ground for abuse and corruption.

Like the pictures described above, the change to a feeling of optimism in Seoul over the past weeks from the dark stupor of the last few years has this writer filled with hope for the future of Korea. But caution, vigilance, this is no time to relax. The candles may have been put away, but you must keep the fire burning.

By James Copeland James Copeland is an assistant professor of Hongik University. -- Ed.

Read the original:
[James Copeland] Democracy, the unending battle - The Korea Herald