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In Africas year of elections, with democracy in retreat in many parts of the continent, Lesotho is a pygmy beside giants like Nigeria and other larger nations facing votes.

But many observers are watching the small mountain nation as it heads to the polls Saturday, one of just a handful of African countries that in the past has seen a peaceful democratic handover of power from one party to another.

Lesotho's democratic credentials are in question after an attempted coup in August forced Prime Minister Tom Thabane to flee the country.

Saturdays balloting is supposed to resolve the crisis, if friction between political opponents and rival branches of the security forces doesnt derail the process.

Among the other countries facing elections this year are Sudan, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, Tanzania, Mali, Burkino Faso, Burundi, Chad, Niger, Mauritania, Guinea, Central African Republic, Togo and Mauritius.

Jeff Smith, an Africa specialist at the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, said Lesotho's election is significant because the nation of 2 million had been a leader in democracy, press freedom and human rights in Africa, as other parts of the continent had seen a backslide in democratic values.

Lesothos important because, despite its problems last August, it is often regarded as a democratic standard-bearer throughout Africa, said Smith. Its got a pretty big reputation to uphold.

He said Lesotho was one of the freer countries, as democratic gains are peeled back in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa.

We have what Id describe as a democracy recession. Theres a really worrying trend of leaders peacefully stealing elections, said Smith, citing subtle methods such as the manipulation of voter rolls by incumbent parties to maintain a grip of power without using outright violence.

The most dangerous sign as Lesotho heads to the polls is the politicization of the security forces. In last years crisis, the police supported Thabane while the army supported a rival.

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Why Lesotho's election is a crucial test for African democracy

In times of war, Athenian voters agreed to spend 15 times more on the armed forces than they did on state pay or festivals.

Is democracy good for balancing a budget? For many, today, the answer is a resonating no. This answer is easy to understand. In the birthplace of democracy, Greece, the state's budget is a mess. For too long the politicians of modern Athens feared voters would not tolerate the financial truth. To pay for unaffordable election promises, they borrowed irresponsibly instead of raising taxes. They lied to voters about the ballooning public debt. It all ended in a huge sovereign-debt crisis.

Even in the midst of this crisis, Greek politicians were afraid to tell voters how the country could escape it. They left it to Greece's creditors to dictate harsh austerity policies, which have caused enormous personal suffering. Greek voters did not vote for them. Not without reason, they are incredibly angry with their politicians.

Politicians do not believe voters can tolerate the financial truth. They assume that democracy is not good at managing public finances. For them it can only balance the budget by leaving voters in the dark.

Greece's crisis might be exceptionally severe but the problem behind it is not unique to Greek democracy. Two other modern democracies, Australia and Britain, were also forced to take drastic budget measures in response to the global financial crisis. In each democracy, centre-left politicians borrowed heavily to pay to prop up the banks and maintain private demand. In each country, these expansionary policies minimised the crisis's human impact. But in the elections that followed, the left-of-centre politicians who had introduced these policies refused properly to justify them. They feared that voters would not tolerate frank public debate about public finances.

The centre-right politicians who opposed them were no better. In these elections they promised to bring budgets back into surplus without new taxes or major public-sector cuts. But these promises again turned out to be lies. In office these conservative politicians have introduced austerity policies without clear electoral mandates. They too continue to face the wrath of their electorates. For good reasons the voters of Australia and Britain have lost a lot of trust in what politicians say about public finances.

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In all these democracies there has been a common underlying problem. Politicians do not believe voters can tolerate the financial truth. They assume that democracy is not good at managing public finances. For them it can only balance the budget by leaving voters in the dark.

As an historian of ancient Greek democracy, this assumption strikes me as plainly wrong. Certainly the politicians of ancient Athens did not share it. Ancient Athens was an incredibly successful state. It developed democracy to a higher level than any other state before the modern period. It was the leading cultural innovator of its age. Athens became one of the ancient world's greatest military powers. These successes did not come cheaply. They depended on Athenian democracy's ability to raise new taxes and control public spending. What made these successes possible was the sound management of public finances.

That the democracy of ancient Athens was good at this will come as a surprise. Germans have been critical of Greek public spending for a very long time. In 1817, August Bockh famously criticised ancient Athens for spending more on public-sector pay and cultural festivals than on its armed forces. For this German professor, this wasteful spending weakened ancient Athens's armed forces. It made it possible for Greece to be conquered by Macedonia.

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If ancient Greeks could balance a budget, why can we?

China is a political force to be reckoned with. Photo: AFP

Politics Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalisation of Democracy FRANCIS FUKUYAMA Profile, $49.99

On the eve of the collapse of the Soviet empire, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama pronounced the global victory of the idea of American-style "liberal democracy". Nearly three decades later, things look grim for his "end of history" thesis, though close readers of his new book will surely conclude that although his thinking has since become guarded by qualification, and by convolution, his old story of American triumph hasn't fundamentally changed.

Political Order and Political Decay is the second volume of Fukuyama's investigation of the origins, evolution and decay of political institutions. Its lengthy argument can be summarised in a single sentence: without the prior establishment of a well-armed and functional territorial state, and without an independent judiciary responsible for overseeing the rule of law that robust state power then makes possible, modern liberal democracy cannot happen. No state, no rule of law, no democracy is the complex algorithm that structures the book, in support of his view that liberal democracy centred on free elections remains the world's No. 1 political preference.

Political order and Political Decay by Francis Fukuyama Photo: Jason Steger

Fukuyama admits of specific troubles in the house of democracy, but they are seen as remediable (how they're to be fixed, he doesn't say). The bigger historical picture is different, and the future bright. His unaltered conviction is that liberal democracy has the winds of long-term evolutionary trends in its sails. Long term is important to Fukuyama, above all because the modern territorial state has become the indispensable kingpin of political order. If there is no state, there can be no rule of law, or liberal democracy.

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Fukuyama's point can be read as a backdoor critique of the farcical American-led failure to build functioning states in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. It's also a sobering reminder that liberal democracy can't be built by liberal democratic means. It requires the establishment of political order through the state, followed by the imposition of legal restraints on state power. Only then can free elections take root and flourish among people living inside territorial states.

Fukuyama reminds his readers that liberal democracy is the offspring of the modern territorial state. The end result proved advantageous in several ways: it reduced civil wars; legalised and legitimated social divisions; enabled the growth of civil society, and facilitated the grand-scale enfranchisement of peoples for whose welfare it provided. And in international affairs, fixed state boundaries provided room for manoeuvre for any given liberal democracy.

Liberal democracy in state form has certainly had downsides. In the violent business of state building, peoples who lacked the capacity to become a modern state were typically left behind, as "stateless people" and "asylum seekers"; or they became the raw material of colonisation, or victims of forcible removal and outright annihilation.

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Francis Fukuyama sticks to his guns on liberal democracy

Access to information today is supposed to be for everyone. So-called data democracy labels have been ascribed to every vendors presentation layer in an effort to bring more users into contact with actionable business stats of all kinds. This is where data vizualisation comes in as a route to representing abstract data sets as (usually) multi-colored images and graphical representationsdesigned to help humans find and then interpret patterns and trends held inside the business or scientific data in question.

The first law of information democracy states:

As the number of workflow-engaged stakeholders interacting with data vizualisation tools increases (within agreed policy access limitations), the natural propensity increases for actionable insights to be a) taken away and acted upon and b) further fed back into the analytics engine itself.

On paper (or, on screen, obviously) this technology proposition appears to hold water. Giving a wider number of workers access to data vizualisation streams is indeed democratic, but is a little data vizualisation knowledge a dangerous thing?

CEO of data-driven Business Intelligence (BI) tools vendor Looker Frank Bien thinks it might be his firm produces a piece of software for data scientists that is intended to help make tangible sense of the data crucial for growing enterprises through a browser. He says that wider data literacynot visualizationshould be our next enterprise information imperative.

A little data vizualisation is a dangerous thing

Lookers Bien suggests that the new data visualization tools have created a false expectation in the data marketplace. They provide a great way to engage employees with data in a visceral way, but once business users have it, the depth they can explore the data is limited. What this ultimately means is that these users slow down the query process and they make it a challenge to answer complex questions.

The promise of self-service BI and moving data exploration out of IT and into the hands of business users is only partly addressed but this has done more to whet the appetite than to address the real need. Furthermore, the proliferation of visualization tools impedes an organizations ability to make decisions based on reliable metrics, because it leads to a lag in relevance of the data. We are on the cusp of a renaissance in BI in which modern data tools unlock the true business value of data and enable all knowledge workers to explore and engage directly with the data, stated Bien.

Data visualizationwithout education is myopia

The solution he says is to increase data literacy, not improve data visualization. Data literacy is an increasingly strategic focus for organizations of all sizes and a vital driver of business success.

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Debunking The First Law Of Data Democracy

Swazilands absolute Monarch, King Mswati III, wants citizens to protect the country from pro-democracy groups he blames for tarnishing the image of the Southern African kingdom abroad.

In his speech at the opening of parliament, King Mswati said activities of the groups have deprived the country of good opportunities and benefits that could help improve the living conditions of Swazis.

Denial

But, Wandile Dludlu, the national coordinator for the Swaziland United Democratic Front (SUDF), a pro-democracy group, says the kings accusations are unfortunate and misplaced.

He says the international community is aware that state security agencies intimidate, harass and abuse the rights of citizens critical of the king and his administration.

We are not surprised by the utterances of his majesty. We live in a global village and it is not possible to keep hiding the shenanigans of his majesty, said Dludlu. He is denying the reality that he is the cause of the main problem that continues to pain the country negatively out there. By refusing to democratize, respect human rights, [and] respect the rule of law, these are the things that cast negatively about the country out there.

Pro-democracy supporters worry that the kings latest pronouncement enables security agencies, including the police, to violently crack down on their activities including meetings and protests. Dludlu said he agrees with the concerns of pro-democracy supporters.

His majesty is taking a more tougher stance on demonstrations on dissidents as he calls us," he said. "Going forward, we will continue to do our best to mobilize Swazis to continue protesting. We are making a call because these utterances are educative enough for the world to see what type of a leader and leadership is in Swaziland.

He said there is a need for the international community to pressure the king to create the enabling environment to ensure the administration respects human rights and the rule of law.

In our view his majesty will continue to posture so bad as he does if many governments in the world continue to treat him with white gloves, continue to trade with Swaziland without taking a good look at the human rights record of Swaziland, said Dludlu.

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Swaziland Pro-democracy Group Rejects Kings Criticisms