Democracy
Democratic governance is predicated on the principles of separation of powers and elective representation, in which leadership positions are unrestricted to certain groups or people.
This raises questions with regard to traditional leadership, which originally was, and largely still is, structured on the hereditary devolution of male power.4 Traditional leadership is usually not elected through universal suffrage, nor is it open to everyone to compete for vacant positions, which are most often for life. Some say traditional rule represents an “African form of democracy,” with chiefs as the true representatives of rural African communities (Kyed and Buur 2007). They point out that in most traditional institutions there is either direct participation of all adults (or in some cases only of male adults) or a representative system in which each clan or sub-clan is represented in the village council. While such institutions do indeed exist in most communities, the question is how well they function when there are increasing opportunities to profit from traditional leadership positions. Ubink (2008a) describes the breakdown of checks and balances in peri-urban Ghana, where chiefs either ignore or co-opt (buy off) their traditional councillors when these question the chiefs' land administration. Alternatively, they fill the traditional council only with members of the royal family. Mnwana shows that among the Bafokeng and Bakgatla communities in the platinum mining belt of South Africa, the mass community meetings (kgotha kgothe) are elite dominated—including often by white experts in charge of community business investments—use highly technical language, and as such have very little room for grassroots voices. In addition, the heads of the clans (dikgosana) are represented in the Supreme Council, which convenes “whenever important decisions affecting the entire community need to be made” (Royal Bafokeng Nation 2004). However, they often fail to fully grasp “the highly sophisticated, technical and intellectually demanding decisions that pertain to mining contracts and other business partnerships” (Mnwana 2014, 835). Mnwana furthermore reports (836) that in 2014 among the Bakgatla, kgotha kgothe meetings no longer took place at regular intervals because of community attempts to hold their chief Pilane accountable for alleged corruption and misappropriation of mining revenues.When rural residents in South Africa's platinum belt tried to organise to hold traditional authority to account, traditional leaders and councillors requested state courts for interdicts against certain groups and people and the police have arrested critical community members. Court decisions have denied commoners locus standi to call meetings of the tribe or the village or to mobilise for the removal of the chief, effectively closing off another route of organising resistance. As Claassens and Matlala (2014, 129) point out, this means the traditional leader cannot be held accountable by anyone in the community except for a select few, a statement unsupported by historical and anthropological literature “about the role of councils and interlocking customary structures at various levels in mediating and shaping the exercise of chiefly power” (Delius 2008).
Another challenge in the reconciliation of traditional authority with democratisation arises from the co-existence of traditional authority with local elected government. Logan concludes from the Afrobarometer that most Africans do not draw a very sharp distinction between traditional leaders and elected local government. They rather understand them as “common players in a single, integrated political system.” Consequently, their assessments of both institutional actors are closely linked (Logan 2009). This does not deny, however, that the introduction or transformation of new local government institutions can have a strong impact on local governance. In South Africa, where rural elected local government was introduced after its transition to democracy in 1994, the roles and responsibilities of traditional and democratic local institutions were reported to be often unclear, ambiguous, and/or conflicting (King 2005, 12-14; Von Maltitz and Shackleton 2004, 124), which created uncertainty and “titanic struggles” (Ntsebeza 2003, 213). It also resulted in some areas in traditional leaders hesitating to enforce such rules and to sanction violations, out of competition for popularity and local support with local democratic institutions (Von Maltitz and Shackleton 2004, 125). According to Findlay and Twine (2018, 14), these findings could suggest a widespread reduction in compliance with and enforcement of laws and could signify a weakening of local institutional control.