How Africa’s power politics became a high stakes affair

What happens to a democracy when the price of running for office climbs faster than the ability of ordinary citizens to pay it? This was the key question this week when experts gathered in Accra to discuss the mounting cost of political leaders, even as people try to defend the relevance of democracy.

Most countries in Africa hold regular elections. Picture Kenya, South Africa, Ghana, Uganda, Nigeria and Tanzania, all who hold regular polls to elect office holders for parliament, presidency and even municipal elections. Yet, over the years after the second liberation that mostly ended sing-party politics or military juntas, Africans continue to grapple with costs that lock out most people from contesting.

In eastern Africa, for example, the statutory fees for running for Member of Parliament ranges from $155 in Kenya to $790 in Uganda. Other countries such as Tanzania ($390), Rwanda ($160), Democratic Republic of Congo ($666) and Ethiopia ($500) also charge fees on candidates. Somalia is most expensive, charging contenders as high as $40,000 to run for parliament, even though women get a 50 percent discount.

Yet the real cost is in campaign costs. Binaifer Nowrojee, the president of Open Society Foundations, has spent a career studying how power is won and kept across Africa. The recent pattern of costlier politics has elicited fears.

“It’s money that’s now determining who goes into politics, who stays in politics, and whose interest gets heard,” she said ahead of the High-Level Regional Convening on the Financialisation of Politics in Africa, in Accra from July 14 to 16.

The money means candidates pay out to rally goers. It may also be budgetary need to take down rivals.

“This money continues to corrode… it continues to influence whose voices are heard, how public resources are allocated, who gets the government contracts, which business interests prevail at the expense of people.”

In eastern Africa, each successful Member of Parliament spends at least $40,000 to win a seat. The money rises if you include statutory fees. Although Kenya’s electoral body charges the lowest fees to enrol as a candidate relative to neighbours, The EastAfrican analysis shows the respective political parties, for example, may impose additional fees and the contender may have to hire full-time teams to run his campaign.

Some countries such as Tanzania have managed to limit campaign spending, with candidates mostly riding on the popularity of the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi to win elections. In Ethiopia, political parties hardly fund candidates so anyone enrolling must be ready to spend an arm and a leg. Somalia’s clan-based politics means candidates spend more to persuade rivals to drop from the race and bribe clan elders to sway the vote. Some candidates say they spent as much as $500,000 to win the seat.

Yet voter expectations mean the burden on a contender in Kenya and Uganda is highest and candidates are often forced into handouts, raising the cost of winning the seat. In Kenya, the full election cycle in 2022 put the average parliamentary campaign at roughly Ksh18.2 million (about $140,800), rising to Ksh22.8 million (about $176,400) for Woman Representative seats.

Ironically, this was the office created to widen women’s access to Parliament. It went as high as Ksh35.5 million (about $274,700) for a Senate run. Even the cheapest office, Member of County Assembly, averaged Ksh3.1 million (about $24,000). “Sustainable reforms are always strongest when they’re owned and informed locally,” Nowrojee said, speaking on the need for transparent campaign financing laws.

The cost of elections shows up in a Kenyan by-election where State resources and rival campaigns compete for the same voters, or in a Nigerian party primary where the real contest is decided before the general election even begins.

Ghana presents a paradox. Its elections are among the cheapest in Africa for the State to administer just $0.07 per registered voter in 2016, the lowest recorded on the continent. Yet the private cost of winning a seat has moved sharply the other way: the average parliamentary campaign now runs to an estimated $693,000, having jumped roughly 90 percent in just four years.

Kenya, by contrast, carries both burdens at once. Its 2022 General Election cost the State an estimated $370 million to administer roughly $18 to $20 per registered voter, the highest rate in Africa and among the highest in the world. The Kenyan Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission now projects the 2027 poll will require at least Ksh61 billion (about $472 million).

Layered on top of that public expense is one of the region’s more demanding private campaign markets meaning a Kenyan candidate, and Kenyan taxpayers, are effectively paying twice over for the same contest. It was this dual crisis – State cost and private capture – that drew government officials, anti-corruption bodies, electoral commissions and civil society from across the continent to Accra this week. Much of the conversation centred on a single instrument: the African Union’s model law on political financing, now being developed by the AU Advisory Board Against Corruption (AUABC) together with the Pan-African Parliament.

The pan-African Parliament adopted a policy, which individual countries are then expected to domesticate. But this parliament itself lacks teeth and works only as a policy recommender whose decisions are never binding. Yet it is not entirely useless. It helped develop model legislation on the protection of cultural heritage; a multi-year process of drafting, expert review and parliamentary adoption that offers a rough template for how the political financing law is likely to proceed.

Its authority ultimately comes from Article 10 of the AU Convention on Preventing and Combating Corruption, which already obligates member States to enforce transparency in campaign funding and bar use of illegally acquired money in politics, the model law is meant to give that obligation practical, adoptable legal text, country by country.

Ghana’s Deputy Finance Minister Thomas Nyarko Ampem, delivering the keynote speech on behalf of Vice President Jane Naana Opoku-Agyemang, told delegates that political finance reform “had become a development imperative rather than merely an electoral issue”. In the same address, he conceded that Ghana itself “still lacks a comprehensive legal framework governing political party and campaign financing,” three decades into its reputation as a regional democratic model.

Ghana’s Speaker of Parliament Alban Bagbin said that when money becomes the principal determinant of political success, he warned, “public office is treated as an investment to be recovered” a dynamic he said turns the contest of ideas into a contest of financial muscle. Prof Henry Kwasi Prempeh of Ghana’s Centre for Democratic Development warned that the cost implication of politics could cause further disillusion with democracy.

He cited an Afrobarometer poll that showed recently that more than six in ten Africans, say they are dissatisfied with how democracy functions in their own countries, dissatisfaction he linked directly to financialisation. He also flagged nomination and filing fees, he argued, function as gatekeeping mechanisms that price out capable candidates before a campaign even begins.