As any student of African politics over the last sixty or so years will tell you there are some lessons which one must never forget if one is to remain in power indefinitely. There are many details about the minutiae of dictatorship which unfortunately go unreported amidst the general hullabaloo about how these hard working men are tyrants and blah blah. That is modern journalism for you; fake news and sensationalism. This publication is here to remedy all of that rubbish. This publication is here to help you, aspiring dictator, learn how not to play yourself. Stick with us and one day people will say your name in the same breath as luminaries of the profession such as the most esteemed Uncle Bob. There is always the question of where to begin and I think given recent happenings on the continent, it is most pressing to examine how not to lose elections as an incumbent dictator.
Yahya Jammeh played himself. Sooner or later, sooner seems more likely, he will be ousted as the “president” of Gambia. While there will be much to unpack in the aftermath (the implications of what has happened here for Gambia, West Africa as a region and governance in Africa in general) there are other far more entertaining things to be discussed in the interim. What exactly can be learned from Jammeh?
The first is to never hold elections to begin with. Elections are by their nature highly probabilistic affairs. While the entire point of a dictatorship is to eliminate all uncertainty. Remove choice from the equation because people when faced with a choice will choose. The only one who should be doing any choosing is you.
Unfortunately, it will not always be your choice whether or not elections are to be held. You might be facing mounting international pressure, or there might be a scale of unrest at home that your threats of force are no longer able to contain, or the news of the one hundred or so dissenters that you had murdered may finally trickle into the public discourse. If there needs to be some symbolic action for the pacification of forces that are momentarily beyond your control, then you might have an election.
But do not stage an election to reconfirm the idea that the people you rule love you. You are a dictator and you need never be so insecure. Take it as a given that they love you and continue to operate under that assumption. Never, and this bears repeating, never stage an election whose sole aim is to mollify your ego.
What happens then if you have to stage an election? It is important to pay attention to word choice here. There is a chasm between a staged election and a held election. An election effectively held is one in which every (wo)man is truly free to choose a candidate based on a set of self-determined criteria and to act upon that choice by casting a ballot which will be counted as part of a whole no greater than the sum of registered citizens who satisfy the predetermined conditions for casting a vote.
To effectively stage an election is to create an indistinguishable simulacrum of all the preceding, while ensuring that the outcome is the one that you have desired from the beginning. One could argue that since there are always varying degrees of shady shit happening during any election, all elections are to some extent staged. I would be inclined to agree with them. One could also point out that my definition for what constitutes an effectively held election is severely limited. I would also gladly concede that point. However, I will require that One agree that the fabric that binds all of society together is perception or at least that One do so for the purpose of the rest of this document.
While we can get into long winded and complex philosophical debates about this position, halfway through which I will be forced to bullshit, (as the recipient of a well rounded liberal arts education, my strategy is usually to misattribute some stuff I made up to Hegel and hope that whoever I am debating is not a student of German idealism and if they are call them an elitist) I would really like to move on to the point I am trying to make. What is important in the aftermath of an election is not what happened during the election, but the feeling that a fair say was had and that shady shit was kept to a minimum. At this point one might point out that my criteria for what matters in the causatum(I took latin 101 lol) of an election is more complex and nuanced than the things I have listed. To which I would contend that One does not understand that partisan politics do not exist in an election au milieu de dictatorship, it’s One or the other guy, complexity is the least of One’s worries. I would then tell One to sit the fuck down and let me fucking finish.
So what exactly is the key to effectively staging an election? The answer is shockingly simple; you must maintain the illusion of ceding control to an independent body while simultaneously ensuring that you are in total control of every decision that independent body makes. Do not be so obvious as to place your son, or your uncle or your gateman at the head of this body. Make sure that it is someone who has no immediately apparent connection to you. However, you must also make sure that this person can be controlled through the use of bribery, blackmail, the threat of force and its actual dispatch in varying combinations.
At no point should it be unclear to this person that you can elevate them beyond their wildest imaginings should things go your way, or fuck their shit up beyond their wildest imaginings should things not go your way. Take extra care to make sure that this independent body is made up of a majority of people that you control. Also make sure to include a few “legitimate” (legitimacy is a social construct) members to further heighten the illusion that you have ceded control.
Another thing that you must ensure is that there are no international observers. Since you should have installed a dummy independent body at this point, they should make that case.
Opening up the country to international observers is an infringement on the sovereignty and the integrity of the electoral process. Who knows the agenda that these foreigners have anyway? We are Africans and we will have an African election under the mandate of God.
On the other hand, your official position should be that you welcome all observers but that there is an independent electoral commission for a reason . At the end of the day, the decision to welcome international observers is up to them. You might still be forced to have international observers regardless. If this is the case, make sure that the decision that they can be present is made a day before the election.
Further, it is important to have a coherent social media policy. The world has advanced technologically and so should you as a dictator. Keep in mind though that this policy should not be aimed at people at home. It is aimed at the bleeding heart westerns whose fancy is momentarily taken up by one “injustice” or the other in the global south, in the moments they can pull themselves away from consuming some thing or the other the production of which is only made possible by the good work people like you do. It is also aimed at the children of those people who fled your country at the end of the eighties. Their childhoods spent in the west have left them properly equipped to have nuanced dealings with the multiple things you must daily contend with. If you do not address them, they will figure you out, maybe.
You need Twitter bots and fake Facebook accounts. You also do not want to overdo it because to draw too much attention to yourself could lead to increased scrutiny which might impact the degree to which you can control things at home. It is a fine balancing act, but the point is to lightly steer the conversation by whispering in the collective driver’s ear and not to grab the steering wheel and make everyone mad if you steer into the path of an onrushing lorry.
Finally, ballot box stuffing is blasé, at least the flavor of it that you are most used to. You cannot stuff ballot boxes to the extent that there is a massive discrepancy between the number of ballots cast and the number of people in your country. You must make sure instead to get votes by bribery or coercion or by making sure people stay home so you can fill in their votes as you like. To this end you must also ensure that the election is held on a workday preferably in the middle of the week and that polling stations are as inefficient and cumbersome as possible. Don’t just stuff the ballot boxes, stuff the ballot boxes with style.
There are many other points to consider, but I believe I have covered the major ones and that all other courses of action can be inferred from a simple heuristic. Find what is outside your control and control it while leaving as much room as possible for plausible deniability. The point at the end of the day is to create the illusion that the only thing that influenced the election is your good decision making, stellar record of governance and unwavering love from the people who are about to reelect you.
If you have done the above right, then congratulations, you’ve probably won. But let’s face it, the best laid plans of mice and men and all that other stuff. So what happens if you’ve lost? Throughout the election process you should have been documenting the generalities of the shady dealings of your independent electoral body, but not with so much detail that anyone can decipher that the majority of the shadiness was carried out by you.
One effective way of doing this is to make sure that there are some ballot boxes stuffed with your opponent’s name. The point of this is not to help your opponent win the election, but to cast doubt upon the process of the election should things not work out exactly the way you planned them to. Having several questionable ballot boxes can lead to you suspending the election’s results until you have been able to launch an independent investigation into how these horrible irregularities happened.
The primary objective here is to get the results of the election thrown out and the challenger thrown in jail. This strategy will only buy you a few years at the most, but in the short term it is the most effective. Failing the primary objective, your next objective is to create the impression that there was a stalemate and to force the creation of a unity government. A unity government also buys you a few years and gives you the opportunity to reflect on the ways in which you messed up and how not to repeat those mistakes the next time elections come around. At no point until your investigation is complete should you concede victory to the challenger. Also make sure that no stupid changes to the constitution, like term limits, are made while the unity government is in power.
Unfortunately, it might happen that you are unable to cast the required doubt on the election to force either of the aforementioned options. If this is the case then you need to yield. Accept that you lost, make a speech about it, ingratiate yourself with the incoming elect and consolidate your base of power to make sure that you can neither be arrested nor tried without a few hundred people dying over it.
If the elect does not seem like a reasonable fellow then move to Switzerland tout de suite, or Kenya if the Europeans suddenly discover their consciences. But make sure that you can continue to do the hard work of undermining him (I said him dammit, everybody can’t be Johnson Sirleaf my friend) by consolidating your base of power. You must do everything to make sure his rule is an utter failure and in the aftermath, you may return to run against him or her again. They will be begging you to come back.
Or you can disregard everything I just said and just do the opposite of everything Jammeh has done.
