As Eswatini rises against its king, its people should be wary of the promise of democracy

As time runs out for Africa’s last absolute monarch amid a growing clamour for democracy in Eswatini, my mind raced back to a 2013 talk by Chinese venture capitalist and political scientist Eric Xun Li in which he argued that democracy was overrated.

The protesters in Eswatini won’t agree. For them, monarchy is to be rejected for the pain it has brought.  The lives lost. The persecution and torture. Democracy, unknown to them, ought to be better than their current nightmare. 

Not so, according to Li.

He said in 2013 that development, and not democracy, should be front and centre of our pursuits. His was a rebuke of “Western elites … making [universal claims] about their political system, the hubris [that electoral democracy]” is a panacea for human development challenges.

“China’s political system will never supplant electoral democracy because, unlike the latter, it doesn’t pretend to be universal. It cannot be exported [even though many South Africans travel to China on fact-finding missions]. But that is the point precisely. The significance of China’s example is not that it provides an alternative, but the demonstration that alternatives exist.”

That democracy works for India, a Westminster-type system works for the UK, or a one-party state works for China does not mean that any of these systems will generate similar results elsewhere. 

To the extent that democracy helps us deal with what scholars have termed wicked problems, people are entitled to choose how they want to be governed. Li’s remarks made me wonder how things might have turned out in Eswatini if the king, by chance, had been progressive. Imagine that. 

What if Mswati was not preoccupied with marrying too many women for him to handle? What if he was the most generous king, looking after the weak and infirm? What if this monarch did not spend R2.7bn on an aircraft and instead invested in infrastructure, created jobs and wooed investors to a stable, well-run country — a modern-day Wakanda? 

No, really. Think about it. What if he fundraised for bright pupils from his country and pressured UN agencies to help, and spent time with ordinary folk, being helpful but still, importantly, insisting there should be no democracy in his country? Would school kids be out in the streets, as we have witnessed in the past few days? Would we have seen the type of police brutality on show this week? Would MTN executives have been under pressure to restrict internet use, acquiescing to a discredited king?

Despite the pressure to make all of us think that one-party states are a terrible idea, China’s civil society is the 'most vibrant in the world'

The significance of China is not that it provides an alternative but the demonstration that alternatives exist, to revert to Li. 

His pushback against the West and his somewhat over-the-top but scholarly defence of China are informed, as he wrote in Foreign Policy last year, by “the narrative that an authoritarian one-party state is by definition incapable of retaining genuine public trust”.

Analysing China’s management of the pandemic, he observes: “If we look at Chinese civil society in the classical definition of the term, what Aristotle called koinonia politike — political community that is not distinct from the state — it appeared throughout this pandemic to be perhaps the most vibrant in the world.” 

In other words, despite the pressure to make all of us think that one-party states are a terrible idea, China’s civil society is the “most vibrant in the world”. The point Li is making is that China, overpopulated as it is, used its state capacity to marshal national efforts, with the enthusiastic participation of civil society, to isolate and defeat Covid and “potentially [prevent] hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of deaths”.

For him, what is to be cherished is this state capacity,  not some simple right to vote for a person (or a party) who will neglect the responsibility to build this capacity to save lives and, in the South African context, create jobs and save many from indignity.

“The doctors and nurses who were sent to Hubei [the province in which Wuhan lies] from around the country were mostly state employees working in state-operated hospitals. The companies that built the hospitals and produced most of the masks were state-owned enterprises.” 

Looked at differently, if Mswati and his team were capable and willing to put in the hard work, and the ordinary people of Swaziland realised that their king was putting his shoulder to the wheel, would Li’s assertion that China proves that alternatives do exist not be proven right? 

Granted, China has many problems, including, but not limited to, lack of free speech. The same could be said of some electoral democracies. The point is not which is better. Let 1,000 flowers bloom.

As South Africans, we know too well how many of us  died for the right to vote. They must be turning in their graves realising how many of the previously disenfranchised will, in the local government elections next week, not bother to cast a ballot. The novelty of the vote has been lost. The fruits of democracy, the promise of a new beginning, have turned into a nightmare for some. 

Meanwhile, even if there is no democracy in China, Li is able to say: “In just 30 years, China went from one of the poorest agricultural countries in the world to the second-largest economy — lifting 650-million people out of poverty.” This turns  on its head the notion that the only path or, as he puts it “salvation”, for the “long-suffering developing world”, is democracy. 

Democracy has its victories too. Even if Eswatini achieves it, it is not, in and of itself, the much-awaited fruit — it is just a seed.