The global year of elections is ending: Have we all chosen wisely?

The year 2024 has virtually earned the title of the first-ever Global Year of Elections in human history. Nationwide elections, referendums, and other forms of public voting are taking place in over 70 independent UN member states – more than a third of its total membership.

Including elections in unrecognized territories (like Somaliland in the Horn of Africa), partially recognized regions (such as South Ossetia in the Caucasus), territories with limited sovereignty (like US-governed Puerto Rico), along with dependent territories (such as Sint Maarten in the Eastern Caribbean) and places with ambiguous status (for instance, Niue in Oceania), the count approaches nearly half of the world’s countries and territories. 

In total, this year’s elections – regional and local included – are estimated to involve, to some extent, around quarter the world’s population with active voting rights.

Meanwhile, the African continent continues to lead all other continents in the number of nationwide elections, referendums, and plebiscites. At the start of this year, 18 African countries had scheduled such events, including Algeria, Botswana, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mauritius, Mauritania, Madagascar, Namibia, Rwanda, Senegal, Tunisia, Togo, Chad, South Africa, South Sudan, and the Comoros Islands. No other part of the world can match this scale of national electoral events this year.

It is worth noting, however, that not everything has gone smoothly in all African countries. For example, in South Sudan, elections have been postponed by two years to allow for the completion of a national census, the registration of political parties, and the overall ‘strengthening of the constitutional process’. This development is hardly surprising in a country that emerged on the political map through secession from Sudan – a move that underscores the broader risks associated with altering established territorial structures, particularly in the Nile region, where the history of such divisions has often led to instability. In fact, South Sudan’s situation closely mirrors that of neighboring Sudan, where a full-blown civil war has been raging for the second consecutive year. 

In the 2000-2010s, among experts focused on reconciling parties involved in such conflicts, the concept of reuniting Greater Sudan was discussed. This proposal envisioned a confederal-federal union encompassing all constituent regions: the southern and northern parts of Sudan, aligned along the Nile; Darfur, which has endured nearly a quarter-century of interethnic conflict; and the Red Sea province of Bahr el Ghazal, the ancestral land of the legendary Blemmyes-Beja tribe. Yet, for this kind of unity to be realized, representatives – and, more broadly, supporters – of opposing factions in these conflicts (which are far too common across the African continent) must commit to reconciliation and to the shared pursuit of peaceful, harmonious coexistence.

In this context, it is worth mentioning two notably successful election campaigns from this year, which had positive outcomes for the local populations. These examples come, as it were, from the opposite end of Africa – in Botswana and South Africa.

In the latter of these countries, South Africa, voters made their will unmistakably clear in May of this year. As Cyril Ramaphosa, the current leader of the African National Congress (ANC) – the party once famously led by Nelson Mandela (1918-2013) – put it, the election results, with the ANC securing just over 40% of the vote, sent a message calling for cooperation among all constructive political forces to save South Africa from the brink of collapse. This cooperation is grounded in the constitutional principle of ‘Ubuntu’, a concept that is familiar to anyone who has used open-source software. Ubuntu, akin to the Russian notion of ‘sobornost’, reflects a belief in communal truth derived from unity and mutual understanding. Literally, ‘Ubuntu’ means, “I am because you are, because we are,” or more poetically, “the universal bond that connects all of humanity.”

Following a coalition agreement with the previously opposition Democratic Alliance (led by John Steenhuisen) which garnered over 20% of the vote, and seven other political parties, the first government of national unity since the end of the transitional post-apartheid period (1994-1999) was formed. Extremist political factions, representing radical viewpoints, were left out of the coalition, and Ramaphosa was re-elected as president in June.

While many of the challenges that have arisen over the past 30 years are only now beginning to be addressed, the mere achievement of societal agreement and unity around common sense has already led to a notable improvement in South Africa’s economic forecasts and statistical indicators. These shifts, in turn, have enhanced the country’s tangible macroeconomic prospects and development outlook.

In neighboring Botswana – a country long recognized as one of the leaders in socio-economic development not only in Africa but globally – the situation unfolded quite differently. Former President Mokgweetsi Masisi, head of the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP), which was founded by Botswana’s ‘father of the nation’, Seretse Khama, and which had ruled the country continuously since its independence in 1966, found himself at odds with the majority of influential political factions, including former president Ian Khama, the traditional leader, or kgosi, of the largest ethnic group, the Bamangwato, and son of Seretse Khama.

The outcome was a sweeping – and particularly unexpected – electoral defeat for the economically vibrant Botswana, a country that has never experienced dictatorships or military coups and enjoys a high level of social development by global standards. Of the 36 seats that once gave the BDP a parliamentary majority, the party retained only eight, ceding power to the opposition Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC) coalition, led by Duma Boko, the leader of Botswana’s oldest opposition party, the Botswana National Front, who was backed by Ian Khama. The former ruling party even failed to secure the position of official parliamentary opposition, which went to the Botswana Congress Party, which nearly doubled the Democrats’ seats. 

Thus, voters in Botswana also decisively expressed their will, penalizing those who disregard traditions and fail to strive for unity in the name of the common good.

Of course, the attention of many Africans (and their descendants on other continents) is now focused on another election – the US presidential election, with voting concluding on November 5 and Donald Trump announced the winner. It’s important to note that this date marks the end of the voting process, not the final election itself. The president of the ‘world’s oldest democracy’ – just 250 years old, though still far younger than the 2,500-year-old classical Greek democracy – is elected in a notably archaic manner, through the Electoral College. Each state has a number of electors equal to its total number of representatives in the US Congress.

Among experts and representatives of nearly all US political forces, there has been a growing push for the replacement of this outdated procedure with direct, popular presidential elections. In cases where one candidate wins the national popular vote and the other secures more states, it has been proposed that the decision should be entrusted to the majority of members of the US House of Representatives, who directly represent their constituents at the federal level. Interestingly, a similar parliamentary model for electing the head of state is enshrined in the constitutions of Botswana and South Africa.

However, the population in those countries, as it seems, truly embraces the principle of Ubuntu, whereas in the US – where some polls indicate that over 60% of the population supports direct presidential elections – national consensus remains elusive. In fact, the political climate in the US from 2020 to 2024 has been so polarized that American politicians themselves consistently refer to the situation as a “cold civil war.”

To ensure that this ‘cold internal conflict’ does not escalate into the devastating flames of a nuclear war, those in the country that often calls itself the ‘global hegemon’ must make a conscious choice for peace – rooted in goodwill and common sense. This is a choice that we, too, must make in our hearts, minds, and actions. Such a choice rejects the approach of those who label themselves as democrats yet propose, as a serious employment measure for Black communities, a national program subsidizing the cultivation and sale of marijuana. It rejects the leadership of political forces whose current figurehead, outgoing President Joe Biden, has publicly labeled half of his fellow citizens as “garbage” – fortunately stopping short of calling them ‘vermin’ or ‘cockroaches’, as the Tutsis were called in the infamous RTML (Thousand Hills Television and Radio) broadcastings, ‘death by radio’ during the Rwandan genocide in 1994. It rejects the influence of those who laugh at images of the assassinations of independent leaders – the founders of African unity – while publicly declaring that international justice should serve merely as “a leash for African and other former colonies.” And finally, it rejects those whom even their own supporters fear might trigger a global nuclear conflict, one that would undoubtedly spell the end of humanity. Therefore, choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live (Deuteronomy 30:19).