NAIROBI, Nov 13 (AFP) - The fiasco surrounding the US presidential
election
has undermined the United States' role as the standard against which all
other
democracies should be judged, according to African newspaper columnists.
   The foreign editor of Kenya's Daily Nation, Henry Owuor, predicted that
the
Florida recount debacle would stain the international reputation of the
United
States.
   "Former president Jimmy Carter knows what this means -- his Atlanta-based
Carter Foundation will think twice before sending him (again) out to Africa
to
preside over elections.
   "Even the foundations run by the two top parties will henceforth be
frowned
upon in the same capitals (where) they once lectured election officials on
the
fairness of elections," wrote Owuor.
   "For Africa, the losers are the pro-democracy campaigners who used the US
as an example of a just society. The victors are the dictators who are under
pressure to improve their human rights records. Already, Zimbabwe's
(President) Robert Mugabe has ... expressed his delight at the goings-on in
Florida."
   The fact that the president is selected not on the basis of the overall
popular vote but by the all-or-nothing electoral college system, which
determines the president on a state-by-state basis, has raised a few
eyebrows.
   Lucy Oriang', jumping the gun in Nairobi's Daily Nation on Tuesday,
confessed to being "confounded by the fact that the man who won the popular
vote ended up a loser in a country that purports to uphold democracy, in
other
words, the people's will.
   "But there is something vaguely familiar about the distorted logic of the
electoral college. Most African countries are, after all, ruled by men who
came to power with minority votes, or simply rigged their way in," mused
Oriang'.
   Charles Onyango-Obbo, editor of Uganda's Monitor but writing in the
Nation,
sarcastically declared himself surprised that "Americans can go the Moon and
land a probe on Mars, but can't steal an election."
   John Kitongo, head of the Kenyan branch of Transparency International, a
corruption watchdog, picked up the theme in the East African, published in
Kampala and one of the most respected newpapers in the region.
   "What do Americans know about elections?" he asked, going on to imagine
an
ironic scenario with the US polls being organised as they are in Africa,
with
African observers monitoring them and the CIA and FBI closely involved in
their organisation.
   "Opposition leaders would cry foul and the top leadership of the
incumbent
party would issue their own statement accusing the opposition of trying to
rig
the polls. ...
   "Anxiety levels would reach a high enough pitch to force some people to
rush out to supermarkets to stock up on non-perishables."
   The African monitors, Githongo imagined, would eventually declare that
the
election "saw its fair share of ballot stuffing, head-cracking, bribery and
the like, but in the grand scheme of things, when all is said and done,
(say)
it generally represented the democratic will of the people."
   This was a jibe at the attitude of the election monitoring industry,
which
in the past has shown a tendency on this continent to declare given polls
acceptable "by African standards."
   Githongo was also drawing a direct comparison with elections in Zanzibar,
a
semi-autonomous state of Tanzania, held on October 29 and November 5 and
widely discredited by the opposition and international election observers,
some of them from ... the United States.
   afm/gd

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