Benin: Of Gizzards And Threats

BENIN

Of Gizzards and Threats

History has not been kind to Benin.

The tiny West African country exported more than a million slaves to the United States and elsewhere centuries ago. On the country’s coast stands the Door of No Return, a moving memorial at the port where slaves once embarked on the torturous Middle Passage.

After gaining independence from France in the 1960s, Benin struggled through military coups and authoritarianism. In 1991, democracy emerged. Voters twice re-elected former dictator Mathieu Kérékou, but the political system nonetheless thrived. In the last parliamentary election four years ago, voters could choose between 20 parties.

Sadly, that democracy is now under threat.

Citing technicalities under new reforms, election officials recently ruled that only two parties can run in parliamentary elections on April 28, reported the Mail & Guardian, a South African newspaper. Both parties happen to be allied to President Patrice Talon, a cotton and shipping tycoon. No opposition candidates are standing for office.

Protests have flared up, but security forces have quashed them. Talon stationed troops, paramilitary forces and military vehicles throughout the country, including around the headquarters of the opposition Benin Rebirth Party.

The military is not the only way Talon appears to be consolidating power. Last month, the Tanzania-based African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights ruled that Benin mistreated former presidential candidate Sebastien Ajavon, a poultry magnate who lost to Talon in 2016.

As Bloomberg explained, after Ajavon lost the election, authorities found 40 pounds of cocaine in a shipping container of imported turkey gizzards in one of his companies and charged him with drug trafficking. He claimed he was being framed and now lives in exile in France.

Those moves led critics to charge that Talon was planning a power grab. “Talon’s plan is to revise the constitution as he pleases,” said Corneille Nonhemi, a young activist who had wanted to run for parliament as a candidate under Ajavon’s Social Liberal Union.

Talon countered that the new election rules were designed to encourage around 250 opposition parties to coalesce into two or three groups.

Former President Thomas Boni Yayi, who backed Ajavon in 2016, has called on Talon to postpone the election, wrote Agence France-Presse.

Beninese opposition leaders have also called on Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, the current chairman of the Economic Community of West African States, to intervene. “Nigeria has over 800 kilometers (of) land border with Benin Republic and principally stands to suffer the consequences of any political instability in Benin,” Jean Adèkambi, a leader in a coalition of opposition groups, said in the Nation, a Nigerian newspaper.

Hopefully, foreign military intervention won’t be necessary. Sometimes, as in The Gambia, the threat is enough.