Multiparty Competition

Summary

Alternatively, a rival with the support of the landless may replace the existing rulers and redistribute land in such a way as to give land to the landless.

(North 1981, 116)

Debates and conflicts over land rights have played a powerful role in some of the continent's most closely studied experiments with political liberalization – including those in Kenya in the 1990s, Côte d’Ivoire since the mid-1990s, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zimbabwe, and Rwanda (1990–1994). In Kenya in 1992 and 1997, the incumbent regime of Daniel arap Moi stoked land tensions in the Rift Valley to consolidate its electoral constituencies, disorganize the opposition, and help strengthen the ruling party's hold on power. In Côte d’Ivoire since the mid-1990s, national-level politicians have catered to southwesterners’ land grievances against immigrant farmers in order to mobilize the electoral support of “true Ivoirians” in this region. In Zaire, Mobutu's National Conference in 1991 opened the door for politicians in eastern provinces to mobilize electoral constituencies around promises of land restitution. In Zimbabwe from the mid-1990s on, Mugabe played the land issue to the hilt to bolster his nationalist and populist credentials, cement his hold on an electoral base, and destroy the opposition. In Rwanda, too, an ongoing history of the use of state power to impose, allocate, and reallocate land rights shaped patterns of political mobilization in the period of multiparty politics from 1991 through April 1994.