Africa’s election aid fiasco

The development industry is as fashion-prone as any other. Fads come and go. There are a few giveaways when it comes to spotting them. Deceptive simplicity is one indication. The idea should have a silver-bullet quality, promising to cut through complexity to the nub of a problem. Even better, it should be a notion that can be rolled out across not just a country, but a region.

Covering the Kenyan elections, which climaxed with the inauguration last week of Uhuru Kenyatta as the country’s fourth president, I suddenly realised I was watching a fad hitting its stride: the techno-election as democratic panacea. We’ll see it again in Mali’s elections this summer.

Like most of these trends, it is premised on the best of intentions. Like many of them, sadly, it has the potential to create a fresh host of problems, wasting millions of dollars in donor funding, because it makes the classic mistake of confusing symptoms with causes.