African elections: glass half full or empty?

It’s easy to be cynical about democracy in Africa, but there is as much good news as bad.

Joseph Kabila, right, pictured at the United Nations in New York in 2014, is facing pressure to leave power this year, now that his two terms as president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo have expired and he's reached the constitutional limit.UN photograph by Amanda Voisard

Opinion

BY GWYNNE DYER

January 11, 2017

LONDON, U.K.—There are a number of ways to win an African election. The simplest, obviously, is to win the most votes, but this is sometimes hard to achieve, especially if you have been the president for a long time and people are getting fed up with your rule. If your country’s constitution on...

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