- Title
- Power-sharing in Zanzibar: from zero-sum politics to democratic consensus?
- Creator
- Nassor, Aley Soud; Jose, Jim
- Relation
- Journal of Southern African Studies Vol. 40, Issue 2, p. 247-265
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2014.896719
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2014
- Description
- Power-sharing has become a common strategy to resolve political conflicts in Africa. However, it has rarely survived for very long, and much of the scholarship on power-sharing remains largely negative. Yet Zanzibar's power-sharing approach, adopted in 2010, points to a more positive democratic possibility. We explore the background to this development, note some of the issues behind the move to power-sharing, and look briefly at its implementation following the 2010 elections. We argue that Zanzibar's power-sharing strategy appears to have ended the zero-sum nature of Zanzibari politics, ushering in a more consensus-based approach reminiscent of Julius Nyerere's concept of ujamaa. For Nyerere ujamaa was a specifically African alternative to the institutionalised oppositional politics of western liberal democracy. We conclude that Zanzibar's experiment in power-sharing demonstrates that a multi-party political system need not be structured according to a two-party oppositional model in order to achieve stable and functional democratic government.
- Subject
- power-sharing; Zanzibar; political conflicts; Africa
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1303309
- Identifier
- uon:20646
- Identifier
- ISSN:0305-7070
- Language
- eng
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