In many African countries elections are not really contests between candidates and parties; they turn out, in effect, to be contests between all opposition parties/candidates on the one hand, and the governing party’s candidates and the state on the other. A report in The Economist on the 1999 Algerian elections made the same point when commenting on the funding of Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s presidential election campaign: “With plenty of money from somewhere he set up the flashiest campaign offices and the noisiest loudspeakers playing specially commissioned music from popular Algerians” (emphasis added). The report went on to imply that once the pouvoirs (the generals and senior politicians who run Algeria’s affairs) pick a candidate, as they had evidently picked Bouteflika, resources are not a problem (The Economist 17 April 1999:78). The state resources behind the state candidate evidently proved so overwhelming that all the other candidates pulled out of the race! In an account of their experience as monitors of Gabon’s December 1998 presidential election, Tordoff and Young remarked that: “The superior financial resources of the ruling party were readily visible; on the opposition side only Abbesale’s campaign showed evidence of much spending capacity” (Tordoff and Young 1999:261–276). Similarly, the Commonwealth Observer Group which monitored the 1991 Zambian elections drew attention to the unfair advantage UNIP had as the governing party, using state resources, including government vehicles, although even its superior resources did not save it from defeat that time. In Botswana, one of only a handful of African states that have always had multiparty elections, the disparity in resources between the governing party and the opposition parties has led to critical comments about the quality of its democracy (Fernandez 1994:112). In many African countries the opposition parties have been too weak and divided to succeed in extracting from the government even the most basic aid the state can give to political parties, namely, free and equal access to the government-owned and -controlled mass media. Such access remains one of the most persistent demands made by opposition parties. In Ghana the opposition parties had to go to court to obtain the free and equal access to the media that the constitution 27 guarantees. In Kenya it took the threat of a lawsuit and the personal intervention of the visiting Secretary- General of the Commonwealth to secure equal access for the opposition parties – 90 seconds per day “paid up” advertising on Kenya Broadcasting Corporation’s radio and television, and live coverage “where possible” of their rallies. This great victory for fairness and democracy was won only six weeks before the December 1992 election. If governments resist demands for free and equal access to the media they ought not to control in the first place, it is not surprising that they resist even more vigorously any requests for greater equality in party financing. Even if the principle of state funding of parties is accepted, what exactly should the state support and at what stage of the political process and to what level? Public Funding of Political Parties in Africa Public funding (i.e. in the sense of legislated provisions) of political parties gladiating for power is a novel concept on the African continent. Thus, Africa lags behind other regions of the world in the proportion of countries that have public funding provisions (Öhman 1999; and Öhman in a study commissioned by IDEA). As of the beginning of 2002, on the basis of the available research, only 14 African states were known to fund political parties directly, with or without legislation. These were Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Malawi, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, the Seychelles, South Africa, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. Of these, only in four were the sums involved sizeable enough to make a difference to the operation of the opposition parties (South Africa, Morocco, Seychelles and, if the ruling party there had allowed it at the time, Zimbabwe). In South Africa, for instance, according to the amounts cited by Soggot in a study commissioned by IDEA, the five largest opposition parties would have received ZAR 43 million (Int’l $21 m.) as against ZAR 64 million (Int’l $31m.) for the ANC over the period 1998–2000. 16