Power-Sharing in Zanzibar: From Zero-Sum Politics to Democratic Consensus?

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.