Rethinking Democracy in Africa
Like men in a stupor, African leaders are staggering through the labyrinthine paths of democracy, oscillating between hope and despair, chasing the promises of democracy that are now at best, a will-o-the-wisp. To imagine where we are now is to forget where we have come from. Talking about democracy in Africa right now is fatuous, akin to a man laying a foundation and inviting the village to come and admire his beautiful house. Africans feel thoroughly distraught and wonder which gods they have offended. The elite stare sheepishly at how the dreams of yesterday have turned into nightmares. They sneer at their foibles and complicity yet, while deriding their conditions and engaged in self-flagellation, they expect some kind of a deus ex machina. Like a child who has blotted his copy book, the Nigerian elite search for alibis and engage in weaving conspiracy theories and sing lachrymal tunes as to how the texture of democracy is foreign to African culture. We continue to side step the difficult but inevitable questions, namely, why is democracy not delivering for Africa?
Could we truly say that after independence we were on the democratic path while building a country on the rump of feudal states foisted on us by a hurriedly departing colonial state when both systems along with the military were antithesis of democracy? Human history is about human beings attempting over time to work out systems that would permit them to live together in peace and harmony as much as possible and for as long as possible. Some of these systems have been very simple, others less so. Yet, in all of this, each group tried to work out its own system of government, based on its own cultural, geographical, social and historical realities, and borrowing what it found useful in the experiments of other groups.
The Nigerian political elite has never really seriously committed itself to understanding the intricate dynamic fabric of our different, competing and even conflicting political and socio-cultural world views. We have had assumptions about the models of liberal democracy, rule of law and other prescriptions of what constitutes democratic culture. Before and after independence, we have had series of Constitutional reviews, constantly searching for workable models to take our people out of the state of nature where life has remained, nasty, brutish and short.
Nigeria, nay, Africa, was victim to some of the most barbaric exploitation by Arab invaders and European slave traders. These inhuman experiences threw Africans into a furnace and left behind our perpetual fault lines of violence that have rendered Africa a continent permanently on the burner of violence. Our identity violence continues to mount, wars over arbitrary boundaries persist. Ironically, the most richly endowed countries and communities today remain the most combustible environments, riddled with violence, poverty and squalor.
Against this backdrop, Africans continue to wonder, why has democracy delivered so little to us? The former colonial masters sit smugly on iron horses of racial arrogance and wonder why Africans have been unable to fix their problem after independence. Our local elite have memorized some of these lyrics and engage in self-abnegation, often believing that indeed, something must be wrong with us as a people. This ahistorical view of the world is perhaps our undoing. Africa’s unwillingness to take a historical view of where we have come from, to interrogate the assumptions of the models we have adopted have led to a level of cynicism and self-defeatism. To be sure, our purpose in this piece is to argue that there is need to rethink our assumptions about Democracy and its redeeming futures. The idea is not to negate the fine principles of Democracy, but to ask that we become more modest in our expectations of the deliverables of democracy as a system of governance.
Although we seem to have been sold to the idea that democracy is desirable for Africa, we want to interrogate this position and argue that democracy is riddled with contradictions and distortions. We will argue that the assumptions that it is the weapon of choice for delivering on good governance is an illusion. In our view, words hardly correspond exactly to the concepts which they are meant to express. Secondly, concepts and the terms that express them have different histories, and it often happens that with the passage of time a term comes to be applied to a concept with which it originally had nothing to do. We Africans have always tended to take democracy and its claims as a given, a kind of sacred text with unquestionable cannons. In doing this, we fall into the temptation of ignoring the historical, cultural phenomena that have signposted democracy through the centuries.
Modern Western democracy has various sources some of which go back to the ancient times. Most prominent among these were the classical Greek city-states (especially Athens) and the republican tradition of Rome. Equally