Africa’s democratic practices not helping region’s progress – US don
A United States-based Nigerian scholar and Professor of Political Science, Cyril Obi, has stressed that the current Western democracy practised by the majority of African nations has not helped the progress of the region.
Obi said the current democratic practices in the region are becoming more autocratic such that it has rendered the electorate disempowered.
Delivering an inaugural lecture titled, “Caught between de-democratisation and re-democratisation: Grappling with Africa’s complex conjunctures through the lens of political dialectics,” at the University of the Free State, South Africa, Obi, the Programme Director of the African Peacebuilding Network of the Social Science Research Council, New York, lamented that despite the adoption of democracy by African nations, recent coups in some countries have shown a decline in the acceptability of the system of government.
Obi said, “Democratic trends are becoming more autocratic, open to contestation and interrogation as a post-COVID-19 pandemic world is faced by radical forces of the left and right or those opposed to neoliberalism and idealised configurations of globalised market rule and deregulation, and seek for nationalist, populist, or socially rooted alternatives.
“However, we must not lose sight of those subtle but potent attacks by autocratic tendencies that emanate from cynical manipulation of constitutions, overbearing technocrats wedded to powerful wealthy elites, alienated, divided, and disempowered electorates, and the growing socio-economic crisis.
“This suggests that democracy is not only being contested from within, but is increasingly drowning in the face of growing threats to its norms, values, and principles in the context of unprecedented levels of socio-economic inequalities, the erosion of basic freedoms and rights, and confrontation by advancing populist, nationalist, elitist, and in some cases, oligarchic interests.”
Citing a recent study, the renowned Professor of Political Science noted that there has been a decline in the acceptability of Western democracy among Africans.
He attributed the worsening democratic practices in the African region to widespread corruption, political manipulation, state capturing and the use of courts to manipulate election results.
He continued, “The manipulation of multi-party elections is a central factor in the trend towards de-democratisation. We could cite a couple of examples to see how this has fed into what I call pseudo-democratic governments. You can draw on perspectives from Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, Burkina Faso, Mali, Sudan, and Zimbabwe, among others.
“But there is an interesting trend in a new book that has been released by a Nigerian international human rights scholar, Prof Chidi Odinkalu, who talks about the judicialisation of elections, and he defines this as a situation whereby courts are increasingly being instrumentalised in a manner that uses the appearance of norm abiding processes to engineer authoritarian conditions into being.”
He continued that Africa must adopt a paradigm shift from the principles of Western democracy and focus on terms that align with the yearnings of its youths.
“The issue of reversing the current trend towards the democratisation in Africa calls for a paradigm shift based on a deep knowledge of the changing social dynamics and fostering a political dialectic that will contribute to re-empowering African citizens to re-democratise the continent on terms that will structurally transform political structures and norms that prioritise freedom, equality, and peace.
“Africa’s future lies in the hands of its youth and the growing impetus for re-democratisation and a generational power shift. Re-democratisation will require a critical understanding of the emerging forces of change, drawing on research, a careful rereading of alternate politics, and moving away from an automotive paradigm of choiceless democracy that has been fast outpaced by social struggles, innovative technologies, regional, and global transformation.
“There is a sense in which it can be argued that this is not the first time Africa has been re-democratising. After all, the third wave of democracy caused by the collapse of one-party states and ministry governments and their replacement by elected multi-party states in the 1990s could be considered re-democratisation.”
Obi stressed that the agitation for redefining democracy should not be seen as a pan-Africanism idea “but an attempt to organically grow a fit-for-purpose African democracy that can engage and embrace global partnerships that respect the validity of the contribution of African knowledge systems, civilisations, and institutions to the democratic ideal globally.”
He challenged African scholars to go beyond transforming knowledge to communicating and implementing such knowledge for the betterment of the African region.
Obi, who was a former Senior Research Fellow at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs, concluded that “Africa will have to struggle to break the cycle of the repeated birthing and dying of caricature liberal democratic experiments on the continent. The break will free the continent to embrace a paradigmatic democratic revolution sprung from the rich earth of Africa’s struggles, visions, and imaginations.”
