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| Author(s): | Archie Mafeje |
| Organisation: | African Forum for Envisioning Africa |
Democratic Governance and New Democracy in Africa: Agenda for the Future
Preamble
Hardly ten years after independence Africa experienced a continuing and deepening crisis of democracy. This was signaled by a series of military coups in 1969 after visible signs of tension in the mid-sixties between civilian and military leaders in some African countries. The generals accused political leaders of corruption and economic mismanagement. They actually spoke on behalf of the people and promised to rid the system of such malpractices, and solemnly promised to return the affected countries to civilian rule as soon as their surgical operations were completed. There was no immediate reason to doubt the sincerity of the then untainted men in uniform. Existentially, neither they nor the public had had any prior knowledge of the evils of absolute power in the new African states. Very quickly the generals discovered that military coups were the easiest and the fastest route to state power, the only economic good left in Africa. Thus, all promises to turn over power to civilian rule at the earliest possible time evaporated into thin air and coups became a recurrent phenomenon. This made it impossible to distinguish between the corrupt civilian presidents for life and military dictators for as long as it lasts. In this context the belated cynical move by the OAU to deny coup-makers any recognition should be seen more as a ploy by the civilian wing of African dictatorships to out-flank their military rivals than as any concern for democratisation on the continent. This is notwithstanding the fact that military regimes, compared to civilian governments, are prone to use directly and uninhibitedly what they know best i.e. naked force. Nonetheless, from the point of view of democracy what is of greater relevance is the fact that all dictatorships rely on illegitimate power and coercive methods. Therefore, depoliticisation of the political process under presidents for life and militarisation of politics under military dictators in Africa are tantamount to the same thing from the point of view of those who seek genuine democracy.
This having been said, it is important to warn that analytically it is not enough to heap blame and opprobrium on acknowledged villains or culprits but to comprehend at the deepest level possible why these palpable aberrations have become endemic in this forsaken land. All kinds of false explanations have been offered to account for autocratic tendencies, corruption, inefficiency and mismanagement among African leaders. These range from predispositions of chiefly institutions in Africa in which power is supposed to be personalised and arbitrary to unlimited access by chiefs to public resources and to venality and lack of ethics among modern African leaders. Such prejudicial suppositions overlook the fact that traditionally Europe was a land of corrupt absolute monarchs and predatory and callous feudal lords. Yet, these institutions were superseded by liberal democracy in Europe under changed socio-economic conditions. In contrast, in Africa where plenty of egalitarian traditional societies and representative political institutions existed liberal democracy never took root. Attempts to adopt liberal democracy after independence succeeded only in producing one-party dictatorships under a veneer of European bureaucratic structures and procedures. Thus, the outcome was neither African nor European. This legacy has plagued virtually all African countries and accounts for a great deal of what went wrong in the post-independence period.
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