THEORIZING DEMOCRACY AND DEMOCRATIZATION IN AFRICA: FAULT-LINES IN PRAXIS

Abstract

Democracy as widely practiced in Africa contemporarily, has posted sundry outcomes spanning from the absurd to the banal. It is a borrowed Western liberal ideal that has proven increasing hard-fit and a tough sell in most locations across Africa. The causal factors for this dysfunction here can be located at the nexus of the rather infertile grounds of cultural heterogeneities and inter-group incompatibilities on which it has been supplanted courtesy of Africa’s awry colonial heritage. As experienced in most state instances, in praxis it has yet produced the kinds of handsome dividends for the masses as recorded in the advanced countries.  Thus, whilst the elites have increasingly grown richer and have become all-too powerful in their various state instances, the masses have been grossly and callously impoverished over time. Despite its huge resource endowments, majority of African countries have been persistently ranked very high in the global poverty index perennially by international financial institutions. This attests to the degree of squalor Africans have been sentenced to due to bad governance initiatives and inept leadership in their various states. This paper interrogates fault-lines in the processes of democracy and democratization in selected locations across Africa. The paper anchors its analysis on the Jacksonian and Lijphart’s Consociational Democracy models. The paper concludes that, for democracy to grow well in Africa, there is a dire need to indigenize such an ideal with a view to bringing it in synch with Africa’s traditional specificities exemplified by administrative compactness and the ethos of communalism as ensconced in the notion of a ‘development democratic system’ for Africa.