Victor Okafor: Democracy is the key to Africa's social transformation
I have read Professor Toyin Falola's historically grounded and brilliant piece on "The West and the Hypocrisy of Democracy." I do agree with his thesis that overall, the West has superimposed its avarice for control and exploitation of African natural resources over its avowed interest in seeing democracy thrive in Africa. In its bid to safeguard what it defines as its strategic interests, a code term for Africa's natural resources, the West has generally had a pattern of propping up counter-revolutionary strivings and their leaders, while at the same time helping to crush pro-people, genuinely African-centered movements, and leaders. That is to say that in its dealings with African governments and peoples, the West has had a tendency to place a premium upon its own perceived interests instead of the social developmental interests of pertinent African peoples and their governments. We saw the same pattern of Western alignment with reactionary forces, as opposed to people-oriented, Africa-centered forces, during the independence movements on the continent, be they armed nationalist movements that occurred in the settler-colonies or the generally non-violent independence movements that swept through the non-settler colonies. As Professor Falola aptly pointed out, the erstwhile Cold War between the West and the East tended to serve as the fulcrum for and prism by which either side largely determined which side to support in a typical African conflict or electoral process. Somehow, the West often tended to take the wrong side of history, to align with African political currents that were not necessarily in alignment with the aspirations of the people for meaningful social transformation.
Though it propagates the popular governmental system of democracy, the West (which Professor Falola defines particularly, but not exclusively as the United States, Britain and France) has, when and where it pleases it, has sacrificed that goal of democratic governance on the altar of economic exploitation expediency; and African people, overall, have suffered, rather than benefited, from trying to adhere to the Western democratic clarion call. In short, Professor Falola thoroughly and credibly established his thesis of the West's hypocritical approach to democratic enactments on the African continent.
In short, the West, generally-speaking, has not allowed Africa to chart its own destiny and freely pursue a path towards true inner-driven social transformation. Economic structural adjustment has been applied by the West to compel African governments to pursue a path of denationalization, deindustrialization and deflation that is antithetical to human social development. The annual statistical data of the United Nations Human Development Index (HDI) attests to that fact. Professor Falola provided rich historical examples of all these contestations. A message that emerges from Falola's essay is that the West generally does not want to see a self-reliant, African democratic synergy. Instead, the West wants a dependent, manipulatable, and exploitation-prone continent, not a germination of self-determination for self-development. Thus, in African political history, we have seen instances of military coups that were mounted against truly Africa-centered, people-oriented leaders who were perceived by the West not to be in bed with the Western paradigm for how Africa ought to lead its life. Thus, for the West, determination of a good (or moderate, as they say) African leader is based on a spurious judgement about who is pro-Western or who is anti-Western, not necessarily who is pro-African. One wonders how this Western calculus would designate an African national leader or aspirant leader who seeks to establish African control over African resources. Famous examples of people-oriented, Africa-centered leaders who were dislodged through reactionary military coups include Prime Minister Patrice Émery Lumumba of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso. When a Nigerian military Head of State, Murtala Muhammed, who was transforming the Nigerian sociopolitical landscape during his short spell in office, was assassinated by an unsuccessful military counter-coup of 1976, the fact that the coup failed despite Muhammed's killing, the fact that his deputy was able to take over and continue the military administration's national agenda, and the fact that the coup leaders were subsequently tried and executed, effectively eclipsed any impulse for probing whether the counter-coup itself had been externally-instigated.
Where I tend to defer
That said, I would like to state that I believe that democracy—that is, representative governance—is an imperative form of governance for Africa and, in fact, for all human communities on earth. I am of the position that it is human for a people to want to have a say-so in how they are governed. In that respect, the ballot box, as we know it, is merely one of possible ways by which a people can actualize what I see as an innate quest to participate in decision-making about their lives and life prospects or have that participation delegated as we see in a representative form of governance. In other words, democracy, which I define as fundamentally a form of governance that reflects the will of the people, is not necessarily an invention of any particular segment of the global human community. I compare this to "thought," or the act of thinking, which is conscious of itself, as another phenomenon which is innate in the homo-sapiens species and thus not the invention of any segment of the global community of human beings though we know that a particular branch of the human family would like to fancy itself as its inventor.
Second, we need to be clear that where democracy has failed in Africa, it is not necessarily because democracy in and itself is not a workable form of governance for Africa. Professor Falola himself cited several examples of calculated Western efforts to squelch genuine democratic fertilization on the continent through its support for counter-revolutionary, reactionary forces who did/do not necessarily represent the real choices of the people but whom the West perceives as being amenable to their economic exploitation designs—euphemistically called "strategic interests." I believe that democracy is the key to Africa's social transformation. Again, by democracy, I mean a system of governance established by the people, based on the people's socioeconomic interests, and driven by the will of the people as expressed through the ballot box as an example. Where a government of the day is based upon the true will of the people and also removable through the same will of the people, that government inevitably must be accountable, and has a reason to perform knowing that if it fails to perform, the electorate will get rid of it. A key problem with Africa's experimentations with democratic rule, with reasonable exceptions such as Botswana, South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, Ghana, Namibia, Algeria is that a firm administrative and technological root and a firm political culture have not yet been manifestly established for capturing the true will of the people. We have seen subversions of voting procedures, voting instruments, voter intimidations, in given African polities, such as the notorious example of Nigeria's 2023 presidential and governorships elections.
Third, I do not wholly agree that incumbent longevity, as we have seen in progressive societies like Rwanda and Uganda, does necessarily negate democracy or constitute examples of the opposite of democracy. In fact, longevity of rulership is a mark of African traditional systems of governance. My position is that a borrowed practice of changing national governments or conducting fresh national elections every four years is not conducive to the teething developmental needs of a developing country. Some of us who champion this four-year electoral cycle as an approach to democratic governance and then quickly cast aspersions on long-serving African leaders (whether or not they are leading effectively) appear to forget that their thinking appears to be informed by the Western experience (which itself is not necessarily homogenous) and not necessarily informed by considerations about the stupendous costs of running national elections every four years and how affordable that might or might not be for a developing country that is saddled with expensive infrastructural development priorities. As I just indicated, the Western experience with the tenure of elective offices is not necessarily homogenous, and I cite the case of the United States to buttress my point. How many of us are aware that the US practice of limiting its presidency to two terms of a total of eight years dates back to 1951 when the 22nd Amendment to the US constitution took effect. And, that term limitation of the 22nd Amendment was not necessarily the result of a grassroots' thirst for a term limitation but a the outcome of an intra political class push from mainly the Republican party, which saw the constitutional presidential term limitation as a means of getting it back to the presidential office after a long spell of a Democratic party occupation of the White House due to successful re-elections of the incumbent; specifically, the constitutional amendment was the result of a Republican-led rebellion against the fact that incumbent Franklin D. Roosevelt (Democrat) had been re-elected as president for an unprecedented four terms. Notable is that in terms of the US evolution as an integrated national entity, at the time that the 22nd amendment took effect (1951), the US was no longer at the primary stage of national social development or national integration, yet needing to set in place elementary infrastructural fundamentals as most of African societies are at the present time. I am of the position in the case of Africa, as long as an incumbent national leader is leading effectively, attending effectively to the expectations of that office in terms of the socio-economic needs of the country, leading with a sense of justice and fairness for all, that leader deserves to seek as many terms of office as possible, subject to the consequences of a free and fair electoral process. There are times when some of us appear as if we want to call a dog a bad name to hang it by our citing bad apples to buttress what appears like our reflexive opposition to electoral term longevity for given African leaders. For sure, Cameroon's current president demonstrably makes political longevity look like a bad egg; but citing his bad example without citing the counter effective leadership records of the Museveni's or Kagema's of the African political landscape is not a balanced argument.
A need for Africa's mental Liberation
In sum, only Africa can liberate itself from the material and mental clutches of neocolonialism. How can we possibly get to the destination? At all levels of learning, we need decolonized, African-centered education that can generate a sufficient mass of people within each polity that are imbued with victorious consciousness, a spirit of "we can do it" consciousness, a self-reliant consciousness, an African pride consciousness, and a consciousness of an indigenous capacity to solve emergent problems (as opposed to a consciousness that solutions are only possible from an external entity). A mentally liberated Africa would fertilize and propel an enduring system of governance that could routinely represent the will of the people. Once the will of the people begins to inform Africa's electoral outcomes, democracy will be animated as the true engine of a people-centered social development that it is designed to be. And that is what I mean by my working hypothesis that democracy is the key to Africa's social transformation. The fact that subversions of the will of the people, either through corrupted segments of Africa's ruling classes or through Western machinations or both have characterized wobbly African democratic experiments should not lead us to conclude that democracy in and itself is not fit for Africa or has failed Africa.
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