Wednesday, January 26, 2022

Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Are coups back?

hi moses
thanks for your long, considered response.
i am tempted to try to respond point by point, but the idea defeats me, and in the end feel i am more in the position of the amateur confronting the expert. certainly it is not my field of expertise, except that we all participate in a public field where non-expertise opinions are often welcome.

you want to challenge established ideas, and i agree with that as a principle.
but the established ideas you take on are, at time, imputed to groups (you call these groups Africans or Westerners), and i don't agree with that portrayal of people as a single entity.

when i look at most countries in the world today, i believe the populations are divided into two major groups, at least, with minor offshoots. i don't know why that is the case. but let me try it:
--Often it is simply a party in power opposed by those out of power. some might want to see this opposition in identity terms. for instance, when i grew up it was white anglo-saxon protestants who represented the dominant ruling group, and their opposite numbers included sort of "everybody else." that started to change, with presidents, with the catholic kennedy.

 anyway, the real major opposing groups in the united states, when not put into racial and ethnic terms, is left/right, or liberal/conservative. you will find jews split into liberal/conservative; also black people or hispanic are split in that fashion; etc.
--if you go to europe the same split occurs. in s africa there are similar splits, with the anc holding forth for one idea of progressive politics, and coalitions of others opposed.
--you continually refer to the ideal of a western liberal democracy as representing one pole, and another as presumably autocracy, although you develop a series of models based on 4 criteria that offer different possibilities. here are the four criteria for governance: accountability, representation, legitimacy, and participation--
you call them "the four cardinal principles of democracy" and that they can be accomplished without necessarily holding destructive elections.
"If some African countries want to pursue these four tenets of democracy through periodic elections--with or without parties--then let them do that. If some want to have selections or gradations of selection processes, let them have that as their own iteration of democracy as well."
--but the word that i would object to in this line of reasoning is not simply the binary democracy/autocracy, but also capitalist/non-capitalist.
you use "liberal" democracy as holding to a model of elections as the essential western element and flaw. and you rightly point out how often it is in relatively failed states or highly imperfect ones, where the people are discontented or miserable, that this ideal of democracy fails.
--but for me we live in an order in which the role of capital, the controls of capitalism, the workings of global capitalism, work against the interests of the majority of people, and in favor of the interest of the owners of capital, the shareholders, the money investors, the profit makers and profiteers. it is global neoliberal capitalism that holds us in thrall, not liberal democracy. and the "liberal" side is actually neoliberal capitalism.

you posit westerners as a broad category who espouse a political order that has become naturalized for them. all true. but you exclude the radical divisions of all western states that could be seen much more clearly along economic lines, as republicans vs democrats in the u.s. echo pro-capitalist sentiments vs pro-public sentiments. i am not expressing that clearly, because it isn't really socialism, but we could use the neologism of socialism as representing social democracy and set that against the conventional liberal democracy you evoke--what i would call dominant capitalism.

similar processes are true in africa, where the group "africans" you cite as wanting this or that are described unproblematically as a unified entity.
not so.
i don't want to go on, for fear of being too long. but simply put, i believe the large proportion of african people who sought freedom after colonialism wanted not only the foreign boot off their neck, not only their own people in charge, but also a better life. when the new states turned to dictatorships, the "suns of independence" turned into repressive, disappointing regimes for many. what was the disappointment in? the failures of rule that generated fear and oppression, not freedom. the struggle for a good life always mattered; no one was ever happy with a regime, under democracy or not, that could not put food on the table. but a sense that your four ideals were being observed, accountability, representation, legitimacy, and participation, never disappeared for long. (i lived in cameroon for 2 years in the 70s, and people were really afraid to hold forth publicly on any political view)

if you want to call that democracy, as an ideal, that's fine. if you want to say, let the people determine how to achieve these ideals, no one would complain. but unless you describe mechanisms that people can debate, both sides free to speak, it won't be a real discussion.
as for my own personal views of the ideal, i would begin with socialist values that must serve the needs of the people, and a non-autocratic  system permitting the 4 ideals you cite for political processes.
i don't believe that an autocracy will accomplish any of those 4 things in the long run, even if it can better accomplish the goals of food on the table in the short run. this was the real dilemma for gramsci when he asked why the proletariat voted for mussolini, turning away from the communist party. in the end, they hung him upside-down till he died, and rebuilt their lives along socialist democratic lines....(for a while)
as for elections--that could be the subject for another set of exchanges. i certainly don't believe in elections for their own sake: often systems are warped to avoid permitting people to participate meaningfully)
thanks for the discussion.
ken


kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

harrow@msu.edu


From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovdepoju@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, January 26, 2022 6:32 AM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Are coups back?
 
Frightening:

"Not so for poor countries whose poor citizens are impatient and want things to work, decisions to be taken quickly, and governments to govern with alacrity and decisiveness.

 In many cases, liberal democracy constrains these possibilities, and Africans look nostalgically to the days of military autocratic rule when, whatever other problems existed, there was no political impasse or gridlock and when decisions, good or bad, were quickly taken."

Moses Ochonu

On Wed, Jan 26, 2022, 12:18 Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:

Moses and Ken:

The implosion of the Sahel is long in the making; so no surprise. It is like expressing a surprise were Biya to be overthrown today. It is long overdue.

I cannot lay my hands on the document, but I was part of the conversation in Egypt that concluded that we cannot define democracy to exclude putting food on people's table. This was well circulated.

Any government that cannot deliver security, including food security, ensure poverty eradication, put the energy and skills of young men and women to productive use, is a failure, irrespective of what you call it.

TF

 

From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com>
Date: Wednesday, January 26, 2022 at 5:04 AM
To: USAAfricaDialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Are coups back?

Ken

 

I apologize if I came across as angry. I didn't mean to. I was just expressing a strong opinion in disagreement with your point. 

 

I would caution against pushing the Afrobarometer survey findings. As you know, the result of any poll or survey depends on how the question is framed, and indeed when I looked beyond the numbers to the question posed, matters became clearer. Social scientists say you can make quantitative data say what you want it to say. Some people call it lying with data. 

 

In the case of this survey, is it not predictable and obvious that in 2021/22 if you ask people generically on any continent if they prefer democracy to autocracy they would say they prefer democracy? Support for democracy, as a generic construct, would of course come out ahead of autocracy. But that is a false dichotomy, a deceptive framing, a methodological sleight of hand. 

 

For one, it is a predictable testament to the triumph and normativation of the Western paradigm of liberal democratic supremacy, which is itself a function of the West's political-economic dominance, marked by the globalization of the ideology of political and economic liberalization. 

 

Secondly, when you ask about specific things, instead of "democracy" as a generic lump sum, you will get a completely different result. For instance, if you asked Africans the hypothetical question of whether they prefer a dysfunctional, corruption-nurturing, and impoverishing democracy to a stable, peaceful, and perhaps even mildly developmental autocracy, you'd be surprised by the results. Do you believe that if asked if they prefer the current "democratic" chaos or a return to Ghadaffi's autocratic but stable rule, they would prefer the former?

 

This is 2022. We live in a post-cold war world of Western liberal democratic dominance, and after almost thirty years and billions of dollars spent on global pro-democracy propaganda and foreign policies that helped create a political world in which democracy seems both the norm and inevitable. Even at that, with all these factors, and even with the prejudicial framing of the question, the percentage of support for democracy, generically, in Africa is a rather thin majority, which is significantly down from its peak in the 2000s. Clearly, there is a growing disillusionment with liberal democracy and its idea of voting and elections, a phenomenon further illustrated by widespread continental voter apathy (with only 29 percent voter participation in some elections).

 

And it is not simply that "democracy" has failed to deliver an improved life, although of course that is a major factor. In many cases, liberal democracy, which is messy and expensive, has drained the resources of these states--in both licit and illicit ways. It has also resulted in costly and dangerous political gridlocks that have threatened the sovereignty of several nations. And then, of course, under the guise of democracy, autocrats have used the very rules of that democracy (the idea of elections as the conferrer of legitimacy) to perpetuate themselves, often with the complicity of foreign Western actors, in power and take away the ability of citizens to kick out unpopular leaders.

 

Western countries, with their decentralized structures, political and legal institutions, and robust economies can bear and weather the costs and constraints of the dysfunctions and messiness of liberal democracy. Not so for poor countries whose poor citizens are impatient and want things to work, decisions to be taken quickly, and governments to govern with alacrity and decisiveness. In many cases, liberal democracy constrains these possibilities, and Africans look nostalgically to the days of military autocratic rule when, whatever other problems existed, there was no political impasse or gridlock and when decisions, good or bad, were quickly taken.

 

I would not cite the ECOWAS condemnation of these coups. They don't tell us anything other than 1) the ECOWAS leaders are anti-coup because obviously they don't want to to toppled and want to discourage their own army from thinking of staging a coup; and 2) they want to please Western donors and remain on the right  side of the so-called "international community" and its Western-influenced consensus on "democracy." As we have seen from the celebrations that followed the coups, the decision of ECOWAS and the anti-coup disposition of African leaders are in direct conflict with the reactions of the citizens of the countries experiencing coups.

 

Another point: It's true as you said that Africans fought for voting rights in the era of democratization (1990s/2000s), but the leaders of that movement were small groups of middle class professionals funded from and by the West. Regular Africans, many unlettered and rural, followed the lead of the urban pro-democracy elites and got swept up in the pro-democracy excitement and expectational frenzy of the time. 

 

Most importantly, as I have argued elsewhere, they were promised many alleged dividends of democracy, which got them excited, and which promised to make their lives significantly better than their lives were under military and one-party rule while giving them a voice and making the government more accountable. 

 

In other words, Africans were willing to give liberal democracy a chance, to try it out and test the hype. They were desperate for development, accountability, improved living, and dignity. They were desperate to exit poverty and enter prosperity. And those who sold liberal democracy promised that "democracy" would cure all these ills, that all the people had to do was come out and participate and vote. They did that, and have done so for almost thirty years, and they can see clearly that liberal democracy is not a catalyst of development, prosperity, stability, and accountability.

 

That, in a nutshell, is what you're presenting here uncritically and ahistorically as Africans fighting for the right to vote and for democracy. In their minds, more than the abstract elements of democracy, they were, as they had been promised, voting to make their lives better, a gambit that has not panned out in a continent in which time is a luxury because of the depth and scope of personal and national challenges and aspirations.

 

Thirty years later, Africans are souring on democracy for understandable reasons. They realize they have been duped, scammed. And they're changing their minds, as anyone in the same situation would do.

 

You see, Africans are not as rigidly ideological when it comes to politics and systems of government as you Westerners tend to be. Theirs is no abstract commitment to a system of government. If a particular form of government they supported and even fought for in the past, which was fraudulently imposed on them on false premises, fails to live up to the tangible and intangible promises attached to it, they're not afraid or too proud to walk away from it and to even embrace a system of government (military rule) they once rejected and fought against. Their view of political systems is that whatever system is adopted has to respond to their needs and be aligned to their aspirations and peculiar realities.

 

I think that this quality of pragmatism and non-ideological flexibility is something to be admired and praised, and from which Westerners and their doctrinaire and almost creedal allegiance to liberal democracy can learn. 

 

Deceived and manipulated or not, the fact is that Africans supported liberal democracy in the 1990s and early 2000s. Now they've seen how not only chaotic and dysfunctional it is but also how, in extreme cases, it can destroy the very fabric of the state and render it too weak to respond to challenges while ballooning corruption. They then say, no, this is not what we signed up for; this is not what we were told democracy would produce. We want stability and some peace and a government that can take quick, decisive measures. If that government is a military one that sweeps away the politicians and suspends the constitutions then so be it. That's strategic, pragmatic, and non-ideological thinking on their part.

 

Finally, I restate my strong disagreement that elections are necessary for democracy--democracy in the generic sense of the word. You can have democracy through selection, through inherited authority, or even, as is the case in Iran, a religiously sanctioned supreme authority that delegates or reserves authority. You can also have a democracy without multiple parties or without parties at all, let alone multiparty elections.

 

You can have accountability, representation, legitimacy, and participation--the four cardinal principles of democracy--without holding increasingly meaningless, expensive, destructive, and in some cases war-triggering elections. If some countries come to this conclusion, then let them devise and nurture their own kind of democracy along those lines. If some African countries want to pursue these four tenets of democracy through periodic elections--with or without parties--then let them do that. If some want to have selections or gradations of selection processes, let them have that as their own iteration of democracy as well.

 

To begin from a premise that periodic voting and elections are what makes a country democratic is again to valorize, reify, and even fetishize the Western liberal model we should be critiquing, and which is even failing in the West. Elections are, at best, elitist contraptions that give the illusion of popular legitimacy and at worst are expensive rituals for political elites to acquire and keep power at the expense of regular folk.

 

 

 

 

On Tue, Jan 25, 2022 at 5:50 PM Harrow, Kenneth <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:

see attached for chart of african poll on democracy, country by country

 

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

harrow@msu.edu


From: Harrow, Kenneth <harrow@msu.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, January 25, 2022 5:35 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Are coups back?

 

from the african studies review piece on democracy, the claims about popularity of democracy in africa are shown here:

i can't seem to get a copy of the chart. will try in a minute w screen shot. the summary is that democracy is strongly preferred, as stated below.

this is african studies review, 64:3, sept 2021:719.

like people around the world, wish to "assert their own agency" (Mwangi
2014:94).
Popular Attitudes toward Democracy
After years of living under unresponsive authoritarian governments that
failed to engage meaningfully with their citizens, African societies demon-
strate a strong desire to be able to choose their leaders. Nationally represen-
tative surveys carried out by the Afrobarometer group between 2016 and 2018
in thirty-five countries find that strong majorities prefer democracy to any
other form of government in every state surveyed except for the small
monarchy of eSwatini (Figure 1). It is important to note that the Afrobarom-
eter sample does not include some of the most authoritarian states such as
Rwanda and is therefore not fully representative. However, the survey does
cover a number of highly authoritarian countries including Gabon, Togo,
Figure 1. Support for democracy in Africa 2016–2018 (%) SOURCE:
Afrobarometer (2019)
Senegal
Nigeria
Niger
Namibia
Malawi
Botswana
African Studies Keyword: Democracy 719

 

 

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

harrow@msu.edu


From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Harrow, Kenneth <harrow@msu.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, January 25, 2022 3:42 PM
To: USAAfricaDialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Are coups back?

 

hi moses

my little piece on democracy got cut short when a friend showed up, so i had to send it incompleted.

i am sorry if i expressed myself poorly. i am really sorry to incur your anger as i treasure your opinion.

 

to begin... i have two thoughts here:

1.all people on earth want self-rule.

maybe that is true, maybe not. i am guessing that people don't want to be ruled over but want to rule themselves, and to exercise rule fairly. i doubt anyone likes a rich fat cat to decide everything for them, while they suffer in poverty. maybe some people think this is natural and inevitable, but if they thought the rich person's wealth were at their expense, they would probably revolt, at least in spirit.

2.all people want a life. they want to be able to live and have a decent life, free from conflict war suffering and want. free to live well enough. that matters more than the type of govt.

moses, i have heard you make that argument before, and i think it is true, but not enough. #2 by itself isn't enough if you feel you are being cheated in life by unjust people who exercise power over you. there was the "bourgeois revolution" in france, after all, in 1830.

 

the question is how your voice must be heard. my reference to the gathering under the tree was to an ideal of direct democracy, which can't accommodate the size of a national population, so it has to be representative of some kind. my reference to the states was simply to say, we in the states are far from having an equitable representative democracy, much farther from one-person one-vote that most countries, in fact have a better shot at.

 

you question whether point 1. is true, that most people want to be able to vote, for their vote to count as much as anyone else's. perhaps i think this is true and natural because i've lived with this as a natural concept, i.e., socialized to believe it. i don't think it would be different to think this in african states or elsewhere. the military coups are not expressions of people who are opposed to one-person one-vote, but against govts that are failing their needs, or that are lacking military support, and military oligarchs won't permit their wealth to be threatened by democratic states. The revolts in mali and burkina can be seen as disappointment in their govt, not an end to democratic forms of govt.

 

i do agree with your premise: "As you must have surmised by now, what I'm calling for is a self-critical and deconstructive reevaluation of the terms, concepts, buzzwords, and assumptions we take for granted as starting points and baselines for our conversation on democracy in Africa."

i like the openness to thinking you are calling for. but i don't agree that universal suffrage is somehow suspect by being associated with a european and not african social patterns or history; i don't agree that a people who fought for their freedom were not fighting for the right to vote.

 maybe they want to question that right now, but i am skeptical. we can say everything is on the table: there is nothing in american style democracy that i think other countries should necessarily imitate. i did not mean to say that at all. there are good things we have, and bad things, but no one can say we have an equitable democratic system. if i say  most people want some version of it, it is because i believe it goes along with wanting to be free to vote, to express their opinions, to support their political party. There is nothing intrinsically western in this desire.

 

but it has to go along with #2 as well, a life worth living.

 

the last point: western countries tie aid to human rights, unlike china or russia. is that a bad thing? i favor insuring human rights everywhere: no govt should have the right to torture its people, imprison journalists, etc. if aid is to be given, it seems right that the govt adhere to humanrights standards. if the govt giving the aid is itself an oppressive state, the state receiving the aid might have cause to grumble, but not cause to abuse its own people.

 

the problem is not tying aid to practices, it is the exercise of power that is really in question. should one state have the power to dictate to another? should one group of countries be able to do so? the coup in mali has been challenged by ecowas. many countries were invaded by regional forces of others, or called on troops of others, like mozambique calling on rwanda for soldiers, or somalia or sudan or car, all having foreign troops come in, in one guise on another. sometimes this seems like a foreign imposition, or worse, like russia's mercenary wagner group; sometimes it is much more positive, or might be, like uganda troops sent to the drc to stop the adf.

i don't want europe or the u.s. imposing their notions of governance on african states. but i also don't want any foreign govt to go propping up repressive regimes, just to do business, like china in s sudan, or anywhere where there is money to be made.

okay, this is what i might have said if i had finished the email. again sorry for a point that so angered you. but feel free to whack at any of these ideas, now...

 

ken

 

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

harrow@msu.edu


From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, January 25, 2022 2:34 PM
To: USAAfricaDialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Are coups back?

 

"we are "relatively" democratic.

every nation must be like that since they are too large to enable people to sit under a tree and give their opinion and then vote."

 

 

Ken,

 

Let me register my strong disagreement with the premise, logic, and sentiment of the quoted excerpt from your post. Most Africans do not care if the US is relatively or absolutely democratic or even if it is not democratic at all. That is the business of the US. The US should be free to develop and evolve its own type of representative government, governing technique, and architecture of state.

 

But it seems that the US is not willing to allow other countries to evolve their own systems of governance and democracy, and is bent on arrogantly dictating to them how to be democratic. Unfortunately it works because the US has the purse strings and the leverage to blackmail and pressure poor, dependent countries to uncritically adopt liberal democracy, neoliberal economic reforms, etc.

 

This global "democratic tyranny" has become such an axiomatic creed that even a distinguished Africanist scholar and usually self-critical  liberal like the great Kenneth Harrow does not have a problem and does not have the self-reflexivity to see the arrogant ideological certitude in a statement such as "every nation must be like that since they are too large to enable people to sit under a tree and give their opinion and then vote."

 

Who gets to decide for Africans and their states whether a political unit is too big or too small for the kind of democracy that may work for them and that aligns better with their culture, society, and socioeconomic station? 

 

How did you arrive at the false dichotomy that a critique of the calamitous failings of liberal democracy in Africa amounts to calling for a system of people sitting under a tree to give their opinion? And why do you presume, if not that you have been deeply socialized into the normative Western liberal mindset that the Western democratic tradition is the best, that voting is necessary for democracy to occur, and that people must vote in the sense of universal suffrage of one-man-one-vote in order to have the nomenclatural imprimatur of democracy? 

 

As you must have surmised by now, what I'm calling for is a self-critical and deconstructive reevaluation of the terms, concepts, buzzwords, and assumptions we take for granted as starting points and baselines for our conversation on democracy in Africa. Africa needs a democratic autonomy that is unencumbered by assumptions such as the one inherent in your statement that "every nation must be like that"--that is, must mimic America's "relative democracy," a proposition which completely sidesteps the foundational question of what it means to be "democratic" as though that question is already settled.

 

On Tue, Jan 25, 2022 at 12:59 PM 'Emeagwali, Gloria (History)' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:

The truth is that  the official advocates of democracy are often

hypocritical.  They went against a democratic  Mosaddegh 

government in Iran in 1953 in favor of feudalism;  a democratically

 elected government of Arbenz in Guatemala, 1954; Brazil in 1964; 

and more recently seemed to prefer the TPLF, by no means democratic, against a

democratically elected government in Ethiopia. It turns out that

democracy is often just a word.

 

 

Professor Gloria Emeagwali
History Department, Central Connecticut State University
www.africahistory.net

 

 


From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Harrow, Kenneth <harrow@msu.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, January 25, 2022 1:15 PM
To: USAAfricaDialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Are coups back?

 

Please be cautious: **External Email**

there is a new issue of the African Studies Review out (64:3).

in it they have an "African Studies Keyword" and the word is Democracy. It was written by Nic Cheesemand and Sishuwa Sishuwa.

maybe this would bear on your reading of liberal democracy, moses.

 

my impression is that africans have been fighting for democracy ever since colonialism came. but what is democracy? i think of it as the people being self-governing, regardless of the model. it could be parliamentary, direct, indirect, representative etc.

i am angry at the failures in the united states since my vote counts less than people in smaller states, a system set up by slaveowning states to enable them to country free northern states' greater population and urban centers.

we are "relatively" democratic.

every nation must be like that since they are too large to enable people to sit under a tree and give their opinion and then vote.

 

are autocracies better? i believe autocracies can function only by theboss paying off his army police bigmen supporters, at the expense of the people. it is not just.

gotta go

ken

 

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

harrow@msu.edu


From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, January 25, 2022 12:08 PM
To: USAAfricaDialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Are coups back?

 

Toyin Adepoju:

 

In 2010 or thereabouts, there was a coup in Niger and Nigeriens trooped out to celebrate the coup. That was a shock to the "democratization" brigade, but some of us were not surprised.

 

Then it happened in Mali more recently and people celebrated.

 

It then happened in Guinea and the coup was celebrated with a massive street rally, the coup plotters mobbed as heroes.

 

The situation in Burkina Faso is fluid, and I haven't seen audiovisual evidence of how the people reacted, but I would not be surprised if there were/are celebrations there too.

 

Which means, we should pose the difficult question of why people in these countries are celebrating coups, which they should be protesting in an era of "democratization" and "democratic" normativity. 

 

Could it be that the liberal democratic model uncritically adopted and implemented across Africa is dysfunctional and has failed to promote unity and security and to fulfill the cardinal promise the pro-democracy forces made in the era of democratization: that liberal democracy would produce economic development and accountability?

 

On Mon, Jan 24, 2022 at 9:20 PM Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovdepoju@gmail.com> wrote:

Is it Africans generally welcoming these coups or armed men taking power by force whatever people think?

 

Toyin

 

On Tue, Jan 25, 2022, 02:36 Moses Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com> wrote:

Are coups back? That may not be the right question. The right question may be, what's souring Africans on Western style democracy and making coups attractive and popular again? That question deserves a truthful answer, not an answer that uncritically reiterates the Washington Consensus and it's associated talking points and buzzwords about the imperative of "democratization."

Sent from my iPhone



On Jan 24, 2022, at 7:00 PM, Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:



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