"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."—Falola
I rest my case. That is the rational, self-interested and pragmatic position of Africans, which causes them to celebrate coups against civilian "democratic" governments and autocratic military and civilian governments, and at other times to enthusiastically fight for and participate in multiparty electoral democratic contests. On the surface the celebration of coups may appear as ignorance of democracy, as Toyin Adepoju claims, or even as a form of ignorant nihilism, but I would argue that it is a radical, pragmatic, existential political flexibility, which is at variance with the abstract, ideological, political commitments of Westerners, which leads them to a mindset of democracy for democracy's sake. Africans have no patience for democracy as its own reward, and they say rightly that if democracy (or any other type of governing technology for that matter) cannot give us peace, stability, food, and other basic needs, we have no use for it and must embrace something new no matter repugnant that something new is to the Western world, the international community, and ECOWAS/AU leaders. The West can and should learn from this pragmatic African political disposition and temper its ideological fanaticism and arrogant certitudes regarding democracy. But then again, as Gloria stated earlier, the West is not even as democratic as it claims and uses it merely as a rhetoric to accomplish its foreign policy goals in poor countries.
On Jan 26, 2022, at 5:18 AM, Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:
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.
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