ARPS Media - Africa is not in a democratic crisis – because democracy does not exist there

The continent’s struggle is not about broken institutions but a failed model of ‘auto-colonisation’ where elites treat citizens as subjects.

To explain the current dynamics unfolding across the continent as a “crisis of democracy” is a category error.

Quite simply, substantive democracy does not exist in Africa.

With the exceptions of South Africa, Botswana, the Seychelles, and Cabo Verde – and to a lesser extent Mauritius, Senegal, Ghana and Nigeria – precious few regimes on the continent exhibit even the basic features of a state governed by the rule of law.

What is in crisis are the institutional arrangements inherited from the colonial era which, in the 1990s, underwent a mere cosmetic facelift.

The contemporary African crisis has nothing to do with democracy in its substantive form

Following the waves of protest that led to national conferences and constitutional revisions, many states appeared to turn their backs on military rule and one-party systems, seemingly converting to the dogmas of the market economy.

Yet they took great care to avoid adhering to the fundamental principles of the rule of law. In place of substantive democracy, they settled for an “administrative multi-partyism”, whose sole function was to drape a new mask over the old trappings of the one-party state.

The poison of self-hatred

In many communist-led countries, the one-party system was the ultimate political form of totalitarianism, used by elites to regiment society.

In Africa, however, the immediate source of both military and one-party regimes is found in colonialism.

A profound driver of colonial power was the self-hatred it systematically instilled in the indigenous population.

The granting of independence did not neutralise this poison. On the contrary, African ruling classes quickly seized upon this dark resource to pursue, for their own benefit, the process of “auto-colonisation” first inaugurated via the system of local chieftaincies during foreign occupation.

It is this process that continues today. Administrative multi-partyism, as a derivative of the one-party state, does not break with the logic of self-hatred necessary for auto-colonisation.

The contemporary African crisis has nothing to do with democracy in its substantive form. What has broken down is the paradigm of auto-colonisation itself.

What is no longer tolerable is that rulers continue to administer their citizens as if they were colonial subjects, and their countries as if they were occupied territories.

Three historic crises

This form of government, practised for over a century, has proved incapable of addressing the three great historic crises stalling the continent’s development: the crisis of wealth production, the crisis of redistribution, and the crisis of citizen representation.

African states have failed to create the conditions for wealth production necessary to meet the vital needs of their people.

What little wealth does circulate is hoarded by a shrinking class of predators whose interests are diametrically opposed to those of the masses they command.

Meanwhile, the crisis of representation is evidenced by the widening chasm separating the social body, the electorate and the political class.

The administrative multi-party model has only exacerbated these issues. It relies on the extraction of natural capital, an economy built on the destruction of the environment and habitats. This increasingly resembles a “war economy”, where the decisive struggle is over the means of predation rather than production.

Everywhere, this model demands heightened levels of violence to ensure profit.

In the tradition of colonial command, the goal of most regimes is to perpetuate a society of subjects rather than a community of citizens. This is why they strive to prevent the emergence of strong civil societies or independent authorities.

They wish to exercise power without accountability. Politics has become a zero-sum game: those who lose, lose everything, facing prison or exile; those who win, gain total access to the sources of predation.

A dark period for humanity

We are entering a dark period in human history. Across the globe, including in the West, we are witnessing the retreat and hollowing out of democracy, the emasculation of multilateral institutions, and the destruction of international solidarity.

This is an era where force and power are reduced to their simplest expression: the capacity to seize.

In Africa, this “spirit of the times” risks a formidable ransacking of natural wealth and the destruction of human life, as seen today in Sudan, eastern DRC, and the Sahel.

This is all the more reason to support civil societies and the rising competence of those inventing new ways of living together.

It is essential to create new social coalitions involving women, youth, intellectuals and activists. This is the great battle of ideas currently under way in Africa: it pits “neo-sovereignists” who believe in the power of brute force, against social coalitions aspiring to substantive democracy, betting not on brutality but on the collective intelligence of Africans.