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Time to leave behind Afro-demagoguery and mobilise for a new Africa that works

Raphael Adebayo
By Raphael Adebayo
11 Sep 2024
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Democracies in Africa are deeply flawed, at best. At worst, they suggest a profound misalignment between the dominant sociocultural particularisms on the African continent and the putative universalism of certain Western ideals, particularly liberal democracy.

On 5 August 2024, a multi-agency operation comprising more than 15 gun-wielding officers of Nigeria’s security agencies broke into a hotel Gestapo-style in the city of Port Harcourt, South-South Nigeria, to abduct a whistleblower and anti-corruption torchbearer, Isaac Bristol, otherwise known as Pidom. 

Throughout the week that followed he was tortured, deprived of food and placed in cuffs in solitary confinement. At the end of that week, he was bundled into a plane and transferred to Abuja, the country’s capital, where he is now being held under dehumanising conditions and denied access to legal representation, good food, sanitary products and his relatives. 

Pidom, as he is fondly called, joins a growing and disturbing list of a dozen arrested or abducted journalists, more than 2,100 arbitrarily detained peaceful #EndBadGovernance protesters, and 20 #EndSARS protesters who have inexplicably disappeared from Ikoyi Prison in Lagos under the regime of 82-year-old or 72-year-old Nigerian President, Bola Tinubu.

Authoritarian regime


Similarly, in Harare, Zimbabwe, the authoritarian regime of 82-year-old President Emmerson Mnangagwa forcibly removed human rights defenders Namatai Kwekweza and Robson Chere, alongside opposition councillor Samuel Gwenzi from an aeroplane and arbitrarily detained the three. 

The regime suspended their right to communicate with lawyers and relatives while subjecting them to continuous torture and unsanitary conditions with the backing of the judiciary. They join at least 70 other activists and democratic opposition members who have been arrested or abducted and arbitrarily detained, including a mother and a one-year-old infant, by the regime’s security agents.

Democracies in Africa are deeply flawed, at best. At worst, they suggest a profound misalignment between the dominant sociocultural particularisms on the African continent and the putative universalism of certain Western ideals, particularly liberal democracy, which surged in acceptance and practice following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 90s. The 87-year-old former president of Nigeria, Military Head of State, and admired African elder statesman, Olusegun Obasanjo, is one of the most recent proponents of this school of thought on democracy in Africa. 

Mockery


Both Zimbabwe and Nigeria claim to be democracies, but according to The Economist’s Democracy Index they are effectively a mockery of that liberal ideal as we know it. Whereas Zimbabwe is ranked an authoritarian regime, alongside 20 other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Nigeria is ranked a hybrid regime, alongside 14 other African countries where blatant disregard for the core principles of liberal democracy — constitutionalism, regular and reasonably contested elections, a vibrant civil society, the sacredness of human rights and press freedom, and so on — is the norm. Of the 44 sub-Saharan countries covered in the index, only six are classified as flawed democracies.

Obasanjo’s idea of Afro-democracy has been vehemently denounced as a “false promise”, but it is rather premature to do this as Africa is indeed a peculiar case in the adoption and practice of liberal democracy, even on the Democracy Index. It must be said, however, that whatever the failures of liberal democracy are in Africa today, African rulers like Obasanjo and Mnangagwa have, in fact, played a consequential role in that disaster. 

Mnangagwa found himself in the foremost seat of authority after 37 years of Mugabe’s dictatorship. But he has so far failed to deliver on the promise of liberal democracy and, worse, his party, the ruling Zanu-PF, wants him to remove constitutional term limits so he can rule in perpetuity. Mnangagwa has denied involvement in this scheme, just as Obasanjo and others before him did. 

Flagrant assaults


In the same way, Obasanjo was retrieved from his Abacha-imposed obscurity in the final years of Nigeria’s horrific experience of almost three decades of military dictatorship. Although he ushered Nigeria into its current “democratic” dispensation, Obasanjo also spearheaded relentless flagrant assaults on every consequential principle of liberal democracy in the early 2000s, from the “thuggification” and hijacking of local government and state government elections to the hounding of political opponents, impeachment of democratically elected state governors, looting of state funds, and manipulation of oversight institutions. 

Ultimately, his totalitarian appetite led to the wicked dissipation of more than $500-million in a bid to arrogate to himself whatever liberal democratic promise Nigeria had, surreptitiously marshalling interest-driven groups to champion constitutional amendment for a presidential tenure elongation agenda. When that agenda failed, he mindlessly rigged and instated his preferred candidate, Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, into office in an election that observers and the candidate himself would admit was anything but credible. Today, the inheritors of that legacy are perpetrating the most ruthless assault on liberal democracy ever witnessed in the country and the entire sub-Saharan region.

There is much to be said and understood about the conundrum that democracy in Africa today throws up in our faces. Nonetheless, the uncurbed propensity of African gerontocrats to abuse democracy and then descend into anti-Western demagoguery when it is most convenient is a poignant reminder that young Africans must abandon their preference for fiddling while the continent burns, and begin to mobilise for organised social action toward a new Africa that works. DM

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