Democracy in Africa?

Abstract

M. BRATTON and NICOLAS VAN DE VALLE, Democratic Experiments in Africa. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997. A. OLUKOSHI (ed.), The Politics of Opposition in Contemporary Africa. Uppsala, Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1998. J. DANIEL, ROGER SOUTHALL and MORRIS SZEFTEL (eds.), Voting for Democracy: watershed elections in contemporary anglophone Africa. Aldershot, Ashgate, 1999. M. COWEN and L. LAAKSO (eds.), Multi-party Elections in Africa. Oxford, James Currey, 2002. M. G. SCHATZBERG, Political Legitimacy in Middle AfriCa. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 2001. `Democracy' was a new beginning, and shari'a is what people democratically want as their new beginning. Madeleine Albright, when visiting Kano recently, was taken aback when thanked (albeit ironically) for introducing shari'a: `but it's due to democracy,' she was told. [Last, 2000] Not so long ago people of broadly liberal persuasion were writing about democracy in Africa in tones of wonder: it was a second `liberation', a second `independence'--indeed, if not a Second Coming then at least a `virtual miracle'. More, democracy seemed to be the magic key to further treasures: accountability, transparency, equality, social justice, even conflict resolution and `development'. This is curious, as people of liberal persuasion elsewhere (in the past and now) have been reserved, even scathing, about democracy. Schumpeter's gloomy ruminations (1954) are of course well known, but the ritual reference to these points hardly captures the extent of the deeply sceptical nature of liberal reflections on democracy. WHAT'S THE PROBLEM WITH DEMOCRACY? These misgivings tend to turn on two sets of issues: what democracy is supposed to do and its claims to moral superiority. Simplifying somewhat, the first issue comes down to what exactly democracy aggregates. There is a bewilderingly large list of candidates (as it were), including wants, preferences, interests or wills, and, to make things worse, attached to them all are complex theoretical issues and debates. Since it is these that tend to shape stances on the more familiar issues of representation, accountability, legitimacy, trust and the like it is clear that, to say the least, there is a formidable clutch of problems. Not the least is the possibility that democracy does not actually aggregate anything at all. For analytical purposes these issues can be separated (though in reality, of course, the two constantly interweave) from the second set of explicitly normative issues concerning the moral claims of democratic institutions and values. Here again there is the possibility that democracy may not embody persuasive normative superiority. (1) Both sets of issues are additionally posed on what may be called extrinsic terrains. On the more sociological side, what effects is democracy likely to have, and on the normative side whether its presumed superiority concerns its effects rather than its intrinsic virtues. One may note finally that, in the current global situation, these sets of issues make another appearance as regards the feasibility of and justification for imposing such political orders on others who may be judged to be without them. Adopting a now familiar usage in political theory, one might suggest two kinds of responses to these problems. `Thin' theories may be said to comprise those positions which see democracy, and particularly elections, as essentially aggregating individual choices of policies (invariably presumed to be an effect of given `interests' or `preferences') and, realistically, as these are packaged by competing political parties, themselves largely identified with particular leaders. Such minimalist accounts of democracy cohere well with the minimalist understanding of the liberal state itself in which the state is purely an enabler, little more than a neutral mechanism providing the security to allow free, equal individuals to pursue their life projects, unhindered by others. …