How accountable and transparent is the African democracy? Reviewing political party financing and regulations

Abstract

Democracy is identified as one of the best forms of government worldwide because of its aspirations and a promising tendency to foster accountability and transparency in all its ramifications. This includes the channel of selecting leaders, the governance process, and financial spending. One of the major concerns for democratic governance is how to tame the ugly trend of excessive spending during the campaign process. It is well known that politicians are in their nature selfish and can employ all strategies of winning an election, including violation of maximum spending limits as stipulated by law. This study puts the African democracy into a rigorous test of accountability and transparency by examining the regulations and provisions on political party financing and especially by analysing the extent of the strengths and weaknesses of the law and compliance in terms of adequacy or otherwise. The study adopted a descriptive qualitative method of political inquiry where documented sources of data were consulted. The method used for data analysis is content analysis with an emphasis on thematic analytical interpretations. The study discovered that most African countries lack a unified and comprehensive law on party financing, and where it exists as anticipated, failure of enforcement and sanction renders the laws inactive. Besides, there is no effort by the African states towards taming the menace of excessive campaign spending and the use of money in politics. The most annoying aspect is that most of the money for campaign expenditure in African states are sourced from the state treasury, which resulted in bribery, corruption, looting, and misgovernance. The study recommends, among others, that there should be a prompt action need to adopt a unique framework for taming the excess of campaign spending and the use of state treasury for personal political purposes even though the study realises that it is practically impossible to adopt the same rules for financing as each country has its own unique laws of democracy.