West Africa’s Democratic Evolution

A democratic consciousness informed by West Africans’ gloomy history is helping to nurture the region’s democracy. The fundamental theme is using democracy to address development challenges in a region with high unemployment, large number of restless ethnic groups, dangerously bulging youth, never-ending poverty, and certain cultural inhibitions that entangle progress...In the past 20 years or so, the intellectual climate of West Africa, encouraged by the international community and diasporan West Africans, is changing and the beginnings of deliberately thought-out reform movements for democracy is emerging. In the face of West Africa’s murky political history, the contending issues are whether West Africa should adopt Western democratic liberalism or democracy brewed from within West Africa’s history and cultural traditions. Western liberal democracy is cooked in Western cultural context with all its attendant limitations. While West Africa may borrow from the West, it has to be blended with the West African culture. In Nigerian political scientist Claude Ake’s Democracy and Development in Africa, he argued, “Even at its best, liberal democracy is inimical to the idea of the people having effective decision-making power. The essence of liberal democracy is precisely the abolition of popular power and replacement of popular sovereignty with the rule of law.”