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12 Democratic Governance in Africa at the Start of the Twenty-first Century Lessons of Experience Michael Chege Evaluating Democracy in Africa under “The Third Wave” There has been a long debate on whether the standards of democratic governance ought to be based on procedural criteria (such as the quality of competitive elections, openness of access to public office, voter turnout, etc.) or on the achievements of substantive political goals (like personal liberty and the rule of law [Zakaria 2003]). Inside the democratizing states, progress on both fronts is often unequal; movements in one end up frequently exerting pressure on the other. Since democracy by definition is an endogenous, citizen-driven process, and people have different priorities, any broad assessment of the fate of democratic experiments in any region—whether Africa or elsewhere—is bound to reflect the national variation resulting from that. Democratic experience in sub-Saharan Africa in the past fifteen years reflects unequal gains by country, and uneven progress in attainment of the procedural and substantive goals of democracy. In a number of significant states, however, democratic innovations aborted early, yielding to chronic violence and instability that has received much international publicity. The main intellectual challenge, therefore, is to explain these uneven achievements, rather than to provide a single theory that accounts for the political woes that supposedly afflict Africa as a whole. For in all fairness, the death of democratic government in Africa has been vastly exaggerated. This book opened with a justification for assessing the fate of democratic experiments in Africa after the Cold War. In one of the first efforts to explain the contemporary upsurge of democratic governments worldwide, Samuel Huntington remarked that of the three distinct historic outbreaks of democratic governments since the American Revolution of 1776, the latest (“the third wave”) began with the anti267 fascist Portuguese coup d’etat of April 1974, and the free elections that followed it ushering in Mario Soares’s Socialist Party administration in 1975 (Huntington 1991). If so, then sub-Saharan Africa’s entry into the “third wave” began with the release of Nelson Mandela from prison after twenty-seven years of incarceration by South Africa’s apartheid regime; the popular uprising that toppled the Mathieu Kérékou dictatorship in Benin; and the landmark all-Africa conference in Kampala , Uganda, on “Security, Stability, Development and Cooperation” in Africa. All of them took place in rapid succession between early 1990 and mid-1991. This was the high point of the most widespread pro-democracy protests in African states since independence in the 1960s. By caving in to popular pressure, the collapse of the tottering authoritarian regimes in Benin and apartheid South Africa demonstrated that it was possible to initiate a transition to democracy through nonviolent means, particularly now that Africa had ceased to be a pawn in the Cold War struggles between East and West, under which all opponents to pro-Western dictatorships—not least South Africa— were tainted as pro-Communist by powerful conservative forces in the West. With the Cold War over, Western strategic interests in the region waned, an event best evidenced by America’s abandonment of Liberia, once a key American intelligencegathering post, and its vile dictator Samuel K Doe, who was executed by a brutal rebel leader (Prince Y. Johnson) in 1991. Gathering in Uganda, as another U.S.supported dictator in next-door Zaire, Mobutu Sese Seko, was facing open rebellion in the streets for the first time, the Kampala forum was the point of departure toward the current, homegrown, pan-African initiatives to take charge of African regional security in the post–Cold War era. Under those new approaches, democratization and economic cooperation in Africa are considered vital correlates to African security. These efforts culminated in the inauguration of the African Union and the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) in 2002, under which democratic governance is the overarching principle. The Kampala conference brought together over five hundred participants from a wide range of African countries—heads of government, leading intellectuals, journalists, community development activists, charity groups, and religious leaders . It laid unprecedented emphasis on governments’ accountability to the governed , as a foundation of national security. Its final product, “the Kampala Document ,” whose principal goals—after many detours—are now enshrined in the charter of the African Union (formerly the Organization of African Unity, OAU), and the New Partnership for African Development, stated that democracy was the key solution for the continent...

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