Democracy: Africa Wrecking Borrowed Systems

Published on 6th December 2011

The amount of adrenaline the electoral democratic system of winner - take - all pumps into African political system is baffling. Political elites spend millions of dollars to access or sustain themselves in power. The same zeal is completely absent when it comes to solving the continent's perennial challenges of poor infrastructure, health, food security and sound business environment, to name a few. A careless person in need of means of transport may borrow a bicycle or automobile and wreck it, but pass the responsibility to the owner. A wrecked democratic process leaves in its wake disenfranchised African people even as its soundness or lack of is passed on to Western partners. 

Africans are watching the elections in Democratic Republic of Congo where incumbent President Joseph Kabila is reportedly ahead of his main rival Etienne Tshisekedi with keen interest. Election related violence has already claimed 18 lives and wounded another 100 people. The tension sparked off by the run-off for Egypt's first-round parliamentary elections is also of great concern. Morocco's "day of rage," a week following elections to protest the fact that change in government has not been synonymous to change in their misery is also a rude awakening to the borrowed but yet to be internalized system.

Unless Africans internalize and take courage to own and domesticate the borrowed electoral democracy as it were; election seasons will always be days of misery. Democracy has the potential to deliver benefits to Africans if the electoral process was to be used to identify leaders and not as currently practiced; a system to assemble vehicles to engage in legalized plunder in the name of the people.


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