Ademola Araoye

Ademola Araoye

The emerging conversation on the imperative to reinvent democracy to suit Africa is a faux discourse portending reprehensible consequences for the continent. The familiar shameful trick is the usual ruse deployed by a dominant but failed political class in African society to advance their nebulous agenda that has no bearing on the quotidian reality of Africans. In this, the preeminent individuals across Africa turn every invention for the good of humanity upside down to advance contentious and parochial ends of a small class of people. That has been the fate of democracy on the continent. Is democracy responsible for Mobutu Sese Seko, Houphouet Boigny, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo,Paul Biya, Jean Bedel Bokassa and their ilk who all imagined themselves to be democrats??? Is democracy responsible for the virus of term elongation?? This proclivity of Africa’s overrated big men to propagate the odious has been manifest across many realms of human endeavors. These have been expressed in the derogation of global standards in intellectual pursuits in the African academy, in the bastardization of historic emancipatory philosophy including pan-Africanism, and now in the noxious idea of the reinvention of democracy. The common denominator is their often truly scant appreciation of the complexities of the issues that they pronounce on from a studied technical point of view. They dub their shameless enterprise in mediocre standards as Africanization. The shallow perspectives that are purveyed constitute crudely unvarnished insult to the intelligence of black humanity.

At the center of the institutionalization of this demon of mediocrity on the continent is that ubiquitous class that has derailed everything designed for the good of black humanity. That is the political class, the famed political entrepreneurial (poliprenueral)class. Reducing the serious business of efficient mobilization and social organization for progressivism and development to instruments of self and family aggrandizement, the African big man wants to develop a caricature of governance that would promote a myopic vision that can only exacerbate the crisis of inclusion, distribution, participation, identity, integration, legitimacy as well as the challenge of gender mainstreaming that confronts the modal post-colonial African state. Meanwhile, democracy as practiced in even more thoughtful African settings such as South Africa, or even now, Liberia, has proven to be the most potent mechanism of conflict resolution in heterogeneously constructed political spaces. In the search for a dubious alternative to democracy, Africa is spiraling into ground zero.The propagators of African democracy should invest a minute to read the report of the Zondo Commission in South Africa to taste the sweetness of democracy in practice.

Democracy, where faithfully practiced, has proven to be dynamic, and resilient with a malleability to rise to the demands of various social exigencies to achieve commanding legitimacy across diverse spatial and political constructions. It is not static in addressing the challenges of human advancement. There have been significant transformations in the science of leadership and governance in the digital age. These can be analytically dissected from many dimensions and levels of engagement in democratic processes. The main challenge of African democracy lies in the fixations in expedient, self-serving deficiencies of a political class that is insistent on entrenching the barely procedural rather than the substantive tenets of democracy. African politicians extol democracy even as they loathe values associated with the practice: transparency, accountability, constructive unpredictability in policy outcomes, competitive idea modulations, and guaranteed inclusive participation. The African deviations from the democratic norm are contrived for the promotion of ego and personal objectives rather than in the service of the people. The lexicon of democratic practice in Nigeria is instructive: god-fatherism, term elongation, cross-carpeting, sale of forms for elective offices, abuse of remedial mechanisms, scant legitimacy, and institutional decay, among many others. The practice of democracy in Africa thus repudiates the essential values underpinning public governance. Hence, the search for values-conflated organizational contrivances that would suit an African ruling class historically alienated from the population. They call it Africanization.

Governance, or more appropriately, governing, was, in the past, mostly understood to be a result of government activities, and primarily dealt with by political science, political philosophy, or anthropological disciplines. The term governance has a slightly different meaning today. However, the two concepts, governing and public governance, remain conflated in popular discourse outside the specialized circuits of academics and intellectuals engaged in rigorous interrogations of the subject. In Africa, the conceptual laxity is pronounced. The distinction is crucial in light of the wide opposing, almost contradictory, fundamental assumptions of the two concepts and their differential implications for the policy formulation process and the different dynamics of holistic social growth and economic development the two concepts elicit. The confusion around differentiating governing from its conceptual antithesis in public governance has impacted the salience of the discursive enterprise for practical analytic relevance of situations on the ground. The confusion has therefore impeded the process of meaningful analysis of governance process and outcomes, including the conditions for efficient policy making and the crucial modalities of policy actualization; all within the critical imperative of a constitutional order as the bedrock of public governance.

Governance is about the rules of collective decision-making in an environment where there is a plurality of actors or organizations and where no formal control system can dictate the terms of the relationship between these actors and organizations. Governance thus entails the participation of all stakeholders in the political life of a state as well as across specific policy sectors, spanning the political and economic through the cultural to social spheres. These interactions take place in formal and informal settings to attain outcomes, both policy-wise and the policy actuation process, forged through systemic osmotic influences. These influences generated through all manner of interactions are integral to the management of interdependent networks in particular policy spheres. In public governance inclusive participation in policy formulation precludes premeditated policy outcomes or the impositions of determinate goals by state bureaucracy that is associated with governing. Given this character public governance only functions within a setting that real respect the tenets and substantive underpinnings of democracy. Accordingly, a fixation on mere procedural aspects of democracy, such as elections, in set periodicity, that are often sham, and associated dubious democratic consolidations in a series of manipulated transitions from one coalition of political elites that goes for political party or the other anti-democratic institutions would not suffice as the democratic critical context for the existence of governance.

The emergence of the distinctive attributes of public governance, setting it apart from those associated with governing, has been driven by technological revolutions that have impacted the character of society and the very nature of doing things. The revolutions have fuelled tectonic changesin the political, social, cultural, and economic realms across the globe. The impact of the revolutions has been to realign the traditional balance of influence in the policy-making process between the hitherto coercive state associated with paradigms of governing and all other actors in society whose respective leverages for action in the policy-making process have been phenomenally elevated in the practice of public governance. The upsetting of this traditional balance has been made possible and manifest in the integration of the global and national society, including individuals and groups, as well as the accentuation of humanistic global values that have come with radical shifts in the face of the convergence and fusion of the concerns of global society and national societies on numerous planes. The forces driving these changes have included intensified globalization in the fourth industrial revolution, and, in particular, transformative influence of digitalization in the orientations of society and the values of the individual. Digitalization and globalization have accelerated a widening consciousness of a transnational and transracial human identity as well as enhanced recognition of the ascendancy of democratization as the sin qua non for the protection of humanistic values globally. Africa has been unable to adapt to the rigors of contemporaneous leadership practice. The challenge of Africa in relation to the practice of democratic governance is rooted both in intellectual indolence and an overall lack of rigor in society.

The assumptions of the centrality of the state backed by its coercive powers in traditional modes of governing have become unresponsive to the demands of democratic practice. In Africa they constitute impediments to meeting the demands of a new age. It is in this context that the demands for the emergence of inclusive governance that have moved away from the centrality of state power in defining policy and modalities of policy actualization that are associated with traditional governing practice and the associated tenets of outmoded public administration have been imperative. Further, it is against the backdrop of this challenge that researchers have sought to come to terms with the complexities of the empirical phenomena on public decision-making and the observable novel modalities of public policy actualization. There is a clear shift in the paradigm of managing inclusivity as the emerged normative imperative in decision-making in the public sphere. Public Governance and leadership seek to understand the way we construct collective decision-making in a constitutional setting. Efficient leadership thus advances the ethos, operational logic as well as both negotiation and substantial rationality integral to public governance in praxis. These are the transformations that simple-minded African politicians are confronted with that pose a threat to the status quo that they seek to protect. The outcome is to seek to discredit democracy. It is all too familiar in Africa’s long season of ideational normlessness.

By the 1950s there existed an embryonic global constitutional order, with rules that remain in place-albeit rather shakily in some cases-to this day. And the rules, once adopted take on a logic and a life of their own. This has led to historic transformations and geo-political revolution of historic dimensions expressed in the emergence of a new genre of state which has all the symbolic apparatus of a unified political entity. In the world of the post-modern states, the preeminence of the sovereignty of the state and the associated outpouring of patriotism expected of its citizens are oddities as their societies work hard to move away from nationalistic tendencies and toward a supranational union that eviscerates borders and traditional national rivalries. Thus, the evolving governing principles of the post-modern state system appear to be breaking new ground and instituting new inter-subjective understandings and guardrails in society as well as with the post-modern state. These new organizing principles are radically altering the character of the state, its society and the nature of the international system, especially the post-modern state, within this heterogeneous international and inter-state system. The cumulative impact of the increasing alteration of the character of the post-modern state, and its increasing differentiation from the entrenched modern state as the two kinds of states interact closely in the international arena, has been a pervasive misunderstanding and a climate of mistrust.  This climate has continued to erode friendship among allies and led to smoldering resentment.  The close juxtaposition and interaction between two genres of states with differing worldviews, policies, philosophies, axiomatic understandings and standard operating procedures has thus created tensions in the operations of the inter-state system.

As a result of the evolution of universal moral standards and the emergence of an international community conscious of itself as such, in contradistinction from the aggregation of states that earlier constituted the international community, states neither enjoy the unquestionable right to the recourse to violence as an instrument of internal coercion, nor, more importantly, in its relations with other states. Indeed, it is inconceivable that some states, mostly post-modern states, would even go to war with each other. The existence of an international society, built around transnational convergences in ideas, values, principles, and interests and the complex transnational communal linkages that these relationships have spawned, has altered the very nature and character of international society. Morality has acquired critical salience in the conduct of international affairs. In the world of post-modern states, it has rendered obsolete the instrument of war to regulate relations between constituent members of the system.

Against the background of these radical shifts have emerged both practical and intellectual challenges of ascertaining the implications of the dramatic changes wreaked on the character of state and society on the one hand and, on the other hand, interrogating the impact of the changes on the relationship between the state and society by the triple forces of digitalization, globalization, and democratization. The ensuing growing interdependence across the globe and the realignment in the balance of influence between the state establishment and the increasingly liberated citizenry in a digitalized and globalized world has given rise to the expectation of greater leverage of society to impact the process of collective decision-making. The assumptions of the centrality of the state backed by its coercive powers in traditional modes of governing have become unresponsive, in fact, an impediment, to the demands of a new age. It is in this context that the demands for the emergence of inclusive governance that has moved away from the centrality of state power in defining policy and modalities of policy actualization that are associated with traditional governing and the tenets of public administration have been imperative. Further, it is against the backdrop of this challenge that researchers have sought to come to terms with the complexities of the empirical phenomena on public decision-making and the observable novel modalities of public policy actualization. There is a clear shift in the paradigm of managing inclusivity as the emerged normative imperative in decision-making in the public sphere. Public Governance and leadership seek to understand the way we construct collective decision making in a constitutional setting. Efficient leadership thus advances the ethos, operational logic as well as both negotiation and substantial rationality integral to public governance in praxis.

In Public Governance decision-making and public policy reflect the outcome of interactions among governance networks and stakeholders that are based on negotiation rationality as opposed to substantial rationality. This is in contradistinction to procedural rationality under state rule associated with traditional governing. Procedural rationality, which refers to the rationality of the processes employed in decision-making, as opposed to the rationality of the decision itself, is linked to market competition that is related to corporate governance. Network governance is understood as inter-firm coordination that is characterized by organic or informal systems, in contrast to bureaucratic structures within firms and formal relationships between them. In this governance approach, policy compliance or actualization is ensured through trust and political obligation which, over time, becomes sustained by self-constituted rules and norms. This process of pluricentric agenda setting through the involvement of a large number of interacting interdependent actors to produce outcome reflexive of the unbounded interest of the plurality in public policy and its actualization has been a major challenge in Africa. Accordingly, the very notion, values, and tenets of public governance are problematic in the African environment, where the praxis of political leadership is fixated on antiquated traditions of governing that is conflated with public governance in mere faddish intellectual public perorations.

Efficient governance entailing constructive management of often entrenched antagonistic cultural spheres interacting in particularistic political planes, has been elusive in the post-colonial African state setting. The African state universe is steeped in the governing culture of and the instrumentality of bureaucracy and a public administration practice that historically has revolved around the instinctive deployment of the coercive instruments of the state to define, impose, and actualize policy. This is so irrespective of tenuous claims to democracy. Coercion is therefore the normative tool of managing or, better still, suppressing, legitimate and divergent interests. In governance terms, a public policy enforced through the coercive apparatus of the state may be illegitimate. In this oppressive universe, the sociological construction of the modal post-colonial African state pits together various nations and communities with deeply entrenched disparate identities in the new state space. These identities have tenaciously remained defiant to attempts at the forging of new broader citizenship distilled out of their numerous preexisting nations. Therefore confronted with many loci of autonomous cultural universes and their legitimate narrow and partisan interests in a more globalized humanistic liberalized age, the deconsolidated state is permanently fragilized. In the context of this fragility, the rise of an increasingly empowered fractious citizenry and civil society that in the digital age is in close commune with emergent international civil society has transformed the balance in the relationship between the increasingly weakened and disarticulated state and civil society. This increasingly liberated civil society in Africa has burnished credentials as part of a global force with strengthened leverage to influence public policy outcomes. Paradoxically, African domestic society, steeped in its internal partisanships at the national level, is still majorly integrated into an international society with clearly articulated humanistic values that transcend race, ethnicity, gender, and religion across international boundaries. Tensions thus abound in the relationship of the domestic society of the post-colonial African universe that is unable to shake off its essential provincial worldview and its claims to be a part of the global system of liberal advocacy entailed in the normative public governance mode at the global level.

Contemporary international society is defined and bound together by an activist commitment to the protection of multifarious transnational causes for humanity that it has imposed on civilized states trickling into the post-colonial state environment. Yet while subscribing to this tenet of the international society when convenient, it is ironic that civil society in the post-colonial African environment at once thrives on immense internal bonding within the territorial confines of old traditional nations. This bonding is in response to the centrality of the sovereignty of the multi-national state and the legitimation of coercion as the pivotal instrument for policy definition and actuation. In this setting, divisive primordial sentiments are mobilized in the swaying of public policy in the direction of the state along partisan lines. There is thus no serious attempt at neither bridging across the cultural fault lines nor developing constructive cognitive contaminations over the years to advance the emergence of common understandings in the longue duree. Accordingly, the process of forging a culturally syncretic ethic and value distillation to underpin national life, public policy formulation and policy execution is weak. Participation in the process of constructive resolution of policy differences is compromised. Where would a contrived African democracy fit in?

This intervention has identified a few challenges out of the many that should engage serious-minded analysts of the future of democracy in Africa, rather than some jejune belch emanating from opportunistic grandiose platform. Indeed, it is about time African intellectuals began a critical interrogation of democracy to proffer a realistic way forward that would be consistent with the values of human-centered dynamic governance that democracy offers.