Ronald Leonard Egesa

Why western democracy cannot work in Africa?

I have said this over and over and I still continue to get mixed responses –as if I have killed a person. The western world knows it very well that there are stages of social and infrastructural development that a country must undergo prior to achieving democracy, but they will not stop to demand mature democratic practices from the third world countries of Africa. It is the only way the western world will maintain its superiority!
Whoever claims to love Africa cannot fail to see this. Africans as opposed to Europeans have strong ethnic ties that are yet to be broken and the accountability is not one of the high values in many of the traditional African tribes. On the other hand, the western model of democracy places accountability at the top of the values that must be upheld. In simple terms, it is not possible to claim a working democracy without accountability to the stakeholders. Accountability is expected of the President, the Electoral Commission, the Parliament, the local leaders and all other people in the positions of responsibility. In traditional Africa, there was a king/chief who was keenly advised by a council of elders/wise men in society and he did whatever he felt was good for his subjects! The aspect of Patriotism in African societies was inherent. People were born patriots and there was no need to preach it outside the fireplace or mealtimes.

Times have changed. Communication channels have gone global, Africans have travelled around the world, the pressure to be like the ‘developed world’ is more than ever before! This has resulted in Africans themselves demanding more from the leaders than the ground can hold. The leaders are in charge of leading and being accountable to groups of people of diverse ethnic and cultural heritage who were forced to live and work together as nations by the white man! The diversity in cultural identity puts the individual above society – the bad one –corruption is then born naturally out of selfishness. The largest group that people can be patriotic about is the extended family and beyond that, it fades away just like that. It is now very common to see African leaders heaping riches for their Children and their grand children.
As if demanding mature democracy from us is not harmful enough, the western world goes an extra mile and extends donor aid with rosy reasons like reducing mortality rates, supply of clean water among others while in the darkness they sit and connive with the selfish leaders of our countries to rob our natural resources such as oil and other minerals, not forgetting the ‘English tea’ that was grown in Kenya and Zimbabwe! I strongly maintain that the only way Africa will ever get to catch up with the western world is by first prospering in beneficial trade from its natural resource without western exploitation, and then democracy shall set in naturally. One only needs to study the political history of Japan in the last 100 years to appreciate the natural evolution of working democracy when the necessary social and infrastructural development has taken place.
There is simply no way someone will govern or rig elections with impunity and go unpunished when the levels of literacy in a country are over 90%. The same cannot happen when more than 90% of the population is in gainful employment. Until the social and physical infrastructural transformation takes place, western democracy will never be perfected in the land of our ancestors!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 at 4:13 am and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.