By Anthony Akinwale

Former President Olusegun Obasanjo has just been reported to have said that western liberal democracy is not working for Africa (Daily Post, November 20, 2023.)

In his keynote at a consultative forum deliberating on the theme, “Rethinking Western Liberal Democracy for Africa” in Abeokuta, he said, inter alia that liberal democracy was invented without considering the history, culture and tradition of the African continent; it does not take into account the views of the majority; and that Africans have no business practicing a system of government “in which we have no hands to define and design”.

Instead of western liberal democracy, President Obasanjo advocated what he called “Afro democracy.” Many of Obasanjo’s past interventions have been met with ad hominem arguments.

But rather than attack his person, his assertions, their presuppositions and implications should be examined. I am convinced that, subjected to the scrutiny of critical thinking, his most recent assertions on what he called western liberal democracy will be found to be logically wanting and unsustainable.

At a time when the wind of military dictatorship appears to be blowing across Africa, a time when many young Africans are left hopeless by Africa’s ruling elite and are therefore tempted to welcome military rule, it is dangerous to make such assertions.

President Obasanjo’s main argument that Africans have no business practicing a foreign system of government presupposes or at least suggests that Africans lack the capacity to put to good use whatever is of foreign invention.

Apart from the fact that a European might have been described as racist if the European had made such an assertion, the statement ignores the fact that Africans are today found to excel in putting to use other ‘foreign’ ideas.

Computer science did not originate from Africa. Today, Africans count among some of the finest computer scientists in the world. The same is true of different academic disciplines and professional practices. The game of football was born in Europe. Today, Africans are among its best players in the world.

The Asian country of Japan, despite its profoundly non-western culture, practices western liberal democracy. The same is true of South Korea and of India, to mention but these.

But we need not go too far away Asia. There are African countries where what Obasanjo calls western liberal democracy is practiced without shutting down their cities on every election day.

Surely, even by the standard of poor aviation services in Africa, Botswana and Namibia in the southern African sub region are not too far from Abeokuta. Liberia, here in West Africa, has just done the unimaginable.

At the risk of being accused of citing a westerner to make my point, I’ll paraphrase Bernard Lonergan, Canadian philosopher and theologian, who said: statements are not just statements but answers to questions. President Obasanjo’s statement answers the wrong question. The question is not whether western liberal democracy is working for Africa?

The question is whether the oligarchy in Africa, of which Obasanjo is member, has allowed democracy to work for Africa? The answer, without any iota of hesitation, is unequivocally negative.

If democracy is not working in Africa, it is because civilian and military members of the ruling elite in Africa in general, and in Nigeria in particular, have willfully refused to practice democracy.

When, for example, Obasanjo said western liberal democracy was imposed on Africans, I am reminded that the 1979 Constitution, which, despite its patently anti-federal and anti-people provisions, as well as the 1999 Constitution, its identical twin sister, were imposed on Nigeria by military decree.

In fact, the decree that brought the 1979 Constitution into existence was signed by then General Olusegun Obasanjo. The 1979 Constitution establishes a humongous state whose functionaries are beneficiaries of Nigeria’s oil wealth and other resources. To compound the situation, section 2 of the Constitution places sovereignty in the hands of the state, not in the hands of the people, thus making the state more powerful than the citizen. Section 9 of the same Constitution nails the coffin of democracy by making any effort at amending it a near mission impossible.

Democracy, understood here as government of the people by the people and for the people, cannot work where men and women with neither democratic credentials nor democratic temperament design and deploy immoral means of taking over reins of state. In recent memory,

General Sani Abacha advocated ‘home-made democracy’. Now President Obasanjo is advocating ‘Afro democracy’. But democracies have a common denominator comprising its defining features. These defining features are consultation, representation and accountability.

In concrete terms, because we cannot all go into the chambers of government, we elect people to represent us. Those elected to represent us must consult with us before going into chambers of government. And they must return to the people who elected them to give an account of what they have done and what they are doing in government as representatives of the people.

But the people who end up at the reins of government in our land are not true representatives of the people but representatives of political godfathers. They and their godfathers are beneficiaries of an electoral process whose integrity they habitually violate.

Since their ‘election’ does not depend on the electorate but on the ideals, deals and pacts of the elite, they neither consider themselves obliged to represent the people, nor obliged to consult with them, nor obliged to be accountable to them. They in fact demand respect and adoration from the people while they hold the people in contempt.

President Obasanjo reminded invitees to the consultative forum that they were invited “to examine clinically the practice of liberal democracy, identify its shortcomings for our society and bring forth ideas and recommendations that can serve our purpose better, knowing human beings for what we are and going by our experiences and the experiences of others.”

But let us not behave like a surgeon who is looking for the human heart in the stomach of his patient. What we should be examining are not the shortcomings of democracy but the shortcomings of the ruling elite in Africa and in Nigeria. In other words, to go beyond analogical predication, democracy is not the problem.

The problem is their blunt refusal to practice the ideals of democracy. That blunt refusal is rooted in egotism, the habit of conquering every other self except the self. By way of an irony, that egotism is applauded in a land where the oppressed hero worship the oppressor.

It is not that egotism is not found in other climes. It is in fact the world’s oldest pandemic. However, whereas in other climes, good laws have been made to manage this pandemic, here in Nigeria, there is a deliberate refusal to mismanage it by the imposition of a fatally flawed constitution, a constitution that facilitate the reward of bad political behavior.

The pronouncement that democracy has failed poses a danger. It bears the potential of calling for undemocratic means of seizing the reins of state. But this is an occasion to examine our conscience so that we can see that democracy has not failed. Rather, pseudo-democrats have ensured that ideals of democracy are practiced in the breach. They, not democracy, have failed. Fr Akinwale, OP OP is Professor and Deputy Vice Chancellor at

Augustine University, Ilara-Epe, Lagos State.