Politics - The State of Democracy in Africa

Nic Cheeseman

In his regular column for the Daily Nation, our co-editor Nic Cheeseman asks how we should define, measure, and systematically understand democracy across the diverse continent of Africa, and beyond. 


The state of democracy in Africa is one of the most controversial and difficult questions facing the continent today. Is Africa getting more or less democratic? Why have so many countries become stuck in a murky middle ground between democracy and authoritarianism? How can we design democracy so that it better fits African realities? Academic, researchers and media commentators all give different answers to these questions. Some would give up on democracy in Africa, seeing it as a dangerous experiment that too often goes wrong. Others believe that the early signs are promising and that if we keep up the struggle for another generation, democracy will become entrenched within African societies. My take on the subject can be found in my new book, Democracy in Africa: Successes, Failures, and the Struggle for Political Reform, which was published last month by Cambridge University Press.

What makes democracy work?

The book starts by placing democracy in Africa in historical perspective, demonstrating how the experiences of the 1960s, 70s and 80s shaped the kinds of political systems that we see today. In doing so, it reveals an often overlooked fact: African democracies are distinctive not because they face so many challenges, but because they have managed to make so much progress despite the absence of many of the supposed ‘pre-conditions’ of democratic consolidation. Political scientists have identified a long ‘wish list’ of factors that make it easier to establish and consolidate a democracy. Towards the top of the list are a coherent national identity, strong and autonomous political institutions, a developed and autonomous civil society, the rule of law, and a strong and well performing economy.

Adam Przeworski, for example, has famously shown that countries that enjoy a GDP per capita of over $6,000 when they introduced democracy almost always succeed, while those with a GDP per capita of less than $1,000 almost always fail. Both in the 1960s and in the 1990s, few African countries fulfilled this – or any other – ‘wishlist’ criteria.  Yet many of them have nonetheless made significant progress towards establishing stable and accountable multiparty systems. This set of countries is bigger than you might think: roughly a quarter of African states are now ‘free’, including Benin, Botswana, Cape Verde, Ghana, Mauritius, Namibia, Senegal, and South Africa. In other words, a significant proportion of the continent is democratizing against the odds. Given this, Africa should not be thought of solely as a place in which to analyse the fragility of democracy. Rather, it is a continent that has much to teach us about the different pathways through which even the poorest and most unstable countries can break free from authoritarian rule. Read more...