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8 J.L. Pol'y & Globalization 1 (2012)

handle is hein.journals/jawpglob8 and id is 1 raw text is: Journal of Law, Policy and Globalization wwwiiste.org ISSN 2224-3240 (Paper) ISSN 2224-3259 (Online) Vol 8, 2012 1154 Africa and the Crises of Democratisation: A Dialectical Analysis Moses Eromedoghene Ukpenumewu Tedheke Ph.D. Department Of Political Science And Defence Studies, Nigerian Defence Academy, Pmb 2109, Kaduna E-Mail: Tedheke(Hotmail.Com ABSTRACT The crises of democratisation in Africa have not been properly focused on in its primacy, the economic dynamics of democracy. As such this study focuses on the economics of democratisation which is out of the agenda of most African countries. Although Africans and Western do-gooders of democracy pretend to offer Africa the liverages of economic development, they have always done the contrary with the assistance of their local collaborators. The global regime of capital has always worked against Africa's democratisation as it undermines Africa's economic progress which strengthens Euro-American democracy in its fundamental of material base. Thus capitalist law of uneven-development which aids the realisation problem of advance capital strengthens democracy in Europe and North America and underdevelops democracy in Africa. This is the logic of the crises of democratisation in Africa and can only be overcome by a home or African grown development processes and the stoppage of flight of capital to Europe and North America. Keywords: Democratisation, alienation, dialectics, liberalism, underdevelopment. Every generation out of relative obscurity discovers its mission, fulfils it or betrays it Frantz Fanon Every onlooker is either a coward or a traitor Frantz Fanon I would want to sleep! But the indolence of this generation would not allow me to sleep CheikAnta Diop INTRODUCTION Democracy is being discussed, especially, by Western liberal scholars as if it has always been a product only of the Greek direct democracy and that of the contemporary liberal world. This has been done to shield democracy from its linkage with egalitarianism or society of the pristine order, the primitive communal system or primitive communism. One should not be frightened by this concept which has become a 'spectre' to the other side of the world, the Western or Northern hemisphere. Primitive communal system or primitive communism is being your brother's keeper. One supposes that this is not strange to Africa or the other parts of the South. It is quite closer to the social democracies of the Scandinavian countries that is deeply welfarist. The primitive communal system had a naturally-grown democracy based on the gentile constitution that grew out of society that knew no internal contradictions, and was adapted only to such a society. It had no cohesive power except public opinion. However, a society that succeeded it came into being by force of all its economic conditions of existence, had to split into freemen and slaves, into exploiting rich and exploited poor; the society that is not only incapable of reconciling these antagonisms, but had to drive them more and more to a head (Engels 1977:165). The reconciliation of these antagonistic relations since civilisation has been the basis of politics and indeed democratic politics in the contemporary historical process since the age of imperialism or the age of the emergence of advance capitalism. These countries mostly from Western Europe and North America claim to be the citadel of democratic culture. We accept the position that democracy and its politics of representative electoral process are still transitional even in the advance democracies of the world. Francis Fukuyama's position that Western liberal democracy is The End of History is not tenable in the circumstances of democratic transition or democratisation. As such we prefer the term democratisation which stresses the dynamic aspect of a still-unfinished process to the term democracy, which reinforced the illusion that we can give a definite formula for it. Amin (2009:6-7) 1

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