Africa’s Future is in Its Past
By: Sam Vaknin, Brussels Morning
Africa has been failing to get its act together since the late 1950s. This enormous continent with its vast potential is always rife with internecine civil wars and election fraud.
But Africa is not unique and judging it too harshly is racist (a virulent point of view internalized even by African intellectuals). It took 1000 years for democracy to emerge in Europe. Until the 1940s, it resembled today’s Africa.
Democracy was an elitist enterprise (just look at the Founding Fathers in the USA), not a populist one. Where the common folk were granted power, ochlocracies devolved into murderous tyrannies and exclusionary or xenophobic political creeds.
To this very day, regions of the world which have been colonized by European powers in the previous centuries — the Middle East, the Balkans, some parts of the Americas, even the USA — are indistinguishable from Africa in terms of dysfunction and mayhem.
The interference of the colonialists in the fabric of Africa was not limited to the redrawing of artificial boundaries, thus creating geopolitical cages for entrapped and mutually-hostile ethnicities or tribes.
These interlopers also imposed on the denizens of the tortured expanse ideologies and institutions which diverged from local traditions, histories, and institutions.
Democracy and checks and balances are European and Anglo-Saxon ideas, ill-suited for the African climate. They displaced indigenous practices such as customary village justice and imperial monarchies.
Like every transplant they were rejected by the body politic. Endemic corruption, pernicious politicization, and opacity (lack of transparency) followed suit.
Africa needs to revert to its roots, to go back to the drawing board, and to start from scratch. It needs to get rid and unshackle itself of all the colonial and post-colonial baggage through civil disobedience and the formation of parallel traditional or informal institutions, if need be.
The basic organizational units in Africa are the family or clan, the village, and the tribe or ethnicity — not the nation-state. Polities in the continent are informal, not formal.
The system of governance is communal and consensual (think Japan), not adversarial (think USA). Western democracy is a foreign concept which will never take hold or work there. Time to replace it with a homegrown variety.
Sam Vaknin, Ph.D. is a former economic advisor to governments (Nigeria, Sierra Leone, North Macedonia), served as the editor in chief of “Global Politician” and as a columnist in various print and international media including “Central Europe Review” and United Press International (UPI). He taught psychology and finance in various academic institutions in several countries (http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/cv.html )
