THE NATURE AND CHARACTER OF AFRICAN POLITICS

INTRODUCTION

In this unit, you will be introduced to African Politics. This is a follow-up to your study of Introduction to politics. This unit will introduce you to the application of the major principles and concepts you have studied. The various issues that will be examined in this unit include the colonial background of African politics, the structure and nuances of political party formations in the post-independence era, and the major indices that define the nature and character of African politics. The unit will introduce you to the factors that are responsible for unstable political systems in Africa, and problems associated with such upheavals.

OBJECTIVES

It is hoped that by the end of this unit, you should be able to:

• understand the major features of African politics 
• appreciate that African politics is largely characterized by instability 
• explain the factors responsible for this instability. 

Background to African Politics

It is difficult to explain and analyse the nature and character of African politics without taking into account the encounter of these states with foreign influence, under colonial rule. What is now described as colonial legacy is an admission that this asymmetric colonial relation had a formative, if not disruptive or destructive influence on politics in Africa. Almost five decades after that threshold popularly referred to as the “African Year of Independence”, it would amount to self-delusion to claim that African states today are free from the corrosive effects of European values, systems and institutions. Indeed, the manner these foreign models were grafted into African indigenous structures, continue to have consequences for contemporary African politics.

The key issue here is whether an ex-colonial, new state in Africa, and a plural society, composed of old nations can evolve viable political systems, institutions and structures that can sustain political order. The reality today is that African post-colonial political setting is a confusing mixture of authoritarian and democratic parliamentary/liberal institutions. While the ideas of supremacy of the law and the structuring and organizations of a political community from which authority derives were consciously introduced by the colonial administration, corresponding consciousness that the ultimate control of government power lay with the people was lacking.

 According to Jordan (1978:60), The absence of these elements of modern constitutionalism added to the existing confusion due basically to the co-existence of elements belonging to three constitutional traditions: pre-colonial African constitutionalism, the constitutional system of indirect rule and authoritarian administration and the Western model of liberal democracy.



This created an almost irreconcilable gap between the authority of a strong and effective government struggling to modernize and integrate, and the liberty of the citizens, who were anxious to translate the pre-independence “revolution of rising expectations” into concrete developmental fulfillments. The failure to resolve this conflict, which had its roots in the colonial era, was the major dilemma faced by African leaders in the immediate post-independence era. Rather than find solutions to this problem, the inheritors of political offices were so much pre-occupied with the struggle for power and appropriating to themselves the privileges of offices vacated by the colonialists that little time was left for constructing political agenda appropriate for a developing society.

In a recent commentary on Africa’s unique sociological setting, Henry Kissinger (2001:203) remarked thus: “in no other continent did national borders emerge so directly and intrinsically from the way the imperial powers delineated their spheres of control”. Awolowo’s (1947) description of Nigeria as a “mere geographic expression”, a phrase arising from the country’s colonial origin is, therefore, equally applicable to most African states. This explains why unlike in most countries in the world where the state precede the nation, in Africa the nation precede the state. Consequently, it is difficult in African states to wrest a national consciousness from among a plethora of ethnic groups, or forge a national identity where centrifugal forces are strong