I have said before that as I grow older, I have become more of a storyteller. Permit me, therefore, to open this conversation with a story told in a satirical piece,, by Kobina Sekyi more than a century ago. It is a story of a character, Mrs Borofusem, a semi-educated woman, who returns to her native Fantiland in Ghana, after a short stay in England.describes the character of one who imitates the Whiteman and his ways.
The message of the play is pretty simple to grasp, we must not swallow, hook, line and sinker everything Western or foreign. It is, perhaps, an invitation by the author to us, to deliberate on the need to preserve some of our cultural heritage, values and traditions. The author was a proud African, and even though English trained, remained faithful to his native culture and was critical about the incursion of foreign traditions and values into Africa.
Like Mrs Borofusem, we must be prepared, no matter how reluctantly, to retrace our steps. For some reason, however, the urge to retrace our steps has not gained much currently in the discourses around the most sublime aspect of African governance – the making of Constitutions.
At their core, African constitutions contains the following incidents of Western-Liberal constitutional-democracy: Two-party democracy, euphemistically calledbuying, christened “Electoral Democracy”; the Rule of the Powerful, nicely styled “Rule of Law”; Executive Dominance, called “Separation of Powers and Checks and Balances”; Judicial Activism, Adventurismism, named “Judicial Review”; and sporadic and tokenistic overtures to subalterns, dressed up as “Constitutionalism”.
By 2019, democratic trends further reversed, and there are now fewer democracies in Africa than was the case 20 years ago. Notably, West Africa, previously commended as a trailblazer region, has seen serious backsliding as Mali, Chad, and very recently, Guinea experienced military coups. Burkina Faso followed swiftly and then the failed coup in Guinea Bissau.
a few of many destructive behaviours that will result in the inevitable death of democracy on the continent.has noted that more than 50 per cent of the countries in Africa are authoritarian regimes and only two are full democracies. These figures may come as a shock to many but in hindsight, it is rather unsurprisingyears. Africa has thusof the coups in the world in the last five years taking place in Africa.