ABSTRACT
Sub-Saharan Africa is the continent where the absolute number of presidential republics is by far the largest. The fact that countries such as those of sub-Saharan Africa have come to be widely open to analysis and indeed to a true empirical analysis constitutes a clear bonus for political science in general and in particular for the gradual understanding of the processes of legitimacy in the contemporary world. In Nigeria in particular, the return to liberal democracy was a slow and complex process – indeed, the very first Nigeria model of government had a ‘traditional’ rather than a genuinely liberal democratic character. A more general analysis of the way liberal democracy has come to prevail in other countries of sub-Saharan Africa might indicate that other regimes, and in particular military regimes, have no particular reason to be regarded as a major danger to ‘regular’ presidential rule.
