ABSTRACT
Reflections about democratic governance in Africa elicit both a smile and a grimace at the same time. A smirk in the sense that frequent elections in the last two decades are a huge improvement from Africa of old with coups, violence and unconstitutional change of governments. On the other hand, there is grimace considering that the prevailing political environment in the continent is yet to be immersed in the culture, norms and values of democratic governance. It is on the basis of the latter that democratic regimes across Africa can be reasonably assessed or discussed within the context of what Steven Levistky and Lucan Way, as quoted in Yusuph Olaniyonu, 1 referred to as “Competitive Authoritarianism.” The scholars wrote that, in a competitive authoritarian system, “formal democratic institutions are widely viewed as the principal means of obtaining and exercising political authority. Incumbents violate those rules so often and to such an extent, however, that the regime fails to meet conventional minimum standards for democracy.” They further observed that, although democratic states in Africa have constitutions and functional judiciaries, multi-party systems, periodic elections, etc., the incumbents violate rules of democratic engagement to the extent that most governments lack legitimacy. In most cases, election results rarely reflect the wishes of the electorate, because certain democratic institutions, such as election management bodies, security agencies, media organizations, and the courts, are frequently violated and manipulated to create an uneven playing field between the government and opposition. As quoted by Levistky and Way in Olaniyonu, 2 “incumbents routinely abuse state resources, deny the opposition adequate media coverage, harass opposition candidates and their supporters and in some cases manipulate electoral results.”
