ABSTRACT
There are serious questions to be asked in search of the true causes of the instability and violence that have swept across Africa since independence. Why has the winner-take-all policy been so widespread in independent African states? One may argue that it is basically because African indigenous systems of government, whether they were based on clan heads, chiefs, or kings, invariably tended to be a monopoly of power. This should be the most cogent argument of those who claim the African rejection of multiparty politics was because it was alien to African systems of government. On independence the leaders lost one of their most important unifying forces, the colonial power as an object of common opposition. However, because they had had insufficient cooperative experience in running the country during the colonial era, and because their followers had even less interaction, mistrust and uncertainty about the intentions of different leaders for the well-being of others became inevitable soon after independence.
