As the 2022 election dust slowly settles, it is appropriate that we Kenyans assess the impact of elections on our democracy from 1963 to the present. With its emphasis on elections, Western liberal democracy reigns almost supreme in many parts of the world today, Kenya included. Indeed, elections are usually referred to as “a democratic exercise” on the assumption that through them the citizenry get to determine who holds political office and thereby implements policies favoured by the citizenry. Indeed, many post-election analyses seem to proceed from the assumption that elections are the only way to identify leaders “democratically”, and that, in any case, it is not possible to find a better system for this purpose. Thus in 2017, Willy Mutunga, Kenya’s first Chief Justice under the Constitution of Kenya 2010, declared that Kenya was under electoral authoritarianism, and that “Kenya is a fake democracy where elections do not matter because the infrastructure of elections has been captured by the elites.” In the same year, Barbara Yoxon contended that Kenya is a case of a polity in which elections do not equal democracy. Like Mutunga and Yoxon, many others seem to hold that if only the electoral processes were streamlined, Kenya would automatically become a genuine democracy.
However, in what follows, I illustrate that in the Kenyan context, elections are a major obstacle to democracy understood as a governance system in which the people determine the direction of the management of public affairs.
The Western imperialist origins of elections in Kenya
Prior to the blight of Western imperialism, the various peoples of Africa had their own modes of governance that, in most if not all cases, took the views of the governed seriously. The various governance models of the peoples of Africa laid a high premium on consensus-building rather than majoritarianism, thus the absence of elections among them. Kwasi Wiredu writes about a monarchical democracy, free from elections, among the Akan of Ghana: “Contrary to a deliberately fostered appearance, the personal word of the chief was not law. His official word, on the other hand, is the consensus of his council, and it is only in this capacity that it may be law; which is why the Akans have the saying that there are no bad kings, only bad councilors”. Wiredu further notes that the Akan choose their leaders by consensus: “There is never an act of formal voting. Indeed, there is no long-standing word for voting in the language of the Ashantis. The expression which is currently used for that process (aba to) is an obvious modern coinage for a modern cultural import or, shall we say, imposition”.
Similarly, in his chapter in A Companion to African Philosophy, Edward Wamala notes that the Baganda had a consensual monarchical democracy, where neither the king nor anybody else had veto power: “The quest for consensus was carried on at the highest level of governance as well as all the various levels in the structure of society down to the level of the household.” Furthermore, “If after due deliberations the council reached a consensus, it was taboo for the monarch to oppose or reject it.”
My own people, the Luo of Kenya, had a decentralised kinship-based system of governance that laid great emphasis on deliberation and consensus building rather than majoritarianism. Indeed, the Luo refer to government as piny owacho, literally “the community has spoken”, evoking the idea that the laws of the land are based on the will of the people. In my recently published edited volume, Africa beyond Liberal Democracy: In Search of Context-Relevant Models of Democracy for the Twenty-First Century, Odoch Pido notes that among the Acholi of Uganda (one of the cultural cousins of the Luo of Kenya), “Decisions were not reached by voting, but rather by consensus among the elders, …. As long as one elder did not agree, discussions continued until consensus was reached. To act against the will of one person, they said, balo laa (‘damages the spittle’), referring to the saliva used in ceremonial contexts to pronounce requisite blessings.” In the same volume, Tayo Eegunlusi notes that through their acephalous political system, the Igbo of Nigeria operated on the basis of strong consensus in decision-making.
The Luo refer to government as piny owacho, literally “the community has spoken”, evoking the idea that the laws of the land are based on the will of the people.
The foregoing examples of our indigenous systems of governance confirm that our peoples acknowledged the importance of the consent of the governed—the very issue that the West often touts as its own unique innovation and proudly associates with their contrived term, “democracy”. Thus in Models of Democracy, David Held gives the following elementary definition of democracy:
“While the word ‘democracy’ came into English in the sixteenth century from the French democratie, its origins are Greek. ‘Democracy’ is derived from demokratia, the root meanings of which are demos (people) and kratos (rule). …. Democracy entails a political community in which there is some form of political equality among the people.”
According to Held, it appears that the first “democratic” polity emerged in Chios during the mid-sixth century BCE, although others, all with their own particularities and idiosyncrasies, soon formed. Thus while Athens stands out as the pinnacle of this development, the new political culture became fairly widespread throughout ancient Greece. Furthermore, while today most people think that it is impossible to have democracy without elections, understood as universal suffrage expressed through secret ballot, the ancient Greeks, to whom the term, theory and practice of democracy in the West are usually traced, did not lay such a high premium on elections. As Held points out, they deployed multiple methods of selection of candidates for public office, including direct election, lot, and rotation. Yet we must never idealise ancient Athenian democracy because it excluded women, slaves and foreigners, so that the bulk of the city-state’s population was excluded from it. Besides, it was prone to manipulation, leading to some undesirable decisions such as the sentencing to death of the Greek philosopher Socrates in 399 BCE.
Athens and other democratic ancient Greek city-states were overthrown by Alexander III (popularly known as “Alexander the Great“ [356-323 BCE]), who was a pupil of the philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BCE) and his fellow Macedonian, and an avid supporter of the philosopher’s scholarly pursuits. However, Alexander’s empire was short-lived, and was eventually partly replaced by the Roman Empire. The Romans greatly admired Greek thought and culture, but deluded themselves with a pale shadow of what the democratic Greeks had done. With the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 CE and the subsequent rise of Roman Catholic dominion over Western Europe during the so-called Middle Ages (approximately 5th to 15th centuries CE), democratic ideas were almost unheard of in Western Europe, as the notion of the citizen who participates in governance was replaced by the believer in Roman Catholic doctrine, or, as Held puts it, homo politicus was eclipsed by homo credens.
However, democratic ideas in Western Europe were revived during the Renaissance—a French word literally translated as “rebirth”. The Renaissance, typically believed to have begun in Italy in the 13th century CE, was characterised by the revival of scientific and artistic activities that drew inspiration from ancient Greece and Rome. Nevertheless, with the rise of capitalism and liberalism in Western Europe around the 18th century CE, the ancient Graeco-Roman democratic ideas were re-modelled to articulate individualist aspirations subsumed under the term Liberal democracy. This was in sharp contrast to the moral, communitarian ideals of ancient Greece expressed through what is commonly referred to as direct democracy. Thus, in sharp contrast to the democratic thought of the ancient Greeks, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Herbet Spencer, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, among others, articulated a political philosophy which presented the individual as standing in opposition to society rather than in co-operation with it. For example, in On Liberty, Mill wrote:
“The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. . . . The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”
Strangely, as Domenico Lesurdo graphically illustrates in Liberalism: A Counter-History, the liberal democratic ideas that the West trumpeted did not restrain it from enslaving and colonising the peoples of Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, North, Central and South America—virtually most of humanity. Yet in the sunset of classical colonialism, Britain told its colonies, Kenya included, that they would only be adequately prepared for “independence” by demonstrating that they were “ready” to embrace liberal democracy, with the high premium it lays on elections. For example, a while ago a video clip was circulating in social media, in which, soon after the British released Jomo Kenyatta from prison, an English journalist condescendingly asked him if Kenya was ready for independence. Tragically, Kenyatta dignified the question with a reply. Yet scholars of decoloniality have now amply illustrated that “independence” is markedly different from liberation, the former turning Western colonies into Western neo-colonies now in the guise of globalisation, the latter tearing formerly colonised peoples away from the intellectual, economic, political, social and religious structures of Western imperialist domination.
Five ways in which elections hinder democracy in Kenya
In what follows, I seek to illustrate that elections are an obstacle to at least five characteristics of democracy understood as a governance system in which the people determine the direction of the management of public affairs: A decision-making process that is intelligible and practically accessible to the citizenry; respect for the voices of all citizens; an atmosphere in which citizens are highly motivated to pursue their common good rather than their sectional interests; a sense of solidarity among citizens; enough stability to keep a polity intact, and also instability sufficient for engendering requisite changes in the polity.
Alienation from the Political Process
Since democracy is rule by the people, the processes of governance ought to be intelligible to the citizens. Besides, A.S. Narang has noted that since politics is an integral part of culture, the political system of a society ought to be consistent with the cultures of the peoples governed by it so that they can identify with it. V.Y. Mudimbe memorably observed that Western colonisers engaged in “the domination of physical space, the reformation of natives’ minds, and the integration of local economic histories into the Western perspective.” Thus, as he laid The Foundation Stone of the Royal Technical College of East Africa (now the University of Nairobi) on 25th April 1952, Philip Mitchell is reported to have expressed the hope and belief that the College would “serve for the generations to come as an invaluable part of the foundations of the new society which we are building here”. So Mitchell was aware that he and his fellow colonisers were systematically dismantling the intellectual, social, political and economic structures of our various peoples and replacing them with a society created to serve their imperialist purposes for a long time to come.
The liberal democratic ideas that the West trumpeted did not restrain it from enslaving and colonising the peoples of Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, North, Central and South America.
Indeed, more than fifty years before Philip Mitchell’s 1952 speech, the British invaders had decreed that Kenya would be perpetually under British imperial law. On 12th August 1897, they declared what they called The Reception Date, referring to the day when they issued a decree that the English statutes of general application passed before 12th August 1897 are law in Kenya, unless a Kenyan statute, or a latter English statute made applicable in Kenya, has repealed any such statute. In short, the British invaders imposed their law on the peoples of the territory now called Kenya in perpetuity, thereby purporting to declare the legal systems of those peoples null and void. Where the British invaders acknowledged indigenous legal systems at all, they demeaningly referred to them as “customary law” to communicate the presumption that they were inferior. It is noteworthy that the said imposition of English law on 12th August 1897 still holds to date, as evident in the way in which advocates and judges in Kenyan courts and speakers of Kenya’s parliament frequently refer to English law, but very rarely to the jurisprudence of our various peoples.
With the advent of Kenya’s independence in 1963, liberal democracy proved to be a crucial pillar of the “new society”, designed to facilitate the perpetual Western imperial domination over our peoples. No wonder Kenya’s independence constitution, which was liberal democratic through and through, was negotiated in a series of conferences at Lancaster House, situated in London’s West End, close to Buckingham Palace. In his Ph.D. Thesis, the late G.G. Kariuki notes that the venue was chosen because “it would insulate the delegates from ‘offstage pressure’ and enable the Colonial Office to exercise control over the course of discussion”. Thus the conferences were held under the keen supervision of the British colonisers, far away from the gaze of the people of Kenya in an age in which overseas communication was mainly by telegram, telephone and postal mail. Kariuki further observes that the agenda of the first Lancaster conference (18 January to 6th February, 1960) was tightly controlled by Ian Macleod, Secretary of State for the Colonies, under a shroud of secrecy in pursuit of British interests. The colonisers even determined who would attend it. In Not Yet Uhuru, Oginga Odinga narrates how during subsequent Lancaster conferences, Macleod’s successor, Reginald Maudling, arm-twisted KANU into accepting a federalist structure of government that would promote the interests of the European settlers.
Where the British invaders acknowledged indigenous legal systems at all, they demeaningly referred to them as “customary law” to communicate the presumption that they were inferior.
Thus, as I illustrated elsewhere, liberal democracy, with its characteristically thorough-going individualism, is alien to the communalistic outlook of the peoples of Africa. While the electorate are regularly urged to vote in pursuit of their personal interests rather than those of their cultural groups, many of them feel morally obligated to vote with a view to promoting the welfare of their cultural groups, which they see as extensions of their own families – and, as I argued in a previous article here, there is absolutely nothing inherently wrong with this if one is not under the spell of liberal democracy. What is more, elections, which are core to liberal democracy, are highly sophisticated, so that most of the electorate hardly understand what actually happens, thus the regular civic education drives prior to any poll. Besides, the high premium placed on the reports of Western so-called election observers is further testimony that foreigners understand the system better than its Kenyan users.
The people are further alienated from the political system by the fact that Western-type elections require massive finances—for campaigns (posters, rallies and media advertisements, among others), requisite fees to the elections management body, an army of agents to guard the vote in polling and tallying centres, and legal fees in case of election petitions. Clearly, the kinds of sums of money needed to run for office are way beyond the reach of most Kenyans, leaving competitive politics almost entirely to the upper middle class. This financially exclusive nature of Kenyan elections becomes clearer when one considers the fact that the law requires any civil servants wishing to run for political offices to resign from their jobs—a move which would spell almost certain financial disaster for most of them.
Disregard of citizens’ voices through majoritarianism and party politics
Contrary to the majoritarian Western liberal democratic orientation, respect for the voices of citizens means that no citizen expresses his/her view in vain—that every view counts. Even John Stuart Mill, that great defender of liberal democracy, distinguished between true democracy in which all are represented, and false democracy in which only the majority is represented. Yet in a majoritarian system such as Kenya’s, the voices of minorities are disregarded, as the winner-takes-all approach remains largely in place despite the Constitution of Kenya 2010. Thus, at the end of the 2022 Presidential Petition at the Supreme Court, Philomena Mwilu, Kenya’s Deputy Chief Justice, correctly observed that while it was fashionable to say that everyone was a winner in the court’s ruling, the truth was that over six million Kenyans were grieved by it.
Kwasi Wiredu highlights the important distinction between formal representation on the one hand, and substantive or decisional representation on the other: “There is the representation of a given constituency in council, and there is the representation of the will of a representative in the making of a given decision.” Wiredu avers that in the latter consensual case, both minority and majority views count, as they are represented not only in council but also in counsel: “. . . the majority prevails not over, but upon, the minority—they prevail upon them to accept the proposal in question, not just to live with it, which is the basic plight of minorities under majoritarian democracy.”
The high premium placed on the reports of Western so-called election observers is further testimony that foreigners understand the system better than its Kenyan users.
Besides, as I illustrated in “Doing Democracy without Party Politics”, the people’s voices, both the majority and the minority, are disregarded in a situation such as Kenya’s in which party leaders and their confidants have sweeping powers over the nomination of candidates to run for political office, and over positions taken by their parties in legislative processes. Recently we have seen parties shift from one coalition to another immediately after elections, which is clearly a move in total disregard of the wishes of those who voted for them on the premise that they belonged to particular coalitions. All this brings to mind David Held’s observation that since the ancient Athenians understood citizenship as participation in public affairs, they would have viewed the limited scope in contemporary politics for active involvement by most citizens as most undemocratic. Thus, as Uchenna Okeja observes, the core of the problem in current African politics is political failure—a specific kind of powerlessness which manifests in the feeling that individuals can do little to change the social and political circumstances shaping their lives, with the result that politics is experienced as meaningless performance.
Perhaps the sense of meaninglessness of politics that Okeja refers to above explains the fact that the voter turn-out has been dwindling in subsequent Kenyan elections. According to the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC), in 2013, 85.91 per cent of the 14,352,533 registered voters took part in the elections. According to the IEBC, out of the 19,611,423 registered voters, 15,145,546 (77.23 per cent) cast their ballots in the annulled 8th August 2017 presidential contest. According to Quartz Africa, the leading two candidates in those elections, then president Uhuru Kenyatta and opposition leader Raila Odinga, received a total of 15 million votes (approximately 76.5 per cent of the registered voters). However, only 6.5 million voters (less than 35 per cent) came out to cast their ballots in the 26th October 2017 repeat presidential election—a figure largely explained by Raila Odinga’s boycotting of the repeat poll.
The voter turn-out in the 2022 general elections was at its lowest in fifteen years (excluding the discredited repeat October 2017 poll). The Standard reported that according to the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS), the number of eligible voters rose by 10.49 per cent from 25,212,096 in 2017 to 27,857,598 in 2022. However, only 22,102,532 of them actually registered as voters, implying that more than 5 million of them did not even register as voters. Of the 22,102,532 who registered, only approximately 14,378,000 (65 per cent) actually cast their ballots, with the youth staying away from the polls. This means that approximately 8 million registered voters did not cast their ballots. Thus, Jakaya Kikwete, former President of Tanzania and leader of the East African Community Observer Mission to the 2022 Kenyan polls, stated: “You expect in every election to have a better voter turnout. So if the voter turnout is lower than in the past elections, then it is a matter of concern.”
Kenya’s Deputy Chief Justice, correctly observed that while it was fashionable to say that everyone was a winner in the court’s ruling, the truth was that over six million Kenyans were grieved by it.
There are those who believe that if one did not cast one’s vote, one has no right to complain when things go wrong in the governance of the country. This reasoning is faulty on at least three grounds. First, it suggests that a person who refrains from voting forfeits his/her citizenship—a patently false proposition in view of the fact that citizenship is acquired by birth, not by voting. Second, the reasoning is faulty because even those who do not vote pay taxes, and therefore have a right to comment on how their hard-earned money is spent. Third, with the serious lack of internal democracy in the political parties, many of the candidates nominated to run for office are largely imposed on the people, and as such the people have a right to refrain from endorsing them. Those who refrain from voting are saying that there is something pathologically wrong with the electoral process, and this is a message worth taking most seriously.
Obstacle to the pursuit of the common good
In his Politics, Aristotle memorably avered that human beings form states to jointly pursue the highest good. However, because liberal democracy is founded on the individualist values of capitalism, both the candidates and the voters go into elections with their personal interests rather than those of the country in mind. In a culturally plural country such as Kenya, and especially with the communalistic outlook of many of its peoples, the focus is usually on the perceived collective interests of the voters’ cultural groups fired on by cultural elites with rallying calls such as “It’s our Turn to Eat”. The result is that what is touted as an exercise to identify leaders for the good of the country is simply what Basil Davidson refers to as “a dogfight for the spoils of political power”—and a dogfight it is, with devastating consequences to life, limb and property, as graphically illustrated by the near-cataclysm of the Kenyan 2007/2008 post-election crisis.
Obstacle to citizen solidarity
By “citizen solidarity”, I refer to the feeling among compatriots that regardless of their divergent opinions, they belong to the same political project. Such solidarity is usually undergirded by moral values, especially justice and equity. However, even without the ravages of elections, citizen solidarity is shaky in Kenya’s multi-cultural society, which, like most other countries in Africa today, was forcefully cobbled together to serve colonial purposes. The British colonisers demeaningly referred to our various peoples first as “tribes”, and lately as “ethnic groups”, a matter on which Kalundi Serumaga sheds precious light. Elsewhere I have shown that while official census records indicate that Kenya is home to just over forty distinct peoples, the real number is well over seventy, with many of them condemned to official invisibility by the British colonial endeavours to consolidate groups that, by and large, had some cultural similarities—a practice that subsequent independent Kenyan governments have almost invariably continued to pursue.
Those who refrain from voting are saying that there is something pathologically wrong with the electoral process, and this is a message worth taking most seriously.
Ishbel Matheson correctly observes that in calmer times, cultural differences are a source of humour among Kenyans. However, as I have discussed elsewhere, more often than not, Kenyan politicians, like their counterparts in most other culturally plural post-colonial polities in Africa, engage in nationalist rhetoric while creating political cleavage along cultural lines, leading to the violation of the rights of non-dominant cultural groups to meaningful political participation, equitable economic opportunities, cultural identity, and secession. This situation results in an on-going lack of legitimacy in these polities, thereby exposing them to perpetual neo-colonial domination. The gross marginalisation of cultural minorities is amply illustrated by the fact that if a Kenyan from a minority such as the Ogiek, El Molo or Pokomo with a desire to see one of their own become president were to vote consistently in elections from the age of 18 to the age of 83, he/she would have voted fourteen times with an extremely slim chance of his/her preferred candidate winning the presidency, thereby aggravating his/her sense of exclusion from the polity.
What is more, in a bid to present themselves as more suitable for office than their competitors, contestants hurl insults and dubious or blatantly false accusations at their opponents. In a chapter in my recently published edited volume, Africa beyond Liberal Democracy cited earlier, Emmanuel Ifeanyi Ani observes that the verbal aggression in the contest for power in multi-party politics threatens the very foundations of peace, especially since empirical studies indicate that physical aggression is frequently preceded by verbal aggression. The feeble calls for the country to come together after the elections, usually made by whoever is declared winner, cannot match the effects of the vitriolic attacks traded by competitors for two to three years before the polls.
The citizen solidarity deficit in Kenya is further eroded by the belief, deeply entrenched in a sizeable proportion of the population, that elections favour those with access to state power. Indeed, during the Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel arap Moi regimes, personnel from the provincial administration who reported directly to the president doubled up as returning officers, to the great advantage of the president and his cronies. Even after this practice was shelved, the president continued to have wide latitude in the appointment of the commissioners of the now defunct Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK) which pushed the country to the edge of the precipice during the 2007 elections. The establishment of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) following the discredited 2007 elections was an attempt at addressing this anomaly, but the president continues to enjoy considerable latitude in the appointment of its commissioners.
Consequently, whereas in all liberal democracies incumbency affords considerable advantage to a contestant, the situation in Kenya is made much worse by the longstanding perception that the electoral process itself is routinely tilted to favour the incumbent or whoever an outgoing incumbent prefers. Thus, in the run-up to the 2007 elections, a senior member of the Kibaki family declared that every president occupies the office for ten years, suggesting that there was no way Kibaki could lose his bid for a second term. Similarly, during the campaigns for the 2017 elections, a politician declared that there was no way their side could lose the polls because they were already in government, and because they had won the 2013 polls while out of government. Besides, in the run-up to the 2022 elections, another politician declared that their coalition was bound to win because “the system” was on their side.
The citizen solidarity deficit in Kenya is further eroded by the belief, deeply entrenched in a sizeable proportion of the population, that elections favour those with access to state power.
It is therefore no wonder that all the presidential elections held since the promulgation of the Constitution of Kenya 2010 have been challenged at the country’s Supreme Court, with contestants typically seeking to outdo each other in casting their opponents in unfavourable light in the full glare of the electronic and print media, thereby further eroding the shaky sense of solidarity among the country’s peoples. It is also not surprising that since 2007, the side declared to have lost has called for electoral reforms after every election. Yet much more needed than electoral reforms is an atmosphere of trust that can only be nurtured where fair play is the order of the day, not simply with regard to electoral laws and regulations. Thus Western-type liberal democratic elections in an atmosphere of mistrust and hostility have consistently reinforced the solidarity deficit among Kenya’s various peoples.
Cause of instability
Due to the foregoing considerations, Kenya lives under the shadow of political instability arising from the discontentment of those declared to have lost elections. Thus, according to a Kenya National Commission on Human Rights report, following the contested 2007 elections, approximately 1,500 Kenyans were killed, over 400,000 displaced, and an unknown number of women raped. Among the grotesque displays of violence motivated by politicised ethnicity were the Kiambaa church burning in Eldoret where 35 Kikuyus were killed, the burning of a house in Naivasha where 19 Luos were killed, the forcible circumcision of Luo men in Naivasha and parts of Central, Nairobi and Rift Valley Provinces, and Police shootings in several places, including Kisumu and Kericho. Besides, along with a number of people killed or wounded after the 2017 elections, there were economic boycotts, as well as calls for secession that threatened to plunge the country into all-out civil war.
Thus, soon after the dust settles on every Kenyan election cycle since the restoration of multi-party politics in late 1991, economic activity in the country picks up with the attendant optimism, only to plummet as the next polls approach. Clearly, the instability engendered by elections in Kenya is more than the desirable deliberative kind that produces positive change, for it threatens the very core of the polity.
Which way forward?
Several theorists from Africa have proposed alternatives to liberal democracy with its emphasis on general elections on the continent. Kwasi Wiredu prescribes a no-party consensual democracy to mitigate the ills of majoritarianism and institutionalised divisions. In a world in which liberal democracy enjoys an almost hegemonic status, many today might find Wiredu’s prescription odd. However, David Held informs us that while the citizens’ assembly in ancient Athens sometimes resorted to voting to settle intractable matters, it aimed at unanimity (Greek homonoia) in the belief that problems could only be resolved correctly in the common interest: “. . . the ideal remained consensus, and it is not clear that even a majority of issues was put to the vote”.
For Uchenna Okeja, public deliberation is the only way to effectively navigate the current political situation in Africa “where ambiguities and confusions exist regarding the ends of politics and the purpose of the state”. He is of the view that this will help to recover the agency of the individual eroded by the imposition of Western modes of governance on the peoples of Africa.
In Africa beyond Liberal Democracy, David Ngendo Tshimba warns against prioritising general elections in post-conflict societies such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Emefiena Ezeani proposes a pyramidal co-operative collegial democracy which dispenses with general elections, while I argue for ethnically-based federations to mitigate the trauma of colonial consolidation that continues to cause significant discontentment in culturally-plural countries in Africa. Let the discourse continue!
