Deconstructing Africa’s 'Pseudo-democracies'
A conversation with Adelaja Odukoya
On Friday 26th and Saturday 27th June, 2023, I had the privilege alongside over two dozen young workers drawn from about 20 affiliate unions of the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) and the Trade Union Congress (TUC) and some civil society organisations (CSOs) - who are part of the 2023 cohort of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Young Workers Program - to sit down with Adelaja Odukoya for a critical reflection on the subjects of politics, statism, power, democracy and ideology. Adelaja is a radical unionist and academic, and also, by the way, a professor and proud "Akokite". I mustn’t forget to mention that Remi Ihejirika, the programme officer for the young workers program, as well as Ayodele Olaosebikan and Kelvin Ayemhenre were expectedly with us to together with the comrade academic facilitate the intellectual - and stomach - nourishment of the young workers.
A definition of the state which stood out profoundly for me during the conversation was that of the Marxist perspective which sees 'the state as the product and manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonism’. This definition exposes the fact that the state, to the extent that it is ultimate seat of power, maintains order which promotes the interests of the ruling class in the long run.
In defining politics, Adelaja quoted Harrods Lasswell who describes it as the process of deciding "who gets what, when and how of society’s limited resources". This aligns with my initial understanding of politics which I have described as the process of deciding by what rule and by whom the society is governed.
The conversation reaffirmed that democracy in its true sense is about protecting and advancing the interests of the people as a collective - and not the interest of a small sect as the case in authoritarian regimes. Democracy is fundamentally the expression of the will of the people, as brother and friend, HT Soweto loves to put it. As it became more obvious during the conversation around social ideologies and philosophies, democracy is advanced by people with progressive ideologies. Individuals with ideologies that make them unable to correctly apprehend reality cannot help build a more democratic, more just, more humane world.
Perhaps for my Pan-Africanist background, the most striking part of the conversation for me was the concluding part which was dedicated to deconstructing what the professor describes as the "pseudo-democracies' that we have in Africa. In his words, what we have today in Africa is what can simply be described as democratic absurdity, as it is simply absurd that the majority of African nations have leaders who are bad representations of what democracy should be. Or how else do we describe sit tight leaders that we still have in Africa, people who want to die in office?
As noted by Adelaja, in places where we say we have democracy, it is usually paternalistic. The Buhari and Obasanjo examples can easily be cited. Obasanjo, just like Buhari, was popularly addressed as "baba" in the popular press, which shows the paternalistic nature of our democracy, in which people believe they have to submit to those they perceive to be above them. This explains why those who hold power think that they are doing the people a favour whenever they have to concede to the people’s demands.
But are elective positions properties of anybody’s father in a democracy? African leaders, as it was revealed during the conversation, have the mindset that they are entitled to occupy the seats of government. This was particularly evidenced by the election that brought in Nigeria’s current president, Bola Tinubu, whose first campaign slogan was "Emilokan", which translates as it is my turn.
In a truly democratic state, the people decides by whom they will be ruled. African leaders instead don’t believe the people have the agency to determine who should be their leaders, so that they have to exercise that agency by proxy for and on behalf of the people.
"Democracy is supposed to be about the people, but here we are having democracy without the people. That is problematic!" Adelaja emphasized. He went further to note how the African democratic experience is more of warfare, and election is a zero-sum game. "The do or die syndrome is a contestation of the people’s agency."
It thus became convenient to assert that in Africa, given the characterization that have been given, there really are no democrats amongst those who occupy the seats of government. "Democrats accept that losing one election is not the end of politics or of life, that there will be another time; they recognise that if they are rejected today they could be accepted tomorrow. What we have as political leaders in Africa in essence are what may be called "militaricians", and these are civilians with military pathologies"
This, he made obvious with the explanation that within the military mechanism every opposition is an enemy that must be destroyed, as they are trained to conquer and subdue. There is no consensus, simply "obey no complain". So although African politicians wear civilian regalia, they are are actually military men - yes, nearly all men -at heart.
The absurdity of the African democracy was further further exposed when the conversation touched on the critical place of free press and free judiciary in a democracy. It was noted that there cannot be democracy without free press and free judiciary. In Africa the judiciary is instead in the pocket of the executive. This, obviously, is why the ruling class are quick to say "go to court" because they know that the court is no longer the temple of justice, rather it has become the temple of injustice.
Looking at all the parameters even within the context of liberal democracies, African states do not even measure up. The closest we have to anything democratic in Africa, as the facilitator pointed out, is in Botswana.
A conversation on decocracy in Africa will be incomplete without noting that we were not introduced to democracy by the European colonialists. Colonialism, as it well known, is domination by foreign power. It was noted that in Africa there are examples of both settler and non-settler colonialism. But essentially all colonialism is about exploitation.
Substantial amount of time was dedicated to pointing out that governance during colonialism was arbitrary and autocratic; and it in fact was authoritarianism, contrary to the popular euro-centric narrative that presents colonization as a civilizing mission. So it was emphasized that colonialism was nothing but economic exploitation.
So it became obvious, that the colonial African state, even though not created like the European state, as it was created by external force which is the colonial power so that the colonialist can continue to opress the colonies and exploit their resources. The state is by its constitution anti-people, anti-democratic and exploitative.
The conversation went further to reveal that while independence was supposedly given to the colonies at certain period in history, the state that was put in place was not smashed, it was merely inherited. Adelaja illustrated this with a machine which used to produce some sweat and after many years the machine is handed over to another user. Even after handing it over, he pointed out, the machine will continue to produce the same product, except it is seriously reconfigured.
With this analogy and preceding exposition it was established that the states that we still have in Africa are colonial states, and no miracle can be expected from this states, as they were not created to produce anything good. The Nigerian state for instance was created in 1914 to exploit and subjugate the people. At independence, what we had was that the operator of the state changed, but the structure and everything about the state never changed. The colonial state is what we still have today across Africa. That state as it has been shown is undemocratic, and that is why the citizens confront the state as an extractive machine, as an instrument of force. And that is why the police brutalize citizens and any uniformed man oppress the citizens.
The concluding point of this conversation was to expose how the people who operate the African colonial states today are not in control of the means of production. They are simply individuals who leverage political power to get some economic power. For Adelaja, these individuals are commission agents who serve two masters; they serve some foreign masters who put them in charge and yet they have to service themselves, yet the people are also making demands, thereby necessitating the need for the people to be suppressed. That is the sad logic of the undemocratic system in African colonial states.
For the radical academic, as for other folks present, for this machine that used to produce some product to produce something else, it has to be totally reconfigure. For me, the whole machine must be condemned and something new that can ensure that African no longer need to flee her country to suffer racism and xenophobia elsewhere has to be used to replace it. The decolonisation quest must be completed!
