| Preface Economic reform and liberal democracy have emerged as the dominant
ideas shaping the political and economic structures of countries in the last two decades
of the twentieth century. Starting haltingly in the mid-1970s, democracy had triumphed by
the end of the 1980s in practically all the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean.
There has also been a swift movement toward democratic régimes in Asia though several
countries, especially in South-East Asia, have continued to resist the democratizing
trend. The closing years of the 1980s witnessed a dramatic fall of communist régimes in
most countries of East and Central Europe and their replacement by fledgling democracies.
It is in Africa and the Middle East that the democratic movement has made the slowest
progress.
The last few years have, however, been marked by intense
struggles for democratic reform in several African countries and the 1990s are likely to
be the decade for transition to democracy in a growing number of African countries. In
this highly topical study, Yusuf Bangura tackles the profoundly important and complex
questions of the foundations and determinants of authoritarianism and democracy in Africa.
The paper addresses itself to such questions as: How does one explain the persistence of
authoritarian and military rules in a large number of African countries? What are the key
processes involved in the transition from authoritarian and military régimes to civilian
and democratic ones? What are the structural pre-conditions for sustenance of democratic
systems in African countries? What are the implications of economic crisis and structural
adjustment for the prospects of democracy in the continent?
A good deal of the mushrooming literature on this subject
tends to focus on the political dimensions of democracy – the multi-party system,
free elections and civil rights. And few analysts are able to resist the tendency to
transplant in its entirety to Africa the democratic model as it has emerged in the West
over decades. One of the strengths of Bangura's approach is that democratic struggles are
placed within the wider social and economic context and the analysis is rooted in the
institutional and historical reality of the region. The paper argues that it is the forms
of accumulation interacting with a number of socio-economic variables which mainly
determine the nature of the dominant political system.
The author identifies three dominant patterns of
accumulation as transnational capitalist production, rent-seeking capitalism and petty
commodity production. It is the strength or weakness of these patterns interacting with
variables such as rural-urban integration, welfare services, social system and state-civil
society relations which ultimately determine the shape of the political régime. In the
last part of the paper, Bangura applies the above model to the Nigerian experience with
focus on structural adjustment and democratization, demilitarization and civil
governmental authority, civil society and the state and the democratization of the rules
of competition.
This paper forms part of the ongoing work in the United
Nations Research Institute for Social Development on the social and political dynamics of
economic crisis and structural adjustment and more generally of its work on participation,
democracy and development. Yusuf Bangura is a Research Fellow at the Institute with
responsibility for the UNRISD project on Crisis, Adjustment and Social Change in Africa.
Previously, he taught Political Economy at the Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria and was
a Research Associate at the AKUT programme at Uppsala University in Sweden.
| March 1991 |
Dharam Ghai |
|
Director |
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