Democracy is not always the answer

Debates on the best form of government remain inexhaustible, despite the profound attempts by scholars to explicate the reverse of the first (1828–1926), second (1962–1976), and third waves (1976–1990) of democracy that, in the past, swept across the world. These periods, with significant democratic gains, witnessed major transitions of states from absolute monarchism, fascism, totalitarianism, and military dictatorship to democracy. An American political scientist, Samuel Huntington, in 1991 identified at least 30 states that experienced transitions to democracy between 1974–1990, and this experience represented a “global democratic revolution” that was expected to reach virtually every state in the world.

By the 1990s, however, these democratic gains were halted by military coups in some states that have previously transited to democracy. These states include Suriname in 1990, Haiti and Thailand in 1991, Sierra Leone in 1992, Gambia in 1994, and Pakistan and Ivory Coast in 1999, following the overthrowing of the democratically elected government of Nawaz Sharif by General Pervez Musharraf and the ousting of President Henry Konan Bedie by a group of soldiers led by Tuo Fozie, respectively. Indeed, the concerns over this democracy in retreat continue unabated, as scholars become more inquisitive about unravelling the obstacles to democratic consolidation in these hitherto democratic states, with emphasis on understanding the factors that tend to promote societies that are both stable and democratic.

The most common factors are electoral process and pluralism, the functioning of government, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties. Besides, education has previously been theorised as a viable factor for promoting stable and democratic societies. Scholars have argued, with testable hypotheses, that education leads to greater political tolerance, increases the likelihood of political participation, and reduces inequality. In view of the obvious need for education to pollinate democracy, citizens in Western societies, to a certain extent, are seen as more politically adept at organising democratic forms of government, but fail to also consolidate other traditional values of what are considered as functioning democracy, such as tolerance, respect, negotiation, and social cohesion.

In fact, every society is governed in the self-interest of a very few power elites. Even in Western societies, democracy has, surreptitiously, been commandeered by a very few often extremely rich political “rogues” who perpetrate injustice at home and abroad. The history of democracy in Western societies, with its strand of liberalism, suggests a system in which the power elites have often placed the sovereignty of the state far above justice for their citizens. With power residing in a very small group at the top of the military, economic, and political system, the state is, indeed, interwoven with the preservation of the interest of this small group, even if it means suffocating its citizens for the sake of combatting external forces that it feels threatened by, a situation frequently witnessed during the Cold War polarisations with regard to the US. There have been instances of agents of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) cremating US citizens in the course of preserving US national interests or orchestrating coups in other sovereign states, based on its noxious “doctrine of containment” to prevent the expansion of global communist influence, such as happened with the army-led overthrow of the democratically elected governments of Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran in 1953, Patrice Lumumba in the DRC in 1961, and Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. It is still material, in my own view, to enthusiastically critique Western oriented Darwinian liberal or neoliberal democratic propaganda that is synonymous with the global capitalist exploitation of the weak and which is the reason for the global diffusion of the culture of corruption, clientelism, and patronage.

This culture of corruption, clientelism and patronage, which is undoubtedly inherent in the Western neoliberal credo, has been handed down through colonialism and inherited by African elites who are perpetually subservient to the whims and caprices of the core Global North elites. No matter whether these African elites succeed in holding elections, they are still seen as failing to legitimise their governments and unable to deliver good governance and effective service to large parts of their populations. Frantz Fanon's “The Wretched of the Earth”, as mentioned by Cosmos and Kitabayashi in 2023, may be viewed as a vital guide both to the tenacity of white supremacy in the West and to the moral Android intellectual failures of the Global South elites. An article by Halford Fairchild in 1994 on Fanon's work emphasised the evil of African elites depending on these core Global North elites for survival and stated that Fanon's conclusion underscores “the importance of this work for African and African American liberation, to be sure; but, more importantly, it challenges Africans throughout the diaspora to assume a leadership position in bringing about a new, more humane world order.”

Since independence in many African states, the indigenous power elites, whether civilian groups or military gangs, have consistently subverted the growth of political empowerment among Africans through a deliberate opaque propaganda machine that has helped them to sustain their dominance in power. Denying Africans education is to subvert their political empowerment, which has resulted in losing their trust in their ability to change their incompetent governments or considering that they can't understand and influence political affairs. This prevailing lack of political enlightenment in African societies has created a poverty of politics among Africans in which many African states are now categorised as “closed” societies. Also, injustice festers in these African states that are “closed” societies, while this injustice is closely monitored and exploited by a still imperial Collective West comfortably pilfering African resources.

It is, therefore, not surprising that Washington, London and Paris are encouraging ECOWAS member states to engage in a military conflict with the military junta that overthrew a civilian government in Niger on July 26, 2023. Paradoxically, rulers of ECOWAS member states, who pretend to be advocates of Western democracy, are also incapable of making democracy deliver. The report of the 2022 research by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) on global democracy index showed that all the regimes in ECOWAS member states have either retrogressed to hybrid regime, authoritarianism, or flawed democracy, with its research being based on five democratic indicators, which include electoral process and pluralism, functioning of government, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties. Mauritius, according to this report, is the only African country that was categorised as a full democracy, having scored reasonable points across the whole range of these democratic indicators.

Furthermore, the study of politics has shifted from institutional approaches to behavioural, based on political inquiry, where we find a new fashion of experimental codification that involves the use of scientific criteria in testing and retesting previously acceptable political hypotheses. One such attempt to explain the paradox of Western democracy is a discussion by Karl Popper in “The Open Society and its Enemies” that was published in 1945. Popper was a political realist who saw many contradictions in the classical theory of democracy (majoritarian rule). These contradictions were similar to what Alexis Tocqueville described as “tyranny of the majority” based on the notion that majorities in a democracy are capable of electing a tyrant. This is a possibility which in some states, for example, would cause national leaders to not hold elections, out of fear that anti-democratic fundamentalist parties could rise to power. In the case of Algeria, the victory of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) in the first round of the 1991 Algerian legislative election was annulled by the army in 1992. The army justified its action on the basis of preventing Algeria from becoming an Islamic state. Popper, himself, in his own observations on Western democracy, concedes that majorities could also vote for an end to democracy, with the examples of the democratically elected governments of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in mind.

In fact, however, perhaps "the people have the right to rule" is a misunderstanding of the reality of Western democracy where, even today, elections are merely used as a means of control of a potential work force that is exploited to satisfy every whim, military or otherwise, of the ruling class. This misunderstanding is a practical reference to the illusion of majoritarian rule, which contradicts the old held Abraham Lincoln's dictum of democracy as “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” Wayne Norman noted, in a study entitled “A Democratic Theory for a Democratising World: A Re-assessment of Popper's Political Realism,” that Popper's work reminds us of a wide range of frustrating moral and political dilemmas that are yet to be resolved when we contemplate that “despotism is no longer acceptable but democracy is not quite possible.” And, in fact, in the so-called democratic West, democracy has enabled the gap between poor and rich to grow to obscene levels, where one percent of the population in the US, for instance, now owns 50 percent of that country's GDP. In a protest against this wide economic divide in the US, Oliver Anthony sang the “Rich Men North of Richmond” to decry “the fat cats who would take advantage of the working man.” Also in China, democratic practise is nothing but unapologetic dictates of one party communist politburo, with reference to Orwellian “1984” book which depicts a society where civil liberty and human rights are heavily suppressed. The problem is that political theories were developed to justify the means of exploitation rather than to address the core issue of exploitation, itself.

For a good reason, the study of politics is an existential necessity in understanding the place of people in a society. Socrates, in his analysis of politics and society, was, essentially, preoccupied with the meaning of justice in relation to virtue and happiness. Plato's Republic emphasised the pursuit of justice, virtue, and happiness as the basic ideals for every political community. The political community conceived by Aristotle was the one that fostered virtue and happiness for all citizens.

By asking this age old question again about which human societies provide optimal happiness for their citizens, and whether they might be theocracies, monarchies, feudal aristocracies, or political systems controlled by technologically driven predatory capitalism, Francis Fukuyama in 1989 presented the concept of a historical evolution of human societies leading toward the “end of history” in which mankind would achieve “a form of society that satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings.” For Hegel, the end of history was the attainment of a liberal state, while for Marx, it was the eventual enthronement of a communist state. However, history has shown that no system of political organisation has ever given “peace and prosperity” equal recognition with the other concerns of contemporary Western neoliberal democracy.

The conclusion is quite simple. No matter whether “primitive” or “advanced,” “traditional” or “modern,” the most important concern for any society should be governmental virtue—having a system of government populated by people of good character.

Hakeem Sule, PhD
Director of Academic Planning, Development
and Quality Assurance
Foreign Links Institution, Ile-Ife, Nigeria.

Hikaru Kitabayashi, PhD
Professor Emeritus of English Language.
Daito Bunka University, Tokyo, Japan.