Popular Struggles for Democracy and Crises of Transitions in Africa

The paper brings to focus mis-presentation of civil society groups' struggles for multi-party democracy in Africa as the only entry point into understanding the struggles for democracy by the African peoples. Popular uprising against dictators, ethnic militia violence, popular rejections of election results are forms of popular struggles for genuine democracy that are yet to be given sufficient attention in our discourses of popular struggles for democracy in Africa. This error seems to be a product of post-Cold War neo-liberal discourse of democracy, which tends to 'emasculate democracy of its social and historical dimensions; and presents it as an ultimate nirvana'. The paper deconstructs this trend and follows up with an explanation of how such trend created crises of transitions; and how the African states have attempted at coping with these crises. The central argument in the paper is that although democratic transitions in most post-independence Africa remains endangered; there is nothing that makes democracy un-African or makes Africans ungovernable. The major set-back for democracy in the continent is its failure to evolve from the grains of its best-fit values but the imported 'best-practice' principles of the grand theories.