Elections and the Politics of Participatory Democracy in Africa

Abstract

Election is a process to recruit political leadership, gauge popular preference, and demand responsible and responsive leadership. Participatory democracy refers to the nature of political system that allows for healthy disputations, debate and dissenting views on issues in the public domain. The governance process is a power relation where social groups struggle to impact on the policy domain, public choice and appropriation. It becomes involving when the public domain is accessible, democratised, empowering, and enabling of contending ideas. Election is thus a critical aspect in participatory politics and assists to deepen the democratic space. This article is a critique of the electoral process in Uganda, Nigeria and Zimbabwe. It identifies the monetisation of politics, one party hegemony and lopsided representative system as inhibiting factors to expanding the democratic space. The work adopts a comparative approach to identifying and accounting for the histo-political trajectories of the identified states, their similarities and dissimilarities, and the potentials for inter state transfer of political experiences. This research identifies the centrality of the state in the electoral process, the perception of a prejudice state particularly by the opposition, the perception of politics as warfare and the state as arena of conflict. The work identifies the pervasive nature of economic crisis in the region as serious threat to participatory democracy. It argues that the region should deal with its economic underdevelopment and correlating poverty to reduce the repressive nature of the state, engender popular economic empowerment and ownership of the public space.

Lagos Historical Review Vol. 7 2007: pp. 94-104