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This book compares the constitutional justice institutions in 16 West African states and analyses the diverse ways in which these institutions render justice and promote democratic development. There is no single best approach: different legal traditions tend to produce different design options. It also seeks to facilitate mutual learning and understanding among countries in the region, especially those with different legal systems, in efforts to frame a common West African system. The authors analyse a broad spectrum of issues related to constitutional justice institutions in West Africa. While navigating technical issues such as competence, composition, access, the status of judges, the authoritative power of these institutions and their relationship with other institutions, they also take a novel look at analogous institutions in pre-colonial Africa with similar functions, as well as the often-taboo subject of the control and accountability of these institutions.
The effective division of powers is critical to ensuring the promotion of good governance, democracy, and the rule of law in Africa. This book examines key issues arising during reforms of African constitutions, and focuses on the emergence of independent constitutional institutions providing checks against future abuses of powers.
The global movement toward democracy, spurred in part by the ending of the cold war, has created opportunities for democratization not only in Europe and the former Soviet Union, but also in Africa. This book is based on workshops held in Benin, Ethiopia, and Namibia to better understand the dynamics of contemporary democratic movements in Africa. Key issues in the democratization process range from its institutional and political requirements to specific problems such as ethnic conflict, corruption, and role of donors in promoting democracy. By focusing on the opinion and views of African intellectuals, academics, writers, and political activists and observers, the book provides a unique perspective regarding the dynamics and problems of democratization in Africa.
Ghana, the torch bearer of African Independence from the yoke of colonial bondage, has been pushed to the background from its earlier pre-eminent position in international as well as African affairs. Since independence, Ghana has experienced diverse forms of Government and has almost run out of models for governing herself. Instead of providing leadership to the underdeveloped countries of Africa, Ghana is busy in its quest for evolving a stable and workable political system. In its effort to evolve a stable political system and an operational constitution capable of providing steady economic progress and social upliftment. Ghana has experimented west-minister style parliamentary system, a Single Party Republic and many military regimes following coups and counter coups. Like many of the developing states of Africa, Ghana has been plagued with post-independence political instability. Civilians as well as military governments have been installed with initial enthusiasm but so far none has been able to solve the pressing problems. In fact the quest for a permanent solution to what appears a persistent governmental crisis, has invited many coups and counter coups. It addresses and analyses the maladies that has afflicted the Ghanaian body politic.
Swaziland—recently renamed Eswatini—is the only nation-state in Africa with a functioning indigenous political system. Elsewhere on the continent, most departing colonial administrators were succeeded by Western-educated elites. In Swaziland, traditional Swazi leaders managed to establish an absolute monarchy instead, qualified by the author as benevolent and people-centred, a system which they have successfully defended from competing political forces since the 1970s. This book is the first to study the constitutional history of this monarchy. It examines its origins in the colonial era, the financial support it received from white settlers and apartheid South Africa, and the challenges it faced from political parties and the judiciary, before King Sobhuza II finally consolidated power in 1978 with an auto-coup d’état. As Hlengiwe Dlamini shows, the history of constitution-making in Swaziland is rich, complex, and full of overlooked insight for historians of Africa.
Questions surrounding democracy, governance, and development especially in the view of Africa have provoked acrimonious debates in the past few years. It remains a perennial question why some decades after political independence in Africa the continent continues experiencing bad governance, lagging behind socioeconomically, and its democracy questionable. We admit that a plethora of theories and reasons, including iniquitous and malicious ones, have been conjured in an attempt to explain and answer the questions as to why Africa seems to be lagging behind other continents in issues pertaining to good governance, democracy and socio-economic development. Yet, none of the theories and reasons proffered so far seems to have provided enduring solutions to Africa’s diverse complex problems and predicaments. This book dissects and critically examines the matrix of Africa’s multifaceted problems on governance, democracy and development in an attempt to proffer enduring solutions to the continent’s long-standing political and socio-economic dilemmas and setbacks.
This book offers a series of new studies on the dynamics of political and legal culture as well as of conflict management in contemporary Africa, taking inspiration from and honoring the scholarly contributions and impact of Prof. Gerti Hesseling (1946-2009) in African Studies.
This book provides the first comprehensive overview of the history of democracy in Africa and explains why the continent's democratic experiments have so often failed, as well as how they could succeed. Nic Cheeseman grapples with some of the most important questions facing Africa and democracy today, including whether international actors should try and promote democracy abroad, how to design political systems that manage ethnic diversity, and why democratic governments often make bad policy decisions. Beginning in the colonial period with the introduction of multi-party elections and ending in 2013 with the collapse of democracy in Mali and South Sudan, the book describes the rise of authoritarian states in the 1970s; the attempts of trade unions and some religious groups to check the abuse of power in the 1980s; the remarkable return of multiparty politics in the 1990s; and finally, the tragic tendency for elections to exacerbate corruption and violence.