The Hazards of Democratic Backsliding in Africa
Authors: Matlosa Khabele 
Published: February 2025

The 1990s political transitions in Africa, propelled primarily by the end of the Cold War globally and the demise of apartheid in Southern Africa, triggered enormous optimism about the continent’s democratization. However, this optimism dissipated and was later replaced by a sense of pessimism heralded by democratic backsliding since the mid-2000s. While the 1990s transitions reinforced democratization, the transition since the mid-2000s is whittling the vitality of democracy globally and in Africa specifically. There is neither a totally perfect nor a totally imperfect democracy. Thus, democracy is always a work in progress. It is constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed at various historical moments. Therefore, the most constant feature of a democratic process is “transition” either forward (toward what in the literature is termed consolidation) or backward toward autocracy. Between democracy and autocracy is the state of anocracy (hybridity, gray zone, or illiberal regimes). The democratic backsliding in Africa tends to drive most countries in this category of hybridity where they are neither completely democratic nor completely autocratic.

The structural drivers of democratic backsliding are many and varied, chief among which is the crisis of the state, which, in turn, denudes legitimacy of governments. A dominant feature of democratic backsliding is the whittling of institutions of democracy as an existential strategy by the elites. It is under conditions of weak institutions in the context of anocracy that democratic backsliding thrives. The five main specific triggers of democratic backsliding include military coups, executive coups, diminishing electoral integrity, an entrenched culture of violence, and the contradictory role of social media. Its deleterious effects include a strained state–society compact and an enfeebled social cohesion.

Africa may not completely reverse democratic backsliding short of a transformative agenda that would overhaul the entire democratic edifice in place. The model in use in Africa is the liberal democracy that was bequeathed to the continent by the former colonial masters as they departed around the late 1950s and early 1960s as part of decolonization, which ushered in political independence and self-government. Despite political independence, Africa has not yet transformed its democratic model to better suit its own peculiar sociocultural and politico-economic contexts. Such transformation is required and calls for rethinking, reimagining, and recalibrating African democracy beyond its current liberal incarnation. Africa needs a kind of democracy that transcends liberalism and embraces developmentalism to better address socioeconomic challenges, such as underdevelopment, poverty, hunger, and inequality, while guaranteeing civil liberties and political rights. Unless democracy concretely improves lives and livelihoods of African citizens, and not just those of the political elites, it will remain shallow and hollow. Democracy, of necessity, ought to facilitate the protection and promotion of the right to development.