In 2022, according to the Report on Democracy Index elaborated by The Economist Intelligence Unit, more than 35% of all countries in the world were considered authoritarian regimes, and only 14.4% were full democracies (EIU, 2022).
Among the 10 worst countries in terms of democracy, four were African and six Asian. Among the first 40 most democratic countries of the world just two are African countries: Botswana and Cape Verde.
One of the greatest problems in African politics is how to change an incumbent party and regime.
According to Ake (2000), there is a doubt regarding African crisis of democracy: it is the process of development which leads to democracy or is it the other way around?
The failure of the African economic pattern weakens the ability to think and acting autonomously. Therefore, the economic, political, and cultural systems do not change.
In fact, democracy in Africa tends to lose its transformative potential: It does not produce strong and stable institutions, but only “strong men”.
This contradiction includes not only authoritarian regimes, such as the Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea or e-Swatini; in the last few years such a tendency also increased in countries whose constitutions are formally democratic: Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Conakry, and Guinea-Bissau represent only some examples of this democratic regression.
Thus, when a political change becomes impossible through the instruments of the democratic game, other factors prevail.
First, violence increases, particularly related to the formation of terrorist groups in various parts of the continent.
The Sahel transformed itself into the most critical area for the presence of alleged Islamic terrorism; nevertheless, some scholars think that the roots of this violence must be related to internal factors like exclusion, marginalization, and discrimination of local people rather than to the direct action of Islamic terrorist groups.
Then, the dissolution of the Westphalian nation-state system in many African countries could explain an insurgency which found in an extreme idea of Islam its practical configuration (Edgerly, 2023).
In a country like Mozambique, a similar process has occurred since 2017: once again, its roots have to be found in historical mechanisms of exclusion and marginalization by the central state in detriment of peripheral populations (such as Amakhuwa), which represent the majority of the Mozambican people (Bussotti and Nhaueleque, 2022); the practical impossibility, for the political oppositions, to gain regular elections against Frelimo, the incumbent party since the political independence, in 1975, represents another, important reason to explain continuous and serious manifestations of violence in that country.
If political change is not possible through democratic tools, in many cases, parts of African societies manage to carry out changes in other forms.
Besides terrorism, or violent riots, one of the preferred ways is the coup d'etat. Generally, the position of the international community before a coup d'etat is to condemn it and to ask for the restoration of the previous institutional order.
There are many types of coups d'etat, and it is impossible here to illustrate all their typologies; nevertheless, some of them are a response to authoritarian regimes or, in recent years (as in the case of Guinea-Conakry with Alpha Condé), to a “institutional” coup d'etat. It means that the incumbent president passes constitutional reforms to extend his or, more rarely, her power beyond the limits permitted by law.
A Guest Editorial