Constitutional democracy bequeathed us by Britain has failed. But we have nothing to replace it with
Ekow Nelson
Across former European colonies particularly in Africa, constitutional democracy was introduced as the system of governance at the fag-end of colonial rule. Western style constitutional democracy did not exist in Africa prior to colonisation and the colonisers themselves did not govern their colonies based on the principles of constitutional democracy – there were no elections, no parliament and only an executive branch to administer treaties and agreements on behalf of the monarch. Even where local courts existed to settle disputes, the final Court of Appeal was, in the case of Britain at least, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council appointed by the monarch in far away England- a vestigial relic that still operates in remaining British overseas territories in the Caribbean and elsewhere.
Africans, no matter how educated in the ways of the European elite, had no prior experience of the system of government they were force-handed at independence. Systems of governments are not invented overnight; they are part of the cultural fabric of how societies are organised and evolve over time. The history of the colonial powers themselves is testament to this.
The system of government in Britain today has its roots in Oliver Cromwell and the ‘Wars of the Three Kingdoms’ – of Roundheads and Cavaliers. France’s democratic history may be more recent but with antecedents in the storming of the Bastille in 1789 when the Ancien Régime of Louis XIV was overthrown. Germany has only existed as a nation-state since Otto von Bismarck brought together the kingdoms of Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony and Württemberg along with the Grand Duchies and Duchies, principalities, and three Hanseatic cities, including Bremen and Hamburg, in the late nineteenth century. Still, its federal structures and fierce independent identities of its constituent city states (Stadtstaaten) from Schleswig-Holstein in the north to Bavaria in the south, closely resemble the Bishoprics of the Holy Roman Empire from which they emerged.
The evidence shows that successful systems of government emerge from within and are a culmination of years of internal struggle, disagreements, conflicts (some of them tribal and ethnic) and the compromises and resolutions to these are what shape the settled status we call systems of governance.
For over one hundred years neither the British nor the French (or indeed the Portuguese, Belgians or Germans) administered their colonies in Africa based on the system we call constitutional democracy. Yet it has become an article of faith that this is the most appropriate system of government for post-independent Africa.
Apologists for empire argue that the legacy of constitutional democracy bequeathed us by Britain is one of the crowning achievements of empire because many / all of us continue to govern our countries on that basis. Except it isn’t working! From war-torn Sierra Leone to war-weary Ivory Coast, impoverished Togo and Benin, to Ghana and Nigeria both mired knee-deep in corruption with impunity, our constitutional democratic experiment is failing and it certainly isn’t delivering for the people. And yet our elite revel in interminable debates about articles, clauses and subsections in our constitutions, drafted by people we grandly refer to as ‘framers’.
When leaders of the 13 states came together to form the union of American States, they did so with the express wish to design something new that would subsume what existed prior. In that sense they were not just ‘framing’ a document, they were architecting a new nation state that would not only replace George III and his empire, but one that integrated and bound the existing states into a new federal union to which everyone owed allegiance.
We instead bolted an imported system of governance on to our complex and varied age-old traditional systems held together by a document many ordinary people can’t read and certainly don’t understand. Writing a constitution does not make a nation or a republic. It is a paper exercise that has failed to bridge the gulf between the principles it set out and the actual reality of the structure and needs of our society and of competing loyalties and allegiances.
The truth is our small band of western educated elite who authored and administered our western constitutions have no first hand knowledge of how it should work in practice, beyond legal showboating, nor are they invested in its success. On the contrary, they are experts in exploiting the extraordinary powers it confers on rulers for their own ends – to ‘chop’ and to loot – rather than develop and improve! We lack the institutional, muscle memory and habit-forming norms embedded in the alien democratic culture imposed on us and failed to adapt to our realities.
Successful ex-colonies like Singapore managed the experiment better; they adapted what they inherited for their local circumstances, jettisoning the parts they believed were not fit for purpose. In a speech to the Singapore Law Society in 1962, Lee Kuan Yew set out the challenge faced by ex-colonies who absorb without question, the constitutional and legal precepts of the colonial master. He said: “There is a gulf between the principles of the rule of law distilled to its essence in the background of peaceful 19th century England, and its actual practice in contemporary Britain. The gulf is even wider between the principle and its practical application in the hard realities of the social and economic conditions of Malaya. You will have to bridge the gulf between the ideal principle and its practice in our given sociological and economic milieu. For if the forms are not adapted and principles not adjusted to meet our own circumstances but blindly applied, it may be to our undoing.”
Lee Kuan Yew’s party has dominated the politics of Singapore since independence with most of the opposition crushed. Of its three Premiers since independence in 1965 two are from the same family – father Lee and son Lee Hsien Loong*. LKY also delivered a prosperous nation that is the envy of the world with almost no natural resources other than being in a strategic maritime location and as a beachhead for the emerging economic super power of the twenty-first century that is China.
In 1971 when British Prime Minister Edward Heath informed the Trucial Sheikhdoms of what is now the United Arab Emirates, that Britain was ending the treaty with Bhahrain and Qatar, that it could no longer afford to offer them the protection it had over the years, it came as a lightning bolt from nowhere to the rulers. As the late Sheikh Zayed of Abu Dhabi said, the decision came as a big shock – all of a sudden, they were left to their own devices. They had no army or any semblance of a civil service and had to create one in short order before the British withdrawal.
Sheikh Zayed calmly gathered the rulers of Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Fujairah, Bhahrain and Qatar to agree on a union because as individual sheikhdoms they knew they could not survive on their own. Building on their traditional forms of governance, they painstakingly stitched together a system of government that wobbled at the beginning (leading to the exit of Qatar and Bahrain who struck out on their own) but has since stood the test of time, admitting Ras Al Khaimah and Umm Al Quwain into the Union along the way.
What they’ve achieved cannot be attributed only to the undoubted vast wealth from the oil of Abu Dhabi. After all Angola and Nigeria and now Ghana, have plenty of oil and it hasn’t helped. Besides we in Africa too are endowed with many natural riches from gold, diamonds to copper and many other resources that have been indispensable to the accumulation of wealth from the success of the industrial and digital revolutions of the past couple centuries.
Much of what these other nations achieved is through human ingenuity and a determination to make the most of what they had and never again to be at the mercy of a foreign power that would leave them unprotected and defenceless in a very volatile region of the world.
We did not get that. Perhaps we are too fractious a people (see neighbouring Ivory Coast for example) to have made the most of that opportunity to determine our own future. We may have ended ethnic rivalry through wars, but residual ethnic tensions (aka tribalism) spilled over into other spheres – in the civil service and armed forces in particular, and have since undermined national unity of the kind one finds in the Gulf countries and south east Asia.
Instead, Ghana has had four constitutions since independence, interrupted by four military regimes and we seem to be going backwards when others have made huge strides forwards in their development. The gulf between our constitution and native systems of governance grows ever wider as we alienate and sideline that which is authentically ours.
The institutional safeguards of the Fourth Republic that should act as a bulwark against impunity have proven powerless and ineffective. Parliament does not hold the executive to account with the two main parties behaving like a cartel, colluding to share in the spoils of power and patronage. There are no guardrails.
The finance minister and his henchmen have all but captured the state and numerous boards of state-owned organisations packed with friends and family, lobbyists and journalists (many with no prior corporate experience) who are sympathetic to the government. The judiciary holds anyone who questions its impartiality in contempt. And our last line of defence, quasi-independent institutions like the Auditor-General and the Office of Special Prosecution, have been emasculated with their former ‘too-known’ heads removed for investigative overreach.
Without being overly dramatic what we have constructed is a Raubwirtschaft (a looting and plunder economy) of the kind that presaged the decline of the western Roman Empire. And there is nowhere to turn as we stare into the abyss of despair, until 2024 when the electorate is called upon again to vote – with the usual inducements.
Herein lies the weakness of the constitutional democracy we were bequeathed – massive impunity with no form of effective accountability between elections while the ship of state sinks. This is clearly intolerable but it is also ominous.
We all know what happened when the western Roman Empire fell; the Barbarians took over and Europe entered the Dark Ages or saeculum obscurum (whose literal translation in English I shall leave to readers to lookup for themselves) as the cardinal historian Caesar Baronius named it.
(c) Ekow Nelson
London, August 2023
* In contrast with Singapore, Ghana has had 12 heads of state since independence in 1957 and only three Asantehenes in that period.
reimagining 