Comparative Cultural Democracy: the key to development in Africa

By Daniel T. Osabu-Kle

Publisher: Broadview Press Ltd, PO Box 1243, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada K9J 7H5. 2000

www. broadviewpress. com

Price: $27. 95 (paperback); Pages: 317

Reviewer: Kofi Akosah-Sarpong in Montreal, Canada

The books packed into Daniel Osablu-Kle's office at Carleton University in Ottawa make a kind of search for what is missing in Africa's political equation, which he has diagnosed for years both as military officer in his native Ghana and political scientist and university don in Canada, sifting out the incompatibilities and unrealistic ways in which Africans, since they got independence from their colonial masters, have been trying to rule themselves.

At the right side on the wall in Osabu-Kle's office is a small blackboard scribbled with illustrations of the missing links in Africa's political development-he calls the missing link jaku democracy, that's the modification of African cultural values to suit contemporary situations, more so in an era of internecine civil wars and anarchiac events which have seen the call for the reconstruction of the African nation-state.

Osabu-Kle's haul of Africa's political inadequacies, or political darkness, raw material for his brave new book about compatible cultural democracy between Africa and the rest of the world, especially the Western world, shows that the current political crisis in Africa is nothing more than Africa's inability to modifify its political cultural values to fit today's world.

"There is a reason why native African democracy is called jaku democracy which has been practiced by African rulers for well over 100 years. . . It[jaku] predates Western democracy. . . But during the era of colonialism Africa was subject to domination through indirect rule system in which the rulers were used against their own people. . . During the independence struggles African elites saw the African chiefs as allies of the colonial power. . . So their system of rule was downtrodden by the African elites, and because they are custodians of jaku democracy, jaku democracy was destroyed, " he says. "African nationalist elites didn't come from African royal families and so most of them were not exposed to actual practice of jaku democracy. "

And for this incompatibility Africa is experiencing arrested development, coming in its wake the bloody Sierra Leone and Rwanda civil wars, weak patriotism, large scale corruption, tribalism and hatred, confused elites, economic decline and inequities. This has created the erroneous impression that the state in Africa is fading, its roots shallowest. But as Osabu-Kle explains, there is nothing wrong with the roots of the African nation, which is an ethnic coalition; rather what is missing are core African cultural values as part of a modified political system accepted by all the ethnic groups forming the nation-state. He blames African elites who were trained either overseas or in accordance of the blueprint of Western institutions, they became inclined to think in terms of European values and thus became aliens in their own countries.

Osabu-Kle, one Africa's leading military scientist-turned-political scientist, has ambitious aim: to refute the view that Africa's native political system do not fit modern times, to reveal the fact that Africa's native political system not only are compatible with any one any place but most aspects are better, or compare better, with any political system in the world. He says this from both extensive travels, life long experiences, close range observation of both military and civilian governments (He was director of Ghana's Civil Aviation from 1984-1989), and long-running study of not only the missing links in Africa's political development but, prescriptively, how to fix the missing links via modifications of the African political system.

The need for cultural democratic compatibility now in Africa, for him, comes from the fact that the transplanted type of democracy has not worked in Africa and so Africa needs a type of democracy which is compatible with its culture. "The inherited Western democracy is not democratic. . . It is actually the dictatorship of the elcted. . . After obtaining the election mandate through the ballot box, they turn round and dictate to the people unlike jaku democracy which constantly consult with the people. "

In modern sense, Osabu-Kle says, the modifications of Africa's native cultural values to suit todays political challenges has to be done this way: "In every African ethnic group there is a symbol for unity. These symbols we have to transfer to the national level, just as ideological symbols were transfered in the case of Britain from England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland to constitute the Union Jack. In every African ethnic group there are clans which transfered their ideological symbols of unity from the clan level to the ethnic centre to constitute that particular ethnic group. That same process can be used for ideological symbols of unity from the ethnic level to the national level to constitute a strong nation. . . And we can use the same process to transfer the ideological symbols of unity from the national to constitute the United States of Africa. . . It can be done because the process of doing that is already there and it has been done before such as the five clans that came together to form the Asante nation. "

His immediate call is to his contemporaries today , traditionally the distillers and planners of policies, who have for long overlooked the missing elements in Africa's political development and seen Africa in European way that has never worked. "My contemporaries of today have become coconut which is black outside but white inside, and prescribed European solutions to Africa's problems. " He wants to see Africa's heritage of thousands of years of its cultural values applied to the issues of politics and reconstruction of the African nation-states, economics, the environment, family structure, conflicts and war.

"African democracy was enshrined in chieftaincy and we now need to take out of African chieftainy with its consensual culture intact, with its consensual culture a mold of representation intact to the national level. We need to modernize by forgoing certain traditional practice which are no longer necessary. "

Taking collapsed Sierra Leone as a laboratory to modify the African political structures to fit it's environment, Osabu-Kle, whose doctoral dissertation entitled "The Economic Crisis of Ghana: Non-Conformity with the Indigenous Political Culture as the Root Cause", which would see total recasting of Ghana's economic policies to fit Ghanaian values and environment, says "the problem with Sierra Leone is fundamentally the misfit of Western democracy in the Sierra Leonean cultural democracy.

"Now revive the African jaku democratic process of representation to the Sierra Leonean society after educating representatives of various ethnic groups on the Sierra Leonean (African) democratic process itself. To let each of the 13 ethnic groups transfer their ideological symbols of unity to the centre together with their associated representation. With all ethnic representations, the notion of one ethnic group dominating the others no longer holds. From this sense of equality, let the representatives consensually nominate whom the president and its cabinet should be. Should there be any consensual deadlock African democracy provides a way for breaking that deadlock, and that method is called ajina. "

Osabu-Kle, who specialises in public affairs, policy analysis and development in Africa, and has been teaching for the past 23 years in both Ghana and Canada, says today's African elites can modify Africa's incompatible political system to suit Africa's challenges today by "re-education and this re-education requires an ideology. . . And the ideology I envisage is Pan-African nationalism to emancipate Africans from mental slavery and to value their own culture. . . Because what is happening is that we are now emulating the values of others and forgetting that we are Africans who can solve our problems only the African way. . . And Pan Africanism is the ideology which is Afrocentric first and everything second. "

In a controversial manner, he thinks the much touted African Renaissance lietmotif is not the same as the Pan African nationalism solution to Africa's problems. Why? "The African Renaissance process is reactionary and reforming in its context and limited only to improving the conditions of Africans on the African continent but Pan African Nationalism is revolutionary in orientation and is aimed at emancipation of peoples of Africa everywhere from mental slavery, and giving them the dignity they deserve. "

Osabu-Kle's book, "Compatible Cultural Democracy: The Key to Development in Africa"( Broadview Press, Canada), is partly an examination of Africa's colonial experience and its subsequent brutal transplantation of Western political values which have been continued by post-independent African elites, and partly a movingly cool analysis of how Africa's political values compare neck-to-neck with the Western ones and how these can be modified today to fit the African scene.

"Africa has not dance well to the tune of alien political music. Is it not therefore most likely that Africans will dance comfortably to the tune of a modified form of indigenous political music, " he asks in the preface.

The modification of Africa's native political values with the Western imposed structures, his book argues, is the only way "capable of achieving the political conditions for successful development in Africa. Successful development in Africa demands the existence in each country of an encompassing coalition capable of enjoying the support of sections of society in such a manner as to be able to contain the stresses and strains emanating from both the local and international environments.

A close look at the political histories of any number of Africa countries reveals that the required encompassing coalition cannot be forged through any wholesale transplantation of alien political organization or ideology, whether it is Western democracy, Western-inspired military rule, or Marxist-inspired socialism, " he writes.

In such an atmosphere, he is even suspicious of the recently internationally praised Senegalese elections. "The Senegalese one is not jaku democracy and its suceess maybe only temporary. The dictatorship of elected representatives is still the case. In jaku democracy there are no political parties, and every clan or ethnic group selects its representative based upon merit arrived at by observing the candidates right from their childhood, " he says.

Osabu-Kle's book discusses four typical African political systems-the Ovimbunda, the Zulu, the Ashanti and the Ga political systems, which operated under strict system of accountability, demanding that political office-holders live up to expectations or "they would be deposed before the completion of their terms of office"-- and concludes that there is common consensual characteristics even when compared to what Jurgen Habermas called for, in the twentieth century, for "social and political institutions to permit open, unconstrained dialogue through consensus. "

Osabu-Kle's thinking here is that before the European, Jurgen Herberman, said all these Africans had thought and have been practicing them. ". We could conclude that on these same terms the political systems of Africa were actually far more advanced that the European ones-and they were so hundreds, perhaps thousands of years before Habermas laid down his principles. The African systems had a great potential for social justice, they were democratic-they were the very structures that colonialism either destroyed or, at the very least, polluted. "

A large part of Osabu-Kle's book is devoted to why African countries like Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Somalia, Senegal, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have all not find their political feet, after practicing diverse political economic systems. The trouble, says Osabu-Kle, is there are missing African cultural dynamics. To resolve, or rather modify, the prevailing political system Osabu-Kle says African constitutions should recognize the dynamic nature of culture, and its flexibility should be "enough to enable adaptation to cultural variation over time, " since "democratic practice existed in Africa long before European contact and the indigenous African democratic practice is capable of being modified to suit the present needs of African populations. "