*By Paul Ejime
As Africa continues to experiment with electoral democracy, 2025 was among the busiest election years on the continent. But apart from Malawi, where an incumbent lost to a former and older opponent, political power remained largely in the same hands, with a resurgence of military incursions.
The danger signals have always been there, coupled with warnings from concerned experts that liberal democracy is in decline worldwide, particularly in Africa. However, incurable optimists remain in denial, while the beneficiaries of the anti-democratic gravy train pay no heed.
(South Africa’s legendary President Nelson Mandela, voting in the country’s first all-race polls in April 1994 & Tanzanian President Samia Hassan in military fatigues.)
In a May 2024 lecture organised by the Dakar-based School of Politics, Policy and Governance Senegal (SPPG), Dr Larry Diamond, America’s renowned political sociologist and leading scholar on democracy studies, observed that “democracy globally has been in a prolonged recession since about 2007.”
There might be “many new (third wave) and old democracies (that) have been resilient, …many others (are) deteriorating,” he warned.
For Africa, and particularly West Africa, which once blazed the trail in preventive diplomacy, conflict management and resolution, the governance prognosis has been grim for the past decades.
By 2019, all 15 Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) members were practising one form of democratic system or another, no matter how imperfect; even so, the region is now disappointingly living up to its dubious moniker as a “coup belt.”
The 2020 military coup in Mali changed the dynamics. More ECOWAS member states – Guinea, Burkina Faso, Niger, and lately, Guinea-Bissau became a bastion of military juntas after the toppling of elected civilians. The junta leaders in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger have since withdrawn their countries from ECOWAS to form the Alliance of Sahel States, AES.
As expected, the junta chief in Guinea Conakry, Mamady Doumbouya, was on 30th December 2025, declared the winner of a controversial presidential election, devoid of any serious opposition, despite having earlier pledged not to run for office after seizing power in September 2021. He changed the constitution to enable him to run, in violation of the 2007 African Union’s Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance, and the 2001 ECOWAS Supplementary Protocol on Democracy and Good Governance.
However, Doumbouya, 41, and whose wife is a French legionnaire, is only one among army officers reminding Africa, especially West Africa, of its dark past when many of the immediate post-independent countries were under one-party state systems or military dictatorships.
Sudan is currently struggling under a deadly military interregnum, after the 2019 ousting of long-time ruler Omar Bashir and the breakaway of South Sudan in 2011. Chad is ruled by a young army General, Mahamat “Kaka” Derby, after a controversial vote in 2024 following the assassination of his father, President Idriss Derby, by rebels in April 2021. Faure Gnassingbe of Togo used a similar template to succeed his father, Gnassingbe Eyadema, who died in 2005, and retained power through disputed elections.
In April 2025, another young army officer, Brice Oligui Nguema, claimed victory in a controversial vote after staging what many called a “power-realignment coup” in 2023 against President Ali Bongo to disrupt his father Omar Bongo’s dynastic reign in Gabon.
On 12th October this year, an elite unit of Madagascar’s Armed Forces overthrew the government of President Andry Rajoelina, and on 26th November, Guinea-Bissau President Umaro Sissoco Embaló chose to outdo other coup makers with his self-coup, to avoid an electoral defeat.
The military struck again, this time in Benin on 7th December 2025, in an attempt to topple President Patrice Talon’s almost 10-year-old government. The plot attracted international attention, with Nigeria, the regional powerhouse, foiling the attempted coup through a rare military collaboration with France.
The resurgence of military rule in Africa is such that concerned observers are beginning to ask, in which country will the army strike next?
While democratic decline may be a global phenomenon, Africa has been worst hit due largely to its weak democratic institutions/structures, lack of democratic culture, and negative stakeholder mindset/attitude.
Some critics even argue that democracy cannot work or has failed in Africa, but my thesis is that the fault lies with the practitioners – politicians, security agencies, civil society groups, the media, electoral umpires, the executive, legislative, and judicial arms of government, and the electorate, who elect and support undemocratic leaders and fail to hold them to account.
Voters who demand/receive incentives, sell their votes, or vote along religious and tribal/ethnic lines should blame themselves, not democracy, when the tide turns against them. The same can be said for politicians who rig elections, buy votes, or manipulate the electoral process for personal gain. They are the same as lawyers and judges, who commercialise court judgments; lawmakers, who fail in their oversight/legislative duties; media professionals, who abandon their watchdog role; corrupt civil servants; compromised civil society activists; security/armed forces personnel used by the government against citizens; and opportunistic soldiers, who grab power.
Former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill said in 1947: “Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time…”
Military coups/dictatorships remain an aberration. The armed forces are not wired for political governance, and military interventions are a consequence of the anti-democratic conduct/dispositions of civilian leadership.
Their method is similar, if not the same. From the sit-tight geriatric leaders – Paul Biya, 92, of Cameroon and Teodoro Obiang Mbasogo, 83, of Equatorial Guinea, to Cote d’Ivoire’s Alassane Ouattara, 84, and younger elements, such as Faure Gnassingbe of Togo and Adama Barrow of The Gambia, to say nothing about Tanzania, with a woman President, Samia Hassan, who recently justified the mowing down of unarmed protesters by security forces.
The pattern is to alter national constitutions for tenure elongation and assume more executive powers; capture state institutions, especially the parliament, judiciary and civil society, institutionalise corruption and cronyism, create primordial divisions, weaponise poverty, clamp down on the opposition, the media, and stifle free speech and the civic space; hold must-win elections; otherwise, use the courts to win or sustain political power.
In a presentation on Elections, Governance and Democracy in October 2024, Dr Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, an authority on elections globally, and Chair of Ghana’s Electoral Commission for more than 20 years, said “…multiparty democracy means that one political party does not dominate elections so much that all the other parties combined do not make a difference. If one party dominates to such an extent, the country is a one-party state, irrespective of the number of parties.”
“To pass the test of being a democratic election, the results of elections must be credible. That means the results are worthy of acceptance as a basis for forming a legitimate government, a government respected at home and abroad,” he said, adding: “To determine that the results of an election are credible, we… talk about the essential features of an electoral system.”
According to him, “…the electoral systems of all democracies, and all the processes are based on broadly the same principles. What differentiates the systems is how they try to actualise the principles and the formulas for winning elections, such as first-past-the-post for MPs and 50%+1 for the president…”
“The salient processes are (transparent and inclusive) voter registration, campaigning, voting, vote counting, tabulation/collation of results, transmission of results, and announcement of results…” Afari-Gyan affirmed.
In his lecture cited above, Larry Diamond, used data from various peer-reviewed sources such as the Freedom House and the Economist Intelligence Unit, to test the practice of democracy by regions – between 2006 and 2022 with Europe topping the ranking, while Sub-Saharan Africa, some countries in the former Soviet Union, and the Middle East and North Africa bringing up the rear in that order.
He traced the “causes of Democratic Recession from 2006… to the “Backlash Against Iraq intervention by the US and its allies – perception of failed democracy promotion, the 2008 Financial Crisis, and the Rise of Social Media.” Other factors are “Technology boom, the growing concentration of wealth and income within countries, Global Power shift, Decline of US/European power and prestige, Resurgence of Russia and the Rise of China as a major power.”
Diamond also argued that electoral democracy or the conduct of regular elections cannot equate liberal democracy, which, he said, “should be measured not by government or individual performance, but by the aggregation of collective satisfaction of the aspirations of the majority.”
Politicians have generally perfected the art of using democratic tools to circumvent democracy, with impunity enabled by distractions of geopolitical shifts, emerging threats such as terrorism, religious extremism, and the collapse of multilateralism in a world driven by new nationalism, xenophobia, and anti-immigrant sentiments.
With the apparent collapse of the rule of law in international relations, characterised by the use of unbridled dictatorial power by the Superpowers, such as Russia’s invasions of Ukraine and the US capture of President Maduro in Venezuela, no African country can afford to stand alone. The strength of the continent lies in unity and pooling of abundant and largely untapped resources; strategically identifying and collaborating with Africa’s true friends, and providing home-grown, African solutions to Africa’s developmental problems.
Continental and regional organisations, such as the AU, ECOWAS, SADC, IGAD, ECA, ECCAS, Maghreb Union, and COMESA, must wake up to their responsibilities.
Africa’s proverbial “Big Five” – Nigeria, Egypt, South Africa, Algeria, and Ethiopia – must prioritise delivering people-centred good governance at home, and taking pan-African positions in international relations.
*Ejime is a Global Affairs Analyst and Consultant on Peace & Security and Governance Communications*
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