Africa: Democracy is a living cell

By African Bulletin on June 8, 2011

The most difficult action for any emerging country leader is to pull out of inertia all actors of a modern society. It is the largest endeavour,

the more uncertain as well. Some African leaders and chief of states have sometimes paid with their lives their willingness to move beyond the status quo of underdevelopment. That was the case of Nelson Mandela, who spent 27 years of his life in jail for an unjust system, but ended down thanks to the strong will of the people and to the driving forces of history. We can also cite Thomas Sankara, who had transformed the former Upper Volta into Burkina Faso, but paid of his life for his opposition to the forces of inertia. Despite this difficulty to create the action, Africa has unquestionably garnered success within the past decade. Gradually, we see the birthing of open laboratories working on innovative models of democracy, taking into account cultural, economic and social characteristics of each community. Indeed Africa has these models, albeit unfinished. But democracy is a living cell, which grows up, learning daily from new experiences. Many African countries have undertaken a deep work of tedious political reforms, necessary for the emergence of a political class; and therefore for the emergence of a modern nation, a true receptive container necessary to permanently install the actual practices of democracy. From North to South, and from West to East of the continent, locomotives are born to pull the train of democracy; providing that the leaders of our respective countries had learned  enough  lessons from the  mistakes to  measure the importance of the legacy to be passed to the next generations. And despite irreducible politicians that continue to look at Africa with the blinders of the past, analysts are nicely casting a prosperous future for the continent and feel it is adequately equipped, politically, to avoid the storm, but needs, urgently, a strong acceleration of reforms.