I say it is an interesting and very insightful presentation. Bayo and I go a long way back. I do not want to tell you why he likes these kinds of shirts. You should see his winter jackets, but now it is a different type and most of what is said here are things I accept we converge on. I thought I should make some critical points because African scholarship is also defined by active citizenship. Not in terms of what we do or see on the road in Sudan or in Algeria, but also in coming to the realisation that the kind of democratisation we've experienced, what is usually called the third wave, what started from between 91 and 92, and what we have now probably has lived its day. It has ended. What it can do, its full potential has been realised. It is very difficult to do the alternation that we did in the past from the early independence stage to one party stage, to the military and then back to another multi-party regime that lasts about 27 months and the army comes, we have a revolution and we call them First Republic, Second Republic, Third Republic, Fourth Republic.

In spite of the challenges we face today, nobody would accept that the army should come back. Even if there is a desire, the frustration of many people is that this democracy is not working and some change ought to be made. The question is, is it the alternation that will solve the problems that we are confronted with or is it a different look at things that we can do?; and to the extent that the AU and ECOWAS now have protocols and charters that make it difficult. If you look at Sudan, the crowd came out, but you saw the Ethiopian Prime Minister there with an AU special envoy to negotiate the time of the exit of the settlement, probably the longest. So, we've entered a phase of negotiating how changes will be made, and that is keeping many of the democratic systems stable. But, what we have not done, which is what Bayo calls the stalemate. I have looked at the story of Ghana. We are in our Fourth Republic and this is the first time we have had 27 years of a multiparty democracy. It means a lot but in these 27 years, we have learnt more about political parties and governance than we ever did in our history, because they did not have enough time to stay there and we had very negative views about parties; they will divide us, they will steal our monies. All those things are happening, but we now feel that at this stage getting them out like we did in the past is not the solution. So where is the solution?

That is where I think critical scholarship and active citizenship come in. There are those who have said to us that no African country that has done multiparty democracy since the 90s until now has been able to increase economic growth and moved towards transforming their economies within what is now considered to be the generational span of transformation. It is either 25 or 30 years. They will tell you about South Korea, Malaysia, Asia and China. And , you ask yourself how they got there. The answers we get is that there are two countries that are outstanding; we have Rwanda and we have Ethiopia. Then we are told that we need the developmental state. This in a way is telling us to move back to an authoritarian statehood, but we know it is not working because Ethiopia now says it is going the way ofmultiparty democracy. So, where is the solution from the discourse about our development and developmental experiences in the western media? It is no solution, so where lies the solution? I think the more we think about this, I could not agree less with Bayo when he said a strong case exists for a wholesale rethinking of what democratic governance and development should mean for Africa. We are stuck to the central model; centralised power; state power and democratisation has transitioned from democracy, which has always looked at the centre; the parliament, other state institutions like the human rights commissions and others. We have always been of the view that we need to strengthen the centre so that we could have a strong state that will lead or steer our economic transformation and hold us together as a nation.

But, at this stage in time, we are 62 years, and have come very far, for us to be clear that the strong state we set out to create in this particular Fourth Republic has become a weak state. What explains why institutions are collapsing, why we cannot enforce the rule of law, why there is no equality before the law? In democracy, equality before the law is one of the cardinal principles and we cannot enforce it. This means that there is a problem with this whole model.
Our thinking is that, where we are now, probably wholesale thinking is too large, but we must now look at active citizenship in terms of the crowd that comes out. Mostly they are authoritarian regimes that have been in power for over 20 years. At this stage, we ask ourselves what kind of changes are required, and ifit will involve changes in terms of the structure of power and power relations in society. Take Ghana for instance, we talk about the need to build on the foundations of what we have achieved in the last 27 years. Can we now look at the possibility of transitioning or having a second democratisation, which is how to devolve power from the centre to local? Indeed, our local economies are underdeveloped. They are not stagnated, it is just bad. The UNICEF 2015 report says that Ghana is competing to be amongst the 10 most unequal countries in Africa and I don't know if we have not gone down already and probably competing with the five. The report talks about the real poverty and it is just impossible to see public services being delivered. The state is probably dead and yet we still celebrate and laud decentralisation. Decentralisation does not exist. What we have seen is recentralisation of state power. We think that a second transition will require that we see democratisation being internal, a lot of state power and resources at the same time, or to go local. How do we do that? For me, that second democratisation would probably define Africa's contribution to democracy, which would be the fourth wave. It is something probably we would not have the oppor tunity to write about because it would be peculiarly African. How do we develop that? I will give just you two examples. I think constitutions are important to democratisation. Most of the constitutions we have had across African countries have maintained the model of centralising power, the so called "winner-takes-all," excluding people, not finding ways of building consensus upon which we r ise as one people irrespective of our various identities. We need the constitutional lawyers and others to begin to look at how to devolve power such that, exclusion, 'winner-takes-all,' and the kind of development that is not taking us forward, can be dealt with.

I think within the existing framework of Ghana's Constitution, we can tackle that problem. For instance, we have been advocating that an article that anchors 'winner takes it all' and bans polit ical parties from participating in local government, should be changed. . When we did further research what we found out, is that, and you will be astounded; the last time we had multiparty elections in Ghana was in 1958.

In all the four republics, political par ties did not contest local elections and yet parties are the drivers of change if you want to see a new constitutional arrangement. Because of their nature; independent, they compete for power, they are recognised in constitutions and when they are coming in you have to create legal and institutional frameworks to enable them. It also means that we have to question some of our prejudices. We have been very dismissive of political parties because we do not like how we have experienced them from the beginning till now. The question is, what do we substitute them with? The army could not do it, neither could the parties. So, the question of the transition I am advocating is how do we make political parties serve us? How do we redesign them? What are the conditions we can create? And as a people, we have the power to redefine their legal framework. We have the power to put together what we consider our core values and norms and this should be something that we need to have the time to discuss.

So, for me, going forward, critical activism is for critical thinkers to find time to innovate. It is not just swinging, alternating, and copying from the West or the East. Neither of these blocs have the solutions to our challenges. This is the only continent where economic, social, political, and other developments have to take place concurrently. The sequence of first build the economy and steadily give democratic rights and start looking at social work is not there. We have to do everything at the same time because that is the nature of it. It is a challenge.