Allow me to start by expressing my sincere gratitude to the organizers of the event both for inviting me, and for their inspired and inspiring initiative namely the Aki @80 event. The timely initiative to celebrate the life and achievement of Aki Sawyerr signals both the broadening and deepening of efforts to valorize our resources on this continent. I have had the privilege of knowing Professor Sawyerr but it was only by being present at this event that I realized I did not even know his real name!

I am unable to add to the numerous accolades to Professor Aki Sawyerr by speakers before me. My acquaintance with him is limited to our shared moments in the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA). I recall an informal conversation a group of us had with the late Professor Claude Ake who informed us that as far as he was concerned Professor Aki Sawyerr would be the best representative of Anglophone West Africa in the Executive Committee of CODESRIA. During the election, the West African delegation was unanimous in electing him as a member and subsequently, the General Assembly elected him as President. Since then to the present, Professor Sawyerr is CODESRIA's go-to person with regards to all legal challenges, administrative concerns and democratic and inclusive elections. Since then to the present, he has taught us that essential building blocks of a community of African scholars consist of sustained presence, substantive contributions and unwavering critical voice. I would be amiss if I failed to include two of his defining characteristics: his warmth and enjoyable sense of humour.

As others have indicated we continue to cherish and benefit from his profound pan African insights and rigorous defense of our beleaguered institutions such as our universities. His long term research and publications have documented the various internal and external challenges faced by universities, and as a testimony to his enduring commitments to higher education, he continues to advocate the need for 'a vigorous exercise to rethink and re-vision the Academy.' But the creative display of his engagements in a wide array of public spaces during this event reminds us that higher education is only one of his countless commitments. My glimpse of Aki as the quintessential public intellectual can be gleaned from his Presidential address of 2016 to the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences aptly entitled "Marching Forward to the Past: From Newmont II back to Newmont I-via Gold Fields"' and conveying some of his many concerns related to intergenerational equity and factors that contribute to the long term threat to the sustainability of the polity. Parting from established norms, the address focused on issues that ought to engage the attention of, not only the scholarly community, but also the broader citizenry.

What I want to underscore is not his firsthand account of the fiscal give away and thus sell out of national interest by the Ghanaian state through incentives geared towards accelerated foreign direct investment and the resultant 'blatantly unequal distribution of the benefits between the state and foreign investors;' the 'willful playing down of technical competence, professionalism and experience' in negotiating natural resource investments; nor his riveting account of 'entrenchment of mediocrity, corruption and disregard of the public's interest as the norm;' the betrayal of the people's faith in Parliament but in keeping with the theme of the celebration, I want to highlight Aki's emphasis on 'failure of civic vigilance and follow through.'

In other words, he observes that the consequences of the failure of civic vigilance in the specific case of the negotiation of natural resource agreements include '(i) haemorrhage of potential national revenue and (ii) dissipation of non-renewable resources' but more generally it feeds to 'popular disaffection for the political class' and national institution generally, 'posing a medium- to long -term threat to the sustainability of the polity.' While this Presidential Lecture focused on the negotiation of natural resource investment and mostly focused on Ghana, the growing disillusionment, the critical importance of active citizenship are themes that are also highlighted by the keynote speaker as a panacea for the 'politico-governance and developmental stalemate' currently affecting our continent.

I agree with most of the analysis provided by the keynote speaker. But would like to point to some shortcomings that I hope our future democratic debates will address. By way of introduction, I want to highlight another aspect of Aki's biography and its implication for democratization in Africa. We have been informed, following the early death of his father, Aki was brought up by his mother. This reality is not uncommon and only reminds us that a significant proportion of African households are maintained by women alone. These women, as well as most women in male-headed households, shoulder a disproportionate burden of day-to-day caring and nurturing of young children, adults or older persons in the absence of insufficient availability of basic infrastructure to reduce the drudgery of unpaid care and domestic work. A major shortcoming of the old or new democratization process in our continent is its failure to fully recognize the critical significance of these responsibilities and the various ways that they impoverish the democratic process in Africa.

When a gender-aware history of democratisation in Africa is written, it will reveal persistent resistance to a gender transformative political landscape. Here I will only point to a handful of glaring examples. Adebayo refers to the sovereign national conferences that were held in a large number of African countries. Records of these conferences show that these conferences were not inclusive, although the degree of inclusiveness and overall democratic outcome varied from country to country. While a handful of women were able to participate in some countries, they were almost totally excluded in others. Beyond under-representation of women from these fora charged with preparing the ground rules of democratisation, the laws, decrees and constitutions were full of gender biases. Moreover, women who were willing to transgress conventional gender boundaries and engage actively in the unfolding political landscape faced varying degrees of intimidation and harassment and paid a very high personal and social cost. Generally, a gendered account of election violence reveals that in a large number of African countries, women tend to pay a disproportionate and incalculable cost that they are often forced to suffer in silence.

The keynote address provides a passing reference to poor representation of women and the youth in his list of gaps associated with the electoral system and party politics. To be sure, in most African countries, women are underrepresented in political parties, legislatures, cabinets and public administration. But limiting the discussion to poor representations is reflective of the parallel debates that are carried out by feminists on the one hand and male scholars on the other. I would argue that our understanding of the types of democracies that are emerging will be at best partial, in the absence of a robust gender analysis of the process of democratization during the period covered by the keynote speaker. A gendered stock-taking of the democratisation process would, for example, reveal that in Africa in recent years, the participation of women in electoral democracy as voters, candidates for political office, and as members of national legislatures varies but has generally been on the increase.

In the 1990s, women's organizations actively engaged in constitutional change in the hope of gaining voice and representation in the emergent political system. Furthermore, in some countries, this phase also made it possible to identify and include measures such as quotas, or reservations that facilitated women's access to public office in national and subnational legislature. As a result, in a relatively large number of African countries, the representation of women in the legislature has been on the increase. Furthermore, this phase also provided women with the opportunity to campaign against the most egregious patriarchal norms contained in penal and civil codes most of which limited women's basic and political rights particularly those that exclude the private sphere of marriage and family from democratic scrutiny. We can indicate three explanatory factors for these numerical increases in women's participation in formal politics. In brief, these include the international women's movement that has engaged in sustained advocacy for gender parity in public office and which has culminated in the current 50/50 campaign; the growth and maturity of local women's civil rights organizations with similar advocacy and pressures related to the global 'Good Governance Agenda.'

In the context of the predominance of neoliberalism, the 'good governance' agenda prioritized expansion of market activity and the building of market-friendly institutions and property rights even though the agenda also included governance legitimacy and participation of socially excluded groups. This has resulted in increased participation of women in formal politics in a growing number of countries. The emphasis on the numerical increase obscures the nature and quality of representation and concerns with democratizing of the overall policy-making process. We, therefore, need to pose this question: Are these numerical increases indicative of the depth of the democratization process? In my own country, in every election that has taken place since the mid- 1990s, women have made up the majority of voters. In this, and many other cases, women were coerced into voting for candidates of the ruling party. What we are witnessing is that in these cases, women's vote represents what the women's movement has labeled 'Vote Banks.' Sadly, women's increased participation in formal politics has been limited to what I will venture to call 'a numbers game' that camouflages significant limitations of the emergent democracies.

In the context of disempowered institutions like parliaments, these new trends are reflective of political expediency and international pressure. In other words, women are becoming members of legislatures at a time when these institutions no longer make important policy decisions. At present, both globally and regionally, the discussion tends to focus on numbers and proportion of women in national assemblies and hardly on representation and accountability or the effectiveness of female legislators in changing the culture, practice and outcomes of politics in ways that are responsive to gender equality and other social justice concerns.

Two areas that I think deserve more attention in discussing the quest for democratization in Africa are related to the poor representation of the youth and the emergence of what the keynote address includes in the list of major gains of the democratization process, more specifically, 'a new vibrancy in public life underwritten by civil society groupings and a plural media taking advantage of new technological advancements.' Both of these observations are accurate but call for a more nuanced reflection. Who can deny that the emergence of digital platforms in a large number of countries has expanded political engagement and debates especially of the youth and particularly in periods leading to and during elections? Current events in Sudan, Tunisia and Algeria are cases in point. These forms of activism have become more poignant in African countries where citizens have lived under one-party, one man or military rule or have become fed up with corrupt forms of governance. Good cases in point include Zimbabwe as evidenced by the # this flag campaign , Burkina Faso or the campaign known as # Zuma must fall in South Africa.

But the diverse outcomes of the new technologies force us to temper our optimism in reshaping political engagement through digital platforms. In a growing number of countries, African governments are engaged in enhanced censorship of social media, and criminalization of dissent. The emergent forms of censorship range from complete blockage of the Internet to content blockage and the promulgation of restrictive social media legislation. In Ethiopia, where citizens have enjoyed the freedom of the press for a year, following long years of censorship, recent events have resulted in complete but temporary blockage of the Internet on all platforms as well as SMS services. Sadly, varying degrees of such censorship is taking place in many African countries. In defending the recent blockage and exploration of social media legislation similar to other East African countries, the Ethiopian Prime Minister reminded us that the ' Internet is not water or air.'

But our discussion of the possibilities and constraints related to this new media should not be limited to increased democratic participation and/or the curtailment of participation following censorships. It also necessitates robust debates both on the advantages and the social, economic and political challenges accompanying these technologies. In a growing number of African countries, social media has intensified election-related violence; spread consequential misinformation, and/or ethnic tensions. In the absence of employment policies, jobless growth and the extremely high degree of youth unemployment, what are the implications of this current period of disillusionment?

In addition to focused analysis of the participation or lack thereof of the youth in the youngest continent in the world, we also need to explore the implication of the backsliding of democracies globally and what has been classified as the 'third wave of autocratization' on democratization, active citizenship and Africa's transformation. In this regard, Adebayo has identified the threat of a full-scale return to a revamped presidentialism complete with a reconcentration and re-centralization of power in a growing number of countries and various efforts to narrow the democratic space. While I totally agree with Adebayo's call for a rethinking of democratic governance and development and reinventing active citizenship, my optimism regarding these transformations is tempered by the long term and thoroughly destructive legacies of neoliberalism on the one hand and its current revival and the resultant shifting roles of the African state.