For a person who has been one of the most thoughtful, courageous, and dignified voices in the recent intellectual history of Africa, it is more than fitting that our collective reflections today, facilitated by a core group of our colleagues based in Accra, on the state of the ongoing effort at democratisation in Africa, is devoted to celebrate distinguished Professor Akilagpa Sawyerr's 80th birthday. As a versatile, borderless Pan-African scholar who combined his primary t raining in Law with a grounded but non-doctrinaire political economy approach to understanding state and society on the continent over the last half a century, Akilagpa Sawyerr also towers many times over as a tested administrator, institution-builder, change-maker, teacher and mentor. It is not often that we are fortunate to find such a beautiful combination of diverse talents and qualities embodied in one person. Akilagpa Sawyerr has, over a lifetime, exercised these many gifts with the kind of admirable ease, aplomb, and consistency reserved for that rare breed of true and versatile masters. We who have had the privilege to interact with him in one or several capacities have been the richer for it.

Akilagpa Sawyerr's example in basic human decency, simplicity, and transparent integrity has, additionally, both inspired a successive generation of would-be change makers and struck trepidation - even fear - in those wielders of temporal power who, by commission and/or omission, have made a mess of our commonwealth and, in so doing, abridged our dreams. As a scholar, educationist, and administrator, and always in his calm, measured, and unassuming manner, Sawyerr has stood for intellectual integrity and spoken his truth, our truth - to power, without being petty or judgmental. As a researcher, he has used his wide reading and broad real life experiences from around Africa and the world, to build transdisciplinary narratives rich in comparative insights that brought nuance and finesse to much of our scientific debates. Shared ideological affinity with anyone or group has never for him been acceptable as an excuse for shoddy or incomplete work; Sawyerr has also always spoken truth to his comrades. As a Pan-Africanist, both by conviction and in practice, he exudes the settled confidence of a fighter for the unity and progress of the Black and African worlds without being naïve or reductionist. As mentor, he shows that it is possible in one go to be a first class scholar, celebrated administrator, and active citizen immersed in the daily struggle for a better society.

Across the various vocations in which he has been engaged and to which he remains committed, one of the cross-cutting themes in Sawyerr's work has been an abiding commitment to change and transformation in Africa. Not surprisingly, this commitment has, inter alia, placed him squarely in the heart of the conversations about the political economy of transition from authoritarianism to electoral pluralism during the 1990s onwards. Drawing on some of his reflections, including the influential book he edited and titled The Political Dimension of Structural Adjustment in Sub-Saharan Africa, (1990), I wish to suggest that contrary to the high hopes that were generated in the early 1990s by the popular pressures that led to the transition from military and single party rule to elected government, the experience that has been registered to date has failed to yield the transformation for which citizens yearned. Instead, a politico-governance and developmental stalemate has been created which can only begin to be redressed through a revival of organisational work and active citizenship designed to refocus the democratic project as an undertaking that comprises much more than the
routine, ritualistic, and pro forma electoralism it has been reduced to.

A Brief Historical Context and Background

It has been some three decades since the African continent began a renewed effort at building systems of democratic governance that would be reflective of the broad aspirations of the people for freedom, dignity, and prosperity. These aspirations were not in any way new to peoples of the continent. In fact, they were integral to the valiant wars of resistance fought in different places against the European imperial encroachment when it began. The aspirations also underpinned the resistance to colonial rule and the march to independence. The historic defeat of colonialism was a significant moment, which ushered in high hopes that old Africa, to paraphrase Basil Davidson (1959) would rediscover itself and chart a path of progress that would work for the benefit of its peoples. However, that hope, despite some glimmers of success, was not sustained for too long as country after country succumbed to various forms of authoritarian rule and a crisis of developmental vision and management which came to summarise much of the period to the late 1970s (Mamdani, 1990; Mamdani and Wamba-dia-Wamba, 1995). By the decade of the 1980s, the continent was mired in a full blown socio-economic crisis and an accompanying politico-governance stalemate, which was only compounded by the structural adjustment programmes imposed on the debt-burdened countries by an alliance of international financial institutions and leading bilateral donors united under the umbrella of a so-called Washington Consensus (Mkandawire and Soludo, 2003, 1999; Mkandawire and Olukoshi, 1995;
Sawyerr 1990).

The rise of political authoritarianism, embodied in the spread of single party and military rule in many African countries from around the mid-1960s onwards, represented the first major setback of the post-colonial period in Africa's recent history. Power was increasingly centralised, concentrated, and monopolised by a minority group organised around presidents whose rule became mostly as personal and parochial as it was unrepresentative and unaccountable. It marked the highpoint of a process of popular demobilisation that followed the achievement of independence. As individual self-proclaimed maximum rulers emerged, popular participation was dismantled. Intra-governmental checks and balances were wiped out and rulers donning various titles became the new philosopher-kings who dispensed wisdom and solutions unquestioned. Indeed, a few were packaged by the inner circles as living oracles who were next only to God. Within this dynamic of popular demobilisation, autonomous organisations such as trade unions, student bodies, and women's groups, to cite the most prominent of them, were captured and integrated into an umbrella ruling party/movement even as existing opposition parties were dissolved by law in order, ostensibly, to blunt ethno-regional fragmentation and its divisive consequences for the polity. Thus it was, that the pluralism of the early post-colonial years was very quickly replaced by a new political monopoly presented to the citizenry under the ubiquitous slogan of "one nation, one destiny" - and, ultimately, under the guidance of one and only one - leader. In time, demobilisation was to translate into a season of mass depoliticisation, disenfranchisement, and repression.

The demobilisation process that was experienced in the course of the 1960s, and which culminated in the enthronement of single party rule and various forms of militarisation, was mainly justified on the grounds of the need to consolidate national unity and accelerate development. Effectively, however, it had the consequence of constraining and even repressing the very active citizenship, both organised and spontaneous, that helped fire the struggle for independence (Olukoshi, 1998). To be sure -and it is a point that must not be diminished or discounted - the colonial legacy, with its divide and rule policy and political anchors, was hardly a solid foundation on which independence rulers could meaningfully advance a collective v1s1on of unity and progress. Also, to be fully acknowledged is the fact of deliberate neo-colonial interventions that actively sabotaged well-meaning efforts at an African rebirth, a recurrent decimal in the post-colonial governance equation. In fact, both as a reactive posture to destabilising neocolonial interferences aimed in some cases, at effecting violent regime change, and out of a conviction that nation- and state-building and accelerated socioeconomic development could only be effectively and speedily secured by "consolidating" national energies under one big political umbrella, the pluralistic basis on which independence was won was rapidly eroded during the course of the 1960s.

Though the broad goals of nation-building and socioeconomic transformation were impeccable, the assumption that they could only meaningfully be constituted from above by an all-powerful and all-knowing elite to the exclusion of the generality of the populace, set the stage for the multiple contradictions that generated cycles of instability across much of Africa during the 1960s and 1970s, including military coups d'etat, sponsored mercenary invasions, repeated inter-ethnic clashes, and outright civil wars. The demands of regime security in many cases meant that the leadership of most of the authoritarian governments that emerged consolidated themselves, ironically, on an ethno-regional and/or factual religious base that contradicted and undermined the very goal of nation-building, that justified their emergence in the first place.

Consequently, regime political monopoly in most cases became coterminous with parochial and exclusionary ethno- regional and/or factional religious domination directed by an increasingly inaccessible cabal of power mongers alienated from the rest of the populace. In the absence of serious and consistent investments in diversity management, coercion and fear became the preferred mode of political administration; governmental and even state legitimacy suffered in consequence. Thus, far from overcoming ethno-regional fragmentation, single party rule was to become the prime driver of inter-ethnic suspicion even as it failed to deliver self-propelling and sustained socio-economic transformation over the long haul.

The contradictions that underpinned authoritarian rule as it gathered steam in the 1960s and 1970s were brought to a head and compounded by the socioeconomic crises which the continent experienced in the 1970s and which set the stage for the market liberalising interventions of the IMF, the World Bank, and various bilateral donors. Triggered by the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries' (OPEC) oil price revolutions of 1973 and 1979, the socio-economic crises exposed the many structural weaknesses of the post-colonial development experience, not least among them the failure to diversify the resource base of economies, build domestic value addition, and reduce a pervasive external dependence (Claude Ake, 1982). These structural weaknesses explain why economic growth could never go into the two digits that were needed for rapid transformation, even if, in global comparative terms, there were periods of high single digit growth (Mkandawire and Soludo, 1999). The toll taken by the socio-economic crises of the late 1970s was multifaceted, playing out in all socio-economic sectors and manifesting in the collapse of manufacturing and agricultural production, acute balance of payments problems and unsustainable trade debts, shortages of foreign exchange and the collapse of national currencies, shortages of essential commodities and massive job losses, skyrocketing interest rates, etc. These have been extensively documented and need not be spelt out in much detail here (Mkandawire and Olukoshi, 1995).

Against a background of existing systems of governance that had become authoritarian, African governments faced with deepening economic crisis and social dislocation, became increasingly more repressive as they tried to force through unpopular austerity measures whilst maintaining the existing political order which many had come to see as corrupt and untenable. Organised resistance to austerity, mostly led by students and trade unions, went hand in hand with spontaneous mass riots; all the protests were ubiquitously met with police/military violence and large-scale arrests. As the socio-economic crises raged on, the structural adjustment programmes promoted and favored by multilateral and bilateral donors were subsequently introduced with a view to carrying the fragmented austerity measures of various governments to a logical conclusion, making them more all-encompassing and anchoring them on a doctrine of state retrenchment and marketisation that became the new framework for policy-making and implementation.

The inflation-targeting deflationary thrust of the adjustment programmes meant they could only be implemented through a resort to the repression of citizen movements and voices. And that is precisely what happened in most countries across the continent. So-called IMF riots protesting the policy prescriptions of the international financial institutions metamorphosed into anti-SAP demonstrations that signaled citizen discontent with the harsh measures governments were compelled to implement in order to curb fiscal deficits, get financial aid, and debt relief. The high-handed responses of various governments to citizen discontent with policy and politics in the 1980s into the 1990s robbed them of whatever legitimacy they had left in the eyes of the populace. The stage was set for a revival of citizen political consciousness for change as the gulf between the state and society became increasingly unbridgeable. Beginning with the mass demonstrations in Cotonou, Benin Republic, that snowballed into the constitution of a sovereign national conference, which was to be emulated in a number of other Francophone African countries and encompassing calls for wide-ranging constitutional reforms designed to open up the politico-governance space, Africa, during the early 1990s, became the site of mass stirrings for reform and change. The pressures for reform and change were sustained, widespread, and difficult to resist. Domestically, a determined mass of citizens made the case for far-reaching changes in the political system and their campaigns enjoyed a wide popular appeal. Internationally, the world itself was entering a post-Soviet and post-Cold War era and geo-political priorities and alliances were being reshuffled. This conjuncture of popular domestic pressures for change and a changing post-1945 global order set the stage for Africa's transition to a new phase in its political history.

The Quest for Democratisation in Africa

The collapse of single party and military rule across Africa during the 1990s and the rebirth of multi party political systems came with a broader opening and even enlargement of the domestic political space in most countries. Either by way of completely new constitutions or the extensive amendment of existing ones, civil liberties, fundamental human rights, and the rule of law were formally restored, including the right to assemble and the freedom of speech. Country after country also witnessed an efflorescence of associational life as various categories of civil society organisations were licensed under broadly liberal rules to operate. The political party terrain too witnessed a boom as old and new formations came to the scene to canvass for support for the interests they sought to represent. Emotional scenes greeted the release of long-term political prisoners who had been locked up on various, mostly trumped up charges. Similar scenes accompanied the return of longterm political exiles. The monopoly of the state on the media was broken with the licensing of private print and electronic media organisations to operate. Electoral laws were re-written to accommodate the new context of political pluralism and, perhaps more importantly, attempt to assure political actors of a fairer and more level political playing ground. Thus it was, that the phenomenon of independent electoral commissions emerged and spread. Other reforms introduced as part of the return by Africa to a path of democratisation include the limitation of the terms of office of presidents and a raft of measures aimed at significantly whittling down the scope for an arbitrary exercise of unilateral power by heads of state and government. The ambition was to ensure that presidents function more as firsts among equals and less as absolute monarchs (Anyan'g Nyongo,). Attempts were also made at institutionalising a separation of powers among the Executive, the Judiciary, and the Legislature as part of a broader effort at enforcing intra- systemic checks and balances. Furthermore, various measures were introduced to reform the civil service and the security sector, including the police, with a view to decoupling them from old ruling parties and restoring their professional "neutrality". Initiatives at "truth and reconciliation" were pursued in several countries and measures seeking to guarantee the rule of law, prevent impunity, and curb corruption were adopted, including the creation of dedicated anticorruption, ethics, and code of conduct bodies.

In the nearly three-decades since the new wave of democratisation began on the continent, there is no doubt that, thanks to the tenacity of the generality of the citizenry, some important gains were registered.

Among them are:

1. The routinisation of competitive elections as the mechanism for winning and losing power to a point where the African Union and the Regional Economic Communities were able to adopt and enforce a position that power acquired by means other than elections, would no longer be recognised on the African continent.
2. The consolidation of a system of alternation and rotation of power with opposition parties successfully beating incumbents in a number of countries and the rules on the limitation of terms of office of elected officials - especially for presidents - enabling the successful transfer of power from one office holder to another both within the same ruling party and from a ruling to an opposition party candidate
3. The operationalisation of aspects of the rule of law based on respect for basic human rights, including the presumption of innocence before a judicial pronouncement of guilt, a constitutionally specified time limit for police detention without charge, the prohibition of the torture of suspects and detainees, and the right of suspects to bail, etc
4. The enforcement of various civil liberties in many countries across the continent, among them the right to free movement and assembly, including public demonstrations and processions (with or without prior police permits), the right to free speech/freedom of expression, and the freedom of worship, etc.
5. A generalised new vibrancy in public life underwritten by a boom in civil society groupings of various stripes, and the expansion of a plural media whose reach has been amplified by new technological advancements that have also contributed to the rapid growth of social media as a fact of everyday life.
6. An institutionalised multiparty system which is notable as much for its diversity, as its colorfulness and the constant mutations that characterise its workings as politicians negotiate and renegotiate their interests.
7. Significant advances in the administration of competitive elections, with some election management bodies successfully asserting and defending their autonomy and integrity as neutral and professional arbiters of the political game.
8. The embrace of the formal right of citizens to access information about the doings of government as part of new pacts on the freedom of information.
9. Glimpses of an emerging system of checks and balances evidenced by cases in different countries of parliamentary assertion of oversight duties and the exercise of judicial independence vis-a-vis the Executive.

Discontents of the African Ongoing Quest at Democratisation

The gains registered in the process of democratisation have, however, been uneven across board, inconsistent over time and space, and remain largely incomplete. The challenges that have arisen are numerous and speak to the difficulties encountered in going beyond the bare basics to improve the quality of governance and deliver substantive results for the benefit of citizens. The literature on the challenges of advancing the project of democratisation in Africa is replete with examples of the many gaps, deficits, and discontents that have persisted or arisen. Some of the more prominent ones that are cited most frequently include:

1. Difficulties with upholding the integrity of elections as a long-term gain in many countries with the entire voter registration and voting exercises, results collation/transmission methods, and results verification and proclamation processes marred by varying degrees of irregularity.
2. The persistence or resurgence of electoral violence as integral features of intra-and interparty competition, violence which also carries implication for voter participation on election day and the integrity of the entire political process.
3. Open and subtle attacks on the autonomy of election management bodies as incumbents in particular but also oppositional groups in some instances seek to manipulate them to serve partisan ends.
4. Serious weaknesses with the electoral justice system that act to erode faith in the fairness of the political process and the impartiality of those supposed to act as judicial arbiters.

Other gaps, deficits, and discontents that have featured in the ongoing effort at democratisation include:

1. Generally weak political parties operating in a highly crowded and fragmented field, most without internal organizational capacity, territorial spread, and programmatic vision, and functioning under the thumbs of various godfathers and cabals.
2. Ruling parties that conflate state and party resources as part of their bid to hold on to advantage and undermine credible opposition.
3. The increasing, even disproportionate use of money to buy votes and influence the electorate amidst non-existent rules about the role of finance in politics or weak enforcement capacities.
4. A deep-rooted deficit of democratic ethos and values among the dominant political actors for whom politics is a do-or-die game for which all is permitted in the quest to win and/or retain power. Most politicians purport to campaign for and believe in democracy but few are themselves democrats or ready to play by the rules of democracy.
5. An acute and persistent under-representation of women, the youth, people with disability, and various minorities in elected offices and institutions of democratic governance. This is so despite the strides made by a few countries in this domain, with Rwanda, South Africa, and Namibia serving as leading examples, the emergence of female heads of state and government at different times and under different circumstances in Central Africa Republic, Liberia, and Malawi, and continuing campaigns for the implementation of the Maputo Protocol that was signed in 2003.
6. A continuing culture of acquiring political office as the shortest route to quick wealth, with elected officials using their positions to engage in unbridled self-enrichment, including the allocation of unjustifiably large proportions of national budgets to themselves. This culture has fed into the broader dynamic of corruption and nepotism that has been a ubiquitous and an endemic feature of governance as to qualify to be described as systemic.

Beyond the observed gaps and weaknesses associated with the electoral system and party politics, various commentators have also drawn attention to additional sources of disaffection and frustration with the ongoing quest for democratisation. In this regard, questions such as the poor record of service deliver y, both in quality and quantity, have been highlighted, even as service delivery protests have become an increasingly prominent feature of daily life on the continent. This also speaks in part to the almost total disconnect between elected officials and their constituents once voting is over. The heavily rising cost of elections, including dubious outlays on expensive election technologies, have attracted strong criticisms from citizen groups worried, among other things, about the piling up of fiscal deficits and trade debts amidst unrelenting mass poverty, the creation of new donor dependencies via the electoral route, and the lack of attention to technological sustainability.

Concerns have also built up about the gradual abandonment of the earlier consensus on term limitation as incumbents in a significant number of countries have pushed constitutional amendments to enable them stay in power for an unlimited number of terms. Furthermore, the threat of a full-scale return to a revamped presidentialism complete with a re-concentration and re-centralisation of power has, additionally, been noted as a growing trend from Benin to Malawi, Tanzania to Gabon, and Cote d'Ivoire to Chad. This threat has gone side by side with spirited efforts in many countries to "rein in" civil society, curb the independent media, and curtail the right to protest as part of a trend to narrow the space.

Palliatives for Redressing Deficits in the Quest to Democratise Africa

To overcome the observed gaps and weaknesses in the continuing effort to embed and sustain democratic governance in Africa, various local and global institutions have, over recent years, packaged programmes of democracy support to assist governments, political parties, election management bodies, judicial institutions, and citizen groups to better perform their roles in the governance process. In recent years, such support has been presented as technical assistance aimed at:

1. Enhancing the capacity of election management bodies across the broad range of duties and responsibilities entrusted to them, including the production of reliable voter registers, the adoption of improved methods for the collation of results, strengthening of their external communication and voter education capabilities, etc.
2. Fostering programmatic parties that go into competitive elections based on well thought-out manifestos as against a one-sided reliance on parochial considerations or a political godfather for their fortunes.
3. Building and sustaining trust among actors in political society through the convening and institutionalisation of regular inter-party dialogues.
4. Improving the capacity of political parties to communicate with different segments of their support base and/or the wider voting public, including the use of customized and open access technological applications.
5. Strengthening parliamentary and judicial independence through training, the supply of equipment, and advocacy for proposals for additional reforms designed to advance the goal of the separation of powers.
6. Conducting voter education, investing in the strengthening of civil society, and promoting domestic election observation capacity.

Other palliatives that have tried or which are still being pursued include the development of continental and sub-regional standards on elections and the rule of law, which could be enforced by bodies such as the African Union and the Regional Economic Communities (RECs). Attention has also been given to the possibility for establishing measurable indicators for the degree of independence of election management bodies. Training and capacity enhancement opportunities in democracy and democratic governance have been offered to members of the youth wings of political parties as a next generation of leaders being targeted for special attention. Support is being extended to governments directly or their agencies to introduce campaign finance reforms aimed at regulating the growing and insidious role of money in politics in Africa. Furthermore, staff of media organisations have benefitted from a variety of programmes aimed at sharpening their reportorial and investigative capacities. Elected and non-elected but politically active women have similarly been offered various support packages aimed at "empowering" them to more effectively campaign for gender equality in the politics of democratisation.

Beyond Palliatives and Towards a Deeper Understanding of the Challenges of Democratisation

The many palliatives that have been introduced over the years since the 1990s may have offered some prospects of improvements in the overall experience of efforts at democratisation since the 1990s. However, most of them have been introduced in a fragmented manner over different time periods as to have been patchy in their impact. Moreover, they have mostly remained within the overarching framework of a theory and practice of democracy as electoralism; innovative interventions aimed at revamping the system to make it work better and more effectively for citizens have been few and far between. Not surprisingly, therefore, although there is still widespread popular support for the democratic ideal among the generality of Africans, deep concerns have built up and persisted about the ways democracy has been practiced and experienced over the last three decades. In fact, these concerns have been gradually mushrooming over the years into a growing disillusionment that calls for a rethinking of the entire democratic project itself if it is not to flounder and collapse. For evidence, we only need to review the data on voter turnout, as one example, to see the declining trend of citizen participation in the political process. Other examples can be cited.

At the heart of the disillusionment with the practice of democracy is the failure, despite apparent motions of change, for substantive outcomes that matter to the lives and livelihoods of the citizenry to be delivered. To understand this deficit, it is necessary to go back to the choice that predominated in the context of the political reform efforts of the 1990s. Much of the reform discussion that took place culminated in the adoption of a model of democratisation that was:

1. Essentially minimalist and formalistic with a focus on elections, multiple party competition, and the formal separation of powers.
2. Anchored heavily on civil libertarian ideas of democracy but largely bereft of socio-economic moorings.
3. Limited by its reduction of the popular quest for the replacement of decades of political monopoly with political pluralism to a simple licensing of multiple parties to operate.
4. Heavy on rituals, protocols, and procedures but short on substance and content of the type that incentivises citizen empowerment to be active participants in the political process.

While there can be no doubt, against the backdrop of authoritarianism and repression, that the initial political reforms introduced in the period from the 1990s onwards were products of popular struggles that were significant, necessary, and welcome in their own right, they were very quickly transformed into ends in themselves rather than some of the means to an end. As a consequence, the political reforms that were carried out were treated in a compartmentalised manner as a category apart from the social and economic reforms that also needed to be carried out. While domestic debates raged about the nature and depth of political reforms that were required for the transition from authoritarianism, the conversation about socio-economic reforms was far more muted.

Indeed, socio-economic reforms were effectively left to international financial institutions to continue to monopolise and dominate as an exclusive domain in which they held sway virtually unchallenged. Thus, it was that, political reforms failed from the outset to speak and answer to expressed socio-economic needs and preferred socio·economic policies had no popular domestic political anchorage. Political reforms were subordinated to neo·liberal socio-economic reform preferences and priorities; in fact, to the extent to which they counted, they were expected to provide "cover" and some legitimation for neo·liberal social and economic policy measures.

With political reforms anchored on liberal rights and packed with formal rituals while socio-economic policy remained firmly in the grip of the international financial institutions, the stage was set for a series of anomalies in the African democratisation experience. Very early in the transition from authoritarianism, Claude Ake (1996a, 1996b, 2000) was to warn about the dangers of democratisation as disempowerment based precisely on the failure to tackle the structural injustices in the polity as an integral part of the agenda ofreform and change. Amartya Sen's seminal thesis on development as freedom (1999) also spoke to another of the anomalies in the African democratisation effort in terms of the failure to understand democracy as integral to development and development as an essential underpinning for citizens to participate meaningfully in the political process as bearers of agency able to formulate demands and exact accountability. In the context of the power asymmetries in all of the countries in transition, the disconnection of political reforms from socio-economic reforms effectively meant that even as citizens exercised their right to vote, they effectively were, as Liisa Laakso (1999) suggested, voting without really choosing.

It is remarkable that over the last three decades of efforts at democratisation, regardless of the changes in elected political leadership that has taken place, including alternations between ruling and opposition parties, socio-economic policy has mostly remained fixed and has followed one direction, a neo-liberal one based on the prescriptions of the international financial institutions. In recent times, these prescriptions have mainly been embodied in the medium-term expenditure frameworks agreed with African governments by the international financial institutions. Regardless of the manifesto commitments on which governments have been voted in, socio-economic policy has remained unchanging in anchorage, content and direction. To the extent to which the succession of elected governments have had no option than to adhere to the inflation-targeting/ deflationary policy framework set by the international financial institutions, African countries have, effectively, been reduced to a state of what Thandika Mkandawire (1999) has labelled a choicelessness in the citizen quest for democratisation. In this state, whole swathes of social and economic policy are excluded from parliamentary scrutiny and citizen engagement, treated as they are as exclusive preserves of the executive arm acting in concert with the international financial institutions. In consequence, governmental accountability for policy has been taken out of the domestic arena and externalised to multilateral and bilateral donors.

The reality of disempowered citizens living in choiceless democracies has carried many consequences for the quest for a game-changing transformation of the continent. At one level, as governments have come and gone, citizens have increasingly come to the conclusion that, despite their different party appellations and the different cast of personalities they present or simply repackage in new garbs from one electoral cycle to the other, very little really truly distinguishes them one from the other. The feeling is strongly embedded that plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose; changes in leadership are little more than a game of musical chairs played out among an elite that is disconnected from the generality of the people. There is plenty of motion all around in the polity, complete with ceremonial pomp and circumstance, but African countries seem to be jumping on the same spot, doing so in some cases ever more vigorously and determinedly despite the fact that what they have been doing is not yielding the transformation that citizens seek and deserve. Recent narratives of an emergent or rising Africa have done little to assuage the feeling of individuals and countries being trapped in a political system that is unchanging. Indeed, to many an average African, the narrative of emergence and/or rise is one which is alien to their lived experiences.

At another level, on account of the severe limitations of the ongoing democratisation project, a deep-seated apathy with electoral politics as a meaningful vehicle for driving reform and transformation has set in and is threatening to ossify. The literature has captured this in terms of an "election fatigue" reflected, inter alia, in poor voter turnout/generalised voter apathy and a "democracy fatigue" that speaks to broad and rising disillusionment with the type of democratisation that has taken place to date. Political sociologists have also drawn attention to a growing politics of anti-politics couched in a new religiosity in which many are taking refuge even as they seek personal/ individual empowerment in the name of God. Not a few are prepared to do so through the embrace of "radical" ideas, instruments, and approaches that have been fed by, and which also feed into regional and global networks of organised violence against the state and local communities, including such anti-secular movements such as Boko Haram, Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQMJ), Ansarul, and Islamic State in West Africa (ISWA), to cite the best known ones.

Meaning, solace, and empowerment are also being sought by many in ethno-regional networks as parochial identity politics enjoys a resurgence and translates into violent intolerance. Compounded by struggles over various resources, including land, contemporary ethno·regional irredentism is threatening to bring many countries to the brink of a political breakdown and war. In the interim, crime and criminality in various shapes and forms have become a widespread feature of the experience of democratisation as are spectacular incidences of corruption perpetuated by a political elite that has become more and more adept at pillaging the public treasury. Corruption, embedded in the logic of neoliberal socio-economic policy, has contributed to the exacerbation of existing challenges which drove the push for change in the first place and which the particular model of democratisation that was embraced has been unable to redress in any decisive way. Of particular importance are the inter-related challenges of poverty, long-term underemployment and unemployment (especially among the youth), and inequality on historically unimaginable scales.

The challenges of poverty, unemployment, inequality, and exclusion are playing out in the context of a continuing decline in the overall productive capacities of African countries that is reflected by or refracted into:

1. A sustained crisis of de-industrialisation and a prolonged inability to achieve economic diversification beyond an inherited narrow natural resource base, add value domestically, and build inter-sectoral linkages.
2. A massive hemorrhaging of capital through illicit financial transfers and a sustained brain drain.
3. The absence or virtual collapse of a meaningful social policy framework that is able simultaneously to serve a broader production and social cohesion function.
4. The underdevelopment of a domestic investing class with a stake in the real sectors of the economy and an objective interest in a shared vision oflong·term societal transformation.
5. Widespread infrastructure deficits afflicting virtually all sectors, from transportation to the supply of electricity and potable water.
6. Strong and persistent international migratory pressures among young people as they write off the prospects, even over the medium-term, of a continental rebirth and seek to escape a blighted future.

Concluding Comments: Overcoming Stalemate and Achieving Social Transformation

Moving beyond the shortcomings and discontents of the current experience of democratisation in Africa has become an urgent imperative. Thirty years on, a strong case exists for a wholesale rethinking of what democratic governance and development should mean for Africa in the light of the circumstances of the peoples and countries of the continent, and a global system that is mired in multiple challenges of transition from an old order to a potentially new one. Central to the rethinking that must take place is the need to reinvent an active citizenship by which the generality of the people can take back the initiative and fashion a new state-society bargain that could serve as the foundation for the transformation of politics, economy and society. Recent developments in Algeria and The Sudan offers a glimpse of what the reclaiming of an active citizenship can deliver even if the struggle for transformation in both countries is not over. The ultimate goal would be for democracy to deliver development and for development to nurture democracy in a symbiotic and mutually beneficial way. This is a goal for which Akilagpa Sawyerr has devoted a lifetime of work. Let it be realised in his lifetime. We can make it happen. And we must.