Fake democracy takes centre stage in Africa

However, some in their governance are using it properly, while some are taking advantage of the word to perpetuate their own interests. We call it political gimmicks.
Therefore, in reality there must be a distinction between “Fake and Genuine Democracy”.
Africa suffered a lot during the colonial period. Many people suffered and died during the fight against injustice in Africa and other colonised countries the world over.

The use of the word “democracy” is about as powerful as an agent of confusion, double-talk and sheer fakery which encapsulates rhetoric employed by emerging “opposition parties in Africa”.
We have witnessed how opposition parties appropriate words that call something very deep in us all and then use them to justify actions that altogether contradict their meaning.

“Good Governance” they say, and demonstrate their ignorance by supporting and blessing the use of high explosives on the governed.
The opposition parties that are emerging these days do not have the vision of what we were and what we are.
They have been twisted, their minds are throwbacks to the colonial era where democracy, good governance and human rights were non-existent, where only the minorities were in control of the political and natural resources.

The yester-year master is still using our people by urging them to speak about democracy divisively forgetting “Cultural diversity” that is the driving force for development in both the developing and developed world.
In Africa, leaders of opposition parties are confusing the masses by claiming that they have revolutionary ideas to lead the nations. The many years of enslavement of the people of African continent, and a century of colonisation followed by independence and neo-colonialism, have supposedly set Africans off balance and have

confused the black race on what democracy is all about.

However, the confusion still persists as the former colonisers have managed to grab some of our indigenous blacks, passing them off as great thinkers by imitating the European or American democracy that does not suit our own environment and given our different levels of social, political and economic development.
Fake democracy really goes back to the original Greek view of the world. To them, “democracy” represented a participation in government of the minority of free-men in a slave society.

The system worked well in their environment. Even then it was a tactic, a device, to help the rich and powerful in manipulating the lower and middle strata of society.
In southern Africa, leaders of institutions that used to claim authority to be representing workers have tasted the dollar, pound and Euro. They are no more representing workers, they are now using these institutions as a gateway to politics. They are being used as window dressers in order to perpetuate interests of their foreign masters; who have recolonised their minds.

In Abler Mammy’s words, “a colonised person needs to eradicate colonialism in order to rescue his life, but he needs to wipe out his own colonised personality in order to turn into a true human being again”.

In my conception, humanity does not expect us to simply engage in ridiculous imitation of others. Society can accept progressive African think-tanks who are not indoctrinated by foreigners.

We Africans, why should we be used to enrich our colonial masters by preaching fake democracy? Fake democracy found a new lease of life nearer to our times with the development of a bourgeois society who want to continue using their means of production in suppressing the owners of the “land”.
It’s essential function was (and still is) to consolidate the power of the minority by creating in the minds of the majority, the illusion that if the opposition parties are in power they control their own destiny and that they will have a real place in the decision-making process of government.

However, one agrees with other scholars, especially in Africa who say democracy in reality is that the spirit of it has very little to do with political processes but it has everything to do with how people feel towards each other.
Democracy, above all, implies faith in people.

A real democratic society is one in which people have a sense of community, of relatedness and in which a mutual liking and trust flow between them like a thousand invisible threads so that people feel they belong together with no need to be watchful, competitive or tough, with virtually no need to remove an incumbent government by the use of force.

Trying to remove the elected government by force is tantamount to more anarchy and problems therefrom will affect national, sub-regional and continental affairs.
In southern Africa, the crisis in one country usually spreads to neighbouring countries and affects sub-regional solidarity and undermine continental progress.
It is sad to note that Africa is still being marginalised by those so-called industrialised nations by being driven by remote controls.

In all elections, be it presidential or parliamentary, the Western world support the opposition parties against legitimate governments. This phenomenon of “Regime Change” in Africa and in other developing nations is growing like wildfire.
If the opposition fail to gunner enough support from the electorate the opposition parties and their masters would say the elections were not free and fair and there is no democracy.

Is this what you call democracy? Africa should restore the culture of bravery and sacrifices. Africa should refrain from being used as a political playing ground.
Africa should not be re-colonised again.

The struggle continues.