Political Parties in Africa: Challenges for Sustained Multiparty

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Political Parties in Africa: Challenges for Sustained Multiparty Democracy
emerged triumphant in free and fair elections constitute the governing political party
(or coalition of parties), which are endowed with the legitimacy to assume
the authority and the logical implications of the separation and consequent
relations between rulers and ruled in a politically organized society. Political
party is a strategically critical concept for understanding, in any developed
political system, not only the institutions and practices that permit and justify
the exercise of political authority, regulate the effective choice and removal
of political rulers, and prescribe and delimit the authority of the government
in power, but also the ways in which public policy-makers are guided by the
subject of the broad movements of popular sentiment and inter-group feelings
(Weiner 1967: 1–2).
However, political parties straddle the space and span the connective linkages between
citizens and government, and between a multitude of private, market-based, civil
society and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the general public. They
also cut across at least four conventional processes of government: the electoral, the
legislative, the executive and the administrative. Beyond cutting across government
processes, political parties also shape public policies and programmes that cut across
party politics and government functions, and even the state’s response to transnational
public policy issues where the party in power holds sway in implementing policies
informed by its electoral pledges.
By their very nature, political parties are representative institutions that endow regimes
with legitimacy; provide ideologies that represent social, economic and political
interests; and produce leaders who through democratic elections form the machinery
of government (from parliament to the political executive) or opportunities for
political participation, or a combination of all three. Political parties also intermediate
and create opportunities for upward social and political mobility—the formation of
coalitions of powerful political interests to sustain government. All these functions
have a major influence on politics and they way in which parties carry them out in
as indicator of whether a particular democratic system is institutionalized or fragile.
When they win the majority of seats in parliament, political parties’ programmes
also inform the government’s policies and programmes. In Africa, some political
parties have been active not only in political mobilization but also in mobilization
for self-help activities, conflict management and so on.
One of the authors of this report (Mohamed Salih 1999: 355–6) argues that the
external emphasis on democratic governance means that there is a need to widen the
scope of political party activities and the political space within which they operate
through representation and competitive politics. Democratic consolidation can
hardly be achieved without political parties playing a significant role not only in the
debate but also by practising the principles and policies they advocate. Furthermore,