Political Parties in Africa: Challenges for Sustained Multiparty

Chapter 4
4. African Party and Electoral Systems
4.1 Introduction
African political parties originated in the non-democratic setting of colonial rule
which was neither democratic nor legitimate. The post-Second World War colonial
state could best be described as a reformed state that sought to include Africans in the
administration of the colonies. Knowing that Africans’ agitation for independence
was inevitable, the colonial powers developed this understanding into an opportunity
to introduce Africans to Western political institutions, including allowing Africans
under strict political surveillance to establish political parties to oversee the
development of a legislature. In the urge to leave behind political institutions similar
to their own, the departing colonial governments decided ‘to export to Africa their
peculiar version of parliamentary government, with several parties and recognised
opposition’ (Mohamed Salih 2006: 141). In some countries, it took the political elite
less than a decade to move from establishing political parties to contesting elections
and assuming the role of governing their countries.
In practice, due to the speed of political development, numerous ethnically-based
parties emerged in opposition to other ethnic parties. Once these political parties
were established, they began to assume the structures and functions of Westernstyle
political parties. After the attainment of independence and the waning of
the ‘decolonization nationalism’, the political elite abandoned the goal of national
unity, the very goal that gave birth to their political ambitions, and fell back on subnationalist
politics. In some countries (Sudan, Nigeria, Congo, Angola, Mozambique
and Uganda, among others), sub-nationalism flared up in civil wars and second
liberation movements—for liberation from what some marginalized and minority
ethnicity political elite conceived as a form of internal colonialism imposed by the
‘ruling ethnicity’.