Africa & Global Power

  A frica held more than twenty national elections in 2024. Measured by volume alone, this looks like a continent deepening its democratic practice. Measured by the quality of those contests, the picture is considerably more complicated. Incumbents won the majority of them. Opposition candidates in several countries faced arrest, disqualification, or physical intimidation in the months preceding polling day. Independent electoral commissions, in multiple cases, delivered results that domestic and international observers described as inconsistent with the vote counts, they had witnessed at the polling stations. This is not a uniform story. Africa has genuine democratic bright spots: Botswana, Cabo Verde, Ghana, Senegal, and Namibia have built electoral traditions that can withstand competitive pressure and transfer power peacefully. Senegal’s 2024 election produced one of the continent’s most striking democratic moments, when President Macky Sall, facing a constitutional crisis of...

    SOCIAL CONTRACT THEORY The social contract theory is not only the most ancient but also the most famous of the theories regarding the origin of the state. The substance of this theory is that state is the result of an agreement entered into by men who originally had no governmental organisation. In the first period there was no government and no law. The people lived in a state of nature. After some time, they decided to set up a state. That they did by means of a contract. The social contract theory described the original condition of men as the 'state of nature'. To escape from the condition of the state of nature man made a social contract. To some writers the contract was pre-social and to others it was pre-political. Writers on this theory are agreed on the point that the state of nature preceded the establishment of government there was no organised life in the state of nature. Each lived according to his own wish and fancies. No man made laws were there to control...