One of the successes of American hegemony and cultural brainwashing is the inculcation of the idea that liberal democracy is the ultimate form of governance.
This is why on Africa Day, you see an African person calling for democracy in Burkina Faso.
This (non) thinking is a recitation of the American gospel which preaches that liberal democracy is the singular, sacred path to legitimate rule.
By liberal democracy we mean elections, multi-party systems, judicial independence, freedom of speech. All of this is now treated not as one model among many, but as the final destination of political evolution, and the African genuinely believes this.
The idea that legitimacy comes only from elections is now so deeply ingrained that leaders who seize power through other means, even in the face of collapse or neo-colonial extraction, are instantly dismissed as illegitimate, tyrannical or primitive.
Meanwhile, the reality is that a vote means nothing in a country where the economy is already captured by foreign creditors and every minister is just a neo-colonial manager.
So, to uncritically repeat that “power must come from the electorate” is to ignore how that electorate is shaped, constrained, and manipulated by global capital, local oligarchs, and ideological gatekeepers.
If Africa is to be free, it must reclaim the right to experiment politically and build new forms of revolutionary governance based on the material realities of its people, not the fantasies of American embassies.
The continent must thoroughly escape the chokehold that treats liberal democracy not as one option among many, but as the only legitimate form of political life.
Most importantly, this thinking must begin not in constitutions or policy papers, but in how political leaders conduct themselves and imagine power.
Sadly, even the most radical or populist African political formations sing from the liberal hymn book. They speak of elections as salvation, parliaments as the supreme arena of change, and courts as the ultimate arbiters of truth.
Their manifestos are laced with borrowed idioms of “rule of law,” “checks and balances,” and “good governance”—terms whose origins lie not in African political culture, but in Western crisis management tools.
In so doing, they betray their own promises and offer instead a reformist illusion wrapped in revolutionary rhetoric.
The truth is, most of Africa’s dominant political classes are fluent in the grammar of liberalism. Whether they seize power through the ballot or the bullet, they often seek legitimacy through Western-style rituals: press briefings, electoral commissions, transitional charters.
To truly decolonise politics, Africans must create political futures that reflect their lived conditions.
This means inventing new forms of revolutionary democracy, not liberalism’s stage-managed top-down technocracy.