Abstract: This paper delineates the negative role played by non-democratic political education and calls for the conception and hence development of a democratic political education to enhance Africa's current democratization derive. (1) It elucidates: The case for a democratic political education informed by African post-colonial experience and the specifity of its transition to democracy. (2) It criticizes Africa's education establishment its negative role during the reign of one-party regimes and military dictatorships. (3) It argues that the starting point in this process should be the liberation of the African education establishment and the reorientation of its mission to undertake citizen-centred political education. Democratic political education is particularly relevant today in order to a secure sustainable democratic process capable of nurturing a new generation of responsible governance.
Africa is experiencing an impressive transition from one-party states, military rule or civilian dictatorships to various forms of political pluralism. This process has evidently not been without difficulties which have exerted immense pressures on African civil society as well as the state. These difficulties are not structural as some might think, but results of unique historical experiences and struggles. In this vein, it is essentially insidious not to recognize that the colonial experience represented a brutal abuse of Africans human rights, and that the colonial experience was neither democratic nor humane. The colonial powers ruled most of the continent with an iron fist and denied its people the right to govern themselves, and in order to make them governable, they exacted a sustained assault on their cultures and traditional political institutions.
Following independence, with few exceptions, the African political elites who inherited power from the colonial rule behaved like the colonialists and continued to deny the African peoples their rights to basic freedoms and human rights. Ironically some societies graduated from a non-democratic oppressive colonial rule to an equally non-democratic authoritarian national rule. The parallels between the colonial and post-colonial political coercion are at times revealing. Both have in different ways denied African peoples human rights and the right to basic freedoms and democratic rights. As a result, very few African states have really experienced a semblance of democratic governance or have sufficiently long experience with democratic practice to merit smooth transition to democracy as many commentators would have wished.
During the previous four decades or so most Africans have been governed by repressive post-colonial states which, in some cases, kept intact elements of the colonial system of government which were neither democratic nor participatory. Yet Africa, for some reason, is expected to develop instant democratic institutions, political parties and various systems of checks and balances. Many well-wishers have expected Africa to be readily available to adopt democratic political systems (similar or identical to those which developed in the West after centuries of struggle) within less than a decade. Many Western commentators, aware of the colonial experience and the post-colonial excesses of the African state continue to blame Africans for not having developed a democratic tradition from the ashes of the old despotic regimes. They also tend to ignore or forget that it took Western democracies centuries of trial and error to develop democratic systems; some are still experimenting, while others are not fully satisfied with what their democratic representatives have to deliver.
Any attempt to compare the political situation in Africa and its peoples' struggle for political rights with what is taking place in the West is based on false grounds and an unrealistic analogy. Not because African societies are structurally non-democratic, but because their colonial and post-colonial histories have, by and large, been histories of non-democratic authoritarian rule. People who have not experienced democracy and internalized its values over a long period, will make errors and will have constitutional and other political crises which are part of the democratic process itself. Africans have to be given that opportunity, supported by democrats who are aware of the fact that democracy is more difficult to manage than dictatorship. To manage democracy involves putting in place social, political, cultural, education and people-centred institutional arrangements which will enable people to be aware of the rights and obligations which democracy entails.
The political marginalization of civil society by an authoritarian state has compelled people to defy state-centred politics and opt for alternative political arrangements outside the state structures. Political disengagement and relocation of political activities outside the mainstream national politics became a norm, with signs of political apathy and withdrawal. One consequence of this is the emergence of social movements, opposition and pressure groups defiant and at times confrontational to the state. Other sectors of civil society have adopted violence as a mode of expressing their disappointment with the state's handling of the national question. Some have resorted to "internal liberation" wars lead by national liberation fronts (in Ethiopia, Sudan, Angola, Mozambique, Nigeria, Mauritania, Mali, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Djibouti among others). Some of the second generation of national liberation wars (that is internal wars against an exceedingly oppressive state) from what Mohamed Salih (1993) referred to as internal colonialism (Sudan, Ethiopian-Eritrean war, the Western Sahara and so on) have continued unabated for decades.
Evidently, both African civil society and the African state are under pressure to take their responsibility seriously and develop legitimate and accountable governance. These pressures are of at least two sources: (1) External pressures exerted by a democratically-inclined global civil society. Some global actors demand nothing short of the introduction and probably an imposition of "instant democracy", although they know that Africa has embryonic to meagre experience with liberal democracy. (2) Internal pressures exerted by civil society and human rights activists who demand that the continent has to provide democratic leadership and accountable political organizations in societies with meagre to no long-term experience with modern democratic institutions and practice. In some cases, African civil society has found itself in confrontation with the newly emerging political party operators and educated political elites who have no knowledge about managing participatory democratic institutions. Other party operators ended up behaving like civil dictators, thus infuriating democrats inside and outside the continent.
In short, the strained relationship between state and civil society in Africa and the politics of discontent which it has ameliorated engulfed state and civil society in Africa, with the realization that the emergence of responsible democratic governance require longer time than what many analysts and democratic rights activists might have thought. Democracy is more than political operators who pose like democrats and hollow political institutions which are internally non-democratic. It is a process that can be enhanced, but not engineered. This paper is intended to explain why probably, more than any other continent, political education and political literacy can play a formidable role in enhancing the drive towards democratic governance in Africa.
The point of departure of this section of the paper is that there are discernable linkages between the current democratization process and the need to enhance the role of political education. It also poses a critique to the conventional concept of political education in populist regimes. Hence, I argue from the outset that most post-colonial states in Africa have developed a hegemonic and intolerant notion of political education based on a narrow state-driven nation-building project. This project has unfortunately been inspired by intolerant attitudes towards other "national" cultures, languages, religions and ethnic groups. In the circumstances, political education is considered part of the overall objectives of the educational establishment which has explicitly been used as an oppressive political instrument to further the official ideology of the state.
However, we will lose sight of the argument if we make the sweeping generalization that political education has not played any positive role in Africa. It is now evident that political education has played an important role in the struggle for independence. Shortly after independence, political education was used as an instrument to consolidate the political leadership's grip on power. The nation-building project has undermined its own mission from within by putting emphasis on a homogenizing educational system which denies people the right to use their own vernacular languages or publicly exhibit their pride in ethnic belongingness and cultures. Unfortunately, the nation-building project has developed into the nation-disintegrating project, particularly when the state has failed to meet peoples aspirations in development and in an improvement in their standards of living. In some cases many ethnic groups opted out of the state and turned to the very ethnic and tribal institutions which the nation-building project conspired to subvert. Today, the grand aim of developing the nation-building project into a nation-state project has been confronted by massive problems which are symptomatic of the failure of that particular notion of political education.
Following independence, the unholy alliance between the official state ideology and political education created an oppressive educational establishment which perceived those who oppose the official ideology or usher an alternative ideology as enemies of the state. Situations in which the official ideology is supposed to be taught and learned (like the case of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc countries), education became an instrument for internalizing the political values which the state holds high. For instance, the courses commonly taught in socialist states were on the fundamentals of Marxism Leninism. Communist ideological and political education was a key aspect in forming the socialist personality and for transforming party members into political subjects or ideologues. Similar association between political education and the state ideology were rampant in African socialist states as well as in various forms of military and authoritarian regimes.
Certainly, in non-democratic political regimes, political education meant political indoctrination, and this is not the type of political education this paper proposes. Non-democratic political education has done more harm than good to the nation-building project. It has undermined the development of democratic institutions and suppressed peoples aspirations for representative political organizations. This is mainly because in most African states, the concept of nation-building has been abused by authoritarian regimes in order to homogenize and hence hegemonize their ethnically, linguistically and religiously diverse peoples.
However, with the creation of a democratic educational establishment and political institutions which respect human rights, political education can play a vital role in advancing the ensuing democratic process. Yet, as I will argue later, the educational establishment itself has to be liberated from a hegemonic nation-building ideology in order to be able to play a positive role in enhancing the drive towards desirable democratic institutions and practices. Democratic political education draws its strength from a conception of democracy based on the trilateral relationship between society, the state and education. Their triangular relationship is based on the conviction that the role of education is to assist citizens to understand and negotiate their interests vis-a-vis the state, without losing the possibility of integrating that role into the normative system of the state. As part of the nation, the citizen is expected to contribute to national integration and to expand solidarity to encompass positive regional sentiments. Therefore, the purpose of political education should be incorporated in the principles of modern humanities-oriented pedagogy, whereby political education is expected to increase political awareness, often measured by political participation, information, media exposure and interest in politics. The model, according to Zaller (1990), explains normative tendencies and regularities of political awareness, including attitude stability, support of mainstream policies and consistency of political ideology and political practice.
In concluding this section, two points merit serious consideration: (1) The objectives of political education differ between democratic and non-democratic political regimes. Political education should not and ought not be for the inculcation of a particular state ideology beyond the need for participation, the rule of law, human rights, accountability, responsible and transparent governance. Political education ought to be democratic. (2) Therefore it is necessary to restructure the role of political education so that it becomes democratic and hence empowers civil society. Considering the pressures which civil society has to face in order to provide a new type of leadership in all walks of life, a peoples-centred political education would certainly play a pivotal role in serving the cause of democracy and the respect of human rights.
Recent contributions to political education and political literacy emphasize that politics and community are necessary and positive dimensions in individual life. Gorham (1992) asserts that citizenship has become a topic of central concern to political scientists and political theorists in the last few decades with the need to further citizens' understanding of the public policy process. Furthermore, Gorham argues, with particular reference to youth, democratic political education can socialize a sense of citizenship creating a nation of defenders of democracy, liberties and rights. To that extent, the advocacy of political literacy is neither heretic nor unjustified even in more developed democracies. For instance, Gale (1994) defends the importance of political literacy in the United States of America, with its long democratic tradition, by arguing that political literacy confronts and responds to the question: "What is required of the citizens of a democracy to ensure their individual and social rights?" It advocates the view that citizens must be so educated as to have an intellectual awareness of the inherently political nature of public life and their relationship with the state. Gale calls for changes in the way the public is educated about the justice system in the USA and about the risk of complacency in this crucial area of public life.
Earlier studies on the development of political education in Britain, West Germany, and the USA revealed that the economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s and the economic crisis of the 1970s resulted in apathy and undermined various aspects of political activity that determine the legitimacy of the state. Political education was perceived by politicians and citizens as a means to introduce political literacy (Hanson 1966; Freire 1972, 1973, 1985; Carnoy, 1981; Cohen 1983; Nweke 1992; Jenniags 1993; Lister 1994). In these societies which have a long traditions of liberal democracy, the question for Cohen (1983) is not one of harnessing the non-democratic tendencies among the political elite (as in the case of Africa), but to deal with the question of deference to power in democratic societies. Boyle and Mulcahy (1993) made the point that the quality of freedom and democracy is directly tied to the knowledge and education of citizens. The question is: If we cannot be ignorant and free, how smart do we have to be to keep our freedom? The answer is: Pretty smart, and smarter every day. To be a citizen means to be a lifelong student. But the ultimate pay-off is a more enlightened populace and a democratic society that works better.
Although it is obvious that education is politics, the role of political education is not only strictly political, it has strong linkages to other life pursuits, including legal advocacy, social development, empowerment of the disadvantaged, increasing public policy awareness and so on. Democratic political education has an important role to play in explaining the nature of political reforms and transition, management of political parties, electoral education and reform and the creation of citizen politics. However, the manner in which this can be achieved differs from one country to another and therefore it is necessary to caution against any blueprints and readily transferable packages.
Democratic political education is possible only when the education establishment itself is democratic and not fearful of empowering the younger generation whom it has to prepare for the future. Conventional, backward-looking education establishments have to be liberated before they can be entrusted with the task of generating democratic citizens. Non-democratic education establishments can hardly be expected to enhance the spread of democratic values or increase political awareness to emancipate citizens or encourage their free engagement in public life and public policy setting.
Without liberating the education establishment from its inherent position as the guardian of the status-quo, social transformation and the accompanying political emancipation will be impossible. If left as it is, it will fail to fulfil its role of advancing individual liberty or societal interest in democratic governance and non-authoritarian political values. If education passes on the notion that non-conformity is politically unacceptable or socially unjustified, it will lose its ability to challenge the genesis of political apathy and instead foster those values which encourage control and domination. Such an establishment could even usher the Marcusian (Marcuse, 1972: 23) contention that liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination based on the absence of basic liberties.
The main question here is, how can an education establishment which served dictators, also be useful in serving the conception of a democratic society based on the principles of liberty and citizens-politics. No matter how the education establishment may attempt to rethink its mission, the formalizing role of education must be challenged in order to give way to an essentially different social and political order (Freire, 1985). Exposing and clarifying partisan, ethnic (national or regional) goals, real and imagined fears, and strategic objectives cannot be achieved by affirmative action alone; negation of the status-quo is just as important. An education system which is based on the ability to express only that which is taught, is an education system which falls short of decolonizing the imaginative and creative faculties of those on whom the education mission is exacted. Such education betrays society and merely reproduces intellectual fads tantamount to disillusion and subversion of societal goals, particularly the democratic values which are based on the negotiation, debate and discussion of multiple scenarios of problem solving.
The mismatch between education mission, practice and the democratic values which society is eager to further cannot be more obvious than in the lecturer-student relationship. In most of Africa, the distance between lecturer and student is so wide that accessibility to the lecturer becomes impossible. Cases of critical thinking being repressed, silenced or treated as troublesome are common. It is impossible to imagine that a non-democratic education experience can yield democratic results or help foster the goals of democracy. Democracy has to be practised by the lecturers and educators who are supposed to uphold the higher values that they themselves teach and hence propagate. An authoritarian educational system is apt to produce an authoritarian society, particularly in the form of an educated elite who generally form the future leadership of society. The institutionalization of democratic values cannot come from nowhere. Education can and has been used a means of control and an instrument to achieve mischievous political goals by authoritarian regimes and one-party states: to justify the prevalence of non-democratic values. The point I am driving at is that a democratic, non-authoritarian educational system and a democratise society are mutually reinforcing.
The current proliferation of ethnic identities, hostile to the state, can only be explained against the background of the failure of the non-democratic education establishment which was entrusted with the implementation of the nation-building project (Mohamed Salih, 1996). This is mainly because the African education establishment is the main instrument used to inculcate the values inherent in the nation-building project. In my view this is a major misuse of the interrelationship between the conditions of rational action and the conditions of social rationalization in which state interests have parted with societal goals. Instead of a society-in-state scenario (Migdal et al., 1994), societal demands are expressed in terms of state interests and not in terms of state as a medium for social interaction between diverse social forces. Habermas (1990) recalled that life-world is a correlate of the concept of communicative action which refers to collectively shared basic convictions, to a defuse, unproblematic horizon within which actors communicate with one another and seek to reach an understanding. Seen from a theoretical perspective, the critique of the educational establishment relates to my commentary on the failure of the existing education establishment to aid the nation-building project in at least two respects: 1) In most of Africa, more than about four decades after independence, active communicative action is still within communities whose cultural tradition, social integration and personal identity are those of the ethnic group or the locality. 2) Actions are not only embedded in the symbolic space of the life-world, in Habermas' sense, but are also organized into functional systems. That functional system has not, in most cases, been allowed to engage in a meaningful communication of societal interests with the dominant state institutions and policy orientations. No wonder that the failure of the nation-building project has produced, in some cases, political disintegration and in most other cases a sense of political apathy.
Instead of creating a national space which enhances communicative action, education has become a communicative barrier through the use of foreign languages and foreign symbols only to suppress national languages and centuries-long traditions and ethnic symbols. In essence, this implies that the inner colonization of the life-world means that any attempt to replace primordial communicative action with a superficial nation-building action will produce secondary or pathological effects (Habermas, 1990). In that respect, the nation-building project has produced secondary and artificial national as well as personal identities which oscillate between modernism which it taught and traditionalism which provides the main constituent of a life-world communicative action.
Liberating Africa's education establishment cannot be done without redefining the education mission and developing it into a citizen responsive establishment. This view emanates from the fact that the present oppressive education establishment is not an aid to democracy. It is an accomplice to the "pedagogy of oppression", which presents a false and authoritarian notion of political education, with its coercive "populist pursuits". In Freire's (1972: 39) words,
The pedagogy of the oppressed animated by authentic humanism (not humanitarianism) generosity presents itself as a pedagogy of man (sic). Pedagogy which begins with the egoistic interests of the oppressors (an egoism cloaked in the false generosity of paternalism) and makes of the oppressed the objects of its humanitarianism, itself maintains and embodies oppression. It is an instrument of oppression.
Therefore, I emphasize the need for what Gramsci (1971) calls an alternative "democratic revolution" which conceives change not as a mere seizure of power but as the building of a new culture of counter-hegemony into a historical bloc which, over time, becomes the democratic state of the nation(s). A recent commentary on this powerful statement by Coben (1995) emphasizes the importance of Gramsci's work for education as a life-long process with an important political purpose in an information-based society where hegemony may take new invisible forms. In this sense encountering hegemony may take different forms ranging from the politically overt to subtle forms of domination (like those transmitted by the education establishment). Owing to the diversity of hegemonic forms of authority, counter-hegemony must also take different forms including citizens political education.
In short, I do not presuppose a rational explanation of a consciousness change of people or a presupposed notion of political education. Moreover, I neither advocate a populist political education, nor the politicization of the education establishment. All what I have attempted to explore is the possibility of introducing a positively desired change of political attitudes through sustained efforts to be exerted on and eventually replaced by an alternative education establishment. Short of liberating the education establishment is the creation, outside the education establishment, of an alternative venue for political education fully committed to citizen politics.
The education establishment is still largely preoccupied with conventional methods which at best usher compliance and at worst obedience. This is particularly so in some African societies which have recently emerged from one-party systems or military regimes where education was used as a tool for political indoctrination. In most such countries, the education establishment itself was non-democratic. Transition to democracy, educational reforms and the values that political transformation is expected to enhance have often been resisted by reminiscences of the old establishment which feared that such democratic values may herald the relinquishing of what is left of their claim to power.
In my view, it is difficult in the circumstances to achieve much in the way of democratization when the educational establishment is nothing more than yet another institution entrusted by the old guard to maintain the status-quo. If political expediency within the education establishment rules over the perspective of citizen politics, it most probably also hampers any attempts to de-link the well-established alliance between power and knowledge (Foucault, 1980). In an imagery described by Finnegan (1994) as close-knit, full-time, localized, long-lasting and exclusive, the so-called academic community is more resistant to change of privilege than any other community. Privilege here does not refer only to financial benefits, knowledge itself is most probably the greatest privilege. Notwithstanding the financial difficulties which the educational system is undergoing, it is the most suitable institution for the pedagogy of oppression to be subverted and new democratic values be encouraged.
I have no apology in asserting that Africa's democratization process should be guided in order to allow people to reap the benefits of political participation and to further the call for accountability and good governance. Citizens' politics, action and practice without democratic institutions and political awareness, will be incapable of delivering results or internalizing the political values enshrined in the democratic pursuits. Nor would democratic slogans such as participation, accountability, transparency, good governance, expanding the public space and so on be able to heed-off the twin effects of "political ignorance" and lack of information on which citizens can base their own opinions about public life and the organizational parameters within which responsibility towards the private and public good need to be constructed (Boyle and Mulcahy, 1993). This point granted, democratic political education is also in a position to internalize citizen experiences with the right to free expression of political views and ideas, the right to organize themselves and develop a critical understanding of public policy. If only for this reason alone, there is a need for a citizens' politics with an empowering and an emancipatory role, leading to engagement at local, national and regional levels.
Therefore, I argue that without citizen-centred politics and serious engagement in the current democratization process, the defining moments of "citizen politics" can be lost or else appropriated by a small number of "political-actor-operators" who monopolize the art of agenda-setting and political issue-making. In this respect one of the essential ingredients of public policy education is to help the emergence of a new generation of citizens who think and act as liberated citizens emancipated from the fear of performing new roles and setting new agendas for "social progress". That agenda should be advanced, with a sense of understanding to what responsible and engaged citizenship implies at the local, national and regional levels. In my view this type of new citizenship should be conceived within the overall democratic process which should ideally assist people to discover the true meaning and benefits of positive, but self-chosen, political participation.
The stakeholders democratic political education are those who have a stake in the current democratic process: the present generations who heralded the transition and the younger generations whom we hope will carry the torch and internalize the democratic values which it ushers. It is not only the creation of civil society (political parties, opposition groups, grassroots organizations, indigenous peoples, trade unions, women, youth, professional associations, the alternative media and so on), its mission should also spark discussions beyond the education establishment by providing leadership in all the walks of life which involve civil society. The African state and its education establishment must certainly have a stake in democratic political education if it is to provide people with knowledge, information and skills pertaining to political literacy, pedagogy, public policy education and leadership formation. The real stakeholders are the younger generations who will be better prepared for the future.
The current debate on the need to empower civil society and strengthen its capacity to generate legitimate and accountable governance pays more attention to how to reform or change leadership and less attention to inter-generational aspects of leadership. Such an approach could be described as a statist approach which assumes that the reformation of the state will result in the reformation of the system of governance. Implicit in this approach is the possibility of ensuring political change by changing the state ideology or reducing the level of state hegemony over civil society. Although it is possible to exact change in situations where the democratic principles and venues of political expression and practice are internalized by civil society, results might not be uniform or identical in different societies. To be sure, it is doubtful whether an accountable leadership would automatically sprout from the wreckage of the previous one. Recent African history is a testimony to the fact that in some instances, even when a political regime is ousted, the new power holders either lack a new vision or are incapable of providing a different style of leadership.
While issues of intra-generation concerns with governance can be understood at the level of contingency and short-term needs, inter-generation processes are more important, and essential in situations where leadership failures are apparent. Hence inter-generational considerations go beyond the moral basis for arguing that future generations should be prepared for the future, whatever that future may be, to one that alludes to the fact that today's youth constitute the future generation of governance. More than any political processes, generations have to be aware of the burdensome task of assuming leadership and aspiring to create a better system of governance. As mentioned earlier, leadership-cum-governance not only transcends political leadership, but also encompasses the need for responsible governance and citizens in all walks of life.
In Africa, the systems of governance inherited form the colonial regimes and continued apace during most of the post-colonial period, calls for what is termed by some as the second liberation of Africa. Leadership forums have been useful intra-generational exercises, but have fallen short of becoming a forum for inter-generational dialogue on the issues that concern the younger generation and potential leadership-cum-governance. Responses to bases of necessity (democracy, the rule of law, good governance and development) and those of opportunity (social development, growth, environment and social justice) require more than discussion for the sake of discussion, they require political realism with relevant and engaging debates, explanations, utopia, political imagination and even crude predictions.
It has also been argued that the contextual, localizing approach adopted in analyzing the meaning of democracy provides an orientation toward inquiry, but not an assured set of policy recommendations. An African perspective on governance and democracy need to be worked out in response to specific situations as interpreted by those participating (civil society and state operators) in the political processes. The cumulative impact of this on the younger generation is enriching in several ways: (1) The particularity of the national situation or governance crisis does not imply that there is nothing in common in terms of objectives, aspirations and outcomes of political processes. (2) Informing inspirational principles associated with the understanding that systems of governance overlap and carry certain universal underpinnings, is necessary and compelling whether the point of reference is democracy, human rights or a people-centred system of governance.
It has also been lamented in Falk's (1995) Humane Governance that the great visionary opportunities for the enhancement of the human condition are contained within the fluidity of circumstances that make this period of history turbulent and fraught with contradictions and surprise. However, the project of strengthening global civil society cannot start from nowhere. The empowerment of present and future citizens should build on local, national and regional strength before great global visionary opportunities are to be accomplished. It is difficult for generations who in the 21st century will live in a global village to be confronted by narrow meanings, mistrusts and political constraints attached to the regional reach. In a sense, it is not impossible to allow despair to work its way towards diminishing hope despite the possibility of bringing out what is latent in the minds and hearts of the younger members of civil society. The project's aim is more far-reaching than what conventional Summer Schools could deliver.
At the more practical level, the younger generations of Africa's civil society hardly know each other. The economic crisis and decades of hostilities have contributed to the suspension of exchange programmes, study visits and other forms of inter-university educational and cultural programmes. Despite calls for globalization and the emergence of a global civil society, regional integration is yet to become a shared dream. The defining forces of the current regional order are beset by mistrust. The influence of the political elite is yet to be exerted at the national level, while the region level is still open to "common risks and fears": refugees, insurgency, famine, environmental degradation and poverty. It is difficult to be a visionary without a future controlled by those who have a stake in it. In essence, democratic political education should take over from where the education establishment has stoppe from education to empowerment and engagement in public issues. It should be expanded the capacity of Africa's civil society to generate accountable and people-centred governance, leading ultimately the creation of African peoples parliament as a force to put in check their states' excesses of power. This is a local, national, regional and global imperative in which the youthful sections of global societies should be engaged.
Little has so far been done to influence the African education establishment to provide a set-up which can relate to the emerging global trend with their quest for democratic education and citizen politics. Unfortunately, Africa's education establishments have been marred by student unrest and lecturer strikes to protect their rights to freedom of expression and organization. These are sometimes remote responses to the wider national context. There are, of course, some exceptions to this overwhelming trend of political apathy. However, I'm aware of the fact that summer schools that aspire to create a venue for a democratic political education should operate within an education system liberated from the stronghold of the prevailing educational establishment, its teaching methods and the archaic pretence of the existence of an academic community separate from its surrounding social environment. There are African ideas on how to go about this. For instance, it was proposed by a workshop to create an Eastern African summer school financed by the Ford Foundation and organized by the Organization for Social Science Research in Eastern and Southern Africa, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (March 1996), that such a summer school should develop a clear bias towards a citizen-centred democratic political education. The case for such an all-embracing institution is based on the premises that theory and practice of democratic political education should be closely associated with conscientization, i.e. political consciousness-raising (Freire, 1985). In this particular context it emphasizes the need for an increasing awareness of the skewed nature of the hegemonic state against the backdrop of a staggering democratic transition at best and discernable elements of civil authoritarianism at worst.
High illiteracy rates, lack of political education and poverty make a small minority elite vastly powerful. If African political leadership colludes with this minority, aggregate results will benefit mostly the wealthy and powerful who will use the democratic institutions to perpetuate their hegemony over the rest of the population. There is also the typical situation of the leadership in most developing countries which often used economic hardship as an excuse to adopt non-democratic measures to achieve mischievous political objectives. Ake (1996: 7) has correctly diagnosed the situation in most African countries by arguing that,
The struggle for power was so absorbing that everything, including development was marginalized..... Besieged by a multitude of hostile forces that their authoritarianism and exploitative practices had engendered, those in power were so involved in the struggle for survival that they could not address the problem of development. Nor could they abandon it. For one thing, development was an attractive idea for forging a sense of common cause and for bringing some coherence to the fragmented political system. More important, it could not be abandoned because it was the ideology by which the political elite hoped to survive and to reproduce its domination.
The gist of the argument here is that the interest in enhancing the embryonic democratic process which most of Africa is experiencing today will not succeed unless it is backed by huge real investments to bolster what would otherwise be ruined economies. If development is to succeed, it has to be participatory and no genuine participation in development can be secured without adherence to democratic principles. In this respect, the consequences of non-democratic development in Africa are well represented in the failures which beset many well intended efforts to develop the continent's resources for the benefit of its impoverished population.
Basically, I argue that for civil society to take its responsibilities seriously, it should be assisted to internalize the core values of citizen politics and to advance the role of grass-roots organizations, social movements, trade-unions, political parties, pressure groups, human rights and advocacy institutions. Receptiveness, exposure-driven political information and self-discovery through "cultural critique" inform democracy and enhance its translation into political participation through political awareness. For instance, a critique of cultural and political hegemony (national or global) should contribute to the deconstruction of long-held attitudes towards the "other" - the other being another nation, political party, ethnic group and so on.
Some of the challenges which contemporary African societies are beginning to confront can be attributed to the absence of a comprehensive understanding of the new meaning assigned to public policy in the era of globalization and structural reforms. People are receptive and enthusiastic to the fact that the doors to political and economic opportunities are opened to them only if they know how to take advantage of these opportunities. As much as people value their political freedoms, they also value their economic freedoms and are often compelled to make difficult choices. The structural reforms of politics and economic life are closely entwined and it is difficult to imagine such reforms will bear fruits if the stakeholders are not fully aware of the consequences.
The economic arm of democracy prompts the need for a democratic political education aptly conscious of the need for global education in understanding the global notion of structural reforms, market transitions, democracy and the rule of law in an increasingly globalized civil society. It brings home the notion that political education is part of a larger process of democracy, not only to abstract or concrete notions of human rights, but also to the entitlement to economic and social rights as well. Public policy education is, in this respect, one of the most concrete examples of how to enhance public awareness policy-makers' decisions on issues of vital economic or rather survival interests. The relationship between the citizen, the state and education has been increasingly interlocked into the market which has in several cases created competing imperatives often detrimental to the democratic process - food riots, student unrest, an increase in crime and other social problems. For instance, in his recent works Mamdani (1996, 1995) has paid attention to some of the intricate problems of marketization, democracy and late colonialism in Africa. Mamdani (1995: 22) argues that,
For democracy to have any meaning, African Governments must be accountable to African peoples, not only for the resources they receive and spend, but for the very policies they formulate and execute.
In my view, nowadays this type of government requires a particular type of leadership which exists in a handful of African states. The case for political education on issues pertaining to the empowerment of civil society, democracy and development should be part of an all-embracing package of structural reforms.
African democrats would certainly be interested in issues pertaining to the implications of the advancing global culture, informatics and communication if not for their own sake or only because these subjects constitute a cornerstone in contemporary political education studies, but also because their capacity to reveal the promises and predicaments of globalization. Their significance emanates from the very nature of contemporary societies and their interaction with a multitude of global trends in economics, politics and culture. Globally, social life, has been increasingly shaped and reshaped by the communication revolution, economic globalization and increasing technological innovation. A specific consequence of these phenomena has been the creation of a "global village", dominated by global communication systems and networks, global capital movement and a global cultural industry (Edelstain, Ito and Kepplinger, 1989; Garnham, 1993; Martin-Barbero, 1993; Mclaren, 1995). Democratic political education should also be aware of the newly emerging paradigm in the global economy and North-South relations and its growing ability to create global media images, with far-reaching consequences for self-perception and the perception of the other (Mohamed Salih, 1995). This argument goes beyond the current introduction of carder media (satellites, merger of tertiary media) which further dissolves national territoriality into the more powerful global economic territoriality armed with a new set of global socio-cultural values.
In essence, the new democratic political education should be aware of the fact that the totality of the new global context challenges the suitability of democratic politics by reducing state capacity, the possibility of externally-driven accountability, the fragility of a muted sovereignty and the shrinking role of territorial political community, all of which are constantly under review. The relationship between national and global cultural flows certainly has far-reaching ramifications for cultural exchange, the dynamics of local cultures and their response to global trends and processes, including democracy and human rights.
There are discernable linkages between the objectives, functions and mission of democratic political education and the wider societal goals which go far beyond classroom instruction to create a platform for dialogue and self-discovery. It engulfs society and its national as well as the startling realities of an increasingly globalized civil society. The case for democratic political education concerned with issues of democracy and governance is justified on several grounds. The democratization process that is sweeping the continent (with a few exceptions) has shown that the state and civil society are experimenting with political organizations and practices, with little knowledge of the obligations and responsibilities democracy entails. Many citizens' organizations and democratic institutions are run by a small number of political operators most of whom know little to nothing about how to empower their constituency or give them guidance on the rights of citizens in democratic societies. Others have opted out of state-sponsored political activities altogether, with little to no influence on the public policies that affect their lives. In such tense political environment, the thin line between, on the one hand, loyal opposition, the politics of accommodation and confrontation and, on the other, conflictual politics, are far from being a political norm. As a result of the quest for quick results, democracy is often sacrificed and military rule has, in some instances, been replaced by civil dictatorships. Not only does the education establishment need to be liberated, it is financially bankrupt and needs to be rehabilitated before it can take on board direct citizen-centred functions. African political education on governance, democracy and development will enable the present and future generations to foster the regional sentiments which have been lost by decades of sub-regional conflicts and wrangling. They form an opportunity for the future leaders of the continent to get to know each other and discover how similar they are, with the ultimate goal of increasing political, cultural, social and economic regional interaction and regional awareness within and between states.
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