In 1990 Freedom House recorded just three African countries with multiparty political systems, universal suffrage, regular fraud-free elections and secret ballots. “Progress comes in waves,” says Alex Vines, head of the Africa programme at Chatham House, a London-based think-tank. Mali aside, the rest of West Africa has enjoyed a democratic boom. Sierra Leone and Liberia, both violent basket-cases not long ago, have set up respectable if imperfect political systems. Guinea and Côte d’Ivoire overcame spasms of strife and returned to democratic rule. Coup-prone Guinea-Bissau held a calm election on March 18th. Nigeria and Niger ran their best polls in recent memory last year. Ghanaian democracy has been praised by President Barack Obama.
It summarizes and reconfirms existing African engagements on good governance that the continent’s leaders have taken over the last 30 years or so. And the Charter takes them a step further by operationalizing their implementation. Instead of adding to the pile, it tries to rationalize the African good governance architecture and translate it into reality.
