| Summary: | Submitted to the Faculty of Arts in fulfilment of the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of
Philosophy at the University of Zululand, 2011. === The study acknowledges that there have been attempts by scholars of African politics to explain the problems impeding the smooth running and consolidation of democracy in Africa. The acknowledgement of these previous efforts notwithstanding, the thesis sets out to show the value of a philosophical reaction to the positions of scholars on the issue, as a shift towards a better approach to it. It makes an examination, which exposes the inadequacy of the previous approach to the explanation of the problems militating against the democratic project in Africa.
The thesis is not therapeutic. It is primarily diagnostic. Therefore, it did not set out to prescribe some procedural steps to change the ailing political system in Africa. Rather, it has identified the shortcomings of previous approaches to the problem of democracy in Africa, which, has portrayed Africans as mere effects of causes, and incapable of taking control of their own life situations.
In the analysis, the scholars had argued that the unstable state of democracy in Africa has been caused by some internal and external factors. That is, by implication, Africa has been caused to be what it is. This study rejects the causal model of explanation taken uncritically from the Newtonian physics by the scholars of African politics in their explanations of the political challenges of Africa. This study argues that by applying the causal explanation, the scholars have implied that Africa is not more than a mere effect of causes, and therefore, incapable of a self-motivated and a free action. They have also implied that their own analyses were either caused or false Consequently, the study proposes that any reliable explanation of the problems militating against the democratic project in Africa must be non-causal in structure. That is, an explanation in which my explanations, as an African, are my own wilful actions.
By so doing, the study has initiated a new consciousness of who I am as an African. It initiated the consciousness of the fact that such factors as colonialism and corrupt leadership in Africa may have had serious influences on the trajectory of my own history as an Africa, but they do not determine my situation in the deterministic cause and effect relation in the manner in which the scholars intended. === Education Trust Fund (Nigeria Government)
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