Former President Olusegun Obasanjo delivered a blistering critique of Africa’s political inheritance on Tuesday, telling delegates at the 2026 Goodluck Jonathan Foundation Democracy Dialogue in Bauchi that the continent’s Western-style democracy doesn’t fit — and never will.
Speaking at the 2026 Goodluck Jonathan Foundation Democracy Dialogue in Bauchi, the Bauchi State capital, the elder statesman likened the imported system to an ill-fitting garment.
“The democracy we practice has no African context, no African content,” he said, “and if you try to use what is not meant for you to serve your purpose, it is like a dress for which you are not measured — you try to put it on, it is either too small for you or too big for you. It will not fit, and it will not serve your purpose.”
His sharpest fire was reserved for Africa’s first-past-the-post electoral model, which he argued has entrenched a brutal winner-takes-all culture across the continent. “In practice, we have the winner takes all, first past the post,” Obasanjo said. “If you beat me by one vote, then you take it all and whatever I have does not matter.”
He went further, tracing the roots of the problem to the very DNA of the system Africa inherited. Western liberal democracy, he explained, grew out of monarchy — a structure that allows for a “loyal opposition” only because that opposition remains loyal to the crown. Transplanted into African politics, he argued, the concept collapses entirely.
“When you talk about loyal opposition in an African setting — and I have gone into many African languages — opposition means enemy,” he said. “So, what do you do with your enemy? You crush him and destroy him. And that is what we have.”
Obasanjo didn’t stop at electoral architecture. He warned against Africa’s poor management of diversity, insisting that plurality must be deliberately protected rather than steamrolled by majoritarian politics. Nigeria, he said, is only Nigeria because of its diversity — strip that away, he warned, and the country risks fracturing into narrower, exclusionary identities.
The former president also aimed money’s growing chokehold on African politics, saying financial inducement in elections has been “increasing by leaps and bounds,” corroding the integrity of the democratic process from within.
He paired that with a pointed rebuke of Nigeria’s gender politics, noting that more than two decades into the Fourth Republic, the country has yet to elect a single female governor — evidence, he suggested, of a political class more interested in retaining power than reflecting the people it claims to represent.
Yet Obasanjo stopped short of demanding Africa abandon democracy altogether. His prescription instead was reinvention: a homegrown model built on the continent’s own history, culture and values — not a wholesale rejection of representative government, but its overdue Africanisation.
Nigeria, he argued, cannot simply keep importing political parties and judicial frameworks wholesale and expect them to deliver good governance. Democracy, he reminded his audience, is a continuous process — not a destination reached once and left unattended.
The remarks land at a charged moment, with Obasanjo noting that even the Western nations that exported liberal democracy to Africa are now reassessing aspects of their own systems — a reminder, he suggested, that no democratic model, borrowed or otherwise, should be treated as finished business.
