Fordham Professor on African Democracy

Shaebia.org interviewed Dr. Amir H. Idris, Assistant Professor at Fordham, New York City’s Jesuit University. He is from the Department of African and African American Studies.

What is democracy based on African point of view?

I think the question of democracy in Africa is very important question. But, what we need to do is we have to put it into a context. Democracy is one form of political system and all of us know that the purposes and functions of any political system is to share specific objectives. In the case of Africa all of us know that post colonial states now exist in Africa since the 1950s and 1960s. These states face so many problems, and we can summarize them into three main challenges: first is the question of national unity or national identity; the second is the question of economic developments; and the third issue concerns human rights. And I may also add the question of ethnic conflict, civil war etc; these are some of the major challenges of many African countries and I think if you want to talk about democracy then it must be a means of resolving such challenges in a peaceful way.

Link (here) to the full written interview