Author Description

The post-independence era provided the first generation of African leaders with the opportunity to deconstruct, rethink and democratically reconstitute the state that had visited repression, mass deprivation, malaise, and misery upon the African peoples during the colonial period. Unfortunately, with few exceptions, the overwhelming majority of the African leaders retained the colonial state and its pedigree, while simply changing the state managers from Europeans to Africans. Nonetheless, the subsequent generations of African leaders had the opportunity to reconstruct the state so that it can serve the interests of the majority of Africans by protecting and respecting their political rights and civil liberties, investing in basic human needs like employment, education, health care, housing, public transportation, clean drinking water, sanitation and food security, and ensuring environmental sustainability, ethno-communal and religious pluralism and peaceful co-existence. Yet, the majority of African leaders missed the opportunity for enthroning the critical process of democratizing the state. Consequently, the African state continues to experience unedning cycle of mised opportunities and the resulting false starts. The State in Africa: Beyond False Starts therefore departs from previous works on the received literature by insisting on the need to deconstruct and reconstitute the state democratically so that it serves Africans, irrespective of class, ethnicity, region, creed, and gender.