The Democracy Spell: Elections Alone Cannot Transform Africa’s Power Structures

By Wavinya Makai

A government is elected. Observers arrive, clipboards in hand. Votes are counted, certified, and broadcast. A president is declared, a country is declared democratic – and, too often, the conversation ends there.

That is the problem. The word “democracy” has become a kind of incantation. Once it is spoken over a nation, we stop asking the harder questions underneath it.

Who controls the economy? Who runs the institutions that actually shape daily life? Who owns the land, the minerals, the ports, the power grids, and the fiber-optic cables that carry a country’s data? Who, in the end, decides which direction the economy moves in?

Across much of postcolonial Africa, procedural democracy has been laid on top of an extractive state without altering the architecture underneath it. Presidents leave office. Parties rotate. Coalitions rise and fall. But the machinery – the actual pipes through which wealth flows in and out of the country – often stays exactly where it was.

Same Machine, Different Operators

Look past the inauguration ceremonies and the pattern is stubbornly familiar. Nations rich in cobalt, gold, oil, and lithium continue exporting raw materials and importing the finished goods made from them elsewhere. Sovereign debt narrows the room for maneuver on budgets, energy policy, and industrial strategy. Strategic sectors – telecoms, mining, ports, even agriculture – remain substantially controlled by foreign capital. Universities turn out graduates faster than local economies can generate
meaningful work for them.

We change the political managers. We do not always change the system they are hired to manage.

This is why democracy, development, and power deserve to be treated as three separate questions, not one.

• Democracy asks: Who authorized those who govern?
• Development asks: What are they actually producing for society?
• Power asks: Who holds the capacity to shape reality on the ground?

These questions are related. They are not identical. An elected government can be fully legitimate at the ballot box and still fail its people developmentally. Equally, strong economic performance does not, by itself, make a government democratic – plenty of authoritarian states can point to growth statistics. Africa needs both: democratic accountability and developmental capability, functioning together rather than one standing in for the other.

What the Label Can’t Do

This is not an argument against democracy. Free and fair elections remain worth defending, wherever on the continent they are under threat. It is an argument against letting the word “democracy” close a conversation that has barely begun – against treating the label as a substitute for the audit.

Because a political label cannot substitute for popular power. A constitution cannot manufacture productive capacity. An election cannot industrialize a nation on its own. And political legitimacy, however well earned, cannot feed a generation that has no jobs to go to.

So the question worth asking is the one beneath the label: Can a country genuinely call itself democratic if citizens can change the government but cannot meaningfully change the economic direction of the nation?

What should democracy mean, in Africa and elsewhere, beyond the act of voting? Until more of the continent’s citizens can answer that question with confidence, the spell – however comforting – remains just that: a spell, not a system.

Wavinya Makai is a Kenyan author, development strategist, and Pan-African scholar specializing in African economic sovereignty. Her work focuses on youth development, unemployment, and education reforms that cultivate innovators. She is the author of Capital Violence: The Economic War on African Dignity and holds a Master of Philosophy in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge. Makai has been featured as a development analyst on Citizen TV Kenya and is a frequent speaker on leadership and human rights.