THE flow of commentary on political responses to the multifaceted crisis of development in which African countries have been enveloped in the past three decades betrays the propensity of Africanist social sciences to alternate, seemingly without much effort, between moments of exaggerated optimism and despair about Africa's development prospects. Competing explanations of the causes of the crisis agreed that the authoritarian post-colonial state was the primary culprit. The groundswell of popular opposition to authoritarian rule in the late 1980s and early 1990s was, for many, a welcome sign of the re-animation of the agency of Africans to design for themselves more promising futures - futures that would be based on liberal politics and market economies. This euphoria did not last long as successive electoral cycles reaffirmed the resilience of clientelism and patronage as the dominant practice of African politics. Civil society, whose supposed resurgence was much vaunted, turned out to be riven by communal divisions, particularly of ethnicity and religion. Civic associations reflecting such cleavages have had scant positive effect on party formation and electoral competition, and often demonstrate little interest in promoting liberal democracy. Everywhere the politics of identity and ethnicity appears resurgent.

Accounts of the travails of current experiments in multiparty politics turn on unavoidably normatively laden definitions of democracy and the criteria used to gauge its progress. To oversimplify, two, but by no means exclusive, perspectives are prevalent in the African literature. There is the mainstream perspective which favors a minimalist (procedural) definition and sees periodic changes in governments through multiparty elections as the hallmark of democracy. For this perspective, unrelieved economic adversity, the paucity of middle and independent capitalist classes, cultural fragmentation, etc. jointly explain the resilience of cneopatrimonial' politics. Ranged against it are critics of liberal (minimalist) democracy, many of whom are advocates of ‘popular democracy’. For them, the politics of clientelism endures because the main purpose of the elite-driven multiparty politics advocated chiefly by the United States is to widen the circulation and recruitment of elites and legitimate neo-liberal ‘reforms’, and not the transformation of existing inequalities in the distribution of economic and political power.