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For those who like to describe phases in a country’s democratisation process in terms of “waves” (Huntington, 1991; Schraeder, 1995), the current wave of democratisation in Africa, which began with the end of the Cold War between 1989 and 1990, has arguably been the most promising for the continent. The defeat of communism in that great ideological conflict had led to a proclamation of a ‘New World Order' driven by an infrastructure of liberal democracy said to be the ‘end of history’ (Fukuyama, 1993). Democracy therefore became the new mantra, a wind of change that blew from the Berlin World through Eastern Europe to Africa like wild bush fire in harmattan.
With military regimes thoroughly discredited in Africa after a prolonged military dictatorship that only helped to stunt economic and political progress in several countries in the continent, of the modernization theories that sought to justify military interventions in African politics also fell out of favour. Globalization – the idea that the world has become a global village built on an interchange of world views, products, and ideas quickly replaced the old mantra of New World Order thought to convey ideological triumphalism. Globalization masked this triumphalism by suggesting that there are certain ‘higher’ universal values such as democracy that people across the world share in common or should legitimately aspire to have.