View article

African democracies are associated with a considerable number of violent crises. From Liberia to Nigeria, from Sierra Leone to Angola, from Ivory Coast to Algeria, ethno-religious and political formations are up in arms against one another in democratic states or states that describe themselves as democracies. Perhaps one way to instantly dismiss the matter is to simply argue that these polities are not, in the proper sense, democratic states. At best, they are what has been described as' non-democratic democracies'; therefore, they would not be expected to enjoy the relative political tranquility which democratic states are expected to enjoy. But this would be too dismissive and, indeed, would blind us to the very challenging conditions under which these polities attempt to build and consolidate democratic governance, and would also encouraging us to ignore the fact that democracy itself is a perpetual work in progress. Indeed, in contemporary Africa, democracy is a struggle. This chapter attempts to account for the growing incidence of violent communal clashes after Nigeria's transition to what is often called'transition democracy', symbolized by the phenomenon of ethnic militias, a phenomenon which, as Agbaje (2003: 2) argues," concretizes and confirms the virtual immutability of the monotonous and notoriously volatile ebbs and flows of Nigeria's political history". Termed variously by informed analysts of the Nigerian condition as:'the road to Kigali'(Williams, 2003),'the road to Lebanon'(The News''the road to chaos'(Obadare 1999), or “the threat of another civil war"(TELL² these endless spirals of communal violence, which are sparked by what …