La nature et l’avenir de la démocratie en Afrique: la substance de la Charte africaine de la démocratie, des élections et de la gouvernance.

This article offers a critical analysis of the nature and future of democracy in Africa. It unravels the form and substance of Africa‟s contemporary democratisation process, including its progress, problems and prospects. It argues that a majority of the 55 Member States of the African Union have inherited a democracy from their former colonial masters without any attempt to transform these systems to suit the Africa condition. Despite the democratization waves that have swept the continent since the early 1990s, Africa still faces a major challenge of transforming its colonially imposed proceduralist/electoralist and liberalist democracy models into a development-oriented and people-centered developmental social democracy. The principal thesis of this article is that developmental social democracy, which can be inspired by the 2007 African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance (ACDEG) and the African Charter on Human and Peoples‟ Rights. Given that Africa‟s major challenge today relates to development, this model has a major potential to address the continent‟s persisting socio-economic problems such as unemployment, poverty, inequality, marginalization, exclusion and underdevelopment. In this regard, Africa has to stop mimicking Europe and North America by developing and implementing an African type of democracy that addresses its peculiar socio-economic challenges-this is a developmental or developmental social democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]