Broad human aspirations for peace, security, sustainable development, and even prosperity is absolutely no doubt, universal and pointedly connects to the enduring collective human yearnings for happiness and better life. However, the mechanisms, organizations and processes to attain them must give due diligence and context to specific circumstances, historical conditions, and other factors that shape the social outlook of a given people and also give proper effect to the conditions of their developmental stage.

Without adequate understanding of the historical process which poses the question of the existential reality and its challenges in the way, it actually exists and unfolds, gaining substantive leverage over the process and drive transformative agenda that opens the path of sustainable and inclusive development would be deprived of the refreshing tonic of historical far sight and foresight.

In the real and practical sense, democracy which is the broad spectrum of people-centered political organization and process, must find context out of its generalized concept to the specific nature of the different challenges, circumstances, and reality in which a given people find nurture their respective experiences. Without this concrete expression in a particular context, democracy in the developing nations and Africa in particular would function as mere rhetorical flourish or at best, a philosophical abstraction, irrelevant to the routine strivings of the majority of the people. A well-known anti-colonial fighter and one of Africa’s foremost thinker and theoretician Amilcar Cabral said that the mass of the people do not fight and make sacrifices in anti-colonial struggles and national construction efforts for the ideas that exist in any one’s head, no matter how lofty but rather to bring concrete material improvements in the quality of their lives.

In contemporary times, the debate about democracy, especially in the West focuses on procedures and rules, with very little about the people, which is the real substance of democracy. In the new context of re-emerging cold war thinking and outlook in the West, democracy has fallen victim again as mere ideological tool to further the purpose of hegemonic and power politics.[...]