A Comparative Study of the New African Constitutional Institutions

Now that the lanterns and the pallid lights of national conferences and other democratic forums, which so much shook Black Africa around the years 89-90, are out, the time has come for making a critical appraisal of the blueprints drawn up for the so-called democratic constitutions and institutions. Such an evaluation has a double advantage : First, it underlines the changes introduced by the new constitutions while highlighting the points which differentiate them from the monocratic one-party-state constitutions of the three decades starting from the 1960's and ending with the 1980's. Secondly, it shows that, beyond the merits of the sovereign national conferences (pouvoir constituant original) and other democratic forums, these assemblies failed to raise a vital question demanding an urgent answer. These gatherings in fact lost sight of the necessity to clarify, from the on-set, the exact nature of the model of democracy, that is, the exact nature of the democratic state and society that Black African societies are capable of producing, taking into account the fundamentally pluralistic or multicultural character of these societies. In other words, the question of how to reconcile the heterogeneity of a multicultural society with the demand for a democratic ideal was not addressed

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