ABSTRACT

The question as to why democracy has not automatically translated to the much-needed development in Africa has attracted many scholarly interventions. One of the most notable, perhaps, is Kwasi Wiredu's idea of consensual democracy. His ‘consensual democracy’ is based on the establishment of non-party polities as against what he called ‘majoritarian democracy’. He argues that the exclusion of minority groups and lack of decisional representatives, which are the major problems of majoritarian democracy, are addressed in his consensual democracy. In the face of different responses to Wiredu, Barry Hallen has called for a reconsideration of the idea by demonstrating its significance and how it can work in a multicultural context like postcolonial African states. Nevertheless, Kazeem Fayemi, on his part, provides reasons why neither Wiredu's nor Hallen’s positions can be wholly accepted; through a complementarist approach, he shows how consensual democracy can be improved upon to address the challenges of democratization in contemporary Africa. In this paper, I further strengthen Fayemi's complementarist reconstruction of consensual democracy, using Innocent Asouzu’s transcendental existential conversion as the theoretical framework. I argue that Fayemi's position, while largely valid, requires additional fortifications, which transcendental conversion affords. I conclude that a proper remediation of consensual democracy as proposed by Wiredu and defended by Hallen is best achieved for relevance in modern African societies through the fusion of both the majoritarian and consensual democratic ideas.