African Politics

AUTHORS PREFACE In the early modern era, most African countries were colonised by European states from the eighteenth century but by the nineteenth century this condition was reversed as a result of the independence movement. As time passed by, one after the other, most African nations started getting their independence and by 1960 most African countries became independent. Africa as a whole has over one billion people and the current population of Africa is 1,347,333,004 as of Saturday, September 19, 2020, based on the latest United Nations estimates. Therefore, this is to say that Africa's population is equivalent to 16.72% of the total world population. However, Africa being a continent of 54 countries that are diverse culturally and geographically, the questions of underdevelopment, malgovernance, and a form of political life based upon patronage have been characteristic as basic order of many African states. Despite Africa being the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent, after Asia in both cases with about 30.3 million km2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, which makes it cover 6% of Earth's total surface area and 20% of its land area, with over 1.3 billion people, the continent have been faced with serious problems of poverty, unemployment, water shortage, insecurity and deep shortage of food that has tremendously resulted to several kinds of misfortunes like robbery, rape, kidnapping, etc. However, the author opined that generalisation of African Politics is very easy and straightforward since generalization only posits the existence of a domain or set of elements, as well as one or more common characteristics shared by those elements.  He believes that there are some common similarities as well as one or more common characteristics that most African countries share that forms some essential basis for making valid inferences and generalisation to actual situations prevailing in Africa and African politics. African politics is faced with so many crises and challenges ranging from wide acceptability of the government in power by the entire citizens without seeing any sign or act of positivity in governance, corruption, mismanagement, limitation of real output, kleptocatic attitude of leaders of trying to remain in power till thy kingdom come and lastly the sit-tight syndrome and tenure elongation. In addition, African continent kept witnessing a series of political instability ranging from military takeover....