The Fall and Rise of Constitutionalism in West Africa

Abstract

THE conventional wisdom has it that European/Western constitutional forms cannot be expected to take root in African political soil, much less grow and flourish, since they are based on essentially alien predicates and principles. That is why, it is further claimed, practically all the so-called ‘independence’ constitutions were quickly annulled, abrogated, or simply put aside by the generation of ‘founding fathers’ and/or their immediate successors as leaders, despite having been adopted in the 1960s amid universal jubilation and optimism about the continent's democratic future. Needless-to-say, this bit of conventional wisdom suffers from the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy that given the failure of constitutions, it must follow that they were at fault – a conclusion warranted neither by an examination of their provisions and the circumstances of their genesis, nor of the contexts in which they allegedly ‘failed’.