Exploring the Prospects and Limits of Modern Democracy in Africa: The Role of Leaders

Abstract

This chapter seeks to highlight the prospects of procedural and substantive democracy in Africa, emphasizing the limitation and shortcomings of African countries in their pursuit of democracy, citing a transformational-transactional leadership mix ('transfor-sactional') in countering the shortcomings. It achieves this purpose by reviewing literature on democracy, transformational and transactional leadership styles to develop a leadership mixture (transfor-sactional) and further goes on to draw a conceptual framework to show the relationship between transfor-sactional leadership and democracy. This chapter then discusses the concepts in the framework by explaining the relationship between them. The review of literature shows that procedural democracy has good prospects across the continent; however, African countries are lagging behind with reference to substantive democracy. Additionally, this chapter reveals that, the persistent economic hardship, poverty and underdevelopment across the African continent, the role of leaders in mitigating these pertinent human problems cannot be overemphasized. As such, the complementary role of transformational leadership to transactional leadership is shown and thus, leaders who are able to effectively combine attributes of the two leadership styles can achieve effective leadership which is crucial to African countries in achieving growth and development.