Lessons from the law and politics of federalism in Africa : federalism Is bigger than federation; constitutions are more than single mega-documents; the international trumps the domestic; and the past continues to matter

Abstract

The study of federalism brings together both political scientists and constitutional lawyers. It is one of those fields of study where the scholarly and the applied are inextricably interlinked. However, studies on and from the non-Western world tend to be underrepresented in the field, subsequently leading to both scholarly and applied shortcomings. This article is an attempt to start undoing that unevenness by identifying four lessons from the African continent. While doing so, we pursue two simultaneous intellectual goals: One is to use Africa to help sharpen the theoretical insights and conceptual tools of comparative federalism in general – applicable to both the West and the rest. And secondly, running parallel to this, the article also exposes the reader to the varieties of federalism in Africa. This not only enriches our scholarly repertoire but will also help nuance and finetune some of the prevailing theoretical assumptions in the field, and thus improve the chances of federalism to deliver on its promises in applied terms. The comparative lessons drawn from the African experience can be grouped under four categories. 1) The article builds on the conceptual distinction between federalism and federation; and argues that ideas and practices of federalism in Africa are more numerous than the formal federations of the continent. 2) The pre-colonial and imperial history of the continent is marked by British-style amalgamations of constitutional documents, practices, unwritten rules, and customs – some at the imperial level, some regional, some local. 3) International-level factors, especially the arrival of colonialism, and then later, the geopolitical pressures of the Cold War, played key roles in influencing the choice and workings of constitutions on the continent. 4) History has left each African country with certain dynamics unique to them making cutting and pasting best practices from abroad without attention to the local context problematic.