Michel Burgess
Director and Professor of Federal Studies
University of Kent
January 2012
An Essay on the Impacts of Cultural Diversity, Development and Democracy
Federalism in Africa does not have a positive image. Its record of success is patchy while its failures seem manifest. Currently there are only three established federal political systems among the 54 states in Africa: Nigeria, Ethiopia and South Africa. However, the evident paucity of successful contemporary federal systems must not be allowed to convey the impression that federalism in Africa is redundant. On the contrary, it continues to resonate as part of a continuing political discourse about the nature of political authority in many formally non-federal states, such as Somalia, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
This essay provides a short survey of the African federal experience and demonstrates that historically speaking there have been many federal experiments in the 1960s and 1970s that did not survive but which left many important lessons for African state builders who fought desperately to create new nation states that themselves still struggle to hold together societies which remain deeply divided.
