ABSTRACT
The colonial legacy of arbitrary boundary demarcation, resource extraction and human exploitation has not been very conducive to the pursuit of the democratic ideal in Africa. Together with post-colonial superpower rivalry and neo-colonialism, embryonic African states, in their struggle to assert national independence and sovereignty against all odds, were torn between competing political and economic models for developing nationhood — 'Afro-Socialism, Afro-Communism and Afro-Capitalism'. As these experiments failed to deliver the expected improvement in quality of life for the majority of people, competition for political power became virulent.
