An Adaptation of John Rawls’ Concept of Democratic Autonomy to the Citizenship Question in African Politics

Abstract

After decades of independence, many African states are still enmeshed in the web of misrule. Among other factors, this problem stems from abysmal conception of the duties and responsibilities of citizenship among the proletariat, due to the perennial denial of social justice in pseudo-democratic regimes. Against this background, this paper adopts critical and expository methods to explore John Rawls’ theory of justice, with the overarching aim of using the veritable tools therein to resolve the citizenship crisis in Africa’s democracies. Rawls, a foremost social and political thinker of the twentieth century, contends that each person in society possesses basic dignity and rights that can never be compromised by the state for its own end; that is, each citizen of the state is an end in themselves as a human being and, thus, cannot be treated as means of achieving the self-serving purposes of the state and its leaders. This dignity is inherently reposed in humans simply because of their rational nature. For Rawls, therefore, these premises lead to the conclusion that all citizens, especially those who suffer neglect and marginalization from the pervasive bad governance in Africa, must be accorded due consideration in the distribution of social goods and services. To this end, the paper submits that Rawls’ theory provides the blueprint for addressing the citizenship question in African politics, because it is a consolidation of the African traditional communal system of life and politics. Africa will be more likely to gain the status of a well-ordered society when its diverse polities rekindle the sense of dignity, rights and democratic autonomy in its citizenry, as citizens demand accountability through active democratic participation. Data used for this study came from library and archival sources and were subjected to critical and content analysis.