Unfreedom to Transformation: Digital Democracy as the New Frontier of Africa’s Political Cosmos

Abstract Various scholarly interventions have attempted to postulate on the dialectics of political transformation in Africa, particularly, from a political science and African Studies standpoints, without recourse to media and communication studies. A preponderance of research has centred on democratisation and competitive elections as the most tenable parameter to aggregate or measure what constitute political transformation. African history itself and its path with authoritarianism and dictatorship have inversely conditioned democratisation and electoral democracy as the only feasible forms of political transformation. This study, therefore, veers from previous theoretical and conceptual alignment, and argues that digital democracy appears to be the most transformative constituent of contested politics within the African political cosmos. It critically signposts recent political changes that have occurred in the five sub-regions of the continent, Central, East, North, Southern and West Africa, providing clear-cut cases of digital democracy in action and technologically induced political transformation in Africa through the affordances of digital technologies, internet and social media platforms. The study using a multi-disciplinary approach, submits that while digital technologies also carry with them some blind spots and may not be the main trigger, they apparently constitute the enablers, facilitators and accelerants of Africa’s political transformation rendering far more political pluralism in the continent than envisaged.