By Morris Wambua

Let us no longer be polite about the matter. Let us put aside the carefully couched language of foreign diplomats and the colonial apologists who masquerade as African leaders. Let us tear down the veils of political correctness that suffocate truth. Africa did not fight for democracy. Africa fought for land. Our mothers and fathers, our uncles and aunts, our brothers and sisters, those who disappeared into the forests of Chimurenga, Mau Mau, the jungles of Guinea-Bissau and Angola, did not go there to win voting rights or to write party manifestos. They went into the bush for the land. They went to reclaim what was stolen. They died with rifles in their hands and soil in their hearts.

But what did they return with from the frontlines of liberation?

Not land. Not sovereignty. Not justice. They came back with a flag. They came back with democracy.

And democracy, as we have inherited it, has been nothing more than a well-wrapped colonial souvenir. A beautifully worded deception. A smoke screen for the continued pillage of our resources and the manufactured poverty of our people. It was not the victory prize, it was the consolation gift.

At independence, we were given national anthems, coats of arms, and new maps drawn with French and English rulers. We were given parliaments and presidents and the illusion of power. But beneath the surface, the same systems that subjugated us remained intact. The laws, the land tenure
systems, and the extractive economies remained. The settlers may have gone home, but the architecture of their dominance did not. They left behind an elite cadre of Africans trained to maintain the machinery of colonialism under the new name of self-rule.

It is one of history’s cruelest ironies that those who returned from the trenches of liberation were often excluded from the table of post-independence governance. The man who pulled the trigger for freedom was sidelined by the man who signed treaties in conference halls. Those who fought
for land were governed by those who fought for office. And so began the betrayal.

Today, more than sixty years after Ghana's independence lit the torch of African liberation, what has democracy delivered to the African child in the village, to the farmer without title, to the youth
in the ghetto?

Does he eat votes?

Does she build a home with campaign slogans?

Can a family till land that remains in the hands of descendants of colonial settlers or bought up by foreign capital?

Democracy, as we practice it today, is a borrowed skin that does not fit the African body. It is a suit tailored in European political fashion, forced onto our indigenous realities. Our traditional systems: communal, participatory,restorative, have been dismissed as backward. The wisdom of our elders, once the guiding force of governance, has been pushed aside for legal jargon and borrowed institutions.

We have elections, yes, but not power. We have constitutions, but not justice. We have governments, but not freedom.

Let us think about the land question. What was the central grievance of colonial resistance movements if not the theft of land? From Kenya to Zimbabwe, from Namibia to South Africa, land was the axis of oppression. Settler colonialism was not content to govern. It dispossessed. The African was not just ruled; he was dislocated, displaced, and dehumanized. His ancestral home became state property. His rivers became private water rights. His cattle were herded on someone else’s land.

Today, decades after our so-called independence, the land has not returned. In South Africa, where the majority remain dispossessed, land reform has crawled like a wounded animal, blocked by courtrooms and international pressure. In Zimbabwe, where radical land redistribution was attempted, the country was economically crippled and globally sanctioned. Not because of corruption, but because it dared to challenge the sacred cow of settler privilege. In Kenya,
millions live as squatters on land their grandfathers died to reclaim. The same colonial families still hold vast estates, now under the protection of democratic law.

What then is democracy if it cannot deliver justice? If it cannot restore the land? If it cannot return what was taken? We must stop worshipping the ballot as if it is sacred. It is not. Voting is not freedom. Elections are not emancipation. We have been trained to believe that periodic trips to the ballot box amount to governance. We are told that power lies with the people, yet every five years,
our votes are purchased with cheap sugar, party t-shirts, and empty promises. And even then, the winner is often decided not by the people, but by electoral commissions, courts, or foreign observers.

Democracy has become a marketplace of ethnic arithmetic. Politics is no longer about ideas, but about tribe, about patronage, about who eats and who starves. The same colonial strategy of divide and rule has now been localized. Our leaders have become gatekeepers of foreign interests, rewarded with donor money and diplomatic handshakes while their people languish in shacks and slums. Parliamentarians earn salaries that could fund entire schools, while the children of the poor sit on stones in empty classrooms. Ministers fly first class to climate conferences while farmers pray for rain and beg for seed.

Meanwhile, our minerals, our oil, our forests, and our water continue to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. Democracy has not protected our resources; it has commodified them. It has turned governance into a business deal, where state capture is the norm and public service a punchline. Foreign corporations extract our wealth with the full blessing of elected governments, while communities are displaced, poisoned, and silenced. This is not freedom. This is a new form of colonialism, legalized by constitutions and sanitized by the language of development.

The tragedy is not only in the system, but in the psyche. We have internalized the inferiority that colonizers implanted in our minds. We look to London and Washington for validation. We seek Western grants to fund our schools and hospitals while billion-dollar mines operate tax-free
under our feet. Our leaders fly to Europe to beg for loans while children drown in rivers trying to reach school. We take pride in "peaceful transitions" of power while generations transition into poverty.

And through it all, we chant the gospel of democracy.

We are told to be patient. That institutions take time to mature. That democracy is a journey. But how long is the road to justice? How many decades must a people walk before they can sit under their own tree and call it theirs?

Let us return to the memory of our ancestors. Let us remember what they fought for. Not ballots, not boardrooms, not bureaucracies. They fought to reclaim their humanity. They fought to re-root themselves in the land, to breathe freely on soil that belonged to them. They envisioned a world where governance was participatory, not performative; where leadership was responsibility, not royalty; where power flowed from the ground up, not from the top down.

Democracy, as imposed upon us, does not serve this vision. It mimics Western form while ignoring African substance. It replicates colonial hierarchies in native tongues. It celebrates the vote while suppressing the voice. It produces leaders who fear losing elections more than they fear betraying their people. And it reduces citizens to spectators in a political theater funded by foreign donors.

We must dare to imagine differently. We must reclaim the political imagination that animated the liberation struggle. This is not a call for dictatorship or autocracy, it is a call for decolonization. A call to rebuild governance from the roots of our own traditions, histories, and aspirations. A call to restore land, not only as property, but as identity, as legacy, as the foundation of justice.

Let the world hear us clearly: we are not ungrateful for democracy. But we are no longer fooled by it. We recognize its value, but also its limits. We see its promises, but also its failures. We know that true freedom cannot come from mimicry. It must grow from within. And until the land is returned, until resources are controlled by those who live upon them, until governance serves the people and not the elite, there can be no true liberation.

Our forefathers did not die for debates in glass chambers. They did not leave their children in villages to be governed by policies made in capital cities they had never seen. They did not crawl through the thorns of struggle so their grandchildren could inherit servitude wrapped in ballots.

They went to war for land.

And so, let us honor their sacrifice not by voting in stolen systems, but by reclaiming the heart of their fight. Let us dismantle the facade. Let us say what must be said.

Democracy, as it stands in Africa, is not the prize of liberation.

It is the mask of betrayal.

And we, the inheritors of that struggle, must now decide whether we will continue to live in its shadow, or finally step into the light of our own making.