This article includes updated sections from a larger study that was presented to the symposium held in Asmara by the Constitutional Commission of Eritrea in January . . be partly the case, as Michael Crowder claimed in , that ' contemporary judgements about the so-called failure of Africa are really judgements made in terms of a Eurocentric dream for an independent Africa in which liberal democracy would be the norm, a dream that was shared only by a few elitist politicians '," and espoused only by the British and French. What is remarkable, however, is that the dream -Eurocentric or not -remained alive during some years of anti-democratic misrule, and that it spread and became Africanised in the process.All this, nevertheless, still leaves open for discussion the classic conundrums faced by those who engineer constitutions : namely, that these are expected (i) to embody the basic, enduring norms of political life, (ii) to set the frameworks of governance, (iii) to have permanent lives of their own apart from the institutions they create, and thus (iv) to exemplify, if they are democratic in vocation, the political covenant that citizens of a state make with themselves. And if constitutions ' fail ', they do so less on account of being imported or badly phrased, but mainly as the outcome of the flawed vision and acumen of their drafters, and\or because the ' founding fathers ' and their successors chose to subordinate constitutional principles to their own political ambitions. ' The fault ', as Shakespeare reminds us in Julius Caesar, 'is not in our stars, but in ourselves '. This article examines these theses as they relate to West Africa, which I take to include the broad band of states from Senegal and Mauritania in the west, to Cameroon, Nigeria, and Niger in the east. My survey covers the two main foyers of constitution-making in West Africa -that is, the French-and English-speaking territories of the region -a focus that permits some useful generalisations and comparisons to be made. The following three countries have not been included :. Equatorial Guinea attained independence from Spain in October under a democratic constitution, but after the first six months this was to all intents and purposes scrapped by the President-for-Life and ' Unique Miracle ', the tyrant Francisco Macı! as Nguema. He was overthrown in and executed for treason and genocide by his
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