Thus my title is somewhat contested and misleading.

It is contested because the word 'governance' has no academic currency and its conceptual assumptions are problematic.

Its utility as an analytical tool for describing politics in Africa is thus limited.

Misleading because one is uncritically assuming that there is a process of democratisation taking place.

I will, however, use democracy and governance interchangeably here because governance is in vogue and is now the clarion call by all and sundry from opposition parties, human rights activists, the donor communities, NGOs and some academics.

Since 1989 people have been talking about democratic transition in Africa dubbed the 'third wave'.

Thus the 1990s was seen as the period when a good part of the continent was moving away from one-party and authoritarian rule to a democratic dispensation - this has meant, among other things, multiparty elections, respect for human rights and transparency in the conduct of governmental affairs.

Most of these have been achieved at least from the perspective of the World Bank, which, after all, coined the term governance.

In 1989 the Bank diagnosed the crisis in Africa as a lack of governance.

But unfortunately this was cast in legalistic and formalistic terms.

The governance-talk thus failed to address questions of power, democratic participation and active citizenship.

Is Africa making a transition to the promised land of democracy? Is it becoming the workshop of democracy as Professor Richard Sklar predicted some few years ago? Or is it turning into something else? Some say it is becoming a workshop of 'democracy as deception'.

And this is so because most former despots and authoritarian rulers in Africa have quickly learned the new language of democracy without necessarily prescribing to its fundamental tenets.

The Nigerian scholar Adigun Agbaje has emphasised the increasing trend of autocrats appropriating the language and symbols of democracy to frustrate democratisation and deepen authoritarian rule.

The optimistic aura with democratic transition which gripped Africa in the last decade or so is thus steadily fading away.

We can now legitimately talk of reversed, stalled or frozen democracies on the continent.

Take the recent coup in Mauritania, the highly contested elections in Kenya leading to a mini 'civil war' and the one-man elections in Zimbabwe widely condemned as a farce.

Then there are those countries ruled by the 'big men' of African politics - a good part of them in North and West Africa.

There are, of course, many other instances along these lines especially countries facing genetic problems such as Sudan, DRC, etc.

Or the collapsed ones like Somalia.

But even the so-called bright spots like Botswana, Namibia, SA, Mozambique are essentially one-party states.

Thus even though some of these countries have democratic features on the surface, they have been used as camouflage under which substantive democracy is denied to the people.

Yes, they recognise civil and political rights but these don't mean much in the absence of fundamental economic, social and cultural rights for the majority.

Substantive democracy, as opposed to formalistic one, has to go beyond the holding of elections after every five years to address issues relating to health, housing, education, food and land for all.

And one cannot hope to address these critical issues if there is no possibility for a genuine change of leadership and power relations, multiparty elections notwithstanding.

That's why some scholars are questioning the political significance of elections in Africa.

Because they neither result in new leadership nor new power relations safe for some isolated cases such as Zambia, Ghana etc.

There are also cultural factors that have stalled or reversed the much-vaunted transition to democracy.

Some African leaders are engaged in the politics of re-traditionalisation and exceptionalism at the expense of democratic politics.

The academic Celestin Monga advanced the notion of 'protective sophism' to refer to the reduction of concepts like 'national integration', 'nation building' to slogans used to justify practices by which elite groups pursue their own interests while balkanising their countries along ethnic lines.

And in such settings minority groups become the first victims and so are the poor.

This problem seems to be working itself out in the context of Namibian politics where it is now recognised that some minority groups are getting a raw deal in the bargain.

Is there a possibility for the retrieval of a genuine democratic transition in Africa? Yes, but only by bringing back the people into mainstream politics.

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