Fragile consensus as Africa heads to the polls

Africa enters 2026 with elections scheduled in more than a dozen countries and with voter rolls that now exceed 600 million people across the continent. Elections have become the most common ritual of political life in Africa, more frequent than coups, civil wars, or constitutional rewrites. Yet frequency has not produced comfort. Voting has turned into a dual-use instrument: a tool for peaceful transfer of power in a minority of cases, and a method for laundering political capture in many others. It is a contradiction that now sits at the heart of what this year is likely to bring.

Raccontata daarabnews.com