Societies naturally consist of people from diverse social, ethnic, cultural, economic, and political backgrounds and worldviews. Polarisation is therefore a natural feature of any society. There is no society that is not polarised but not all polarisation is harmful to society. Polarisation can either be healthy or harmful to society. Where it is nurtured in ways that promote the democratic contestation of ideas, polarisation can actually transform society because it allows the emergence and application of the best ideas. But where polarisation causes deep divisions, it is extremely harmful to unity, democracy, peace, security, and development. In such contexts, polarisation engenders enmity, hostility, political violence, and the politics of exclusion. While deep polarisation is harmful to all societies, including stable and mature democracies, it is particularly harmful to developing societies. African societies are getting deeply polarised, especially along political and ethnic divides. This is a harmful trend.

In most of Africa, citizens are invariably lumped into deeply antagonistic political camps, particularly the ruling party and the main opposition. These camps incessantly denounce, demonise, discredit, and delegitimise each other because of mutual perceptions of hostility and enmity. They get irretrievably entangled in polarised thinking, a condition that is hard to reverse. Vitriolic, hateful, and warlike language is used against each other as society falls deep into the dungeon of “winners” versus “losers”, “the powerful” versus “the powerless”, “the ruling” versus “the ruled”, “patriots” versus “sell-outs”, “us” versus “them”, “the progressive” versus “the retrogressive”, and “the wise” versus “dunderheads” identities. The space for bipartisan and constructive conversations and engagements gets diminished or closed. In such a political atmosphere, there is no appetite for political parties to try and understand each other’s views or policy positions. Partisan interests are given pre-eminence over national interests. This has made it difficult for African citizens to converge on collective aspirations.

On the whole, polarisation has engendered high levels of violence or threats of violence, intolerance, human rights abuse, political and economic exclusion, blatant looting of state resources, the promotion of partisan and parochial interests to the detriment of national interests, and a crisis of trust in the state and its institutions. It has also created a huge space for external actors to exploit Africa’s resources. It is impossible for Africa to achieve unity, democracy, peace, security, and development without overcoming the polarisation that is entrenched in its political and social systems. It is against this background that the Depolarise Africa Project seeks to reduce the level of political polarisation in Africa. The Polarisation Index also falls under this project. It measures the level of political polarisation in Africa’s five regions with 100% representing the highest level of polarisation and 1% representing the lowest level of polarisation.