Abstract
Democratic governance in culturally plural societies confronts a paradox regarding the locus of the authority as it is presumed to belonging to ‘the people’. Where cultural, linguistic, and religious differences mark the polity, who authorises whom and on what grounds becomes democracy’s central problem. This paradox is particularly acute in Africa, where three decades of multiparty constitutionalism have produced elections without accountability, constitutions without constitutionalism, and states whose formal democratic architecture coexists with exclusion, predation, and civic abandonment. This paper argued that Paulo Freire’s concept of praxis, the iterative unity of reflection and transformative action, offers a resource for considering how shared authority is generated rather than merely distributed. Reading Freire alongside intercultural philosophy, particularly the critique of monological reason, it develops the concept of dialogical authorization which is authority becoming shared through sustained, reciprocal, structurally egalitarian communicative practice. Three claims follow and they are: First, Freire’s pedagogy is best understood as a theory of democratic authorisation, in which the capacity to name the world is inseparable from the capacity to govern it. Second, the ‘banking’ model has a precise institutional analogue in the technocratic postcolonial African state, explaining much of the continent’s democratic deficit. Third, Freirean praxis supplies the missing generative dimension in deliberative and intercultural democracy, which specify conditions of legitimacy but not how the capacities for it are produced, still less under conditions of material scarcity and external dependency. The paper addressed objections concerning vanguardism, the romanticisation of the oppressed, inattention to institutional design, and the charge that Freire’s Latin American framework travels poorly. It concluded that shared authority is not a constitutional artefact but an educational achievement, and that democratic consolidation in Africa depends less on electoral engineering than on cultivating conscientização.
Keywords: Praxis, interculturality, democratic governance, shared authority, conscientização, pluralism.
Author names:
Solomon Ojoka Ojomah
Department of Philosophy
Faculty of Arts
Federal Universityh of Lafia
ORCID ID:
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3042-0714
07060782243
DOI link: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23084027
Copyright © [2026] The Author(s). Published by the Journal of People and Worldviews (JPW). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are properly credited.