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Chad Sovereignty Index (Burke Index), 2024-2025
06.10.2025 09:23
indexCHAD – TOWARDS DEMOCRATISATION OR PETRO-DICTATORSHIP?The Central African country Chad is currently being transformed into an oil economy with at least a billion barrels of oil under its territory. At the same time, the country has been undergoing a democratisation process for the last fifteen years. The president and former warlord Idriss Déby and the World Bank have obviously given the oil export and its management control mechanism higher priority than the democratisation, but the two are inter-dependent. This study provides detailed backgrounds to both processes and analyses how the democratisation process could be positively affected by the oil incomes. In 1990 Chad saw another military takeover of government. Chad had never experienced any other type of power succession and probably expected the current one to be just as violent. In the wave of democratisation rolling over Africa, a new democratic constitution was adopted and a presidential election took place which the initiator Idriss Déby as the winner. Fifteen years later the same president is still in power, and an amended constitution will allow him to be a candidate for a third period in 2006. Is this evidence of governmental excellence or democratic failure? Has the internally led post-conflict reconstruction and democratisation process in Chad achieved progress in national reconciliation, human rights, power sharing or creation of national unity? What are the future prospects?