With Elections Ahead, Some African Presidents Try Engineering Results
By: Ruth Maclean
Presidential elections are scheduled soon in at least 10 African countries.
Many incumbents are changing constitutions and bending rules to ensure they stay in power.
No, no!
The President of the United States is NOT
the first President to try to change the rules
to stay in office.
He has precedents.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Issouf Sanogo/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
DAKAR, Senegal — The president of the West African nation of Guinea is running for a third term on Oct. 18, even though Guinea requires its presidents to step down after two. But because of a constitutional change he initiated, his first two terms don't count.
The president in neighboring Ivory Coast has made his first two terms disappear with a constitutional amendment, too. So he is also running for a third-but-actually-first term, on Oct. 31.
And after 34 years in power, Uganda's 76-year-old president plans to run for re-election in February. The age limit for presidents in Uganda was 75, but then he changed the constitution, and sought to prove his fitness to stay in office with a demonstration of his red-carpet workout routine in the State House — to the howls of many Ugandans.
While much of the world may be focused on the contest for the top job in the United States, presidential elections are also set to take place in at least 10 of Africa's 54 countries over the next five months. All of the incumbents but one want to stay in office.
While most African presidents since 1990 have stepped down after their terms were up, many are now bending the rules to ensure they stay in power. Some have manipulated supreme courts and electoral commissions; others have changed constitutions, prosecuted opposition candidates or prevented them from running by imposing onerous qualifying criteria.
But countries like the United States that once claimed to stand against those undermining democracy are now turning inward and so, some political thinkers say, incumbents are increasingly getting away with it.
"Too many of our countries have not stood by the protocols and the resolutions that we have made in our regional institutions. Regarding democracy. Regarding term limits. Regarding the transfer of power in a regular and peaceful way," said Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the former president of Liberia. "And those shifts are coming also because of the changes in the geopolitical landscape."
Tags
Who is online
62 visitors
Seriously, folks!
You need to learn from the folks who really know how to do this:
The clowns on the right fly silly Rambo flags.
The serious guys carry guns . And sometimes use them.
Trump followers are amateurs.
I seem to remember that Trump had a very classy word to describe these countries. I guess that's why his followers are imitating them...