With elections ahead, some African presidents try engineering results

The president of the West African nation of Guinea is running for a third term 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 do not count.

The president in neighbouring 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 reelection 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.”

European colonisers frequently damaged or destroyed Africa’s own systems and traditions of holding power to account, as historians have chronicled. Post-colonial African governments have instead relied on imported, sometimes ill-fitting political systems. And at around 60 years old, these systems are still younger than many current presidents.

In March, Ivory Coast’s president, Alassane Ouattara, 78, was basking in praise for saying he would step down when he had completed his two terms — despite arguing that he did not have to, because a constitutional change meant his term clock was reset to zero.

But four months later, his chosen successor suddenly died, and the president judged that no other candidate would do. Like his predecessors, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, Ivory Coast’s first president, under whom Ouattara served as prime minister, and Laurent Gbagbo, whose refusal to leave office in 2011 set off the country’s second bloody civil war within a decade, Ouattara decided to hang on — calling it a “real sacrifice.”

Protests spread across the country. Then two of the front-runners were barred from standing in the election — Gbagbo, who last year was acquitted of crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court, and Guillaume Soro, a former prime minister and rebel leader living in exile, who was sentenced to 20 years in jail in absentia in April.

Four candidates remain, although 40 were disqualified.

“Not allowing the others to be candidates will surely bring another war,” said Mélodie Gnékonté, a secretary who said her uncle, an army doctor, had been killed during the last war.

Across French-speaking West Africa, civic space is shrinking, so that citizens trying to hold their governments to account face repressive laws, arrest and sometimes death, according to a report to be published by the global nonprofit Civicus.

Case in point: recent deadly clashes in Guinea, over the new constitution pushed by the country’s first democratically elected president, Alpha Condé.

His success at manoeuvring to stay in power is partly the fault of Western negligence, said Cellou Dalein Diallo, the Guinean opposition leader.

“The Europeans are less attentive, and the Americans, with the arrival of Trump, are less demanding when it comes to democracy and human rights,” Diallo said on a recent campaign trip to Dakar, Senegal, where a large Guinean diaspora lives.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a two-paragraph statement last week about “upcoming elections in Africa,” warning that “repression and intimidation have no place in democracies.” But many Africans commented on social media that such a skimpy, blanket statement about the continent, rather than specific countries, was evidence that there is little interest from the administration of President Donald Trump, who denigrated African countries with a memorable epithet in 2018.

When Diallo got back to Guinea, Condé accused him of going there to recruit mercenaries and attack his own country, which Diallo strongly denies. But Condé closed the border.

As a result, many Guineans living abroad may be unable to return to cast their votes. And some of those at home, who can vote, say politicians are trying to sow division.

“Power shouldn’t be something they cling to, knowing that there are people who could do better,” said Fanta Traoré, a student at the French University of Guinea.

In Uganda, political rallies are banned because of the coronavirus, making it harder for opposition candidates. To reach voters, candidates have to rely on the news media, over which President Yoweri Museveni and the governing party exert great influence.

Tanzania’s political space is shrinking rapidly too. Opposition leader Tundu Lissu, who spent three years in exile after an assassination attempt, has returned to the country to run for president but says police are disrupting his campaign. He says he fears for his life.

Until recently, Gambia was riding on the joyful high that followed the dislodging of its longtime autocratic president in 2016. But the new president reneged on his promise to serve for only three years. Last month, his supporters in the National Assembly rejected a new, transformative constitution because, civil rights activists say, it would limit the new president to a decade in power.

The other countries set to have elections in the next five months are Benin, Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, Ghana and Seychelles. The only country where the incumbent is not running is Niger.

© 2020 The New York Times Company