With Elections Ahead Some African Presidents Try Engineering Results
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.
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 먹튀검증 in power, Uganda’s 76-year-old president plans to run for re-election in February. 메이저토토사이트 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.
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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. 사설토토 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.
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“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.”
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European colonizers frequently damaged or destroyed Africa’s own systems and traditions of holding power to account, 메이저놀이터 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.
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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 didn’t 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 Mr. 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, Mr. 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 — Mr. 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.
