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Experts: African Constitutions Increasingly Used to Prolong Power

by Anita Powell October 31, 2014

In the last decade, at least a dozen African leaders - among them, the rulers of Algeria, Cameroon, Chad, Djibouti, Uganda and Zimbabwe - have amended their national constitutions to allow them to extend their time in office. The men who lead those six countries have been in power collectively for just shy of 150 years.

The latest attempt to prolong power came from Burkina Faso's leader of 27 years, Blaise Compaore. His recent attempts to extend his rule through constitutional amendment were met with fierce resistance in the capital, Ouagadougou, and eventually military intervention. Compaore resigned Friday.

Worrisome trend

Constitutional scholars and analysts see this as a worrying trend, and one that has little justification.

David Bilchitz is a law professor at the University of Johannesburg, and has dedicated much of his career to studying constitutions.

He notes that just because African leaders have adapted from the old tactic of taking power by coup to the more sophisticated strategy of maintaining power through constitutional change - well, that doesn't make it right.

"I think we must distinguish, and it's a very important distinction to make in the context of some of the developments in relation to African constitutions, is the use of formal legal processes often to mask what is substantively undemocratic," he said.

James Stent, a researcher at the Good Governance Africa think tank says changing the constitution to stay in power is not good governance.

"This is a pretty typical example of bad governance," he noted. "The AU [African Union] in fact, stands against the extension of presidential limits. There's really no legal or moral basis in which to extend rule beyond constitutional limits."

People push back

Increasingly, the public is losing its tolerance for bad governance. Stein notes the growing trend for Africa's citizens to push back is positive.

​​"The outrage is encouraging. It means, for one, that people are more aware of their rights in a democracy," Stent said. "And perhaps also that the stories of resistance to regimes being successful, which we saw in the Arab Spring, that citizens who previously may have been unwilling to stand up to the government for fear of reprisals, are now more willing to do so, and are willing to stand up for democratic processes."

The experts say not all efforts to extend power are necessarily bad. Bilchitz noted that the late U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt ran for re-election three times - defying what was then American political tradition - to steer his nation through World War II. Roosevelt died during his fourth term in office, and the U.S. Constitution was later amended to limit future presidents to two four-year terms.

Liberia

​​Such cases, Bilchitz said, are extraordinary - like a recent decision by Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to suspend October's special senatorial elections because of the nation's Ebola crisis. The act drew allegations of abuse from her critics. Bilchitz says it was a tough call.

"Well, I think Liberia is undergoing a tremendously trying time, an emergency which is affecting the health and the very livelihoods of the people. And so there may be a case for not having elections right at this moment, postponing it under some exception. But that would be for a limited period, and for a very limited purpose," Bilchitz said.

The trend of constitutional tinkering does not appear to be slowing. Recently, the leaders of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Burundi - three neighbors at the nexus of what is surely the most blood-soaked patch of this continent - all have been accused of looking to the constitution for an extension.