APA-Banjul (The Gambia) The now defused tension around Macky Sall’s future as Senegal’s president beyond 2024 when his country goes to the polls transfixed the rest of the world not least West Africa, given its turbulent and sometimes bloody relations with political leaderships of a bygone age.
Decades on, this region of hitherto diverse political cultures was now converging on the same point again, where leaders have lost the power and lustre to go beyond their sell-by date as President Sall discovered recently and his mentor turned rival Abdoulaye Wade realised more than a decade earlier with his ill-advised and subsequently ill-fated bid to force himself onto the Senegalese people.
Sall unlike Wade was not even allowed to get that far with the disenchanted lot of the Senegalese citizenry who made it clear they had no appetite for self-perpetuating rule if that was what the coded language behind his ‘coldblooded’ reticence was signaling.
The angry demonstrations that attended to the charged political suspense over either bidding for a third term or respecting his country’s constitution (whose presidential term limit provisions were amended under his watch) had beamed a critical spotlight on the West African region as a whole over its list of past, present and future political transgressors looking to hold onto power by any means necessary because they will never be sated.
For the records, the majority of countries in West Africa have term limits appended to their constitutions and their outgoing leaders seem to be respecting them to the letter with the exception of Guinea where former President Alpha Conde briefly succeeded himself after ‘winning’ a third term only to unwittingly provide an excuse to the military to once again seize power and put paid to his ‘unconstitutional madness’ months later.
The other was Cote d’Ivoire where President Alassane Ouattara made an unlikely comeback after his anointed successor Amadou Gon Coulibaly, died while approaching the eleventh hour of the 2021 election, earning for himself the dubious distinction of a cat-like political survivor with nine lives.
Only the tiny states of Togo and The Gambia with no presidential term limits in their respective constitutions and junta-led Burkina Faso, Mali and Guinea are bucking this presidential two-term trend albeit with differing political contexts to their credit.
Countries in the region which should be leading by example like Nigeria, Ghana and Senegal have made multiple praiseworthy transitions from leaders who were defeated or whose terms had expired to successors who are forced to reckon that they would hit a costly snag if they try to beat the ‘constitutional booby trap’.
Former president Muhammadu Buhari now salivates quiet retirement life after handing over to his elected successor Bola Ahmed Tinubu, being the latest case of a peaceful power transfer in Nigeria where such seamless transitions have taken place four times without fail since the dawn of democratic elections in 1999.
Ghana’s return to democratic pluralism which dates back to the turn of the century has seen four power transfers from Jerry John Rawlings to John Kuffour, John Atta-Mills, John Dramani Mahama and Nana Akufo-Addo.
Other illustrious examples of this are in Cape Verde, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Niger where presidents who were constrained by constitutional provisions to run again, peacefully presided over elections and staged elaborate and graceful handovers of power to the eventual winners.
Senegal’s Sall tried to turn the clock back on this but with dire and perhaps unintended consequences, sullying the image of his country as a cherished bastion of democratic constitutionalism like no other in West Africa.
The deaths from demonstrations and the destruction to infrastructure and property in Dakar and other Senegalese cities turned it into a very costly affair.
This was another example of people’s power in West Africa striking at the very heart of political patronage and with devastating consequences for sit-tight presidents and their strong-arm tactics of influence-peddling and control.
This would have sent alarm bells ringing in quiet capitals across West Africa where leaders with sit-tight ambitions of their own may just have to think long and hard about the sins and follies of overstaying their welcome and plunging their countries into avoidable crises such as the kind the world had witnessed in Cote d’Ivoire under Laurent Gbagbo, an Algeria led by late Abdelaziz Bouteflika and Omar al-Bashir in Sudan.
Other bloodier examples are Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and Samuel Doe of Liberia, removed from power by armed rebellions when all democratic means for a peaceful transfer of power had failed.
No return to West Africa’s political stone age
West Africa has come a long way from the days of old when its past leaders save a few, clung onto power with aplomb, convenient in the knowledge that there were no constitutional provisions barring them from self-perpetuating rule.
Those were not the days of strong democratic institutions or vociferous civil societies, putting leaders on their toes or snapping at their heels for one political transgression or another.
Those were the period when supreme leaders like Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Cote d’Ivoire acted like supreme beings whose whim was all that was needed to run a country and its subservient population.
They were their countries’ laws in human form and could famously re-echo Napoleon Bonaparte’s l’etat c’est moi in a casual diatribe without expecting any socio-political consequences which could see them hounded out of power by popular revolts such as the one against Blaise Compaore in Burkina Faso in 2014.
In the absence of strong institutions, late Boigny and those of his ilk in West Africa and beyond were so powerful that they subjected everybody and everything to their own personal whims, influence and control.
With that they could change the course of their country’s history by the naked force of their whims and caprices even if the consequences meant barring or physically liquidating opponents, real or perceived, overstaying in power and enjoying the trappings that go with it.
This also rang true in other parts of Africa where power was the ultimate endgame and provided the magical Midas touch that guaranteed everything good life had to offer to those in preeminent positions, chiefly among them presidents.
There is no mistaking that strongman rule still obtains across Africa – Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea, Paul Biya of Cameroon and Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni as obvious examples of leaders who have been there since God’s dog was a puppy.
However, the constant evolution of African political leadership can guarantee that this norm belongs to the dead past and can no longer hold sway where people’s power overturns the fortunes of leaders overnight and render them impotent bystanders as history sallies forth without them.
AS/APA