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Africa: Africa's Leadership Crisis the Case of Zimbabwe
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The Namibian (Windhoek)
COLUMN
2 May 2008
Posted to the web 2 May 2008
Hidipo Hamutenya
Windhoek
THE crisis in Zimbabwe goes on without abatement.
As we go to press, the presidential results of the now one-month-old election in Zimbabwe remain unknown.
This is fundamentally a manifestation of the persistence and intractable problem of a leadership succession crisis in Africa, a crisis that has been besetting Africa since the advent of the main wave of independence at the beginning of the 1960s.
Soon after the achievement of independence, the process began to unfold whereby political parties in Africa became mere fiefdoms of their party bosses.
And the broad masses of followers, whose political enthusiasm and energy had been aroused during the struggle for independence, found themselves held hostage to the patronage of the party bosses.
Also, in the absence of internal party democracy, parties began to largely fulfil the role of being instruments of the political ambitions of their leaders, whose preoccupation was now to stay indefinitely in power.
The constitutional provisions that restricted the office of presidents or prime ministers to a specific number of terms (mostly two) had to be subverted so that leaders could prolong their staying in power.
The avenue to democratic and peaceful leadership succession became blocked by the then emerging civilian autocracy and military dictatorship, which ascended to power through coups.
Political instability eventually became the order of the day.
To remove the entrenched autocratic dictators and military rulers became a formidable task, holding back socio-economic development and progress in Africa.
In Zimbabwe, President Robert Mugabe has been one of the civilian autocrats who has been in power for 28 years, tolerating no rivalry to his power.
His political desire to stay in the presidential office remains insatiable and unconstrained by conscience. Hence, the repeated flare-up of that crisis.
As African leaders devote their attentions and efforts to clinging to power, our continent continues to endure the burden of underdevelopment, widespread poverty, high levels of illiteracy, widening income gap between the haves and have-nots, etc.
The end of the Cold War, namely, the ceasing of the once sharp ideological division between the East and West, at the beginning of the 1990s appeared to herald an era of democratisation on the continent.
The phenomenon of military coups d'etat, an undemocratic way of bringing about leadership succession in Africa, seemed to be on the decline, as various forms of multiparty political systems were being introduced around the continent.
But the introduction of multi-partyism did not prevent the leadership succession from developing into an acute crisis on the continent.
With military coups being widely discredited, gaining and clinging to power now took the form of civilian dictatorship, that is, self-entrenched autocratic rule via different forms of intimidation, election rigging and many other forms of undemocratic cheatings.
These dishonest methods of leadership succession often led to violent conflicts. African autocrats did not hesitate to tamper with their national constitutions to prolong their stay in power.
Among the recent cases of succession-driven crises in Africa are those of Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Togo, Kenya and Zimbabwe.
Thousands of lives have been lost due to the destructive nature of these conflicts.
Another aspect of the leadership succession crises in Africa is that of African heads of state stepping down from the presidential office but manoeuvring to desperately cling onto a certain measure of power by remaining leaders of their political parties.
The most recent examples are those of Namibia and Malawi.
In the case of Namibia, the constitution had to be amended to accommodate a third term for the former president, Sam Nujoma, only.
In Malawi, Nigeria and Zambia, similar attempts were made to amend the constitutions, but these were thwarted by a coalition of forces made up of opposition political parties, civil society organisations, and even sections within the ruling parties.
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The ambitions of Bakili Muluzi, Olusegun Obasanjo and Frederick Chiluba, in their attempts to amend the constitutions of their respective countries in order to extend their terms of office, were shameful because all these men came to power masquerading as born-again democrats.
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