Boston — "What does an African head of state do when he leaves office?" said Professor Loyiso Nongxa, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa during an African Presidential Roundtable earlier this month.
The South African academician answered his own question: former African leaders may become businessmen or remain active in politics, planning a possible return to power. They can set up a foundation and do charitable work. But there is rarely any institutionalized mechanism or practice in Africa where the acquired wisdom of former African leaders is tapped in intellectual forums that influence public policy.
Professor Nongxa was speaking at what is probably the first forum established to help fill this gap, organized by Boston University's African Presidential Archives and Research Centre (APARC) and held this year in Johannesburg and Boston.
Charles Stith, an African American pastor and former U.S. Ambassador to Tanzania, founded APARC to meet the challenge of harnessing the experience of democratically elected African leaders who have retired voluntarily or were voted out of office - and respected the election results - in the true spirit of democracy. The research centre runs an innovative "president-in-residence" programme in which former leaders can reflect and air their perspectives on Africa's future, and a Roundtable that brings together ex-leaders and scholars, diplomats and private sector personalities.
In Johannesburg and Boston, we discussed African development against the background of a keynote presentation by Trevor Manuel, South Africa's dynamic Minister of Finance, on the report of the Commission for Africa appointed by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and another by Adil Najam, associate professor of international development at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. A cast of African statesmen formed the core of the roundtable discussion: ex-presidents Nicephore Soglo of Benin, Jerry Rawlings of Ghana, Joaquim Chissano of Mozambique, Ketumile Masire of Botswana, Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, and Ali Hassan Mwinyi of Tanzania. Others were Daniel arap Moi of Kenya, Aristide Pereira and Antonio Monteiro of Cape Verde, Karl Auguste Offman of Mauritius, and Pierre Buyoya of Burundi.
These leaders have varying records in governance. Some, like Botswana's Masire, were indisputably successful, while others were less so. But what mattered was the forum and free exchange of experiences and perspectives based on past successes or mistakes in a continent that has become the centre of new levels of both introspection and international attention.
The challenge is: beyond the gilded class of the political, diplomatic and intellectual elite, how can this knowledge be captured in a manner that is most relevant to African societies themselves and their current and future governance?
The question of what former heads of government do with their time and knowledge is important for every society. The wisdom of hindsight is often luminous. It scarcely matters whether the leader in question was popular or not, respected or despised. When a man or woman has been at the pinnacle of public office, he or she surely has perspectives informed by experience that can be beneficial to a successor and society at large.
Although the insider's perspective is always educative, in Africa it is too often wasted by not being shared at an appropriate time, either simply for lack of will or inclination or because African societies have not built up the intellectual infrastructure for the systemic dispersal of such knowledge. Addressing this question is even more important because only Africa - and Africans - can develop the continent in light of their own history, culture and circumstance.
There is a link between all of this and what academicians have termed "leadership and psychohistory" - the interplay between the psychology of powerful men and women that has helped shaped national and international societies since recorded history. This remains true even in politically mature societies where it might be argued that that institutions work, and there is therefore less dependence on individual leaders.
In the United States, for example, life after the presidency includes the establishment of presidential libraries as knowledge centers. A visit to the Kennedy Library provides profound insights into a presidency that inspired hope, and the Reagan library collection attests to the victory of the capitalist west over communism. There is the deeply entrenched culture of influential chronicles of presidential history and biography. Jimmy Carter's life and work out of high office has made him perhaps the most successful and influential ex-president in American history.
Africans are not unaffected by all this. Bill Clinton's My Life is actively hawked - and eagerly purchased - in the traffic jams of Lagos. I read the biography of the larger-than-life former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in my teens. It is not that some African leaders have not written their autobiographies. Memoirs from the leaders of Africa's independence struggles, such as former Nigerian President Nnamdi Azikiwe's My Odyssey, are staples of African studies, and President Olusegun Obasanjo set up the Africa Leadership Forum in the 1980s after he had handed over power to an elected government. But there is need for an institutionalization of the post-presidency in Africa.
There are four reasons why this has not happened. First, there are currently no structured African knowledge systems. If there were, the countries of the continent would do in written form what the griots of several African societies did in centuries past through oral traditions that were widely known and assimilated. To illustrate the sharp importance of knowledge systems (a phrase I use to mean structured, contextually relevant ways of perceiving and interpreting empirical reality), one well-respected African leader at the African Presidential Roundtable noted how inaccurate the phrase "reforms" - a cliché of the western press - is when applied out of context, in this case to his country. "Reforms?" he asked rhetorically. "What reforms; we are building!"
Second, Africa is still at a stage in its political development in which it is grappling with such fundamentals as the struggle to entrench democracy and to make choices between essentially foreign political models. Serious thought is only just beginning on the role of its former leaders.
Third, the tension between impunity and accountability, which can only be resolved through a judicious mixture of justice and high politics, remains real for many African countries. This tension, however, is not unique to Africa. It has most notably surfaced in Latin America as well. What to do with a president who is accused of egregious human rights abuses or corruption during his tenure? Some African leaders have viewed the prospect of life outside high office with apprehension, an understandable feeling when, as former head of government, he could be the subject of what he would consider a witch-hunt and his adversaries will call justice. These are difficult questions that affect political transitions and the role of ex-Presidents in Africa.
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A fourth (and in my view weak) reason for the absence of an institutionalized post-presidency is the exaggerated "poverty" of many African countries, when the real problem is one of management and priority setting. Boston University's APARC has benefited from the culture of endowments, the philanthropic support that wealthy persons and institutions offer to educational institutions in America. But the private and public sectors in many African countries are quite able of supporting indigenous, APARC-like initiatives and partnerships.
African governments need to go beyond pension schemes, a few cars and the odd police orderly for former heads of government to establish an institutionalized "office of the former president" for former leaders. These offices should be well staffed with research assistance and librarians to engage the perspectives of yesterday's men in the search for answers to today's questions of governance and public policy.
Creating effective incentives for life after the presidency would go a long way in solving problems of democratic governance in many African countries. It's a necessary priority that has been hidden in plain sight for far too long.
Kingsley Moghalu, international lawyer and public policy analyst, is author of the forthcoming book Rwanda's Genocide: The Politics of Global Justice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
