Why they won’t just leave
Some weeks back, a friend came to ask me to explain to him exactly why David Cameron had to resign as Prime Minister of the UK just one year into his new five-year tenure. “Was he convicted of corruption or crime?” My friend could not believe Mr Cameron had to go just because he was on the losing side in a mere referendum to determine the future of the UK in Europe. What was more, Mr Cameron graciously left in July rather than in October as he had earlier announced when the Tory Party concluded its leadership contest earlier than planned.
This all sounded so strange to my friend because here in Nigeria, the mere acceptance of an election result by a president who lost an election is seen as a revolutionary act that he was being propositioned for the Mo Ibrahim prize for good governance in Africa and – wait for it – a Nobel peace prize for saving Nigeria’s democracy! Well, it was the first time a president was losing an election in Nigeria. But on that score, Nigeria came late to the party as countries in West and Southern Africa are setting good examples of leaders leaving when their term finishes or when they lost elections. The most notorious countries however, are in East and Central Africa. From Uganda, to Rwanda, Congo DR, Burundi, Angola and Cameroun, it is still business as usual. Leaders do not leave office regardless what their constitutions say about term limits. They are either forcefully removed or they die in office.
But nowhere in Africa is resigning mid-term popular or possible. As we have seen even in South Africa – Africa’s supposed model democratic state – Mr Zuma is prepared to undermine the country and destroy its institutions rather than resign even after many courts have ruled against him and indicted him for unethical and unconstitutional conducts. In Nigeria also, despite Mr Saraki’s rein as Senate President becoming untenable – he is being tried in different courts for fraud and forgery of senate rules – he is determined to cling to the office of the Senate President until he is legally yanked from it. But why exactly do African leaders find it difficult to leave office? Or rather, what is so attractive about public office in Africa that people do everything possible to get it and retain it for as long as they can manage?
In the 1990s, Olusegun Obasanjo, Nigeria’s military ruler from 1976 – 1979 on hearing that his former deputy, Shehu Musa Yar’adua was aspiring to become president famously asked him what he forgot in the ‘state house’ (seat of power) that he wanted to go back there. Yet in 1999 not only did Obasanjo return to spend two terms of eight years in the Aso Rock (Nigeria’s seat of power), he got used to the goodies of being in public office that he was reluctant to leave office on the expiration of his second term and was reported to have said to his deputy, Atiku Abubakar: “ I left power twenty years ago, I left Mubarak in office, I left Mugabe in office, I left Eyadema in office, I left Umar Bongo, and even Paul Biya and I came back and they are still in power; and I just did 8 years and you are asking me to go; why?”
One possible reason why African leaders are so reluctant to leave office is because political power, as Claude Ake, Africa’s foremost political economist puts it “is now the established way to wealth.” So, those who win state power “can have all the wealth they want even without working, while those who lose the struggle for state power cannot have security in the wealth they have made even by hard work.” Predictably therefore, the struggle for the capture of state power “inevitably becomes a matter of life and death.” That is why, for instance, Pierre Nkurunziza and his fellow traveller in Rwanda, Paul Kagame will do everything to remain in power in their ethnically volatile and fragile countries even if it means a return to violence and killings of the past.
This deadly struggle for power did not end with the adoption of democratic system of governance by most African countries from the 1990s. In fact, it became even more deadly as political contests have deepened the fault lines and election is now the leading cause of conflicts and violence around Africa. Like the Kenya electoral violence of 2007 shows, politicians locked in deadly battles for the capture of state power easily ignite ethnic tensions and mobilise along ethnic lines to actualise their ambitions.
One consequence of the desperate nature of political competition in Africa is the hijack of electoral funding by godfathers and political entrepreneurs or merchants who specialise in bankrolling candidates for elections for huge profits and returns. Nigeria presents the classic example here. With a largely unregulated election financing environment, candidates and electoral merchants now see elections in Nigeria as simply a matter of investments and returns. This is not helped by an unhealthy culture of expectations and entitlements in Nigeria where the people expect politicians and the government to provide jobs, roads, hospitals, education, water, electricity, etc. at little or no cost and where many Nigerians expect and look forward to receiving money from politicians during election campaigns.
Once elected, public officials’ and their godfathers’ main task is to recoup and make huge returns on the money spent during the elections, thus setting off another deadly round of competition between the godfathers and public officials on the sharing formulae of embezzled state resources. On many occasions the competition could go wrong and other rounds of conflicts and violence are unleashed on the society.
This also largely explains why, despite the hues and cries, Nigerian public officials’ salaries and allowances are some of the highest in the world. Some that are not so lucky to get godfathers to finance their elections take huge loans from banks and other sources to finance the elections. Some even liquidate their entire life and family savings to finance their campaigns. It is a great risk alright, but the returns are generally considered to be worth the risk.
Nowhere does the public interest feature in the calculation of those jostling for public office and it is not surprising that it is very difficult to get government officials to be accountable to the people or to leave office when their time is up.
Christopher Akor