SECTION 39: Successions of crises

Even Robert Mugabe isn’t deceiving himself that his re-election as leader of the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front for the next five years has dispersed the vultures circling around his beleaguered Presidency. True, they have been wishfully circling outside for several years, but now the threat is closer to home, within ZANU-PF itself.

That is no doubt why, at the party’s convention last week, Cap’n Bob warned against disunity. But the taboo on discussing succession in the post-Mugabe era has been shattered, and the ageing President is struggling to keep the peace among his would-be heirs.

All over the continent, citizens are facing up to the problems that may beset countries with no orderly succession process.

In Liberia, there is no clear successor to 71-year old President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, an omission that may prove fatal to the chances of whoever eventually emerges to campaign on her policies in the 2011 elections, if the recent electoral success of ex-footballer George Weah’s party is any indicator. Johnson-Sirleaf promised to serve for only one term, and keeping to this would provide a face-saving exit, following her inclusion by the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission as one of 50 people who should be barred from public office for supporting warring factions during Liberia’s civil war.

But she is not otherwise prohibited from running again, and so has no need to adopt the Tandja Mamoudu option.

The 71-year old President of Niger Republic,it will be recalled, solved that country’s succession issues by forcing through a constitutional amendment that allows him to run for a third term, even though it meant facing down demonstrators and dissolving the Constitutional Court.

When another of our neighbours, Cameroon, conducts presidential elections in 2011, President Paul Biya will be 78. Like Thabo Mbeki in South Africa, he benefited from well laid-out succession plans, being Prime Minister in 1982 when then President Ahmadou Ahidjo suddenly resigned, citing health issues. Under Cameroon’s constitution, Biya automatically assumed office as President, a position he has occupied since. And although he spends more time abroad than at home, Cameroonians seem paralysed by fear of the chaos they believe will descend if Biya is not in power. But having long since sacked his own Prime Minister and abolished the position, succession problems now loom. And there are hints that Ahidjo may follow Tandja’s precedent and amend the constitution so that he can keep going until 2018, when he, like Cap’n Bob, will be 85.

Not that a leader has to be a septuagenarian or an octogenarian to have a succession crisis, or to lose control of the process. Ask Mbeki, ex-President of South Africa. Beneficiary of an orderly - even ‘pre-ordained’ - succession himself, things started to fall apart when his attempts to thwart the ambitions of his former deputy, Jacob Zuma, to succeed him failed, and the ruling African National Congress told him to resign or be removed as President. Perhaps Mbeki would have liked to take a leaf out of his predecessor, Nelson Mandela’s book, but it is a lot easier to rise above the fray when your stature puts you beyond it anyway.

Why do our leaders find it so difficult to live with a successor? The reasons given by the Yar’Adua administration for rejecting the Electoral Reform Committee’s recommendation that elections should be held early enough to allow post-election litigation to be concluded show how uncomfortable many African rulers are with the idea of having a successor waiting in the wings. According to Presidential spokesperson, Segun Adeniyi: “both the Federal Executive Council and Council of State reasoned that to conduct elections six months before swearing-in (leading to the possibility of having two authorities for six months in one state or even at the federal level) is an open invitation to anarchy.” Yeah, right.

The Council of State, which includes former heads of state,all but one of whom was unceremoniously booted out of office might not - one would imagine - be the best set of people to offer an opinion on this matter,but as their advice tallied so well with the sentiments and prejudices of those currently in power, i.e. the sitting President and State Governors (who may know a thing or two about arranged successions) it is hardly surprising that the Uwais panel’s proposal was thrown out.

Sometimes a country may have a succession crisis thrust upon it without warning. Having come to power through dubious means, disaster strikes and the leader lies on a hospital bed,receiving treatment in a foreign country while at home, rumours of death or incapacity, and behaviour by aides that trumpet certainty that the president is not coming back drown out assurances of successful treatment and imminent return.

Yet it was perhaps only by initially maintaining the story of his progress towards full restoration of health in a Moroccan hospital that the aides and lieutenants of Dadis Camara were able to prevent a bloody succession struggle and possible descent into wholesale anarchy in Guinea. The country had been nearly rudderless for a decade as ailing President Lansana Conté lay on his sickbed, and the battle for succession among factions in the army that threatened when he died was averted by the bloodless coup that brought Camara to power as president. That coup however, disrupted the constitutional order, and Camara’s foreign sojourn leaves Guinea’s succession crisis at best, on ice.

Here at home of course, we have a functioning constitution with clear succession provisions. Should they be needed. So we’re alright then,aren’t we?