Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos, one of Africa’s longest-ruling leaders, on Friday announced that he would step down from office in 2018.
He told the leaders of his party, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), that he would resign, without elaborating, according to news reports.
It was not the first time Dos Santos, 73, a Soviet-educated engineer and former guerrilla who has been in power for almost 37 years, has pledged to leave the presidency. In 2001, as the oil and diamond-rich former Portuguese colony was winding down a decades-long civil war, Dos Santos said he would not run for re-election. He abandoned that plan.
Africa is home to several so-called leaders for life. Equatorial Guinea President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo came to power during a 1979 coup and was named president in 1982. Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, who recently turned 92, has been in power since 1987.
In recent years, many African nations that had moved toward instituting more democratic principles have started shedding them. Some nations seem to be keeping up appearances, putting into place new presidential term limits that are even endorsed by their long-serving leaders. However, these longtime presidents keep winning election after election. Observers have criticized these elections as nothing more than pageantry. The outcomes, they say, are decided before the first ballot is cast.
Voters in the Republic of the Congo are to go to the polls next Sunday in an election that many candidates have decided to boycott because of accusations the vote is rigged to favor Republic of Congo President Denis Sassou-Nguesso, who has been in power since 1997. His first stint as president stretched from 1979 to 1992, when he was ousted in the nation’s first-ever multiparty election. Now, Sassou-Nguesso is vying for a third consecutive term in office after a change to the country’s constitution that, among other things, eliminated an age limit for the presidency, allowing him to run for re-election.
Voters in Rwanda last year rolled back term limits, allowing Rwandan President Paul Kagame to theoretically stay in power until 2034. Ninety-eight percent of voters backed the necessary change to Rwanda’s Constitution. Opposition leaders fear Democratic Republic of the Congo President Joseph Kabila will push to change the constitution and run for a third term in elections later this year.
Africa is not the only continent where term limits are in retreat. In Ecuador last year, lawmakers passed a constitutional amendment that would eventually allow Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa to run for the office again after his term expires, though he is barred from seeking another consecutive term in 2017 elections. In Nicaragua, lawmakers in 2014 got rid of presidential term limits, allowing Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega to remain in power indefinitely. However, in Bolivia, an effort by Bolivian President Evo Morales to stay in power was recently rebuffed.
Pro-democracy groups have long assailed the notion of constitutional changes that allow for long stretches in office, saying they lead to corruption and worse.
“Such revisions are the cause of domestic violence and political instability and have a perverse impact on regional security,” said Alfredo Tjiurimo Hengari, a senior fellow at the South African Institute of International Affairs in a June 2015 report, “Presidential Term Limits: A New African Foreign Policy Challenge.”
In Angola, news of the president’s planned resignation came as a surprise.
Since 1979, Dos Santos has presided over a nation of rampant inequality that has been criticized for human rights violations and ranks among the worst for deaths of children under the age of five. Angola has been routinely listed by good-government groups as among the world’s most corrupt. Dos Santos’ daughter, Isabel dos Santos, is a billionaire, yet many people in Angola live without electricity or access to healthcare.
In making his announcement, Dos Santos called for measures to be taken against mismanagement, according to news reports.
The timing of his resignation would allow him to stay in office after the nation’s next federal elections, scheduled for next year. The parliamentary leader elected in that vote would assume the president’s role should Dos Santos indeed step down.
In 2014 in Burkina Faso, when former president Blaise Compaore tried to extend his nearly three decades in office, the public revolted and Campaore wound up fleeing the country.
Elsewhere, leaders have amassed huge followings during their decades in power. Some have been in office for so long that officials have barely considered — or dared to consider aloud — succession plans.
In Cameroon, portraits of a young, strapping Cameroonian President Paul Biya grace the walls of government offices. Women wear wax fabric dresses with his portrait. Biya, 83, has been in power since 1982. His term is up in 2018, and his supporters are calling for him to run again.
Senegalese President Macky Sall was elected in 2012 on promises he would shave two years off his seven-year presidential term, keeping with many European countries where presidents have five-year mandates. A court rejected his proposal to shorten his term, and voters are to decide this month in a constitutional referendum whether future presidential terms should last only five years. Sall says he will stay in office for his full seven-year term.
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