Bucking the trend of rule by the young
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YET another septuagenarian has retained power. The people of Mali re-elected President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta for one more term.
By winning the run-off elections against former finance minister Soumaïla Cissé, the 73-year old
Keïta emulated his Zimbabwean counterpart, 75-year-old Emmerson Mnangagwa. Incidentally, the elections in the two countries took place on July 29 and 30 respectively.
Both men steered their respective countries through precarious transitions from a coup of sorts, and both appear to have prevailed over their younger challengers.
In both instances, the vanquished claim electoral fraud; and both have called on their followers to reject the outcome they consider to have been rigged.
Mnangagwa and Keïta join Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, who this week had his 36-year-old opposition contender, Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, arrested for alleged possession of illegal firearms.
In power since 1986, Museveni did all this after removing the presidential age limit of 75 – making him eligible to run again in 2021.
The club of presidential hangerson over 70 in African politics just lost two pivotal members in Angola’s Jose Eduardo dos Santos and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe.
At 85, an even more senior club member, Paul Biya of Cameroon, remains unfazed by the turmoil in the country he has ruled for 36 years.
He might seek re-election; alongside Nigeria’s 75-year old Muhammadu Buhari. The latter and his party somehow see nothing wrong with running a country while evidently unfit health-wise to do so; he spent 104 days in London receiving medical treatment last year.
Mali is among the world’s 25 poorest countries – which is a shame for the cradle of human scholarship and a premier exporter of gold. Its gross domestic product is barely
$40 billion, equal to Warren Buffett’s shareholding in Apple.
Even with its 5% average growth rate, political instability fuelled by perceptions of vote-rigging is not what the country needs to thrive.
Keïta might have steered his country through the dicey postcoup phase, and perhaps Cissé went overboard in inciting his followers to reject the election results.
As an outsider in all these instances, one is not entitled to pronounce on the merits of the reign of these big men, however long it might be. In and of itself, tenure of office is neither an advantage nor a disadvantage. Some rulers have been in power for much longer and left their people much better off.
King August Mokgatle of the royal Bafokeng nation, for instance, reigned from 1834 to 1891. During his time, he laid the foundation for the prosperity of what is arguably the best case in Africa of the sustainable exploitation of natural resources.
Mokgatle proved himself to be the ultimate diplomat and strategist by befriending the powerful while crafting a plan to protect his land. He sent his subjects to Kimberley’s mines to work and used their wages to buy back land, deploying German missionaries as proxies in some instances because Africans could not own land in those days.
His legacy enabled the Bafokeng to turn their land ownership into sustainable wealth beyond mining, by managing their endowments for growth where neighbours had failed.
While critics of their extended tenure argue for their exit from office, the oldies of African politics continue to claim popular support at the polls.
Their opponents, on the other hand, allege fraud and even the suppression of dissent. The problem is that they fail to prove these things.
The efficacy of having old men run African countries in a world in which world-leading economies such as France and New Zealand are managed by people in their 30s is questionable.
It is even more ill-advised because many reports claim that 41% of the
1.2 billion living in Africa are under the age of 15. Why trust people in their 70s and 80s to run our affairs?
Keïta and Mnangagwa could still silence their critics and prove that age is just a number. However, as has been evident in Liberia, Rwanda and Tanzania, Africa is beginning to move towards younger leaders – a preferable trend that is not likely to be reversed.
Kgomoeswana is the author of Africa is Open for Business; media commentator and public speaker on African business affairs, and a columnist for Destiny Man – Twitter Handle: @Victorafrica