Africa’s Leaders for Life

The continent’s aspiring dictators are attacking term limits with a vengeance, finding new ways to avoid handing over power. But citizens are overwhelmingly against it — and can help keep their leaders in check.

By Alexander Noyes and John Reece

October 2024

Term limits are under attack in Africa. Aspiring dictators don’t like constitutional restrictions on how long they can stay in power, for obvious reasons. So they are coming up with new and increasingly sophisticated ways to avoid executive term limits. This is especially the case in Africa, as we have seen in Zimbabwe and Côte d’Ivoire, where the ruling parties are currently plotting to extend their leaders’ terms, and in Togo, where the ruling dynasty cleverly sidestepped term limits earlier this year by changing the entire political system and eliminating popular presidential elections. To stop this undemocratic trend, regional and international democracy supporters must use a better mix of carrots and sticks to promote and uphold term limits in Africa and beyond.

Scholars have shown that term limits can spur democratization in Africa, helping to create opportunities for longtime leaders and ruling parties to be voted out of power. So it makes sense that authoritarian-leaning leaders are working to evade or abolish them. Since 2002, fourteen countries across the continent have either outright eliminated or extended presidential term limits.

This pattern of evasion has spiked in the past decade, and now 30 out of 54 African countries operate without such a constraint, even as term limits remain extremely popular among ordinary citizens. According to Afrobarometer surveys, more than three-quarters of Africans across 34 countries support these constitutional restrictions on their leaders. The recent efforts in Zimbabwe, Côte d’Ivoire, and Togo illustrate this worrying trend of term-limit evasion and how autocratic parties and leaders are inventing new ways to subvert constitutional restrictions.

Term limits are currently in the crosshairs in both Zimbabwe and Côte d’Ivoire. Standing presidents in these two countries have said they will step down at the end of their legal terms. But their parties are — all too conveniently — singing another tune: They are actively plotting to evade term limits. Both countries have long histories of struggle over this issue. In Zimbabwe, a new constitution passed in 2013 that included a two-term limit. But due to the refusal of long-ruling president Robert Mugabe (1980–2017) to agree to retroactive limits, implementation of this provision was kicked down the road and delayed by a decade. Mugabe never got a chance to test the two-term limit as he was removed via military coup in 2017. After current president Emerson Mnangagwa took the throne from Mugabe following the coup, the former vice-president and erstwhile Mugabe ally won dubious elections in 2018 and 2023, meaning that he should be ineligible to run again in 2028.

In Côte d’Ivoire, President Alassane Ouattara, in power since 2011, won a contested third term in 2020. More than 80 people died in election-related violence protesting Ouattara’s third term, which opposition parties declared illegal. In the run-up to the election, Ouattara said he would not run, but when his hand-picked successor candidate died, he changed his mind and stood again. In 2016, the country passed a new constitution that included term limits, but Ouattara, like Mugabe, wriggled out of these restrictions by arguing that the new supreme law reset his two-term limit.

A similar story recently played out in Togo, providing a troubling new template for future power grabs. The country’s longtime leader Faure Gnassingbé — whose family has ruled since 1967 — is the latest president to successfully sidestep term limits, which were first scrapped in 2002, under the current president’s father, Gnassingbé Eyadéma (1967–2005). For more than a decade, opposition parties fought long and hard to restore the restriction. The government eventually capitulated to widespread demonstrations that ramped up in 2017, reinstating term limits in 2019. Yet that hard-won progress was quickly undone this year.

In May 2024, Gnassingbé signed into law a new constitution that once again eliminated presidential term limits, but in a novel way. The 2024 Constitution created an entirely new executive position, the powerful President of the Council of Ministers, which has sweeping say over the affairs of government. The office does have a six-year term, but it is renewable so long as the ruling party maintains a majority in parliament.

Considering the ruling party has never lost parliamentary polls, which are heavily skewed in its favor, Gnassingbé looks set to rule for life. Indeed, in the most recent parliamentary elections held earlier this year, the party won 108 out of 113 seats.

The ongoing plots in Zimbabwe and Côte d’Ivoire, and the successful skirting of term limits in Togo, go directly against the will of the people. A staggering 87 percent of Togolese, 80 percent of Zimbabweans, and 76 percent of Ivoirians favor presidential term limits, making efforts to evade them all the more brazen.

Compared to the brutish tactics of good old-fashioned military coups, these new ways to circumvent term limits are more subtle. But their evasion is by no means any less detrimental to democratic norms and institutions. When ruling regimes change their constitutions to eliminate term limits so that they can hold onto power indefinitely, those moves should be viewed as coups in their own right, however soft or clever such efforts may appear at first blush. Both scholars and opposition parties refer to these events as “constitutional coups,” but the response from international and regional bodies has been much more muted compared to how they respond to traditional coups.

To help reverse this trend of leaders’ maneuvering to extend their rule, regional and international organizations, as well as donor countries, need to ramp up efforts to both support and protect executive term limits in young and fragile democracies. To help deter would-be autocrats, democratic allies also need to punish term-limit evaders more effectively, no matter how artful their efforts may be.

To do so, supporters of democracy should treat the evasion or removal of term limits as the soft coups that they are. When leaders succeed in getting rid of term limits, democratic nations and regional bodies would be wise to speak out strongly and apply the requisite sanctions and restrictions on outside assistance that are called for by regional and international anti-coup norms.

But sticks won’t be enough, especially as such norms themselves are eroding. Carrots will also be necessary to cultivate a lasting norm against term-limit evasion. To incentivize leaders to respect or add constitutional term limits, international partners should better link term limits to increased cooperation, assistance, and preferential trade agreements. They can also increase support to local civil society actors focused on democracy and governance to help empower citizens and keep leaders accountable. Such a carrots-and-sticks approach will certainly be no panacea but would be an important step in coming to terms with term-limit evasion.

Alexander Noyes is a fellow in the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology at the Brookings Institution. John Reece is a former intern at Brookings.

Copyright © 2024 National Endowment for Democracy

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