Former President Mzee Jomo Kenyatta. If in 1963 Kenyatta was among the very few outliers in terms of age in Africa, today he wouldn’t be. If African “democracies” like Ghana and Nigeria teach us anything, it is that electoral politics favours older presidents.
Summary
· It seems that African voters are involved in very complex political arbitrage in electing older candidates in the majority of countries.
Today is Madaraka Day, marking the
June 1, 1963 rite of passage when Kenya gained internal self-government from
the British colonial state.
It went on to get full independence
(at least on paper) on December 12, 1963. Jomo Kenyatta, then 66 (going by 1897
as his birth year), became the first Prime Minister and later President. At
that age, Kenyatta was one of the oldest of the independence generation African
leaders.
Among the leaders of the three
countries that went on to form the first East African Community, Uganda’s Dr
Milton Obote was 38 in 1963 and Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere 41. Kenyatta was the
elder one by decades. Both Uganda and Tanzania had attained independence before
Kenya.
By later African standards, Kenyatta
didn’t last long in power as a strong founding father. He passed on at 81 on
August 22, 1978, after 15 years as the Big Man.
Kenyatta looks and is described as
old in the photographs and in descriptions. Perhaps it was the times. Wealth
advances in medicine, grooming and hair dye hadn’t spread the way they have
today. But he was younger than the oldest African president today—Cameroon’s
Paul Biya, who is 89 and has been president for 41 years now.
On Monday, Bola Ahmed Tinubu was
sworn in as Nigeria’s president following elections in February. Tinubu is
71—five years older than Kenyatta was when he became Prime Minister in 1963. Tinubu
is the youngest of the 10 oldest serving African presidents, whose average age
is 80.
However, at his swearing-in, Tinubu
looked in bad shape. He struggled to walk, had to have a pen pressed in his
hand and was helped to sign swearing-in paperwork.
If in 1963 Kenyatta was among the
very few outliers in terms of age in Africa, today he wouldn’t be. If African
“democracies” like Ghana and Nigeria teach us anything, it is that electoral
politics favours older presidents.
There will be a lot of flowery talk
about a young Africa, how it’s time for the continent’s youth to rise and
shine, but when the ballot is cast, the victor will not be a bright-eyed
38-year-old politician with most of their life ahead of them.
Most young leaders in Africa have
come to power initially by going to the bush to fight a guerrilla war or
seizing government in a military coup—as leaders like Lt-Col Mamady Doumbouya
in Guinea and Captain Ibrahim Traore in Burkina Faso have done in recent times.
Accumulate
money
Why does democratic fortune favour
older African politicians? The obvious first reason is money. If you have been
around for long, you will also have had a greater opportunity to establish the
networks and accumulate the money necessary to secure victory in our graft-ridden
elections.
You are also likely to be more known
at the grassroots; a 65-year-old presidential candidate will have served as a
government district officer (District Commissioner, Health officer,
agricultural officer, Education officer, et cetera) in half of the country
(possibly leaving behind children with various concubines in all those places).
He will have done favours, bought
beers and helped local potentates to steal land from their folks in all those
areas. A newbie, 15 years out of college, just cannot compete against
that—except on Facebook and Instagram.
However, it also seems that African
voters are involved in very complex political arbitrage in electing older
candidates in the majority of countries. The case of both Tinubu and his
predecessor, Gen Muhammadu Buhari, points us to the calculations that might be
going on.
Too many African leaders tend to
cling to power for too long, and many have cajoled and bulldozed to change
constitutions to remove term- and age limits so that they can rule for life—as
Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni, in office for 37 years so far, has done.
Electing a 71-year-old Tinubu
ensures that, even with the best of health and effort, if he were to change the
constitution and bribe his way through, he wouldn’t rule for more than 20
years.
An older shaky-handed big man who
dozes off half the time is also likely to have a weak grip and an incompetent
government, with various factions contending for supremacy.
A dictatorship that creates wiggle
room and fluid spaces where a degree of freedom exists and can be exploited by
progressive forces.
By contrast, if you have a
30-year-old who hits the gym, thus in good health and doesn’t have to spend a
quarter of the year in London hospitals, as Buhari did in Nigeria, you could be
in trouble. You end with an autocrat like Equatorial Guinea’s President Teodoro
Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, who has been in power for 44 years.
Ironically, once a big man manages
to stay in power for 30 years, things get better for him. The voters are
likelier to keep him in office, expecting he will die off soon than elect a
baby-faced successor.
As the young people say, fear the
African voter.
Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist,
writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. @cobbo3
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