Burundi and term limits

By Gwynne Dyer
May 21, 2015

Part of the army rebelled in Burundi last week, not to overthrow the constitution but to save it. The revolt failed after two days of shooting in the capital, Bujumbura, and the generals who led it surrendered. "I hope they won't kill us,"said the coup leader, Major-General Godefroid Niyombare. But like much else in Burundi, that remains up in the air.

Burundi, a small, densely populated country (10 million people) in the centre of Africa, has had a relatively good ten years. After a 12-year civil war that killed 300,000 people, a deal was struck at Arusha in 2005 that made the leader of the Hutu rebel group, Pierre Nkurunziza, the president, but divided the army equally between Hutus and Tutsis

It was a messy compromise, since Hutus are 80 per cent of the population and Tutsis only 15 per cent. However, it avoided the much worse carnage in neighbouring Rwanda, a country with the same ethnic mix where 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered in three months in 1994, so it was worth it.

Nkurunziza was appointed president of Burundi for five years (there was no time for an election at the end of a civil war), but he ran successfully for a second term in the 2010 election. The trouble started when he announced early this year that he intended to run for a third term as president in the election due this June. The new (2005) constitution says that presidents may only serve for two terms.

The two-term limit became standard in the new democracies that spread across Africa in the 1990s, and by ten years ago 34 African countries had put it into their constitutions. It is an attempt to end the "Big Man" phenomenon in African politics and make peaceful political change possible, but it does not always work.

In the last quarter-century, 18 African presidents have reached the two-term limit. Only eight of them stepped down without first trying to amend the constitution and abolish or change the term limit. As President Mathieu Kerekou of Benin remarked ruefully: "If you don't leave power, power will leave you." But ten other presidents did try to amend the constitution in order to stay past two terms, and seven of them succeeded.

So the glass is at best half-full, although long-serving President Blaise Compaore of Burkina Faso was chased from power by popular protests last year when he tried to amend the constitution to give himself another term. But here comes Pierre Nkurunziza, who cannot bring himself to stop being president after only two terms.

Burundi is exactly the wrong place to do this sort of thing. The country's relative peace and modest prosperity depend on everybody being confident that the inter-ethnic killing is really over. That in turn depends on everybody observing the terms of the power-sharing deal between Hutus and Tutsis worked out at Arusha ten years ago.

Nkurunziza was already showing signs of dissatisfaction with the deal. Last year, he tried and failed to change the part of the constitution that guarantees positions for the minority Tutsi group in all government institutions. His party's youth wing, the Imbonerakure, has recently been given weapons, and its resemblance to the Interahamwe militia that did much of the killing in Rwanda makes many people uneasy.

The first step in his plan for holding onto power was to get the Constitutional Court to decide that he had not really served two terms, because for the first term he was appointed by parliament, not elected by the people. The Constitutional Court agreed-although one of its judges then fled the country and said that they had all been bullied and threatened into giving that judgment.

Last month the chair of the African Union Commission, Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, questioned the decision by the Burundi court, saying the Arusha peace accord clearly stated a president should not seek a third term. More recently the African Union called for the postponement of the Burundi election, currently scheduled for June.

The time to put pressure on Nkurunziza to back off and obey the law is now; later may be too late. It should come above all from African countries and institutions, but it certainly wouldn't hurt if the major providers of aid to Burundi also made their views known loudly and clearly.

Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.