Longer terms for elected leaders won't translate to better services

Senate during impeachment trial against Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua. [Elvis Ogina, Standard]

Sometime early this year, I wrote in this publication that Parliament had failed the country and deserved censure. You only need to consider our MPs' staple choice of top-priority issues both in and outside Parliament to agree. When they are not working towards own salary increment—a rare instance when the House evinces “unity of purpose”—they are busy introducing and passing Bills and motions whose interest they themselves cannot plausibly say and whose text and contents they seldom read.

Consider Pokot South MP David Pkosing's proposal—a few months ago—that there ought to be a review of the country's laws with a view to extending the constitutionally stipulated presidential term limit. It's ludicrous. And one wonders how and why Mr Pkosing imagines it would be the panacea for Kenya's myriad developmental deficiencies.

Unfortunately, he is not alone in his delusional reverie. His suggestion has a dangerous precedent in a similar proposal—late last year—by Nandi Senator Samson Cherargei. At the time, the latter's proposal to extend the constitutionally prescribed presidential term limits from five to seven years elicited murmurings of opposition and opprobrium among the vast majority of Kenyans, and rightly so. Presidential term limits—introduced following the successful clamour for multiparty democracy in the early 1990s—have been, and are, a central tenet of our country's political governance. The five-year presidential term is stipulated by Article 136(2) of the Constitution and is protected by the legal strictures of Article 142 of the same.

Around Africa, there are countries that either have or have had seven-year presidential terms such as Rwanda and Senegal. There's hardly cogency for this, though. And the exponents of extended presidential terms are mostly tyrants and sycophants possessed of the expansionist “strongman mentality.” In Rwanda, though, it may have been aimed at enabling the country's most important political leader to pack an impressive punch around national concord, particularly following the tragic 1994 genocide that claimed an estimated 800,000 lives over a three-month period, and, therefore, arguably nobler.

Contrary to Pkosing and Cherargei's slant, however, the supposed “insufficiency” of our five-year presidential terms is palaver with no basis in evidential grounding. History shows the maximum two five-year presidential terms to be enough for any legacy-oriented leader to attain anything within the developmental repertoire of his/her office. Former president Mwai Kibaki is the more easily recognisable referential paradigm of this truism. There are no developmental goals—however lofty and grand—that aren't within reach during a 10-year presidential stint.

Longer-term ones such as the socio-economic integration of ethnic minorities and the historically marginalised—or even the ultimate forging of any land's disparate demographic enclaves into one, compact nation—however, often outlast presidential stints. In Colombia, for instance, the ongoing reintegration process aimed at rehabilitating former members of the Farc rebel movement that fought a 52-year war against the State between 1964 and 2016 is the result of four-year talks that concluded in Havana, Cuba, in 2016, begun by then-president Juan Manuel Santos and then-rebel leader Rodrigo Londono.

Iván Duque Márquez, who succeeded Santos as president in 2018, was antagonistic to the idea of amnesty as quid pro quo for rebels forswearing violence, rendering the above-mentioned process fitful during his reign that ended in 2022. Gustavo Petro, the country's president since August of the same year, himself a former member of the M19 armed guerrilla movement, is, however, reputedly committed to “total peace.”

In the US, at the time of the Founding Fathers' declamation of the 1776 Declaration of Independence, only 13 states, namely New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maryland, Virginia, New York, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Delaware, North Carolina, South Carolina and New Jersey, had federated into the union. The other states were admitted to the union at different points in the country's history, and under different presidents. Such is the multi-frontal nature of nation-building—often crafted and forged over the long haul. It's never wholly telescoped into any one leader's time at the helm.

Nelson Mandela served as president of post-Apartheid-era South Africa for only one five-year term between 1994 and 1999. He emerged from a 28-year incarceration stint in 1990 to win the historic 1994 all-race elections, only to relinquish power after just one term in office, “for his role was done.” And it was someone else's turn to take the helmsmanship of the next leg of the nation's political journey. For nations, in their nature, are almost eternally works in progress.

Pkosing, Cherargei and all those lately proposing the extension of all elected leaders’ terms from five to seven years should, therefore, not worry about—or even play up—the “insufficiency” of our constitutionally prescribed five-year terms. Longer presidential stints don't necessarily presuppose greater “while-in-office” success.

In the West African nation of The Gambia, between 1996 and 2017, there reigned an autarch called Yahya Jammeh. Youthful and boisterous, he made no secret of the fact that he wanted to be in power for a billion years! What was even funnier about his otherwise pious wish was the fact that he attributed its “predestination” to God. Some of us wondered what he needed all of a billion years for—the feat of which he couldn't pull off in 20.