RE: Nigeria: Lessons from America's Presidential term limits
Assensoh, Akwasi B.
NIGERIA: LESSON FROM AMERICA’S PRESIDENTIAL TERM LIMITS
by
Anthony Akinola*
Political sycophants abound everywhere and would seem to be products of a nation’s stage of historical development. Even when it should be a personal decision whether or not one runs for office, there may have been sycophants in Nigeria vowing to divorce their wives or husbands if President Goodluck Jonathan did not re-contest the presidency in 2015.
Similarly, at the early stage of American political history, there were said to be sycophants who urged George Washington, America’s first president from 1789-1797, to transform himself into being the first King of America in the tradition of colonial Britain. Washington was said to have reminded his fellow Americans that it was because of the tyranny of the British monarch that they fought a war of Independence in 1776. Against the pressure of others, George Washington did not re-contest the presidency after he had served two terms in office.
Principally because of Washington’s voluntary withdrawal, it was always assumed that the American president was conventionally limited to two terms in office. Their Constitution of 1787 did not state how long one could be President of the United States.
However, what seemed to have been the convention in American politics changed in 1940 when Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) won a third election to the American presidency. He was a highly successful president who had steered his nation through the Great Depression of the 1930s. He, in fact, was elected in 1944 for a fourth term which he did not complete. He died in 1945.
For those who may be interested in American history and politics, FDR was a Democrat whose economic policies persuaded Black Americans (African Americans) to shift en masse from Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party of Emancipation to the Democratic Party, in what is until today the greatest political re-alignment in American history. It was Lincoln’s Republican Party that freed “Blacks” from slavery.
Be that as it may, Republicans in Congress sought passage of an amendment that would limit the terms of future presidents. FDR was the first and only American president to serve more than two terms in office. The term limits are, however, made clear in the following words:
“Passed by Congress in 1947, and ratified by the states on February 27 1951, the Twenty-Second Amendment limits an elected president to two terms in office, a total of eight years. However, it is possible for an individual to serve up to ten years as president. The amendment specifies that if a vice president or other successor takes over from a president – who, for whatever reason, cannot fulfill the term – and serves two years or less of the former president’s term, the new president may serve for two full four-year terms. If more than two years remain of the term when the successor assumes office, the new President may serve only one additional term.”
Lyndon Johnson, as highlighted in a previous article, was qualified to seek a second four-year term in 1968. However, Gerald Ford who was president from 1974 to 1977, having succeeded the impeached Richard Nixon, would only have qualified to contest the 1976 election which he did contest and lost to Jimmy Carter. Ford served more than two years of the “unexpired” term of Nixon.
What relevance has the Twenty-Second Amendment to our situation in Nigeria? One has tried to explain this for the simple reason that it could serve as a guide for the eligibility of President Goodluck Jonathan, whose route to the presidency began via succession rather than election, to contest the Nigerian 2015 election.
The American Twenty-Second Amendment tells us that it does matter that one has ascended the presidency, even when he or she was not the one elected into that position. In the eyes of that Amendment, less than two years of the term of another may not be long enough to constitute one term in the entitlement of a succeeding president. In which case, Goodluck Jonathan’s re-election in 2015 would not have been the constitutional issue it currently is, had we borrowed from the wisdom of America’s Twenty-Second Amendment. Jonathan had served less than two years of the unexpired term of his deceased predecessor in office.
However, in spite of the pollution of the democratic space by the noises of those begging Goodluck Jonathan to contest the 2015 presidential election, the man himself has said only the national interest would determine whether or not he would be doing so. What constitutes the national interest could be subjective here.
Suffice to say that it is in our national interest that the constitutional issue surrounding the eligibility of Goodluck Jonathan be resolved before the presidential election of February 2015. This is extremely important if we were to avoid a situation, whereby his eligibility could be violently challenged after he might have won the election. The current controversy in Ekiti State, following the election of the once-impeached Ayodele Fayose as Governor, comes to mind here.
Of course, it is also in the national interest that political leaders educate their supporters that it is in the nature of democratic elections that the will of the majority must prevail. There would be no need for the threat to burn down the nation if a candidate of a particular ethnic sympathy did not win in an election that was free and fair.
*Anthony Akinola, an author of several acclaimed books, is a writer, who is based at Oxford (UK).
Cornelius Hamelberg
(This is an aside - please let me get this matter off my mind: as I made clear here – I’m neutral –the extent that I would not like to absolve e.g. the Biafran leadership of all responsibility and all blame for the plight of the Biafra people when the leadership could have sued for peace and surrendered at a much earlier date. Someone has suggested that he probably did not and could not do that without any guarantees for the safety of Igbos outside of the Biafra enclave, scattered throughout the federation. That suggestion is best answered by another question: What was the actual situation after General Ojukwu surrendered to the Federal Government and fled to the Ivory Coast? I zapped through Abidjan to Ghana by road a couple of times before 1970, it was a peaceful friendly country during the Houphouet-Boigny days )
Dr. Goodluck Jonathan does not strike me as an African president who has been following any Machiavellian principles. He is a pragmatist. At worst you can accuse him of enlightened self-interest, as someone who of course would not and should not surround himself with enemies, infil-traitors or those who would do him harm. Would you? In my opinion, better it is to have sycophants, bootlickers and well-wishers in you camp than to have conspirators, traitors and back-stabbers. (In the monthly report about my Google account I notice that my e-mail has been accessed a few times from Nigeria, probably some 419 artists looking for some treasure, although I have none, not a Naira, not even a po-em or one created word or bank information in any of my computers.)
Re – “Suffice to say that it is in our national interest that the constitutional issue surrounding the eligibility of Goodluck Jonathan be resolved before the presidential election of February 2015. This is extremely important if we were to avoid a situation, whereby his eligibility could be violently challenged after he might have won the election”
Thanks for this foresight – all it’s in the national interest that peace and calm reign, when the dust finally settles down after the elections, not just the dust to dust and ashes to ashes. Retrospectively, hindsight is usually full of regret or remorse, finding yourself facing the yawning jaw of Jahanam, the “had I or had we only known” about e.g. putting a mafia boss in charge of the national treasury or leaving the cat with that big saucer of milk, of course 100 billion will go missing and when come time for accounting (accountability), just as Adam blamed Eve (“ it’s the woman you gave me Lord !”, and Eve blamed the slimy serpent so x (the serpent) with impunity will always blame y or say it’s only 50 billion missing, and since you can’t nail the right devil on the cross for such iniquity , all of them go scot-free in the name of collective responsibility.
It’s happened so many times and is still happening
After winning the elections, he could be violently challenged? Could? You don’t have to be a soothsayer to know that the ides of March will surly come and in time be gone and that if Dr. Goodluck Jonathan wins, not only will he be violently challenged, but all hell will break loose in certain parts of the country and spark off Boko Haram currently on the rampage on to an even more terrifying round of carnage. This sordid affair known as post-election violence is inevitably on its way and dragging whoever is deemed to be responsible won’t bring the dead back to life, not even in Kenya...
We also know (wisdom) that prevention is better than cure.
So the question is, what are we (concerned Pan-Africanists) doing about it?
Since the holiness of the Nigerian constitution by which the Naija nation is governed is at stake it has to be interpreted by a competent authority to ascertain Dr. Goodluck Jonathan’s eligibility (or ineligibility) for contesting the next presidential elections and this should be settled by whatever constitutional court authority, before the elections and not pose a retroactive problem, after the elections..
No use crying over spilt milk later, so, at this stage, has anyone challenged the constitutional legality of Dr Goodluck Jonathan’s candidacy?
Assensoh, Akwasi B.
Ivor Wilks (1928-2014)
With deep regret, the Program of African Studies announces the death of Emeritus Professor Ivor Wilks at his home in Wales on October 7, 2014. He was 86 and had long been in poor health.
Emeritus Professor Ivor Wilks first joined the Department of History at Northwestern University in the fall of 1967, but resigned a year later to take up a position in Church College, Cambridge. Within a short time, he realized that Northwestern offered a better opportunity for serious research in African history and decided to accept an offer to return in January 1971 and remained until his retirement in 1993. During that time he was adviser to twenty-eight students who completed PhDs in African history and served on the dissertation committees of another thirty-five in non-African fields. In 1984, Wilks was appointed Melville J. Herskovits Professor of African Studies.
Professor Wilks belonged to the generation of pathbreaking Africanist scholars on the continent and abroad who reoriented the focus of research to African issues and concerns. His interest in Ghanaian history developed during the period 1953 to 1966 when he served in a number of capacities in the nascent University College of the Gold Coast (later the University of Ghana). From 1961 to 1966, he was Research Professor in African History at the University of Ghana. His main interests were Akan history, especially Asante, and West African Islam. His influential publication, Asante in the Nineteenth Century: The Structure and Evolution of a Political Order (1975), was based on wide-ranging oral history fieldwork. It was awarded the African Studies Association Herskovits Award in 1976. Other major works were Chronicles from Gonja: A Tradition of West African Muslim Historiography (1986), coauthored with Nehemia Levtzion and Bruce Haight and Wa and the Wala: Islam and Polity in Northwestern Ghana (1989). Many of his articles were republished in a collection entitled Forests of Gold: Essays on the Akan and the Kingdom of Asante (1993).
After “retirement”, Wilks continued writing and research. Among his several projects were a study of colonial Asante, an Asante biographical dictionary, and a life of Abu Bakr al-Siddiq of Timbuktu. In 1995, he gave the Aggrey-Fraser-Guggisberg Memorial Lectures at the University of Ghana, a week-long series that was published as Ghana Past and Present: One Nation, Many Histories. His academic interests ranged beyond Africa to national resistance in Wales and Palestine. In the 1980s he published a study of Welsh resistance, South Wales and the Rising of 1839: Class Struggle as Armed Struggle (1984), which received the Welsh Arts Council Prize for Non-Fiction in 1985. More recently, he published Palestine: A Once and Past Love: Palestine 1947, Israel 1948: A Memoir, an account of his experience as a young officer in the British colonial army. It can be accessed at:
http://www.northwestern.edu/african-studies/publications/WILKS%20PAPER-8-3-11.pdf.
He is survived by his wife Nancy Lawler, four children, and his grandchildren.
Copyright © *2014* *Northwestern University*, All rights reserved.
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