Former UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan has urged African leaders to leave when their mandated time is up and to avoid excluding opposing voices if elections are to stop contributing to conflicts on the continent.
The renowned
international diplomat said that while unconstitutional changes to government
on the continent had reduced, exclusionary politics threatened to reverse the
gains made.
“I think Africa has
done well, by and large the coups have more or less ended, generals are
remaining in their barracks, but we are creating situations which may bring
them back,” the Nobel laureate said in an interview at the 5th Tana High-Level
Forum on Security in Africa.
“If a leader doesn’t
want to leave office, if a leader stays on for too long, and elections are seen
as being gamed to suit a leader and he stays term after term after term, the
tendency may be the only way to get him out is through a coup or people taking
to the streets.
“Neither approach can
be seen as an alternative to democracy, to elections or to parliamentary rule.
Constitutions and the rules of the game have to be respected.”
Annan, the keynote
speaker at the forum this year, said winner-take-all approaches to elections on
the continent had the effect of leaving out citizens for holding an opposing
view, raising tensions around elections.
Annan, who chairs the
Africa Progress Panel and the Nelson Mandela-founded The Elders grouping, said
he had been the first to tell the African Union not to accept coup leaders
among their midst [during an OAU heads of state summit in Lusaka in 2001].
Annan also said that
solutions to the problems the continent has must come from within. However, the
continent must build up its ability to do so, including in financing its
institutions.
“We cannot always pass
a hat around and insist we want to be sovereign, we want to be independent. We
should lead and get others to support us—that support will be much more
forthcoming when they see how serious and committed we are.”
The African Union has
struggled to get members to pay their dues to allow it run its operations and
programmes efficiently, a recurrent theme addressed by leaders at the forum in
the Ethiopian city of Bahir Dar.
Annan said such
budgetary concerns were constraining the work of the continent in strengthening
stability and required creative ways of resourcing.
“I was happy to hear
them [African leaders] say ‘we must be prepared to pay for what we want; we
must be prepared to put out our own money on the table and fund issues that are
of great importance to us.’”
Ethiopian Prime
Minister Hailemariam Desalegn, Togo’s Faure Gnassingbe, Somalia’s Hassan Sheikh
Mohamoud and Sudan’s Omar al Bashir were among the heads of state and
government present.
Former leaders, Thabo
Mbeki of South Africa, Festus Mogae of Botswana, Joaquim Chissano of
Mozambique, Pierre Buyoya of Burundi and Joyce Banda of Malawi were also in
attendance.
“I think it is a very
good idea that ex-leaders come together with current leaders to share
experience and try to talk very frankly about the challenges facing the
continent and also about our relations with the international community,”
Annan, who was attending the annual forum for the first time, said.
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