ECOWAS Countries Presidential Election Calendar

ECOWAS countries have a lot of presidential elections coming up in the next year or so! I was about to write posts about a few of them but first let's look at the big picture. 

• Benin: February 2016. Yayi Boni is in his second term and will not be running again. (Benin's constitution has a two-term limit but every time a president finishes his second term there is speculation he will try to have the constitution amended.) One candidate mentioned recently in the news is Fernand Amoussou.
• Burkina Faso: October 2015. After serving as president for 27 years, Blaise Compaore stepped down in October last year in response to his attempt to have the constitution amended to allow for a third consecutive term. Compaore was elected to two seven-year terms, in 1991 and 1998, under the 1991 constitution, and then when the constitution was amended to include the two-term limit, Compaore argued that the two-term limit didn't apply to his earlier terms, so he ran for two 5-year terms in 2005 and 2010.  
• Cape Verde: August 2016. 
• Cote d'Ivoire: October 2015. 
• Gambia: November 2016. 
• Ghana: December 2016. President John Dramani Mahama of the NDC party has been president since 2009, when President John Atta Mills passes away. Mahama was re-elected in 2012 for his first full term, so he can run again for a second term. The other major party in Ghana is the NPP, who will be represented by Nana Akufo-Addo. (This is almost the exact same time as the US Presidential election. Coincidence? Joseph Asunka says not - he argues that African governments who didn't want too much attention on their behavior at election time scheduled them to coincide with major events such as the US presidential election, when observers were likely to be distracted. As an Anglophone country, Ghana is more closely watched by American than are Francophone countries.) 
• Guinea: October 2015. 
• Guinea Bissau: 2019. In 2014, President Jose Mario Vaz was elected for a 5-year term, so the next presidential election should be in 2019. 
• Liberia: 2017. In 2011, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was elected for a 6-year term, so the next presidential election should be in 2017. 
• Mali: 2018? Mali usually has presidential elections every 5 years since the first multiparty election in 1992 under the 1992 constitution, but the 2012 election didn't happen on schedule because of the military coup that year. So President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita was elected in 2013. I assume that means the next election will be in 2018, when he finishes a five-year term. 
• Niger: January 2016. In 2011, Mahamadou Issoufou was elected for a five year term, so the next presidential election should be in January 2016, along with the Parliamentary election. 
• Nigeria: 2019. In March 2015, Muhammadu Buhari was elected for a four-year term, so the next presidential election should be in 2019. 
• Senegal: 2017? In 2012, Abdoulaye Wade ran for a third term, arguing that his first term, which started in 2000, didn't count as a first term for the two-term limit in the 2001 Constitution. Current President Macky Sall ended up winning that election, and will be holding a referendum next year to shorten the presidential term from seven to five years. If that goes through (scheduled for May 2016), then the next presidential election will be in 2017. 
• Sierra Leone: July 2017. 
• Togo: 2020. President Faure Gnassingbe was elected for a third five-year term in April 2015, (the 1992 Constitution's two-term limit was amended away in 2002 for his father), so the next presidential election should be in 2020. 

I'll fill in more details on some of those in the next few days...