Tyson's ECOWAS Occasional Journal - Politics in West Africa

You can read the whole thing at the Washington Post's Monkey Cage (someone at WaPo decided to anglicize the country's name). Here are a few excerpts: The challenges of the Ivorian 2020 elections have their roots in conflicts that began 30 years ago, when Ouattara and Bédié were rivals to succeed Félix Houphouët-Boigny , the country’s first president. ... The run-up to the 2020 presidential election appeared to promise further democratic progress, as continued economic prosperity laid the groundwork for stability. A new constitution adopted via a 2016 referendum removed the Ivoirité restriction and included a presidential two-term limit. In March, Ouattara made good on his promise not to seek a third term by designating Prime Minister Amadou Gon Coulibaly as the RHDP coalition’s presidential candidate. ...

After my post on president age , it struck me that in just 2 years, three of the 15 presidents ran for a 3rd or 4th term. That seems like a lot, since presidential term limits (usually 2) are one of the continent's democratic successes.  Presidential term limits are particularly important in "presidential regimes" in which the president is both head of state and head of government. In semi-presidential regimes , where the prime minister is head of government and answers to both the president and the legislature, presidential term limits might play a different role. The president is already constrained to a greater degree by the legislature, and prime ministers generally don't have term limits, so term limits on the presidency might not be as high-stakes.  So I thought it would be interesting to look at the status of term limits in presidential and semi-presidential ECOWAS countries separately. (There are currently no parliamentary regimes in the region.) Shugart and ...

Wow, I haven't posted on here about Togo since 2017 . That's not good! Since then, there have been 3 elections and a constitutional amendment. 

Whoever wins the US election in November and takes office in January will be the oldest president ever inaugurated. Trump was the oldest president to win a first term in 2016, and if he wins a second term he'll by 74 at his 2021 inauguration. If Biden wins, he'll be 78.  That's pretty old! But septuagenarian presidents are a common occurrence in Africa. When Robert Mugabe was forced from office at age 93 he was the oldest head of state in the world.  I posted the ages of all the presidents in ECOWAS countries two years ago. Five out of 15 were 70 years or older. Todd Moss and Stephanie Majerowicz of the Center for Global Development speculated that large gaps could lead to public anger, protests, and government turnover. We can test that hypothesis over the past two years. Below is the list from 2018; if the president hasn't changed I just posted the new age, and if he was recently re-elected. If the president did change, I post the new president with his new age, an...

According to The Africa Report , "The junta that took power in Mali proposed on 23 August to the ECOWAS delegation a three-year transition, led by a military officer." The junta agreed to release President Keita, and said that Prime Minister Boubou Cissé (who placed second in the presidential elections of 2003, 2013, and 2018) was being held in a secure resident in Bamako.  Keita had won re-election in 2018, but there has been ongoing discontent . As was the case in the 2012 coup, some of this dissatisfaction arises from the lack of security in the north, where there has been ongoing violence that sometimes spills over into Bamako, which caused Keita's popularity to plummet . A rally of thousands , organized by an anti-Keita coalition, M5-RFP , that has been organizing rallies against the president for months, celebrated the coup. A smaller pro-Keita rally was dispersed by the police.  As described by The Republic, "ECOWAS leaders have suspended Mali’s membership, ...

 Mali had its fourth successful  coup last week . Previous coups occurred in 1968, 1991, and 2012.  Last week's coup was against President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta (IBK). The country's first coup, in 1968, was also against a Keita - Modibo Keita (not to be confused with Modibo Keita , no relation , who was prime minister under IBK from 2015-2017). The 1968 coup was led by Moussa Traoré, who held onto power until the 1991 coup, after which the country held democratic elections won by Alpha Oumar Konaré, who was re-elected in 1997 and then succeeded by Amadou Toumani Touré, who was re-elected in 2007 and then overthrown in the 2012 coup.  So Mali had a nice stretch of democracy between coups number 2 and 3. The 2012 coup was initiated in part by the overthrow of Gaddafi in Libya, in part by NATO airstrikes by France, the US, and Britain. Malian Tuaregs who had been working for Gaddafi returned home and helped launch a Tuareg Rebellion that conquered much of t...

I need to rename this blog! I haven't been keeping up with the daily schedule, not even close. But it's summer - maybe I'll get back on schedule. Let's do a quick catch-up with Benin, which is my spiritual home in Africa. An article about this year's local elections is called "Benin's 2021 presidential election is already decided." That's weird -- why would local elections (for 1,815 "city council" members) have such an effect on a presidential election in the following year? There have been signs of Patrice Talon's aspirations for power for years. In 2012 he was arrested for his alleged role in a plot to poison then-president Boni Yayi, whose campaigns Talon had previously helped fund. Talon was also implicated in a coup attempt against the president in 2013, and then pardoned in 2014. In 2016 , Talon defeated Boni Yayi's selected successor for the presidency. Soon after he was elected, Talon attempted to push constit...