The former United Nations (UN) secretary-general, Kofi
Annan, has advised African leaders to ensure they leave when their mandated
time is up, so as to avoid excluding opposing voices if elections are to cease
contributing to conflicts on the continent, reports ITRealms.
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.”
The forum, now in its fifth year, is an inspiration of the
late Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi and is organised by the Institute
for Peace and Security Studies (IPSS) of Addis Ababa University.
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