Paul Biya, president of Cameroon for 43 (long) years, is 92 years old. As I write this column, mid-week, he is about to be declared the winner in the latest cycle of presidential elections. Barring dramatic street action or the random course of nature drawing the curtains on him, he will have another seven years, taking him to 50 years in power at close to 100 years of age! Biya’s longevity in power is only bettered by Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang, ruler since 1979. His son is the heir apparent.
There is no guarantee that if Biya left power, either through the ballot or the streets, Cameron will be better governed, or that its citizens will have better lives. In fact, quite the opposite is likely. If he leaves in a carefully choreographed manner, as happened in Angola and Zimbabwe in 2017, where presidents in both countries had ruled for nearly 40 years, there is a high possibility of continuity rather than radical change – his system of rule will endure without him. This has been the story of post-independence Africa. Changes of leaders and governments, but scarcely disruption in the existing structures. No revolutionary overthrow of existing political systems and social structures.
Public anger is often directed at the ruler, not the system. Rapturous celebrations ensue every time a president is forced out of power either by street protests or military putsch, or a combination of popular uprising and military intervention, as happened most recently in Madagascar last week. There is little focus, however, on whether replacing an aloof, corrupt, and inefficient incumbent president with an army colonel who seizes power in the shadows of popular uprising represents real change; often, it doesn’t.
In Uganda, after 40 years of one-man rule, there is revulsion and charged clamour for change. We have a decayed and dysfunctional political system, pervasive inefficiency, blatant official corruption, impunity in the exercise of State power, and personal profiteering at the expense of the public good. A distorted, in fact, broken regime of politics.
Yet, popular anger is directed at the potentate – the ruler at the top. It is easy to see why Mr Museveni is the singular target of blame and public indignation: he is an imperial president. His hand is in every corner that matters. He exercises limitless power in every consequential aspect and agency of government. Were he to leave power, even if his replacement is evidently worse or at best a continuation of the same, wild street celebrations will erupt despite his departure being only of the man at the top and not an overhaul of his system of rule.
As some perceptive analysts, better brains than your columnist, have aptly noted, Museveni will go, no question, but Musevenism and Pax-Musevenica will likely endure unless there is a deliberate movement to dismantle the system of rule he entrenched and presided over. To be sure, he inherited at least parts of this system when he took power in 1986, but perpetuated all manner of ills despite the lofty promise of a fundamental change. It is easy to make grand promises in the moment of triumphalism and exhilaration, but power has a way of corrupting and entrapping those wielding it. Mr Museveni fought a war on a platform of dismantling the colonial state inherited at independence. He pledged to bring about a totally new political order. Remarkably, though, he has done an excellent job reproducing that very colonial state.
Top leadership in a country matters a great deal, especially in ours lacking well-established and functional public institutions. But leadership at the top is not all. Political leaders overrate their abilities to change society; they over-promise and assign to themselves tasks beyond their pay grade. The citizens, on their part, exaggerate how much a government of political elites and bureaucrats can do to improve overall socioeconomic conditions and, especially, achieve structural transformation.
The truth is that a country’s fate, present and future, the wellbeing of citizens, and collective prosperity of a nation, are outcomes of society in its entirety, including leadership at different levels, local and national, institutional and individual, corporate and community. There are examples around the world of visionary leaders who engineered socioeconomic transformation, set the pillars of long-term stability, and oversaw a march from poverty to prosperity of their people, but they did so within specific sociocultural contexts. Individual innovation and ingenuity, collective productivity and quality of national output, the ethos and attitudes that define a people and feed into and fuel the ambition to climb out of poverty or demand better government, are the sorts of ingredients an individual leader has very little control over.
Africans rightly desire leadership change in vain hope of a socioeconomic turnaround. Instead of the promised prosperity, however, disillusionment and disappointment often follow. Changing leaders can be the easier feat; a tougher task is that of structural change and propelling prosperity.