{UAH} Pojim/WBK: EDITORIAL: Term limits are there for a good reason - Editorial
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EDITORIAL: Term limits are there for a good reason
Just under 15 years ago, Rwandan President Paul Kagame and his ruling Rwanda Patriotic Front faced a momentous decision.
As the country drafted a new constitution, it became increasingly clear that a majority of Rwandans, informed by an inglorious past, did not want a return to a multiparty political system.
The popular view back then was that the parties had been responsible for the division that culminated in the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi and should, therefore, be discarded.
In a bold and foresighted departure from popular sentiment, however, President Kagame and his Cabinet decided that the population's view, though understandable, was not for the best of the country. The government decided to go out and persuade the public to accept multiparty democracy and so it came to pass.
In a sense, President Kagame faces a similar call of duty today. Even though it is a distant two years to the end of his two-term tenure as president in mid-2017, calls to amend the Constitution to remove term limits are gaining momentum every passing day. Left to the masses, there is no doubt that a constitutional amendment to that effect would receive a resounding endorsement.
The major factor driving the call for scrapping term limits is President Kagame's record. But it would be a grave mistake to turn the third-term debate into an endorsement or indictment of Kagame's record.
The RPF and President Kagame have already entered the annals of history for their feat of healing, rebuilding and giving a sense of hope and faith in the future to a previously fractured and hopeless country.
Today, Rwanda is not only a nation with a sense of purpose but key social indicators shame its bigger siblings who have not suffered its misfortunes.
While it is the uncertainty over not just the future of these achievements but Rwanda's destiny as well that informs the calls of a third term, Rwanda would do well to search its memory.
Just as with its East African Community partners, the history of term limits in the region's constitutions is rooted in its experience with bad leadership and its negative consequences.
The idea was that term limits put a cap on how long citizens would have to endure a bad leader. That was also expected to take away the incentive or justification for people to resort to unconstitutional change of government.
Leaders like Kagame come once in several generations and indeed the seeming lack of an alternative to him should be the reason for maintaining the current constitutional order because removing term limits could play into the hands of a future bad leader.
More significantly, when the current constitution was being crafted, nobody knew for sure that Kagame would turn out to be such a messiah for Rwanda.
Constitutions are like lamp posts. They are there to light our way in the event of a blizzard and they are never removed or shifted just because the weather happens to be fair.
After the current turn of events in Burundi, and Uganda's deviation from similar limits a decade earlier, the world will be watching Rwanda.
http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/OpEd/editorial/Term-limits-are-there-for-a-good-reason-/-/434752/2710746/-/qnlj6kz/-/index.html
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