The Africa Review in Five highlights African current affairs from a Christian perspective. Listen and subscribe through Youtube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.

Today is Tuesday, July 11th, A.D. 2023. This is The Africa Review in Five, written by David de Bruyn and presented by Yamikani Katunga

Macky Sall not running for third term as president

The president of Senegal, Macky Sall, has announced he will not seek a third term as president. Senegal’s constitution was changed during Sall’s first term, to ensure that no

president could serve for longer than two terms. Even though Sall’s recent tenure has been marred by unrest and the jailing of an opposition leader, his decision to step down after two terms is to be commended. Senegal is respected as a relatively peaceful and stable country within the turmoil of West Africa, where military coups and power grabs are not unknown. 

Term limits have been written into many constitutions as a way of preventing a republic from becoming a de facto dictatorship when the president becomes “president for life”. Limiting a ruler to one or two terms of a set number of years dates back to ancient Greece and Rome. Indeed, it was Julius Caesar who abolished term limits when he ended the Roman republic and became its emperor, an action mimicked centuries later in France by Napoleon. In modern times, Russia amended its constitution in 2020 to allow Vladimir Putin to serve as president indefinitely, while China likewise removed term limits so that Xi Jinping can serve indefinitely. 

African countries have often avoided writing term limits into their constitutions. Some presidents and prime ministers of African nations have served for decades. Robert Mugabe was prime minister and then president of Zimbabwe for 37 years. Defying this trend, Nelson Mandela deliberately served only one term as president of South Africa.

Limiting the term of a ruler’s office emerges from a Christian understanding of the heart of man. If man’s heart is innately good and pure, then it can be left to itself, and good fruit will result. If man’s heart is innately evil then it requires limits, consequences and penalties to curb and control its tendencies. Ecclesiastes 8:11 explains this principle: “ Because the sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil.”

When nations do not apply force to either prevent or punish evil, man’s innate tendencies toward selfishness are inflamed and encouraged. While laws and punishments cannot cure the heart of evil, they can restrain it. Nations with a Christian view of man’s heart have recognised the truth in Lord Acton’s saying, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Instead of investing one man with absolute power, constitutions and democracies emerging from a Christian worldview have created elaborate balances of power so that the creation and enforcement of a nation’s laws was a slow and difficult process involving more than one branch of government. Usually, this involves three branches: 

1) An upper and a lower house of parliament or senate. 

2) The executive, the president. 

3) The courts, who enforce and interpret the laws on the books. 

Together the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of government balance each other so that absolute power never pools and concentrates in one person or group. 

This balance of power often results in a stalemate or a deadlock between opposing parties, and laws fail to pass. People mistakenly think that this is the inefficiency or brokenness of the system. But many people miss the point: that this is exactly the kind of stalemate that protects a country from the monopolistic rule of one party, or one man. When the different branches of government work well, it should be difficult to change the constitution, it should be hard to make new laws, and it should be hard for those in power to assert themselves and change the lives of a nation’s citizens.

Here is the strange irony: those nations that have assumed the worst about the human heart, have created the best political systems, and those that have assumed the best about the human heart, have created the worst political systems. Tyrannies, dictatorships, and fascist systems always emerged because of a false belief in the goodness of man, and in the ability of a few, or even one, to bring about a utopian state of affairs. 

Unbiblical systems always begin with the view that man is flawed but perfectible. Stable democracies that have produced more human flourishing than any other societies have emerged because of the biblical belief that man is a sinner, whose evil must be restrained. Limits, barriers, checks, and balances may seem to impede political progress. But more importantly, they impede something else: the covetous heart of man, ever ready to destroy his neighbour in pursuit of his own lusts (James 4:1-2). Whether it is politics, economics, or law, assuming that we are saints, produces the worst of sinners. But when we embrace the truth of Romans 3:23, and assume we are sinners, our politics, laws, and economics honour and protect humans made in God’s image.

And that’s it for The Africa Review in Five on this Tuesday, July 11th in the year of our Lord 2023. Subscribe to the Missionary Minds podcast on Spotify or Apple podcasts. I’m Yamikani Katunga. Be not weary in well-doing.