USA Africa Dialogue Series - RE: Nigeria: Lessons from America's Presidential term limits

NIGERIA: LESSON FROM AMERICA'S PRESIDENTIAL TERM LIMITS
by
Anthony Akinola*

Political sycophants abound everywhere and would seem to be products of a nation's stage of historical development. Even when it should be a personal decision whether or not one runs for office, there may have been sycophants in Nigeria vowing to divorce their wives or husbands if President Goodluck Jonathan did not re-contest the presidency in 2015.


Similarly, at the early stage of American political history, there were said to be sycophants who urged George Washington, America's first president from 1789-1797, to transform himself into being the first King of America in the tradition of colonial Britain. Washington was said to have reminded his fellow Americans that it was because of the tyranny of the British monarch that they fought a war of Independence in 1776. Against the pressure of others, George Washington did not re-contest the presidency after he had served two terms in office.


Principally because of Washington's voluntary withdrawal, it was always assumed that the American president was conventionally limited to two terms in office. Their Constitution of 1787 did not state how long one could be President of the United States.


However, what seemed to have been the convention in American politics changed in 1940 when Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) won a third election to the American presidency. He was a highly successful president who had steered his nation through the Great Depression of the 1930s. He, in fact, was elected in 1944 for a fourth term which he did not complete. He died in 1945.


For those who may be interested in American history and politics, FDR was a Democrat whose economic policies persuaded Black Americans (African Americans) to shift en masse from Abraham Lincoln's Republican Party of Emancipation to the Democratic Party, in what is until today the greatest political re-alignment in American history. It was Lincoln's Republican Party that freed "Blacks" from slavery.


Be that as it may, Republicans in Congress sought passage of an amendment that would limit the terms of future presidents. FDR was the first and only American president to serve more than two terms in office. The term limits are, however, made clear in the following words:


"Passed by Congress in 1947, and ratified by the states on February 27 1951, the Twenty-Second Amendment limits an elected president to two terms in office, a total of eight years. However, it is possible for an individual to serve up to ten years as president. The amendment specifies that if a vice president or other successor takes over from a president - who, for whatever reason, cannot fulfill the term - and serves two years or less of the former president's term, the new president may serve for two full four-year terms. If more than two years remain of the term when the successor assumes office, the new President may serve only one additional term."


Lyndon Johnson, as highlighted in a previous article, was qualified to seek a second four-year term in 1968. However, Gerald Ford who was president from 1974 to 1977, having succeeded the impeached Richard Nixon, would only have qualified to contest the 1976 election which he did contest and lost to Jimmy Carter. Ford served more than two years of the "unexpired" term of Nixon.


What relevance has the Twenty-Second Amendment to our situation in Nigeria? One has tried to explain this for the simple reason that it could serve as a guide for the eligibility of President Goodluck Jonathan, whose route to the presidency began via succession rather than election, to contest the Nigerian 2015 election.


The American Twenty-Second Amendment tells us that it does matter that one has ascended the presidency, even when he or she was not the one elected into that position. In the eyes of that Amendment, less than two years of the term of another may not be long enough to constitute one term in the entitlement of a succeeding president. In which case, Goodluck Jonathan's re-election in 2015 would not have been the constitutional issue it currently is, had we borrowed from the wisdom of America's Twenty-Second Amendment. Jonathan had served less than two years of the unexpired term of his deceased predecessor in office.


However, in spite of the pollution of the democratic space by the noises of those begging Goodluck Jonathan to contest the 2015 presidential election, the man himself has said only the national interest would determine whether or not he would be doing so. What constitutes the national interest could be subjective here.


Suffice to say that it is in our national interest that the constitutional issue surrounding the eligibility of Goodluck Jonathan be resolved before the presidential election of February 2015. This is extremely important if we were to avoid a situation, whereby his eligibility could be violently challenged after he might have won the election. The current controversy in Ekiti State, following the election of the once-impeached Ayodele Fayose as Governor, comes to mind here.
Of course, it is also in the national interest that political leaders educate their supporters that it is in the nature of democratic elections that the will of the majority must prevail. There would be no need for the threat to burn down the nation if a candidate of a particular ethnic sympathy did not win in an election that was free and fair.

*Anthony Akinola, an author of several acclaimed books, is a writer, who is based at Oxford (UK).

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