Denis Sassou N'Guesso, the president of Congo-Brazzaville, has become the latest in a long line of African rulers to change his country’s term limits.African presidents bending the constitution to their own purposes is nothing new. Having been in power for all but five of the last 36 years, Dennis Sassou N'Guesso's referendum on allowing him to serve a third term as president of Congo was widely expected.
Yoweri Museveni of Uganda set the precedent for the current crop of rulers. Shortly after taking power in 1986 he wrote that: "the problem of Africa in general, and Uganda in particular, is not the people but leaders who want to overstay in power." In an infamous U-turn in 2005, he secured a change to the constitution allowing himself a third term. He is now, at the age of 71, serving a fourth.
Paul Kagame has effectively ruled Rwanda since the genocide of 1994, which saw 800,000 people massacred in 100 days. He was initially vice president, but accepted as de facto ruler; in 2000 he was elected president.The 57-year-old has served the two seven-year terms permitted by the constitution, but has remained worryingly ambiguous about his intentions ahead of 2017 elections. And on July 17 parliament voted to support a change in the constitution, allowing him to run again.The opposition are currently attempting to appeal against the vote in the Supreme Court - but are struggling to find a lawyer to represent them.
As i pen this Rwanda's next door neigbor is on the brink of Genocide. I happen to come from a relatively safer country , the country of Tanzania. When the Rwanda genocide happened in 1994 close to a million people lost their lives. Movies have been acted about the genocide in the hope of educating humanity especially us Africans about the causes and results of war on a country and its people. I have read two memoirs of survivors of the Rwandan genocide; they describe everything that happened and what they experienced; their stories told of horrible acts of inhumanity.
They say that history is repeating itself but this time its in the neigboring Burundi. I have seen pictures and clips of mass graves being prepared to bury body carried in pick-up tracks just like it happened in 1994. And again, the world is looking away, Burundians are for lack of a better word abandoned. Women and innocent children are dying.
A Little History of Burundi
In summary,Burundi has seen 40 years of armed violence and civil war since gaining independence from Belgium in 1962. The conflicts, rooted in political and historical tensions between the ethnic Hutu majority and Tutsi minority populations,While under Belgian control, the lands of Ruanda-Urundi were used to earn profits for the colonial empire. To control the majority Hutu population, the Belgian administrators reinforced existing power structure , namely the Tutsi ruling class led by Mwami Mwambutsa IV.
In 1972, Hutu organisations carried out systematic attacks on ethnic Tutsis with the declared intent of annihilating the whole group. The Tutsi-dominated military regime responded with large-scale reprisals targeting Hutus. In 1988, Hutu groups again reorganised and conducted attacks against Tutsi peasants in the north of the country. In response, the Tutsi-led army massacred thousands of Hutus, killing anywhere from 5,000 – 50,000 people.After elections in 1993, Melchior Ndadaye became the first democratically elected Hutu head of state, leading a pro-Hutu government. In October 1993, however, Tutsi soldiers assassinated Ndadaye, setting off another round of violence. The violence escalated into genocide in early 1994, after the newly elected Hutu president Cyprien Ntaryamira was killed, along with Rwanda’s president Juvenal Habyarimana, when their plane was shot down over Kigali. The wave of violence that followed is estimated to have killed nearly 300,000 people, many of them civilians.
Regional actors, including former Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere and then-South African president Nelson Mandela, led a long series of peace talks to resolve the conflict between 1993 and 2003. Numerous peace agreements and power-sharing deals were signed, most notably the Arusha Accords in 2000, but inter-ethnic violence continued to break out on a regular basis. In November 2003 a major Hutu rebel group, the Forces for Defense of Democracy (FDD), signed a ceasefire agreement, ending the civil war. In 2009 Burundi’s last Hutu rebel group, the Forces for National Liberation (FNL), officially laid down arms and transformed into a political party.
What Triggered the War
The current government, led by President Pierre Nkurunziza, made up of 60% Hutus and 40% Tutsis to reflect the requirements of the constitution. In September of 2011, a massacre in a bar popular with government supporters heightened tensions and increased fears of a return to civil war. Opposition supporters have been jailed and critics have accused the government of restricting the media and political freedom. Extreme poverty, a lack of law and order and ongoing human right violations, as well as the difficulty of integrating former rebels into state institutions, have been major barriers to stability and sustainable peace in the country.Burundi which is a very tiny nation almost the size of Rwanda.Pierre Nkurunziza was supposed to be the answer to Burundi’s problem of decades of disastrous leadership.
A former university lecturer, he became Burundi’s “Minister for Good Governance” and was elected president in 2005. His country had been wracked by civil war and unrest since independence from Belgium in 1962. In 1972 sectarian violence between Hutus and Tutsis saw up to 210,000 people killed, then in 1993 the first Hutu president, Melchior Ndadaye, was assassinated - triggering the loss of a further 25,000 lives through tribal warfare.
For the next ten years peace talks continued, with the mediation of Nelson Mandela. And Mr Nkurunziza’s election was supposed to cement the ceasefire, and mark a new era of calm under the 2000 Arusha peace agreement.Initially it worked. But in April Mr Nkurunziza said he was going to run for a third term – contravening the Arusha agreement, which specifically states that no president can be elected three times. Mr Nkurunziza’s argument was that he had not been actually elected the first time – he said he was elected by parliament, so it didn’t count.
In the ensuing violence, 300,000 people fled to neighboring Rwanda and Tanzania, and generals attempted a coup – which quickly failed.Mr Nkurunziza's CNDD-FDD party scored a widely-expected landslide win in parliamentary polls held on May 29, that were boycotted by the opposition and condemned internationally as neither free nor fair. On July 21 presidential elections were held, with Mr Nkurunziza defying international condemnation to run for a third term. The elections were boycotted by the opposition.
And as of today its horrible to watch what is happening there,worse still it has been reported that Burundi's government has rejected African Union's decision to deploy a 5,000-strong peacekeeping force to curb ongoing violence, saying it will prevent foreign troops from entering its borders.The African Union's Peace and Security Council agreed on Friday night to deploy an African Prevention and Protection Mission (MAPROBU) for an initial period of six months - primarily to protect civilians after months of political violence.The MAPROBU force is mandated to "prevent any deterioration of the security situation" as well as to protect civilians and "contribute to the creation of the necessary conditions for the successful holding of the inter-Burundian dialogue." If anything end with this, Pierre Nkuruziza is a criminal who has no place in leadership and belongs in jail for the entirety of his life. Lets stand and fight for Burundi against this imbecile.
References: http://www.insightonconflict.org/conflicts/burundi/conflict profile/ , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Burundian_unrest
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