Simon Allison
speaker
22 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2012
last heard Aug 2012
Simon Allison’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I seem to be getting an awful lot of calls in the middle of the night telling me an African president had died.
And to be honest, I'm getting a bit sick of it.
Why do African presidents keep dying?
I found that 2012 has been a particularly bad year for presidential mortality, but the trend goes back a bit further.
Going back to 2008, I found that there were nine African presidents...
that had died in office.
In the space of four years, to have nine leaders die seems quite excessive.
And looking further afield at the rest of the world as a sort of comparison, and I only found three other countries whose president had died in office in the last four years.
That was North Korea, Poland, and Barbados in the Caribbean.
And that was it.
This is true of some of the leaders who died in office, particularly we're talking about Omar Bongo, Conte and Gaddafi, all of whom were old school dictators who were never going to leave power voluntarily.
But the others are different.
So Meles Zanawi, who just died recently, he has clung on to power for a long time, but also he's only 57.
So he doesn't really fall into the dying in old age in office category.
and all the others were within their constitutional term limits and hadn't even fiddled with them yet.
Obviously, a death in office leads to a power vacuum, and power vacuums can be dangerous and destabilising.
Look at what happens in Guinea-Bissau.
When Sanha died, a coup followed very shortly afterwards.
This is a difficult situation for Africa to find itself in because it historically has not dealt very well with power vacuums.
However, there is some cause for optimism on this front.
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