Upcoming Event

Join us for the Brownbag Seminar entitled “A Priori Understandings of Presidential Term Limits: Beyond Dogma, Experimenting With Term Limits in Africa” by Dr. Kagiso “TK” Pooe,  Asst. Professor of Future Governance (Scenarios), The African School of Governance (Kigali).

Abstract

In 2012, Time magazine proclaimed that the world was entering an ‘Africa Rising’ moment, suggesting the continent’s one billion citizens might finally shake off the legacies of colonial and post-liberation struggles. However, twelve years on, the African Development Bank Group’s 2024 report laments that Africa’s Gross Domestic Product growth has dropped to 3.1 percent from 4.1 percent in 2023. Meanwhile, the International Labour Organization reports that 72 million African youths are not in education, employment, or training. Two of Africa’s leading economies, South Africa and Nigeria, continue to suffer from systemic governance failures, as detailed in reports such as South Africa’s Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of State Capture and Nigeria’s investigations into the impact of governance policy on socioeconomic development.
These persistent challenges and, in some instances, the outright failure of governments and political actors to address public policy issues are now spurring experimentation with alternative governance models. In some cases, former liberation movements like the African National Congress, having lost outright political power, are turning to coalition governments. Meanwhile, states such as Burkina Faso, Egypt, and Zimbabwe have employed non-democratic means to usher in new or previously marginalised political elites.
This article contends that these non-traditional attempts to address complex policy failures have given rise to a nuanced site of academic and political struggle: presidential term limits. It argues that the success of states like Singapore and China, where head-of-state term limits have been flexible or absent, rightly challenges an uncritically accepted constitutional orthodoxy. While the traditional insistence on fixed term limits is constitutionally familiar, its necessity has never been scientifically proven. By examining ten African states, this article will assert that, given
the nature and complexity of contemporary public policy problems, experimentation with term-limit models should be encouraged.
About the Speaker:

Dr. TK Pooe is an assistant professor at ASG, where he teaches Anticipatory governance, management and delivery. He is a scholar and policy expert with an adjunct role at the University of the Witwatersrand School of Governance in South Africa. He teaches and supervises in areas such as reforming state-owned entities (SOEs), institutional strengthening, development planning, and scenario-based governance. With a public policy career spanning academia and government, TK has held teaching and leadership roles at North-West University and the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Before academia, he worked in development planning and oversight at the Gauteng Provincial Legislature and Sedibeng District Municipality. He has consulted widely, including for the Gordon Institute of Business Science and the Thabo Mbeki African School of Public and International Affairs, focusing on illicit financial flows in mining. As of 2022, he leads the WSG SoE–Energy Transition Consortium, providing strategic guidance on climate policy, carbon markets, and institutional post-carbon readiness.