Is Kenya’s new President, William Ruto, intent on governing for longer than the permissible two five-year terms? While his party moved swiftly to distance itself from a public announcement by one of its Parliamentarians earlier this month that plans were afoot to replace the constitutional limits with an age cap of 75 years, the 55-year-old has remained mum on the issue.

If indeed he is hellbent on being President for the next 20 years, those close to him should prevail on him to abandon the idea – Presidencies are unlike wine, which gets better, the longer it lasts. In fact, the opposite is true, and there have been multiple examples of this across the continent, where several countries are led by the world’s longest- serving non-monarchs. These include Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang Nguema, who has been in power for 43 years; Cameroon’s Paul Biya, the country’s President since 1982; Denis Sassou Nguesso, who has governed the Republic of Congo for a collective 37 years; Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, who was propelled into the Presidency 36 years ago, following an insurgency that he led; and Isaias Afwerki, who has been the leader of Eritrea since its secession from Ethiopia in 1991.

Nguema, 80, will seek to extend his rule in elections due on November 20.

A more recent addition to this list is Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, who, having been the country’s de facto leader since 1994, became President in 2000 and tweaked the Constitution in 2015 so he could be eligible to run for a third seven-year term in 2017 and then two five-year terms. Thus, he could possibly stay in power until 2034.

If you asked them, the long-serving leaders would tell you that the people want them to continue serving. Kagame, for instance, staged a sham referendum that showed 98% of registered voters were in favour of the constitutional amendments proposed by his party.

But it’s not true that Africans like long- serving Presidents. What, for instance, would endear Nguema to the Equatorial Guineans, considering that he presides over a country with the world’s second-highest poverty rate? According to the World Bank, 76.8% of their number live in abject poverty. Only South Sudan has a higher poverty rate, namely 82.3%.

In fact, research conducted by Afrobarometer has poked holes in the claim by Nguema & Co that they are much loved by the people of the countries they lead. Seventy-six per cent of the just under 50 000 respondents in 34 countries whose views the pan-African research network canvassed from 2019 to 2021 said they were in favour of limiting Presidents to two terms. Even among respondents who trusted their current Presidents and approved of their job performance, 73% and 74% respectively indicated that they preferred a two-term limit.

Kenyans who might think that Ruto is a jolly good fellow who deserves to be State President for longer than ten years need to be reminded that studies have shown that term limits, which facilitate regular transitions of power, help prevent a sustained concentration of political and economic authority, which inevitably undermines democracy.

Moreover, researchers from the US Department of Defense’s Africa Center for Strategic Studies highlight in a paper first published in 2020 and updated in 2021 that all eight African countries that faced civil conflict in the past two years – excluding insurgencies by Islamist groups – do not have Presidential term limits and that seven of the ten African countries that are the largest sources of the continent’s 32-million refugees and internally displaced people lack term limits. Corruption is also endemic in countries without term limits, which, on average, ranked 134 out of the 180 countries on Transparency International’s latest Corruption Perceptions Index. This is 46 places lower than countries with term limits.