The immediate cause of recent coups and coup attempts in Burkina Faso and Burundi has been moves by presidents in both countries (ex-President Blaise Compaoré in Burkina Faso and current President Pierre Nkurunziza in Burundi) to set aside their national constitutions and run for a third term as president. Several African nations instituted new or amended constitutions in the 2000s (Burkina Faso in 2002 and Burundi in 2005, for example) that called for term limits, and that’s why you’re seeing several presidents challenging the first invocation of those term limits. We can actually go back to 2006, when Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni changed the constitution to permit himself to run for a third term (he’s now in his fourth term and counting), for the earliest in this wave of presidents trying to overstay their legal welcome.
These efforts have obviously had mixed success. Compaoré was removed from office when he began to move toward running for a third term, but this latest coup apparently puts some of his closest political allies back in power, so who knows where that’s leading. Museveni was able to amend the constitution with relatively little trouble, while Nkurunziza (who didn’t amend Burundi’s constitution but instead exploited a loophole in it) just won his third term amid considerable public violence over the whole affair. Now attention turns to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where President Joseph Kabila should be prevented from running for a third term next year. There have been rumors for months now that Kabila is planning to amend the constitution to permit himself to run for reelection, and thousands of people have only in the past couple of days taken to the streets of Kinshasa to protest against such an act, and Kabila is firing people from his government for publicly arguing against his potential reelection efforts.
Rwanda also bears watching, since while President Paul Kagame’s term doesn’t end until 2017, his people are circulating a petition that would call for a constitutional amendment to allow him to serve another term. Washington has warned Kagame against trying to extend his time in office, but that’s a message they’ve tried to push repeatedly all over Africa and, well, nobody’s really listening. Other countries with a budding “third term” crisis on their hands include the Republic of the Congo, where President Denis Sassou Nguesso (term limited as of next year) is looking to amend the constitution so he can stay in office, and Benin, whose President Thomas Boni Yayi (also term limited next year) has explicitly said he will not run for a third term, but has instead talked about making vague constitutional “reforms” without explicitly mentioning term limits. Opponents are reading between the lines and are concerned that he might change his tune on the third term question.
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The Foreign Exchanges Companion 
I think you could do a bit more with this issue than simply listing the number of African countries, that are either dealing with, or confronted with the near term prospect of doing away or keeping presidential term limits. As though this one data point is enough to put them all in one box.
the ‘logic’ that is driving the push to keep Kagame, is significantly different to that behind the attempts to keep Nkurunzinza, for instance (in two neighboring coountries) not to mention Burkina Faso is treading a significantly different path to everybody else, being that theiy are in the throws of revolution.
I notice you’ve got a blog. The great thing about the internet is that you can write whatever you’d like to see written, as opposed to complaining that somebody else’s unpaid effort doesn’t meet your standards.
I meant what I said as a suggestion rather than a complaint. My apologies, if that is how you interpreted my feedback 🙂
No worries. I must have been feeling irritable yesterday so I apologize as well. Sometimes I take a deep dive into stuff and sometimes I don’t have the time or the brainpower to do it justice so I note what’s going on (and yes, the third term issue is enough of a thread to superficially link these things together. Anyway, I did go deeper into the subject the next day.