Across much of Africa, election season arrives with a familiar tension: incumbents amending constitutions to erase term limits, disputed results, ethnic mobilization, coups, and leaders who refuse to leave.
Against that backdrop, a writer for Peace News Network asks whether a generations-old governance model practiced by the Borana Oromo people in southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya might hold lessons for the continent’s electoral systems.
In an article republished by Global Voices under a content partnership agreement, Diba Kosi Bilinga examines the Borana Gadaa system, which UNESCO inscribed in 2016 as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
According to Bilinga, the system regulates political and social life, resolves conflict, and protects women’s rights, and has rotated power every eight years for generations without coups, third-term referenda, or the bloodshed that has accompanied many modern African elections.
Lesson 1: Power must have a time limit
Bilinga describes a fixed eight-year cycle in which leadership rotates among five Gogeessas, or parties, each governing for one Gadaa period before handing over power and returning to the first after 40 years.
He contrasts this with what Human Rights Watch director Ida Sawyer has called a “constitutional coup” pattern, in which leaders who cannot win re-election rewrite the laws.
Bilinga cites Cameroon’s Paul Biya, who erased term limits in 2008 and has ruled since 1982; Uganda’s Museveni, who scrapped his in 2005; and Rwanda, Burundi, Togo, Djibouti, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, each of which has amended its constitution to extend a president’s tenure.
The writer’s argument is that Gadaa’s lesson is structural: when a time limit is built into the system itself rather than resting on a leader’s promise, departure never has to be settled by force.
Lesson 2: Prepare leaders before giving them power
Bilinga also points to how the Gadaa system prepares leaders. Members pass through age-grades from childhood, absorbing law, custom, and ritual responsibility long before they are eligible to lead, with knowledge transmitted across generations by oral historians.
He argues that most African political systems do the opposite, selecting candidates first and asking whether they are fit to govern only afterward, with patronage, money, and ethnic arithmetic often outweighing demonstrated understanding of law or public finance.
His recommendation is that African parties and civic institutions build structured pipelines in local councils, youth wings, and the civil service that expose future leaders to responsibility long before a national mandate.
Lesson 3: Peaceful transitions are a sign of institutional strength, not weakness
Under the Gadaa system, Bilinga writes, authority passes from the outgoing ruling class to the incoming one at the Balli Walirafudhu handover ceremony, understood by the whole community as final and binding.
Every eight years, the Gumi Gaayo assembly, held under the sacred Odaa tree, reviews the era’s laws and blesses the incoming leadership.
He contrasts this with Kenya’s 2007 to 2008 crisis, when a disputed result triggered ethnic violence that killed roughly 1,000 people and displaced 500,000, according to Human Rights Watch’s investigation, and with Ivory Coast’s 2010 to 2011 rupture, which led to a civil war.
In the Borana system, succession is scripted years in advance; in much of Africa, Bilinga writes, it is an open question resolved only after votes are contested.
Lesson 4: No clan or ethnicity should own the political system
The article notes that Borana society has two broad blocks, the Sabboo Sadeen clan and the Goonaa Bal’aa clan, each with its own sub-clans, but the five Gogeessa that hold political authority cut across these clan lines.
Political identity and clan identity stay separate, so no single clan can capture the system.
Bilinga argues this fault line has broken many African elections, citing the Kenya violence as driven largely by ethnic mobilization and the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ observation that ethnicity is the main axis political elites mobilize around, turning elections into an ethnic census.
Where political identity is inseparable from ethnicity, he writes, losing an election can feel like losing everything for a whole community.
His proposed template is to build structures in party membership, constituencies, and civil-service recruitment that mix identities rather than reinforce them.
Lesson 5: Democracy is more than voting day
Bilinga describes the Gumi Gaayo assembly as doing far more than confirming who leads: it reviews the era’s laws, arbitrates disputes, and holds outgoing leaders publicly accountable through consultation among elders and councils of advisors known as Hayyuu, rather than through a ballot cast once every few years.
He argues that much of Africa’s politics concentrates almost all democratic energy into a single day, citing ITUC-Africa’s catalog of disputed results across Guinea, Togo, Sudan, Burundi, Burkina Faso, Egypt, Comoros, Tanzania, and Rwanda in 2010 alone, with accountability between elections proving far weaker than the contest itself.
Robust democracies, he writes, need standing institutions including independent courts, electoral commissions, a free press, and community dispute-resolution bodies that keep working every day of the cycle.
Lesson 6: Leadership should serve the institution, not the other way around
The article describes the Abbaa Gadaa, the topmost Borana leader, as never ruling alone.
He operates alongside the Hayyuu council of advisors, the Abbaa Seera responsible for law, and the ritual authority of the Qaalluu, in what Bilinga characterizes as a deliberately decentralized structure designed to stop any office from concentrating too much power.
He contrasts this with a 2026 survey finding that rulers such as Cameroon’s Paul Biya, in power since 1982, Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang Nguema Obiang, since 1979, and Congo’s Sassou Nguesso, since 1979, have systematically dismantled the checks meant to constrain them.
In each case, Bilinga writes, the presidency grew larger than the constitution meant to contain it. When power is distributed across councils, courts, and customary bodies, he argues, no single leader’s ambition can capture the whole state.
Lesson 7: Resolve conflict through dialogue before It becomes violence
Bilinga outlines how Borana layers its conflict resolution: the Kora Gossa handles local clan disputes, the Gumi Gaayo settles national matters, and Boran Haraamu Koo’puu Rules, a form of social exclusion, is reserved for those who break the community’s deepest trust.
He points to modern West Africa as showing what happens when such mediation is absent, noting that since 2020 the Sahel has seen a wave of takeovers in Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Gabon.
His conclusion is not that customary courts should replace constitutions, but that no state can survive on election-day mechanisms alone and needs everyday channels of mediation to build citizens’ trust.
Lesson 8: Culture, memory, and inclusion are part of governance
The article notes that Borana Gadaa’s institutions are inseparable from Borana culture.
The Odaa tree is both a meeting place and a living symbol of continuity across generations, and knowledge of the system’s history, including a documented line of more than 72 Abbaa Gadaa, is preserved and transmitted by oral historians.
Governance, Bilinga writes, needs more than law and procedure; it needs cultural memory, shared symbols, and inclusive channels through which groups historically shut out of power, especially women, can still be heard.
Bilinga’s closing argument is that African leaders do not need to build Odaa trees or revive age-grade systems to learn from the Borana Gadaa.
They need its underlying logic: time limits built into institutions, leaders prepared long before office, structures that cut across ethnic lines, power distributed across bodies, and dialogue running continuously rather than waiting for crisis.
Source: Global Voices
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