Across much of Africa, election seasons arrive with familiar anxieties: incumbents amending constitutions to erase term limits, disputed results, ethnic mobilization, coups, and leaders who refuse to leave office.
Bilinga’s essay centers on the Borana Gadaa system, the rotational leadership tradition of the Borana Oromo people.
UNESCO inscribed the system in 2016 as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity that regulates political and social life, resolves conflict, and protects women’s rights, according to the essay.
Bilinga writes that leadership rotates on a fixed eight-year cycle among five Gogeessas, or parties, each governing for one Gadaa period before handing over power and returning to the first after 40 years.
Lesson 1: Power must have a time limit
The essay contrasts that structure with what Human Rights Watch director Ida Sawyer describes as a “constitutional coup” pattern, in which leaders who cannot win re-election rewrite the laws to get their way.
Bilinga cites Cameroon’s Paul Biya, who erased term limits in 2008 and has ruled since 1982; Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, who scrapped his in 2005; and Rwanda, Burundi, Togo, Djibouti, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which the essay says have each amended their constitutions to extend a president’s tenure.
Bilinga’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
A second strand of the essay concerns how leaders are prepared.
Bilinga writes that Gadaa systems treat leadership as something built over decades rather than switched on by an election, with members passing through age-grades from childhood and absorbing law, custom, and ritual responsibility long before they are eligible to lead.
Knowledge of the system is transmitted across generations by oral historians, the essay notes.
By contrast, Bilinga argues, most African political systems select candidates first and ask whether they are fit to govern only afterward, with patronage, money, and ethnic arithmetic often outweighing demonstrated understanding of law or public finance.
The essay’s recommendation is for African parties and civic institutions to 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
On succession, Bilinga describes the Balli Walirafudhu handover ceremony, at which authority passes from the outgoing ruling class to the incoming one and is understood by the whole community as final and binding.
Every eight years, the essay says, the Gumi Gaayo assembly meets under the sacred Odaa tree to review the era’s laws and bless the incoming leadership.
The essay sets that against 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 Ivory Coast’s 2010 to 2011 rupture, which led to a civil war.
Bilinga’s framing is that succession in the Gadaa system is scripted years in advance, while in much of Africa it is an open question resolved only after votes are contested.
Lesson 4: No clan or ethnicity should own the political system
Bilinga also addresses the relationship between political and clan identity.
The essay 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 that the five Gogeessa holding political authority cut across those clan lines, keeping political identity and clan identity separate so that no single clan can capture the system.
The essay argues this fault line has broken many African elections, pointing to Kenya’s 2007 to 2008 violence as driven largely by ethnic mobilization and citing the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ observation that ethnicity is the main axis political elites mobilize around, turning elections into an ethnic census.
Bilinga’s proposed template is for structures such as party membership, constituencies, and civil-service recruitment that mix identities rather than reinforce them.
Lesson 5: Democracy is more than voting day
Accountability between elections is another theme.
Bilinga writes that the Gumi Gaayo assembly does more than confirm 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.
The essay cites ITUC-Africa’s catalog of disputed results across Guinea, Togo, Sudan, Burundi, Burkina Faso, Egypt, Comoros, Tanzania, and Rwanda in 2010 alone as evidence that accountability between elections has proved far weaker than the contest itself.
Bilinga’s conclusion is that robust democracies 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
On the concentration of power, the essay describes the Abbaa Gadaa, the topmost Borana leader, as never ruling alone.
Bilinga writes that the office operates alongside the Hayyuu council of advisors, the Abbaa Seera responsible for law, and the ritual authority of the Qaalluu, in what the essay characterizes as a deliberately decentralized structure designed to stop any office from concentrating too much power.
The essay contrasts this with a 2026 survey it cites 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.
Bilinga’s formulation is that in each case the presidency grew larger than the constitution meant to contain it, and that when power is distributed across councils, courts, and customary bodies, no single leader’s ambition can capture the whole state.
Lesson 7: Resolve conflict through dialogue before It becomes violence
Conflict resolution in the Borana system is layered, according to the essay: 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.
Bilinga points to West Africa as a counterexample, writing that since 2020 the Sahel has seen a wave of takeovers in Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Gabon, following deteriorating security and falling accountability in the years before each coup.
The essay’s stated lesson 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
Finally, Bilinga emphasizes that Gadaa’s institutions are inseparable from Borana culture.
The Odaa tree serves as 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, the essay says.
The essay’s closing argument is that governance 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 writes that African leaders do not need to build Odaa trees or revive age-grade systems to learn from the Borana Gadaa, but rather 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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