Against that backdrop, a writer for Peace News Network, Diba Kosi Bilinga, has posed a question: what can modern African states learn from the Borana Gadaa system, a governance model practiced by the Borana Oromo people of southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya that has rotated leadership on a fixed cycle for generations?
At the center of the argument is a structural feature: Borana leadership rotates every eight years among five Gogeessas, or parties, each of which governs for one Gadaa period before handing over power.
After 40 years, the cycle returns to the first.
UNESCO inscribed the Gadaa system in 2016 as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, recognizing it as a body of custom that regulates political and social life, resolves conflict, and protects women’s rights.
Bilinga contrasts that fixed cycle with what Human Rights Watch director Ida Sawyer has described as a “constitutional coup” pattern, in which leaders who cannot win re-election rewrite the laws instead.
He cites Cameroon’s Paul Biya, who erased term limits in 2008 and has ruled since 1982; Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, who scrapped term limits in 2005; and Rwanda, Burundi, Togo, Djibouti, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which he says have each amended their constitutions to extend a president’s tenure.
His conclusion is that when a time limit is built into the system itself rather than resting on a leader’s promise, departure does not have to be settled by force.
Lesson 1: Power must have a time limit
A second strand of the argument concerns how leaders are prepared.
In the Gadaa system, members pass through age-grades from childhood, absorbing law, custom, and ritual responsibility long before they are eligible to lead, with oral historians formally transmitting that knowledge across generations.
Bilinga argues that most African political systems invert this sequence: candidates are selected first and judged on fitness to govern afterward, with patronage, money, and ethnic arithmetic often outweighing demonstrated understanding of law or public finance.
His recommendation is that parties and civic institutions build structured pipelines in local councils, youth wings, and the civil service that expose future leaders to responsibility well before a national mandate.
Lesson 2: Prepare leaders before giving them power
Succession is the third theme. Under the Gadaa system, authority passes from the outgoing ruling class to the incoming one at the Balli Walirafudhu handover ceremony, a transfer the community understands 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.
Bilinga sets this against Kenya’s 2007–08 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 against Ivory Coast’s 2010–11 rupture, which led to civil war.
In the Gadaa system, he writes, succession is scripted years in advance; in much of Africa it is an open question resolved only after votes are contested.
Lesson 3: Peaceful transitions are a sign of institutional strength, not weakness
On ethnicity, Bilinga notes that Borana society comprises 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.
Political identity and clan identity remain separate, so no single clan can capture the system.
He points to Kenya’s 2007–08 violence as an example of the opposite dynamic, citing the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ observation that ethnicity is the main axis around which political elites mobilize, turning elections into an ethnic census.
Where political identity is inseparable from ethnicity, he argues, losing an election can feel like losing everything for a whole community, and he proposes structures — party membership, constituencies, civil-service recruitment — that mix identities rather than reinforce them.
Lesson 4: No clan or ethnicity should own the political system
Accountability between elections is the fifth area Bilinga examines.
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.
He contrasts this with what he describes as Africa’s concentration of democratic energy into a single day, citing an ITUC-Africa catalog of disputed results across Guinea, Togo, Sudan, Burundi, Burkina Faso, Egypt, Comoros, Tanzania, and Rwanda in 2010 alone.
His conclusion is that robust democracies need standing institutions — independent courts, electoral commissions, a free press, and community dispute-resolution bodies — that keep working throughout the cycle.
Lesson 5: Democracy is more than voting day
Bilinga also emphasizes the dispersal of authority within the Gadaa system.
The Abbaa Gadaa, the topmost Borana leader, never rules alone, operating alongside the Hayyuu council of advisors, the Abbaa Seera responsible for law, and the ritual authority of the Qaalluu.
He describes this as a deliberately decentralized structure designed to prevent any office from concentrating too much power, and contrasts it with rulers such as Cameroon’s Paul Biya, in power since 1982, Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang Nguema Obiang, in power since 1979, and Congo’s Denis Sassou Nguesso, in power since 1979, who he says have systematically dismantled the checks meant to constrain them.
Lesson 6: Leadership should serve the institution, not the other way around
Conflict resolution in the Borana system is layered, according to the article: 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’s Sahel, where Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Gabon have seen takeovers since 2020, and argues that deteriorating security and falling accountability in the years before each coup illustrate what happens when such mediation is absent.
His stated lesson is not that customary courts should replace constitutions, but that no state can survive on election-day mechanisms alone.
Lesson 7: Resolve conflict through dialogue before It becomes violence
Finally, Bilinga treats the Gadaa system’s institutions as 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.
Governance, he 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.
Lesson 8: Culture, memory, and inclusion are part of governance
His closing argument is that African leaders do not need to build Odaa trees or revive age-grade systems to learn from the Borana Gadaa.
What they need, in his account, is 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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“excerpt”: “A Peace News Network article by Diba Kosi Bilinga, republished by Global Voices, argues that the Borana Gadaa system’s fixed eight-year leadership rotation offers lessons for African elections. The piece compares Gadaa institutions with constitutional term-limit removals, ethnic mobilization, and disputed results across the continent.”
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