By Julius Peter Ochen
Identical to corporate companies that go through five stages of product or service life cycles, most regimes in Africa have got life span which in most cases is embedded in the life of the generation that ushered it in.
Like an onion with layers upon layers of concentric circles around the center, generations of children form strata from where leaders emerge successively.
Again, just like an onion, with time and natural cause, the outer layers begin to develop dull colors, sometimes desiccate and pill away. Layers upon layers may soon follow and go the same way. Still what remains is a clean bulb good for cooking.
But unlike the onion, political regime’s layers are determined by systems’ design. I am talking about political tenure-ship. African political leaders at whatever levels of political offices are less known for retiring. They always act with self-justification to stay on even with glaring evidence that their administrations have since lost effectualness.
Jerry Ross in his book; The Reinforcement Theory, blamed the occurrence on reward policies. He says that when people receive rewards intermittently, they can become quite persistent especially if it’s slow and irregular.
Unfortunately, many regimes situations that escalate to disaster involve precisely this type of reinforcement pattern.
Straw and Ross(1997) however argue that when a person’s fate is tied to demands for performance and when accepting failure means loss of power, hanging on in the face of service breakdown sometime makes sense. I don’t agree.
Unless put to good use, the same natural phenomenon may happen right from inside the ring of a once clean onion. At that point, the onion starts to rot from right inside rendering the other rings slippery and grotty. The whole onion is doomed.
If there is no deliberate system design for the generations of succeeding leaders to break to surface, certainly there is kismet. Unlike onion that develop emotions and begin to rot from the inside in protest, the succeeding generations will develop ring of force and weight to respite out.
There has been general outcry that thirty years of president Museveni is a lot enough. I think twenty years or even fifteen years is enough for meaningful contribution in our offices of placement. If we desire change up, we must start to work for change down.
Rgt Hon Rebecca Kadaga for instance has been within the apex of parliamentary leadership for the last 15 years. There is no doubt that she has been instrumental in political and policy development of this country, and still has a lot to offer, but Hambrick & Fukutomi( 1991) say that there is an inverted curvilinear relationship between the CEO’s tenure and firm performance due to inverse influence of learning and adaptation.
Beyond ten years, positive effects of learning are, however, outweighed by progressively increasing costs of mismatch between the paradigm which the CEO has selected and environmental.
Torsten, Stubner & Jutta( 2010), confirmed this line of argument when their findings revealed that while new CEOs are highly attuned to the external environment, longer-tenured executives are increasingly isolated from it.
Romannelli & Tushman (1988) say ten years is enough tenure of office. Fifteen is a lot much. Anything beyond that is counterproductive. Their studies revealed that when entering the new position, a CEO generally strives to demonstrate efficacy in order to prove that his nomination was the right choice and in order to build legitimacy.
However, after ten years, CEOs typically have reached a very strong power position but simultaneously start to lack the excitement for their works. Instead of taking new initiatives, CEOs tend to concentrate more on the ceremonial aspects of their jobs in this season.
Even when Lucier, Wheeler and Habbel(2005) advanced a new line of argument that longer tenure of office for CEOs leads to higher institutional performance due to experience and seniority of the jobs, Finkelstein, Hambrick, & Canella(2009); Giambatista, Rowe, & Diaz, (2007), contended that CEOs uses their seniority only to entrench themselves and assert their authority, but not to benefit institutions and the people they serve.
Now that voters have validated ambitions of political pensioners in parliament, it’s incumbent upon members of parliament and appointing authority to acclimate ourselves to what Pfeffer and Ocasio( 1994) described as circulation of power within. Ocasio said, given time, political CEOs develop their power positions as their relationships, actions and beliefs become ‘rules’ that are not put into question by other members anymore.
Pfeffer( 1981) added that, given time, these CEOs use this legitimacy to further strengthen their power position by growing their networks and expanding their resources. They strengthen their power position with every year that they stay in office, consequently, the odds of being replaced decrease over time.
Whereas NRM government have been able to contain the phenomenon through deliberate policy design that does not prohibit inner political layers from sprouting to surface, circulation of power within is inevitable especially now with increased service delivery demand from masses.
The writer is a public policy analyst with interest in politics