Boston University, led by former Ambassador to Tunisia and head of BU’s Africa Center Charles Stith, is instituting a program that would provide former African leaders with a safe future along with socially acceptable incentives to leave their offices without incident or turmoil.
The proposed site for their relocation: Boston University.
“This is the first program of its kind, not just at BU, but anywhere in the planet,” said Stith, who recently returned from a five-country tour through Africa, during which he briefed sitting heads of state and heard their thoughts about the direction of the program.
This program would attempt to solve what is known as the “exit problem,” referring to the difficulties that many state leaders experience when leaving office. For many of them, parting with power means a high chance of experiencing loss of wealth, judicial prosecution, or in the worst cases, assassination. The program offers the former heads of state a 12-month residency at BU.
“We would look to maximize their time by creating the greatest amount of latitude to participate in the greatest amount of events at the University,” Stith said. “We would also get them outside the city of Boston.”
The residency will include speaking tours as another incentive for leaders to adhere to democratic ideals.
Students would be able to take classes taught by the former leaders, as well as hear a multitude of special lectures and other special benefits the political figures would bring to the campus.
“We hope that we will begin to make some overtures in the propulsion of democracy in Africa,” Stith said.
The program is scheduled to begin this September, awarding one person a year with the position.
BU writing professor Peter Anderson, who lived in South Africa for the first 40 years of his life, teaches several writing classes on Africa and apartheid. Anderson said the variety of leaders in Africa might present problems.
“With a place like South Africa, you would get many of the more leftist leaders still at the stage of refusing to be connected with capitalistic America,” Anderson said. “It might be interesting to try to get them anyway.
“One would want some sense of encouraging deep democratic transformation in Africa and universally,” he said. “The very problem is infrastructural, whereas this [program] seems to be, or at least in my mind, superstructural.”
“The program will offer a good break after the period a head of state is in office,” said Liz Fehrenbach, a College of Arts and Sciences freshman taking Anderson’s writing classes, “Apartheid and After.”
“It will be a buffer between when things would be most heated in the country,” Fehrenbach said.
Anderson expressed concern, however, that the program will aid BU and the leaders more than it will the people of Africa and the state of the continent’s growing democracies.
“Currently, America gives one a political dimension which may be good and may not be good, in terms of their reception back in Africa,” he said.
“BU is seen as a highly conservative university in Africa. All of the political factors are going to play into it,” Anderson continued. “I would expect more conservative people to come. I think if the program leads to more educational interaction between America and Africa it is all to the good.”
“The [program] has a lot of potential for controversy because African politics are very complicated,” said CAS sophomore Nicele Erjavic. “It will be hard because BU might be endorsing one person over another. I’d be interested to see how BU handles it.”
“Africa is pretty democratic in many ways already. Would the program benefit the people of Africa? That is my question,” Anderson said. “There is clearly a Eurocentric-Afrocentric struggle. There are these colonial and terrible racist struggles overlapping, in the case of America and Africa … There is sort of an umbilical cord connecting the two.
“Africa might be better off without some of the leaders,” he said.