By Dr Malang Fay
In many parts of Africa and beyond, election season brings the same spectacle. The incumbent president arriving in a remote village with a full motorcade and security detail to rally thousands. He announces a new road, a new clinic, a new promise. The state broadcaster carries it live making the news headline. Press release left right center. The photograph of him embracing a grandmother lands on the front page the next morning. Few months later the same president files his nomination papers to contest the very election he has been campaigning for all along.
We have been told that the nationwide tour is a constitutional requirement and that the president must “tour the country” to inspect development projects, listen to the people, and assure them that their taxes are at work. Yes, that is true!
Section 222(15) states: “The President shall undertake a nation-wide tour at least twice a year in order to familiarise himself or herself with current conditions and the effects of government policies.”
It sounds noble. It sounds necessary. But let us not be children. In an election year, the nationwide tour is not governance. It is the most sophisticated campaign machinery ever invented and it is paid for by you, the taxpayer.
My take is that the fundamental problem with the nationwide tour during an election year is that it obliterates the distinction between the office of the presidency and the campaign of a candidate. Political scientists have long documented what they call the “incumbency advantage”. The structural edge that sitting office-holders enjoy over their challengers simply by virtue of already occupying the seat of power. In the United States for example, Yale’s David Mayhew found that incumbent presidents running for re-election kept the White House roughly two-thirds of the time, a pattern so consistent that it prompted formal theories about why the presidency itself functions as an electoral weapon. Moreover, recent scholarship has refined this argument further. John V. Kane in his article “Two terms of endearment? Incumbent-party performance in US presidential elections” published in 2024, shows that one-term incumbent-party candidates in US presidential elections have averaged 54.5 percent of the two-party vote. Providing a nine-percentage-point advantage over their opponents. That is not a small edge. Notwithstanding, in young democracies with weaker institutional checks, the advantage of incumbency is not merely about name recognition or voter risk aversion. It is about the raw, unapologetic conversion of state machinery into campaign apparatus. If we look at what a nationwide tour actually entails. For example, the president travels with a motorcade of vehicles are maintained by the state. He is accompanied by civil servants whose salaries are drawn from the state coffers. He is covered by state media whose broadcast frequencies belong to the nation and paid by the people. He is protected by security services funded by the treasury. He stands at a podium announces projects that will be funded by the national budget. Every single element of that tour is paid for by the people.
Yet, the crowd gathers not to hear a civil servant read a budget report rather they see the man who wants their vote. The grandmother he embraces is not a development indicator. She is a campaign prop. All the roads he promises is not an infrastructure project being evaluated on its merits rather it is a down-payment on loyalty.
In 2020, the Institute for Security Studies report on African elections, put it bluntly: “African leaders seeking re-election often exploit access to government resources to boost their campaigns, creating an uneven electoral playing field that gives them an advantage over their political opponents.”
The report highlights that Ghana, development projects are routinely appropriated to benefit incumbent leaders before elections. A similar case has been observed in Malawi, the Electoral Commission documented that during the 2014 tripartite elections “presidential campaign rallies could not be distinguished from presidential functions” (International Foundation for Electoral Systems, 2017).
The theory of incumbency is very visible in the Gambia and beyond. This is not conspiracy. It is structural. One needs to understand that the president does not need to stuff ballot boxes if he can stuff the airwaves with images of himself as the caring father of the nation. He does not need to bribe voters with cash if he can bribe them with promises. This gives the president the advantage over every opposition in the polls. While the president tours the country on the state’s resources, his challengers must hire buses, rent halls, and pay for security out of their own pockets or from party funds. They must beg for coverage on the evening news. The president’s every sneeze is breaking news on the state broadcaster and on social media. This is not a campaign. It is a theatrical production of election inequality.
The Venice Commission and the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights have jointly warned that legal frameworks must establish “effective mechanisms to prevent public officials from taking unfair advantage of their positions in order to influence the outcome of elections.” Their guidelines call for a “clear distinction between the operation of government, activities of the civil service and the conduct of the electoral campaign.”
But how can such a distinction exist when the president himself refuses to distinguish between his office and his candidacy?
The Cabo Verde example and what it proves
There are nations that have recognised this problem and acted on it. Cabo Verde, that small island democracy off the west coast of Africa, requires that no candidate may hold public office from the announcement of their candidacy to the official declaration of election results. In 2016, President Jorge Carlos Fonseca suspended his own mandate two months before the election and handed power to the speaker of the national assembly. He was re-elected with 74 percent of the vote not because he abused incumbency, but because he had earned the trust of the electorate on a level playing field. Election observers concluded that his resignation helped strengthen the equal treatment of candidates.
Madagascar, a country with a far more turbulent democratic history, adopted a similar practice in 2018. Faced with pressure, the sitting president resigned before the poll, allowing the Senate president to assume office temporarily. The election proceeded without the incumbent hovering over it like a thundercloud. These are not wealthy nations. They are not nations with centuries of democratic tradition. They are simply nations that understood a basic truth. You cannot be referee and player in the same match.
Since Jammeh we have been hearing the common defence of the nationwide tour and that it is mandated by the constitution. The president has a duty to tour the country, inspect projects, and engage with citizens. This is a clever argument of lawyer who knows the letter of the law but has forgotten its spirit. We all agree the constitution require the president to tour. However, does not require the president to tour the country 4 months before election and disguise as “meet the people” tours. If a constitutional provision is being weaponised to undermine the very democracy it purports to serve, then the provision must be suspended.
The solution is not complicated matter. It requires only political will and the National assembly should look at the following recommendations. Firstly, there must be a clear legal prohibition on nationwide presidential tours during the six months preceding a general election. If the president wishes to inspect projects or engage with citizens during this period, he may do so but only as a private citizen. Secondly, any presidential travel during the election period must be strictly limited to genuine emergencies or constitutionally mandated functions that cannot be deferred. Thirdly, the state broadcaster and government information services must be prohibited from covering the president’s activities in a manner that advantages his campaign. Finally, we must shift our democratic culture away from the cult of the incumbent. The presidency is not a throne. It is a temporary job. The man who holds it is not the state. He is a servant of the state. Elections are not games. They are the mechanism by which the people grant or withdraw their consent to be governed. And if that mechanism is rigged before a single ballot is cast rigged by the systematic, state-funded, legally sanctioned advantage of the man who already holds power, then the consent being extracted is not genuine. It is manufactured. The nationwide tour during election year is not governance. It is the most elegant form of electoral fraud ever devised because it is committed in broad daylight, with the full force of the law behind it and with the taxpayer footing the bill. It is time to ban it. Not because we disrespect the office of the president, but because we respect the office of the citizen more.