I have just finished writing all fifty-four African country pages on this website. Fifty-four independence dates, from Liberia in 1847 to South Sudan in 2011. Writing them one after another, over months, shows you things that no single country page reveals, and the clearest of them is this: something is happening across this continent right now that almost nobody is naming.

We are trained to watch for the coup. Soldiers on the state broadcaster. The constitution suspended. A general in fatigues reading a statement. When that happens, the African Union suspends the country, ECOWAS closes borders, the European Union issues a declaration, and the world's press arrives.

Meanwhile, in three countries in the last eighteen months, presidents have arranged to stay in power indefinitely, and the response has been close to nothing. Because they did it with lawyers.

The method, in four steps

It is the same technique every time, and it is depressingly elegant.

Step one: win a supermajority. Not necessarily honestly, but win it. Everything else follows from controlling parliament.

Step two: frame the change as modernisation. Nobody announces that they are abolishing the term limit. They announce a move to a parliamentary system, or the harmonisation of electoral cycles, or terms long enough for a government to deliver its development plan. The vocabulary is borrowed from European democracies.

Step three: move the power, not the man. Togo's president did not extend his term. He created a new office, President of the Council of Ministers, made it the seat of real power, had parliament fill it, and left the presidency as a ceremonial post for an 86-year-old. Zimbabwe did not simply extend a term either. It abolished the direct election of the president and handed the choice to a joint sitting of parliament.

Step four: avoid the referendum. This is the decisive move. Most African constitutions written after 1990 protect term limits with a clause requiring a popular vote to change them. So the amendment is drafted to override that clause with a single word: notwithstanding. Zimbabwe's Law Society said plainly that the change required a referendum. It passed anyway, in under five months.

Togo, May 2025: the office that has no clock

Togo is the model case, and it deserves to be far better known than it is.

The Gnassingbé family has ruled Togo since 1967. Gnassingbé Eyadéma took power four years to the day after he helped kill the country's first president, Sylvanus Olympio, and held it for thirty-eight years. When he died in 2005, the army installed his son Faure. ECOWAS called that a coup, imposed sanctions, and then accepted the election that followed it.

By 2024 Faure Gnassingbé had already reset the term limits once, in 2019, buying himself two more runs. That was the old method, and it was becoming embarrassing.

So in April 2024 his parliament adopted a new constitution. Togo would become a parliamentary republic. The presidency would be ceremonial. Power would move to a new post, chosen by the parliamentary majority, re-electable by that majority without limit.

On 3 May 2025 he was sworn into it. Young Togolese who came out in June against it were met with tear gas, soldiers, and men in unmarked cars. Rights groups counted at least fourteen dead across the protest wave, among them children of thirteen and fifteen. The government denies the deaths were connected. Public demonstrations had already been banned since 2022.

In 1963 a Togolese head of state was removed with a rifle. In 2025 the term limit was removed with a legal text. The second method killed fewer people and achieved far more.

Somalia, March 2026: two years, and a war in the capital

Somalia's version looked modest. Parliament approved, and the president signed, amendments extending both parliamentary and presidential terms from four years to five, postponing elections to 2027.

The opposition called it a constitutional coup. The president's original mandate expired on 15 May 2026; he declared that it now ran to May 2027. Somalia has no constitutional court to settle such a dispute.

On 3 June 2026 the argument moved into the streets of Mogadishu, with fighting near the homes of two opposition leaders and thousands of civilians fleeing. By August, Puntland had pushed the last federal security camps out of its territory. All of this while al-Shabaab advances and the African Union force is about to lose its main funder.

Two years on a term. That was the price.

Zimbabwe, 7 July 2026: the vote itself

Zimbabwe went furthest, and fastest.

ZANU-PF resolved in 2024 that President Mnangagwa's second and final term, due to end in 2028, should run to 2030 instead, and reaffirmed it at its conference in October 2025. The bill was gazetted on 16 February 2026. The National Assembly passed it 216 votes to 42 on 18 June. The Senate followed 75 to 4 on 24 June. The president signed it on 7 July.

What the Act does:

Zimbabwe fought a seven-year liberation war, in which perhaps thirty thousand people died, substantially for the right to vote. That right was handed to a parliamentary chamber in under five months, by a majority whose own terms the same document extended.

The Law Society of Zimbabwe stated the change required a referendum under the constitution's own protective clause, and that passing it without one would breach Zimbabwe's obligations under the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance. Constitutional lawyers filed challenges on the day it was gazetted. War veterans and church leaders asked the president to leave in 2028 as scheduled. None of it slowed the bill by a week.

This did not start in 2025

The technique has been developing for twenty years, and the country pages on this site are full of it.

Uganda did it in two instalments: parliament removed the two-term limit in 2005, and the age limit of 75 in 2017, in a session that ended with soldiers in the chamber and MPs dragged out. In January 2026 Yoweri Museveni took a seventh term with 71.65 per cent, the opposition leader escaped a military siege of his house and left the country, and the army remains under the command of the president's son.

Cameroon removed its limit in 2008. Djibouti in 2010. Rwanda put the change to a referendum in 2015 and got 98 per cent. Congo-Brazzaville and Burundi both forced it through in the same year, and Burundi's attempt cost hundreds of lives. Egypt extended its president's possible tenure to 2030 in 2019. Côte d'Ivoire and Guinea both argued in 2020 that a new constitution reset the count to zero, which is the same trick wearing a different hat.

Tunisia shows the variant that starts with genuine popular support. A president elected freely in 2019 suspended parliament in 2021 to public applause, ruled by decree, dissolved the judicial council, and passed a new constitution in a referendum with roughly 30 per cent turnout. By 2026, opposition figures were serving sentences of up to 66 years and an 85-year-old former speaker of parliament had been given life plus thirty.

It does not always work

And here is the part that matters most, because it is the only useful part.

The method fails when someone refuses.

In Nigeria in 2006, President Obasanjo's third-term amendment was killed in the National Assembly by legislators of his own party. In Zambia in 2001, Frederick Chiluba's third-term bid was stopped by churches, civil society and his own party. In Malawi in 2002, Bakili Muluzi's failed by three votes. In Burkina Faso in 2014, Blaise Compaoré tried it after twenty-seven years in power and the crowd burned the parliament instead; he was on a plane within two days.

In Senegal in 2024, a president who postponed an election found the Constitutional Council against him, and the man who won was released from prison ten days before the vote. In Somaliland, unrecognised by almost the entire world, the president lost an election in November 2024 and handed over power.

Ghana should read this carefully

Ghana is currently debating a constitutional reform package that includes extending the presidential term from four years to five.

There is nothing wrong with that idea in itself. Plenty of stable democracies have five-year terms, and four years is genuinely short for anything but campaigning. Ghana's Constitution Review Committee recommended it, and the government has accepted the proposal.

But here is the question that nobody in Togo, Somalia or Zimbabwe asked loudly enough, early enough:

Does the extension apply to the man who is proposing it?

That is the whole of it. A five-year term that begins with the next president is a reform. A five-year term that begins with the current one is a gift. The difference is one sentence in a transitional provision, and it is precisely the sentence that Zimbabwe used in July 2026 to override its own referendum requirement.

Ghanaians are entitled to a clear, written, published answer before the bill moves, not after. The two-term limit is entrenched in Ghana's constitution and changing it requires a referendum. Ghana has also, since 1992, done the one thing that makes all this harder: it has changed the governing party at the ballot box, repeatedly, and the losers have gone home. That habit is worth more than any development plan.

Where the silence comes from

The African Union suspended Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Niger, Sudan and Gabon after military coups, and that was right. Its own Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance also condemns, in writing, any amendment to the constitution that infringes on the principles of democratic change of government.

On Togo in 2025 and Zimbabwe in 2026, the AU and the regional bodies have said close to nothing.

The reason is not mysterious. A military coup is committed by outsiders against the club. A constitutional amendment is passed by a member of the club, with a majority, in a parliament, and several of the other members have done the same thing or would like to. Condemning Zimbabwe means condemning the technique, and the technique has friends.

Western governments are no better placed. The United States has spent 2026 pulling funding from African peacekeeping, excluding South Africa from the G20, and deporting people to countries they have never lived in. Europe is paying North African governments to hold migrants back. Neither is in a position to lecture anyone about constitutional norms, and neither is trying very hard.

What to actually watch

If you want to know whether this is coming to a country you care about, do not watch the president's speeches. Watch these five things, in this order.

Eighteen months, three countries

The point of this website

I have spent this year writing the independence story of every country on this continent, and the conclusion is not the one I expected when I started.

The problem is not the colonial border. The border was a crime and a burden, and Somalia, which had one people and one language, still collapsed more completely than any state cut in half by Europeans.

The problem is not even the resource curse, though Zambia went broke twice on copper and Ghana is poisoning its own rivers for gold as I write this.

The problem in 2026 is the clock. Independence gave Africans the right to remove their own governments. Sixty years on, in country after country, that right is being taken back, not by the old colonial powers, and not by soldiers, but by elected men with parliamentary majorities and competent legal drafters.

And it is being done quietly, because nobody outside notices an amendment.

Watch the transitional provisions. That is where the coups are now.

Verified: 18 September 2026.
Togo's constitutional change of April 2024 and the swearing-in of 3 May 2025, the protest deaths reported by Togolese rights organisations from June 2025, Somalia's term extension of March 2026 and the Mogadishu fighting of 3 June 2026, and the gazetting, parliamentary votes and assent of Zimbabwe's Constitution of Zimbabwe Amendment (No. 3) Act between 16 February and 7 July 2026 are as recorded in the sources cited on the country pages linked above. Vote counts for the Zimbabwean bill are those reported by Zimbabwean media and parliamentary records. The assessment that the Zimbabwean amendment required a referendum is that of the Law Society of Zimbabwe and of the lawyers who filed challenges; the government's position is that the Act was lawfully passed by both chambers, and both are recorded. Protest death tolls in Togo are those given by rights organisations and are denied by the government as connected to the protests. Earlier term-limit changes in Uganda, Cameroon, Djibouti, Rwanda, Congo-Brazzaville, Burundi, Egypt, Côte d'Ivoire and Guinea, and the defeated attempts in Nigeria, Zambia, Malawi and Burkina Faso, are as recorded in standard accounts and on the country pages of this site. Ghana's proposed five-year presidential term is a published recommendation under public discussion; this article makes no claim about whether it would apply to any sitting president, and asks the question. This article makes no allegation against any living person beyond matters already on the public record.