Global South Politics: In Africa, deposed leaders are still sentenced to death even in exile
In September, a military high court sentenced longtime Democratic Republic of the Congo president Joseph Kabila to death, the latest in a string of severe penalties handed down to former leaders in Africa, where many fragile democracies remain prone to insurrections, overthrows, and government overreach.
Kabila was sentenced in absentia for treason, war crimes, crimes against humanity, sexual assault and other grave offences, many of which stem from his alleged collaboration with the Rwanda-backed rebel group M23.
He was also ordered to pay $33 billion in reparations, with $29 billion earmarked for the Congolese state.
Decades before Kabila, Ahmadou Ahidjo, the first president of Cameroon, was similarly sentenced to death in absentia, though for a different reason. His successor, Paul Biya, accused him of staging a failed coup in 1983.
The conviction was the wedge that widened the rift between Ahidjo and Biya, who were former allies and top honchos of the ruling Cameroon National Union. It was even Ahidjo’s resignation that allowed Biya to assume what would be long-held power.
At the time of his sentencing, Ahidjo was living openly in exile in France, unlike Kabila, whose whereabouts are unknown. Biya later commuted the penalty to life imprisonment. Ahidjo died in 1989 in Senegal, where his remains remain, despite Biya’s long-standing pledge — unfulfilled to this day — to allow their return.
Biya eventually commuted the sentence to life imprisonment, and Ahidjo died in 1989 in Senegal, where his remains are still located, despite a longstanding pledge by Biya — who remains in power — to allow his body to return home.
In Chad, the pursuit of justice for former president Hissène Habré proved more complicated.
Rights groups accused him of ordering killings, overseeing torture and rape, and other atrocities that drew international attention. Between 1993 and 2003, Belgian courts attempted to prosecute him, without success.
Chadian courts later sentenced Habré to death in absentia for war crimes and crimes against humanity, charges he dismissed as politically motivated. From exile in Senegal, however, he faced a special tribunal there that convicted him of rape, sexual slavery and responsibility for the deaths of 40,000 people during his rule.
Instead of execution, Habré was sentenced to life in prison in Dakar’s Prison du Cap Manuel. The verdict was historic: the first time one country’s courts tried the former leader of another for crimes against humanity. Habré died in 2021, aged 79.
These cases underscore how, across Africa, fallen leaders often remain entangled in the politics they once shaped — judged in absentia, pursued abroad, or posthumously remembered through sentences never carried out.
This story is written and edited by the Global South World team, you can contact us here.
