While other regions on the continent, especially Central Africa, grapple with incumbent power grabs including “constitutional coups,” the story in West Africa has been more positive in recent years. In addition to Jammeh, the longtime president of Burkina Faso, Blaise Compaore, was forced to leave office in 2014 following a popular uprising, and more orderly transfers of power have occurred in countries like Benin, Nigeria and Ghana. 

Morgan Tsvangirai, Zimbabwe’s longtime opposition leader and head of the Movement for Democratic Change party, announced a new coalition intended to finally topple President Robert Mugabe, who has ruled the country since it attained independence in 1980. 

A few days before the general elections in Kenya, false information (also known as "fake news") continues to circulate on social networks. To try to educate the Kenyans, Facebook has put in place a strategy but the consequences of these false information on the elections seem already inevitable.

"Freedom of expression in Rwanda is virtually nonexistent, unless one is espousing the virtues of President Paul Kagame's leadership," Jeffrey Smith, Executive Director of the NGO Vanguard Africa, told IBTimes UK.

A strikingly toxic campaign ad was unleashed online in Kenya just weeks before national elections – a potentially explosive move in a country where politics and ethnicity are closely aligned. 

Jeffrey Smith, executive director of Vanguard Africa, a nonprofit group that advocates for good governance and free and fair elections in Africa, says the warning signs of “a significant and troubling democratic reversal” in Zambia have long been evident in the successive Patriotic Front governments.

The party has been in power since 2011.

“That President Lungu has been allowed to ratchet up the repression without any real consequence or condemnation has further emboldened his heavy-handedness,” he told Daily Maverick. “History shows, unequivocally, that despots grow strength in the darkness and that is precisely what we are seeing unfold in Zambia.”

My guest today Jeffrey Smith helps spotlight Africa’s “presidents for life.”  His organization, Vanguard Africa, is very new but they already have one success under their belt– assisting the peaceful transition of power from The Gambia’s longtime ruler. He now has his sites set on Africa’s second longest ruling leader, Paul Biya of Cameroon.

We kick off with a discussion of the situation in Cameroon and have great digressions about the Zimbabwe, some deficiencies of the NGO community in D.C. and, of course, the Gambia.

Jeff discusses how and why he came to focus on issues of democracy and human rights in Africa and how he found inspiration from the hero of an anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. If you want to learn how foreign NGOs can help local democracy activists topple longstanding “presidents for life” then have a listen to this Global Dispatches podcast episode.

Jeffrey Smith, the executive director of Vanguard Africa, was one of the international observers closely monitoring the election in Gambia. Smith, who has been an advocate for human rights and democracy in Africa throughout his career, started Vanguard Africa “to shed a necessary spotlight on the need for free and fair processes and why they’re so important to democracy in the short and the long term, particularly in countries like the Gambia that don’t necessarily get the attention we think they deserve.”

Jeffrey Smith, executive director of nonprofit organisation Vanguard Africa, says the centralization of power within dynasties has a profoundly negative effect on the state of democracy in Africa. "What we have today in many instances are family fiefdoms in which the control of state power, and the massive unprecedented looting that often accompanies it, is impoverishing the very citizens these leaders have sworn to protect," he says.