THE tradition that many countries have of limiting presidential terms in office to two is relatively new. It was started by the Americans following the death of wartime President Franklin Roosevelt who was elected four times; death prevented him from taking up more than a couple of months of his fourth term. The 1947 amendment limiting US presidential terms to two has set the standard in so many other countries — in Russia, for example, which is why Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin had to stand down, and in much of Latin America and Africa. Increasingly, however, it is a rule little appreciated by presidents who would like to stay in office a lot longer.

Niger is the latest country to come up with the neat idea of changing the constitution so that the president can run for office again; voters go to the polls there on Tuesday to decide the issue. The presidents of a dozen or so other African states have also changed inconvenient constitutions to suit their political ambitions. On the other side of the Atlantic too, Hugo Chavez finally persuaded Venezuelan voters in February to agree the change so that he can run for office as often as he likes although, in Honduras, President Manuel Zelaya’s attempts to do the same resulted in him being ousted five weeks ago.

It is questionable whether such change genuinely amounts to manipulation as some analysts assert. If voters genuinely want to re-elect someone time and again, should they not be allowed to? No one suggested it was undemocratic when British electors in 1987 voted Margaret Thatcher and in 2005 Tony Blair back into office as prime minister for a third term. British prime ministers are, in terms of political power, on the same level as American or African presidents; they are leaders of the executive.

It is altogether a different matter fixing the results because a political leader does not like the way an election is heading. That is real corruption — and there have been numerous instances of it lately and, sometimes, the culprits have got away with it.

Yet manipulating the system to alter the results is almost as old as politics itself. Changing the criteria by which people count as unemployed so that governments can claim unemployment figures are down is one example. The government in Goa, India, provides another. It has just sacked the head of its swine flu monitoring program because he dared say publicly that the state does not have the funds to carry out the project. The state government did not like the news so it changed the newscaster.

In centuries past, some rulers used to kill the messenger who delivered bad news. Now they just sack them. If they cannot do that, they ignore them — as is the case with the British government and the British Army’s complaints about a lack of equipment and helicopters in Afghanistan.

No doubt, there are those who, because they do not like the news, chose to read another paper. But that will not change the facts. Manipulating elections or ignoring complaints about military equipment or sacking medical officers who tell uncomfortable truths will not alter the basic facts either. And sooner or later, those facts will bite back at those who tried to suppress them.

Disturbing revelation

EXCERPTS from the editorial that appeared in The Independent on Sunday:

Reports by two defectors from Myanmar that the secretive military regime is collaborating with North Korea to build nuclear weapons should send a shudder down everyone’s spines. These are, admittedly, only reports.

Moreover, even if the defectors’ claims prove accurate, Myanmar is still a long way behind North Korea, Libya or even Iran when it comes to acquiring this technology. The target date appears to be 2014.

Nevertheless it is depressing, as well as worrying from a strategic point of view, to conceive of these generals getting their hands on such an important prize in the not-too-distant future.

It is, firstly, a grotesque joke to think of a regime that cannot properly feed, or provide electricity for, its citizens spending millions of dollars on obtaining nuclear technology. The point made by many foreign-based Burmese rights groups is equally important: past experience shows that the acquisition of nuclear arms gives even the most anti-democratic regimes a new aura of legitimacy in the international arena.

North Korea has been an example of this. If ever a country was a candidate for externally imposed “regime change,” this brutal prison camp was it.

But, as the Burma Campaign UK group points out, since Pyongyang acquired nuclear weapons, the emphasis has been on “effectively bribing the regime to give up nuclear weapons, while ignoring human rights.” They also point out that pandering to these paranoid regimes rarely gets the West far. If North Korea’s response to such wooing is anything to go by, the tendency is only to up the ante and demand more concessions.

It would be a pity if the West went down this road with Myanmar too. The regime may well shrug off Western pressure about the lack of democracy there. But the moral sympathy that the outside world has lent Myanmar’s imprisoned pro-democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, has at least kept the issue of Burmese human rights alive.

Another question is whether the Burmese generals can be trusted to use nuclear technology safely or whether, as some experts fear, the likely result is another Chernobyl. The world needs to watch Myanmar closely, and not make the same errors it has made with North Korea.