Gross leadership failure Africa's cause of misery

By: John Mulaa
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[ Posted On: 2008-07-23 ]

African leaders have faced unprecedented scrutiny triggered by events in Zimbabwe and the coincidental African Union annual get together in Egypt. Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, fresh from trashing the electoral process, bludgeoning his opponents and cuffing the voters, declared victory and headed for Egypt. He dismissed concerns over his brutal conduct expressed by a few of his peers by stating a very simple self-evident truth: the leaders are in no moral position to point fingers at him. That stopped Paul Kagames in their tracks. The few voices that persisted, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Botswana, carry little weight. Mugabe did not even bother to respond. The ones that do — South Africa, Nigeria, and hosts Egypt —have acted ambivalently for a good reason. They are not bastions of exemplary governance; they know it, their friends on the continent and elsewhere know it as well but prefer to look the other way for reasons unrelated to deepening of good governance.

Nelson Mandela summed Africa’s problem as leadership failure, an angle that many have adopted as they seek to explain Africa’s tragedy. I did too, until some fellow asked me what this thing called leadership in the African context is, how does it arise, and whether we may be wasting valuable time focusing on areas that experience ought to have shown us, do not hold answers.

How many times has Africa celebrated new leadership only to see it degenerate into the usual psychotic pattern without even a decent interval? Recall the so-called "New Leaders" that so many trumpeted a few years ago? They disappointed in short order. The only new aspect some of them introduced was the sophisticated wielding of violence and intimidation dressed in the garb of democracy.

Nearer home, Kenyans have gone from being among the most optimistic people following a peaceful and promising change of guard in 2002 to some of the most morose, browbeaten by the hydra headed scourges of poverty, state impunity and lack of focus, elite stripping of the State through dubious " legal" means, among others. Kenya’s neighbours are hardly any better. In most cases, they are worse.

The iconoclastic inquirer must seek different explanations and answers, which is what my occasional interlocutor suggests. She writes: "The performance of most countries on the African continent has been similar over the past 50 years. Many have asked, what ails our continent? We can do better than pessimists who lay it on the door of ‘poor leadership’. After all, leaders merely represent the values of the societies they live in or rule. We need to ask ourselves what social, political and economic environment we have nurtured over the past 50 years. It is not simply tribalism, nepotism or clanism that is to blame. It is the societies we have become that define who we are. When we are not blaming leaders, we blame our colonial past or the unfair West. Hardly ever do we take a minute to examine our societies and to criticise ourselves." The observation, commonplace as it might seem, puts Africa’s many problems, including poor leadership, into context. Africans are the authors of their leaders. Even Mugabe has a constituency whose size may be difficult to gauge given the ways polls are conducted over there, but it exists. And it is not restricted to the armed militias that have been rampaging through the country giving a new meaning to the term run-off election, which they mistook to mean running the opposition off and driving voters to the booths. Idi Amin too, had a constituency that lauded his mad policies. It is not uncommon to hear Ugandan revisionist claim that Amin got some things right. Almost certainly, they are referring to Amin’s expulsion of Asians from Uganda, which some applaud to this day.

There are numerous other examples of how Africans participate in the creation of their misery sometimes without linking cause and effect. Legislative chambers the continent over are hardly citadels of shining rhetoric and factories of new and relevant ideas. In some instances, they have turned into dens for divvying up collective resources in the name of the people whose behaviour and attitudes the legislators cite as the cause of their money grab. To a degree, legislators are right. The legislators are us and their behaviours reflect our attitudes and actions.

Having almost entirely bought into this hypothesis, an article by the conservative commentator William Kristol jolted me into re-instating a significant role for leadership in social change. Citing the stirring words in America’s Declaration of Independence, Kristol quotes Thomas Jefferson who wrote "all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are insufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed." Kristol concludes: "the people are conservative. Liberty sometimes requires the bold leadership of a few individuals." Maybe this is what Mandela was referring to when he lamented Africa’s tragic failure of leadership. Mugabe and the rest of them are guilty as charged.

Article Source: http://www.afroarticles.com/article-dashboard

About The Author: John Mulaa is a Researcher and Consultant (World Bank) based in Washington DC. He is also a columnist with the East African Standard. Earlier in his Journalism career, he worked with the Weekly Review (defunct) and the Daily Nation publications in Kenya, as a foreign correspondent.

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