Africa deserves better leaders

This whole world, especially the African continent, is fast running out of leadership material.

When you look around, it is very easy to see successful men and women who have “made it” in politics or business, whatever that means.

In fact, the number of people, especially in the African community, who have made it in the last three centuries of imperialism and colonisation has never been greater than what it is now.

But success and achievement in whatever field that African people have now been allowed to break into, especially politics and business should not be confused with leadership.

The quality of leadership is very low.

One would have guessed that with the release of Nelson Mandela and other Rivonia trialists, return of exiles like Oliver Tambo and Chris Hani and the unbanning of the liberation blacks would have equipped the South African nation, for example, with inspiring leadership material.

But the opposite seems to have happened.

Instead, today there is an acute absence of men and women of calibre who understand that leadership is about selflessness, it puts the interests of the people and the country first.

What we generally have now in the African continent are countless successful super-achievers who are about “I, me and myself first”.

We need to ask ourselves questions about how the African continent ended up in this catastrophic dead end when we come to the issue of qualitative leadership.

There is no doubt that just like the US, we need our own Barrack Obama — someone who is exemplary, visionary, loveable, inspirational, hard-working and makes a difference.

A serious response to this African leadership crisis will, of course, include the acknowledgement that there has been no focus on building a new generation of leadership that was trained and educated to take over from the likes of Mandela, Tambo, Hani, Robert Sobukwe, Steve Biko, Jomo Kenyatta, Julius Nyerere, Patrice Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah, Seretse Khama, to name a few.

As a result, what has emerged is what is considered the “black diamonds” who largely constitute the so-called black middle class.

Yet the emergence of the middle class is not a new phenomenon in the African community.

Perhaps what is new is the content and character, aspirations and orientations of these men and women who were born after 1960, which marked a rise in the number of African countries gaining independence.

Ironically, in South Africa the significance of 1960 as a year lies in the aftermath of the Sharpeville Massacre, heightened apartheid repression, the rule of fear and entrenchment of self-doubt and inferiority complex among native African people, in general.

Of course, the Black Consciousness generation emerged to serve as examples of self-determination, self-love, pride and resistance but they were soon crushed by apartheid repression and internecine warfare in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Generally speaking, the last 50 years of African independence, freedom and democracy have delivered a different variety of leaders whose preoccupation is not only individual self-interest but material worship.

The countries are plagued by elected leaders whose sole aim is to enrich themselves through the gutting of state coffers.

One does not need to read Michela Wrong’s It’s Our Turn to Eat about the failure of African leadership in Kenya, for example. This problem of failure of African leadership is pervasive.

In South Africa, for example, the last 20 years with Mandela and exiles in our midst there has been a huge jump in the numbers of successful and happy African super-achievers.

Yet this leap in the number of successful super-achievers has not been accompanied by a corresponding jump in the number of men and women who are willing to serve their country without expecting money, position and power in return.

The present-day African leadership and management, if one can call it that, is simply not patriotic and has neither love for country nor its people. They are greedy, selfish and individualistic.

To put it strongly, African leadership and management has married into a decadent capitalist and racial economic system. They are not doing anything better than the former colonialists.

For the most part, today’s African leaders in both politics and business, particularly, lack vision for the future. They are largely concerned with their own comfort and security and discourage the development and growth of a better country in the African continent.

It is for this reason that there is not a single African leader who has emerged with the potential to rally together the whole continent with the promise, hope and optimism for a better life.

Needless to say, the current crop of African leadership and management, especially those who are over 60 years of age, are a product of apartheid and the West.

Much of the values they have internalised are neither the product of the struggle idealism nor the teaching of their own communal culture and ubuntu — a heritage which espouses selflessness through a communal spirit.

Yet not everything is bad in African leadership and management.

It is a good sign that there is a glimmer of hope.

If we look hard enough, there are still a handful of people — like President Jacob Zuma, for instance — who inspire hope in the re-cultivation of quality African leadership.

Of course, Zuma is not perfect but there seems to be an intuitive connection with and unflinching commitment to satisfying the aspirations of the grassroots communities in everything that he does.

It would seem that the whole African continent is looking up to him for leadership and hopes that his rise will mark a turning point. In fact, the advent of Zuma marks a very important step in the right direction.

The leadership of Mandela and other former prison graduates like Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, for example, is approaching its end. These African patriarchs have had a chance to do what no man has done before by getting into government and power when they had no clue what to do.

To a very large extent, they have managed to pull off the impossible.

But it is time that, in their dusk of their lives, they go out of their way to cultivate a new leadership and management of government that will be based on merit and promote excellence in performance.

This continent has got great potential and deserves better when it comes to a leadership role in the world.

When it comes to the world’s most popular leader today, that is Barrack Obama, it is his African blood and heritage that has given him his advantage.

Yes, Africans can give the world a more human face.

But that will only happen when they stop imitating or living up to the expectations of former colonialists.