It seems to me that every African knows that the continent has issues, and, were you to ask any one of them what problems their continent faces, the number one response would be “bad leadership”. If you had asked me the same question sometime ago, I would probably have given you the same answer. But for a while now, I have been thinking about the whole bad leadership thing quite seriously, and why the problem is so particular to Africa.
If you were to carry out a poll in Africa in a bid to answer the question as to why Africans think the continent has bad leadership, I suspect the answers you will receive will involve corruption, the desire to hold power, and, for the particularly frustrated, probably wickedness. Listening to some people talk about Africa’s leadership will probably leave you with the impression that the Devil lives in Africa, or that he at least spends a good amount of his time choosing and mentoring the continent’s leaders.
I do not claim that these are invalid concerns, but then, other “developed” nations have had corrupt leaders at some point in their history. They have had dictators too, and people who did terrible things to their people, and to people in other nations. Even though it will probably make for a nice story, Hitler was not African, and neither was Stalin, or G.W Bush. However, the general consensus seems to be that they were all bad leaders. But then Germany and Russia cannot be compared to most African countries in terms of any indexes of development, and neither can the United States.
What is it then about Africa that makes the entire continent so affected by bad leadership? What does bad leadership do to Africa that it has not done, or, cannot do, to Europe, or the Americas?
My initial conjecture was that the intensity of the “badness” of African leaders may be stronger than that of leaders elsewhere. Maybe leaders in Africa just need one chance for them to do world-class damage, while the others, well, they do damage, but on a smaller scale. But that doesn’t really explain much, as both World Wars, amongst many other world crises, were not caused by African leaders, and, even today, most of the crises in the world have very little ties to Africa. So, leaders everywhere also do world-class damage.
However, while discussing this with a few friends, one of them suggested that the difference between Africa and the others is that Europe has had just a few bad leaders, while, for Africa, bad leadership is the norm. So, according to him, the norm for Africa is to produce bad leaders, while the norm for other nations is to produce good leaders. For some reason, I thought it was a more interesting hypothesis, as it would probably imply that there is some compounding going on… everybody just contributes a little portion of bad leadership, and then, over time, the effects just compound and results in a very underdeveloped Africa. If that were true, then bad leadership is not Africa’s problem per se, but merely a symptom of a much deeper problem.
Metaphorically speaking, if Africa were some sort of social system, we could say the input to this system is the babies born to the continent, and the output, well, is the adults the continent manages to produce, and, for the purpose of this essay, the leaders the continent produces. From every observation, for over 50 years now, our system has managed to build a reputation for producing only one kind of output: bad leaders.
Now, from a more scientific viewpoint, if a system produces only one kind of output regardless of the input, the reasonable question to ask would be what property of the system causes it to transform both good and bad input into only bad output.
Unless of course, there is only bad input. But then, that would mean that all Africans are bad, which simply cannot be true. Period! [1]
I find it interesting that very few people have given any thought to this (as evidenced by the scarcity of literature that supports this viewpoint [2], and asked questions as to why for more than 50 years since Africa became independent, “good” leaders, if any, have been the exception, and not the norm, as it seems to have been for the rest of the world.
So I listened to this guy, Fred Swaniker, talking about Africa’s leadership problems, and I found his hypothesis quite interesting. According to him, Africa’s leadership problems are due to the weaknesses of the institutions in Africa. Educational institutions, judiciary institutions… are all weak, which give single leaders tremendous power over the fates of the nations they lead. This resonated with me, because his theory explains quite a lot of the corruption and power hoarding we see everyday in Africa. It also explains why other nations easily survive bad leadership. They have strong institutions, and so one leader cannot simply do as he pleases.
It also comforts me somehow, because it definitely means Africans are not terrible human beings who just want to kill themselves and steal their nation’s money. Saying that other nations have better leaders than African leaders is probably quite right, but not to the extent that is projected in popular culture and the media.
People usually choose to lead because they want to make a difference on some scale that is bigger than the personal, and they need some form of authority to do so. It is therefore safe to assume that a person ambitious enough to become president of a country or at least hold some political office like power, or at least understands it enough to know that it can be used to effect social change on a large scale.
Relinquishing that power should therefore imply one of the following:
- She is tired,
- She has run out of ideas
- She simply has no choice.
I’m very willing to discard the first two options, as
- There are plenty of tired men (I don’t know about women, actually) running countries and companies everywhere, and leaders everywhere, even in the “developed” countries, run for second and third terms. The idea that people get tired of power and authority is counterintuitive enough in its own right.
- Also, every society has problems, and the solutions to some problems cause problems of their own. Because there is never a perfect human system, there will always be ways to improve, and, consequently, anyone at the helm of leadership of such a system will inevitably get a bird eye’s view of things, and see ways in which the system can be improved. So, relinquishing power because of a lack of ideas doesn’t make much sense either.
The only sensible explanation, therefore, is that people relinquish power because they have no choice.
Which explains the longevity of African leaders in power, as they seem to have a choice as to whether to step down or to stay in power. In other nations, the choice has already been made for them (In the US for example, the president must step down after 8 years, whether they like it or yes).
So, the difference, according to Fred’s theory, is that while leaders in Africa can pursue their desires without inhibition or fear of repercussion, it simply is not possible elsewhere, because of the strength of the various institutions. So, African leaders are not necessarily bad, they are simply unrestrained. And while we may criticize them for not being disciplined enough to avoid the temptations of power, it is important to realize the tremendous amount of discipline and willpower it takes to have all that power, and no control, and have to handle all that with just the strength of your will.
To be clear, I am not undermining the problems that Africa is facing. The whole point of this essay is to get people to consider other, albeit more subtle, possibilities. It could be that these leaders have tremendous will to do great things, but simply don’t know what to do, or just don’t have the discipline to avoid the corruption of power when they get to hold office. Simply ranting about how terrible they are, while probably a satisfying endeavor, is not a plausible solution in itself. Also, reducing all the problems the continent faces to bad leadership is probably oversimplifying a very complex problem with plenty of nuance.
The question to be answered now is whether those institutions are truly weak, and, if they are, why this is the case. But that is probably the subject of another discussion. And, like they say in Nigerian movies, watch out for part 2.
Notes: [1] I was asked to justify this statement. Well, I could argue very passionately about why Africans are (probably) the best people on earth, but that is not the point of this essay. For now, I am content to admit that I am biased in Africa’s favor, because, of course, I am African.
[2] A friend pointed out to me that the absence of literature is not synonymous with lack of thought. I agree, there is a possibility that people have actually given this some thought. But why would many people think about some issue, and (almost) nobody say anything about it?
Thanks to Mbu Waindim, Tonge Mabel, Sofiat Olaosebikan and Augustine Annan for reading drafts of this.