| FAILURE OF AFRICAN LEADERSHIP ON THE CONTINENT |
| Leadership Megalomania
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The leadership that emerged in post-colonial Africa was given to schizophrenic posturing and arrant sloganeering. "People's Revolution! People's Power!" they chanted. But they never dreamt of giving their own people the power to remove an incompetent government they did not want. "Freedom for the blacks in South Africa!" they rightly demanded. But not for their own black people in their own black African countries. Too many of Africa's post-colonial leaders were afflicted with intellectual astigmatism and displayed a singular lack of cognitive pragmatism and a generally dysfunctional perspicacity of the process of development. They spoke of expanding external trade, but not internal trade; external causes of their economic crises, but not internal causes; attracting foreign investment, but not domestic investment; colonial plunder and exploitation, but not their own Swiss bank accounts.
It is imperative to draw a clear distinction between the African people (the peasants) and their modern leaders or elites. Elite failure is not synonymous with failure of Africans as a people. The modern leadership, with few exceptions, is revolting caricature of the traditional leadership Africa has known for centuries under its kings and chiefs. The true African chief is no despot. Even illiterate peasants could see through the transparent hypocrisy of modern African leaders and elites. In fact, in East Africa, they coined an apt Swahili name for them: the wabenzi -- men of Mercedes Benz.
It is true the Old Guard -- the nationalist leaders such as Nkrumah, Kaunda and Nyerere -- struggled gallantly to win independence for their people at great personal sacrifices, and their people were profusely grateful. But winning independence for their countries gave none of them an inviolable right to impose themselves on their people and treat their countries as their own personal property. Further, the skills required to wage a struggle for independence should not be confused with those needed to govern a country and run an economy successfully. These two types of skill are not necessarily identical.
Flexibility, tolerance of divergent opinion and the intellectual maturity to accept criticism were indispensable qualities required to govern an African country well. Most of the Old Guard lacked these qualities. They were rigid, intolerant and stubborn. Nkrumah, for example, jailed his critics under the 1958 Preventive Detention Act, while Nyerere for 24 years stuck bull-headedly to a "socialist" path even when things were going so obviously wrong.
As a result, many of the Old Guard led their countries down the road to tyranny and economic ruin and were subsequently booted out or assassinated in military coups. But the soldiers who replaced them were even more egregious. They unleashed savage brutality against their people, ruined one African country after another with brutal efficiency and looted national treasuries with military discipline -- Benin, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan, Uganda, Zaire and others.
Political oppression, civil war, ruinous strife, and chaos have ravaged Africa, leaving the continent littered with human carcasses. Armed with a few bazookas, "useless idiots" blew up their country and people on behalf of foreign ideologies.1 The most bizarre of Africa's civil wars was Ethiopia's, which raged for more than 28 years and where the combatants were mostly Marxists. Frustrated by his inability to inflict a crushing defeat and in a desperate effort to win public sympathy, a beleagured Comrade Mengistu Haile Mariam pleaded: "If you think my brand of Marxism is bad, wait till you see theirs" (The New York Times, Feb. 23, 1990). Black neo-colonialists never questioned the relevance of Marx to indigenous Africa.
Even more unbelievable, the wanton slaughter of Africans was occurring right before the very eyes of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) at its headquarters in Addis Ababa. But this pompously arcane body only recognized oppression when it wore a Western or white face. Each year, the OAU spent millions on glitzy anniversary celebrations, unperturbed by the senseless carnage in Ethiopia.
Having had enough of this callous insensitivity, Mundua Yusuf Alai of Khartoum, Sudan, berated:
The OAU sees itself as striving to unify Africa and one of its responsibilities should be to tackle problems affecting the states and peoples, as in South Africa, the Libya and Chad dispute, and so on. But the OAU has categorically failed in its roundtable work. Even in the country where it was born, Ethiopia, there are several guerrilla groups fighting. But the OAU talks of sending troops to fight the apartheid regime in South Africa.
How will the OAU end the war phenomenon if it purposely forgets the other African internal conflicts -- Ethiopia, Sudan, Uganda, Mozambique, and Angola. No African leaders, past or present, have broached this issue for discussion. If they can't address themselves to these issues why bother going to OAU meetings? The failure to solve these problems shows that the OAU will find it even more difficult to tackle South Africa...It appears the OAU is bent on condoning the killings of the African people by unacceptable and incompetent leaders, poverty, and disease (New African, August, 1988; p.4.)
Africa, often called the cradle of humanity, now has more uprooted persons than any other continent. Though exact numbers are hard to come by, the United Nations estimated in 1994 that 22 million Africans were refugees -- displaced by strife and drought (Africa Recovery, April-Sept, 1994; p.4). That figure constituted over half of the world's refugees. Violence has been the root cause of most dislocation, especially in southern Africa, where 400 children die each day, according to the United Nations. "In every corner of Africa, you will find the refugees," said Godfrey R. Sabati, who was responsible for the refugee program in Zimbabwe in 1987. "It is a terrible sociological problem. These people have not only lost their homes, many have lost hope."
1 This terminology is derived from Lenin's use of "useful idiots."
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George Ayittey,
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