Evil and virtue in African leadership after Mandela

In the past week or so, Nelson Mandela and Sésé Seko Mobutu found themselves in the same discussions. With much of the reporting on Mandela’s death focusing on the supposed hypocrisy of African leaders in mourning Mandela, it was as if a dichotomy of African leadership had emerged, with Mandela on the one hand and the likes of Mobutu and Idi Amin on the other. For me, the attractiveness of the exchanges lay in their simultaneous capturing of what is right and wrong about human nature.Questions about whether Africa will ever get another Mandela are ultimately about African leadership. Truth be told, as long as the continent remains caught up in massive poverty, questions about its leadership will persist, especially now that we know the critical role leadership plays in the development processes.Over the past two decades we have discovered that transformational leadership successfully mobilises resources at its disposal in the interest of improving the socioeconomic conditions of the ordinary citizen. To a degree this realisation explains the leadership training initiatives that have been in vogue over the last decade.In 2010 President Obama set up the Young African Leaders Initiative (YALA). The programme was intended to ‘invest in the next generation of African leaders.’ More specifically, it would give ‘support to young African leaders as they spur development and prosperity, strengthen democratic governance, and enhance peace and security across Africa.’ At least 1,200 Africans screened as potential leaders have benefited from this programme at a cost of $100 to $200 million dollars.One is also reminded of the ‘great airlifts’ of the 1960s. Back then, the ideological battles of global super powers were much more overt than they are today. As the East-West cold war antagonists sought influence over Africa, many African students were offered scholarships to study in the Soviet Union and the United States and Western Europe.In Kenya, the struggle for the African mind played itself out through local representations of Tom Mboya and Jaramogi Oginga Odinga (Raila’s father) as capitalist and communist, respectively. According to a recent story in Kenya’s Daily Nation, Prof. Wangari Maathai, the intellectual-activist, and Barack Obama’s father are some of the beneficiaries of ideologically driven education schemes. In those days, the enemy was either capitalist or communist. Today we are all capitalists.However, the leadership grooming schemes then – and now – are alien in nature. Some beneficiaries are distanced from the local conditions their potential leadership is intended to cure.In South Africa, it was the search for solutions to locally generated problems afflicting society that gave rise to Mandela and other luminaries of his generation of anti-apartheid activists. Similarly, leaders elsewhere in Africa must identify the social ills afflicting their respective societies and the skills required to organise and mobilise efforts to cure them.In other words, important as they may be as forums for gaining exposure to practices elsewhere, it is doubtful another Mandela will be groomed in externally generated and driven leadership programmes or seminars. And when I talk of another Mandela, I do not mean the secular saint the great man was deemed to be. Rather, what I have in mind are transformational leaders.Mandela had unique human qualities and his conduct often reflected the condition of man at his most virtuous: Integrity, humility, kindness, and an exceptional sense of what it takes to reconcile adversaries. It enabled him to resist the temptation to label his past tormentors as enemies, preferring instead to extend a hand of friendship and rally them for the common cause of nation building.However, the circumstances that brought Mandela to prominence bequeathed him a historical role that may be different from that required of his contemporaries.That’s why it is more meaningful to measure a leader by the unique set of circumstances that history has plunged him in. This is the only way to know who belongs where on that continuum of evil and virtue.

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Evil and virtue in African leadership after Mandela