Africa needs more female presidents

I JUST ADDED Joyce Banda to my list of favourite people. First she takes an £11,000 pay cut, settling for £26,000 a year and now she’s made good on her promise to sell off the presidential jet and fleet of luxury cars accumulated by her predecessor Bingu wa Mutharika. I love this woman and trivial as this may sound, I’m putting it down to her sex. You know what they say about women being mothers of nations. We need more female presidents not just in Africa but across the world. Women are not only caring and nurturing but also have a common sense approach to everything. I like to think that a woman would run the presidency the way she does her home. If you don’t believe women would do a better job, take a look at the men ruining, not running our continent. The one thing they’ve excelled at is plundering resources while the natives of their countries starve, lack clean water, medication, proper housing and other basic amenities. Where do I start? Angola where José Eduardo dos Santos handed control of the country’s $5 billion sovereign wealth fund to his son Filomeno dos Santos while his daughter Isabel Dos Santos just made the Forbes list as Africa’s richest woman, worth more than a billion dollars? I don’t need me to tell you where that came from. Forbes Magazine needs to stop profiling these thieves. In my opinion, all this does is reassure other despots that they’re not the only ones turning the presidency into a family business. How else do you explain Teodorin Obiang’s millions of pounds worth of cars, art and luxury mansions? The First Son of Equatorial Guinea has one such mansion in Paris with 101 rooms. Word is that taps in this house are gold and jewel-encrusted. It also boasts a marble dining room with coral pillars and a 20-yard glass table! I don’t even have a ‘proper’ dining table but I guess when your dad has been in power for over 30 years in an oil-rich country, you deserve the best things money can buy. Good thing there’s an arrest warrant out for this one. Meanwhile, in Central African Republic, President Francois Bozizé’s son, Francis Bozizé was until recently serving as Deputy Defence Minister. The president’s sister, Yvonne M’Boïssona was first appointed Minister of Tourism and is now Minister of Water, Forests, Hunting, Fishing and the Environment. She’s literally sitting on wealth. The story is not different in Cameroon, where President Paul Biya is known to enjoy luxurious holidays, most notably one in 2009 in France that allegedly cost $40,000 a day on 43 hotel rooms, or Zimbabwe where ‘Gucci’ Grace Mugabe is famous for her lavish shopping sprees in Europe. The good people in Europe and the US did well banning her from travelling there. And then of course there’s Libya and Egypt. While there’s been a change of guard in these two, the resources plundered over four decades may never be recovered, thanks to overseas accounts and connections in high places who provided the safe havens in the first place. It makes me sick that while millions continue to live in abject poverty, a few individuals just keep taking and taking and there’s nothing we can do about it. I have no problem with people acquiring a few possessions because the very nature of the office demands that. But these guys are just greedy and selfish. I worry for my native Uganda. The so-called oil wealth will only line the pockets of the same people who’ve already taken too much from our country through kickbacks and dirty contracts. We need our own Spring or Occupy movements to reclaim our various nations’ plundered wealth. To be continued…