Poor Leadership, Bad Followership, and Western Imperialism: The Three Sources of our Woes

Quite often, we are told that the problems in the countries of Africa are solely due to bad leadership. However, more recently, others have asserted that our problems are due to bad followership, since it is the followers who elect bad leaders. What if both those elected and those who elected them are not wholly to blame? What if there is a third factor that is seldom highlighted?

I have seen people condemn politicians for corruption, only for they themselves to act terribly corrupt in their own spheres – civil servants stealing stationery at work, teachers and lecturers sexually exploiting their students, middle class families grossly underpaying their househelps, etc. I have seen many people vote for a grossly incompetent and corrupt politician simply because he is from their own community. I have seen people maim or even kill their compatriots simply for holding contrary political opinions. I have heard them say that it is alright for their own to be declared winner even when all the evidence points to the fact that they actually lost but used state power to get themselves declared "winner".

Yet the high primium often placed on electing the right leaders is itself problematic because of the grossly flawed nature of our elections - an exercise riddled with red tape and outrageous requirements for big cash to run for office, reducing the masses to mere voting pawns. I have said much about this in "Elections: A Major Obstacle to Democracy in Kenya" ( https://www.theelephant.info/analysis/2022/09/30/elections-a-major-obstacle-to-democracy-in-kenya/ ).

Most crucially, I disagree with the "leaders-people" dichotomy. I have read theories of leadership and theories of followership, each of them claiming it is the solution to our morass. Nevertheless, both groups of theories ignore neo-colonialism which Kwame Nkrumah explicated in Neo-Colonialism: The Last Phase of Imperialism. Nkrumah pointed out that a neo-colony has all the trappings of sovereignty, but due to its economic dependency, its laws and policies are determined by the erstwhile colonisers. Neglecting to lay blame on neo-colonialism is partly due to the conflation of "independence" and "liberation" which is fuelled by the Kiswahili word "uhuru" used to translate both.

As scholars of decoloniality have pointed out, independence simply gives a country a flag, a national anthem, national anthem national currency, a national coat of arms, and a seat at the United Nations (note, for example, that traditional political formations in Africa had no flags and national anthems).

On the other hand, liberation enables a country to decide whether or not it wants a flag, a national anthem, a national currency, a national coat of arms, and a seat at the United nations, etc. In short, many analyses on leadership and followership ignore current geopolitics dominated by the West. For example, we have repeatedly seen leading candidates in presidential races in various countries on our continent dashing to Chatham House to “validate” their candidature.

Yet it is true that if we were more politically conscious, we would put a lot of shenanigans to a stop. Nevertheless, however committed to high political ideals we as citizens were, if the structures of Western imperialism remain intact in the realms of economics, politics, education, religion, etc., we will never get out of the woods. Remember Thomas Sankara telling an OAU meeting that if all countries in Africa rose up against debt slavery they would succeed, but if he alone tried to do it he would not even be alive to attend the next OAU meeting? Point? Western imperialism is always ready to eliminate those of our people who exhibit true, liberating leadership.

So let us be tough on ourselves and on those who hold political offices, demanding the highest standards of ethics from ourselves and from them, but let us not exonerate Western imperialism for the major part it has played, and continues to play, in our woes since the fifteenth century through four hundred years of slavery, about seventy of classical colonialism, and now more than sixty of neo-colonialism. Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is an excellent text in this regard.

In sum, it is not only bad leadership or bad followership or even both to blame for our woes, but rather leadership, followership, and, above both, Western imperialism.