The tragedy of African leadership

By Barrack Muluka

It was this month 40 years ago that the then British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, made his famously prophetic ‘Wind of Change in Africa’ address in Cape Town, South Africa.

Addressing a White’s only Parliament in Apartheid South Africa, Macmillan proclaimed, "The most striking of all the impressions I have formed since I left London a month ago is of the strength of this African national consciousness. In different places it takes different form, but it is happening everywhere. The wind of change is blowing through this continent and, whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact, and our national policies must take account of it."

Macmillan had done for himself and for his country the thing not done.

He had spent a whole month in Africa, visiting the British Commonwealth on the continent. He even visited Ghana which barely two years earlier had attained independence from Britain. In the spirit of the African wind of change, Dr Kwame Nkurumah of Ghana himself, rather blasphemously, pronounced to the people of Africa, ‘Seek ye first the political kingdom, and the rest shall be added unto you.’

The year 1960 became the year of independence. Seventeen newly independent African States were born to join Ghana and Sekou Toure’s Guinea which had set the pace. The 1960s became the decade of independence and hope in Africa. But if the 1960s represented hope and promise, the 1970s were the decade of realism, when honest Africans began accepting their independence was stillborn. For, the 1970s was the decade of military coups de tat on the continent – granted of course that the coups in fact began almost immediately at independence, with the overthrow of Slyvanus Olympio of Togo in the year of independence, 1960.

Today, 50 years tucked away behind us, it is clear something went awfully wrong with Africa’s independence. If Macmillan’s wind of change was a wind of hope, it degenerated into a horrendous hurricane that has done the continent little good. The continent has suffered the very worst that a free person could do to himself. It is often as if the continent fought for freedom so that it would be free to mess itself up without interference from outside. African heads of State and Government have just returned from their annual jamboree in Addis Ababa, speaking the same language and singing the same old tune. Security, famine, ailing economies, African dignity, abracadabra and sundry fudge was on the menu. They sat there with the fugitive President of Sudan, Omar El Bashir, who is increasingly taking on the image of a wanted criminal on the run. El Bashir is a veritable prisoner, who can only gravitate within the confines of the prison that is Africa and the Arab world. If he dares stray outside, he will be arrested at once and be taken to The Hague, to face criminal justice over Darfur. Bashir brings alive the Portuguese old practice of sending to Africa, over centuries gone, convicted criminals from Lisbon.

It was common practice for a judge in Lisbon to proclaim to an accused person in court, ‘This court finds you guilty as accused. Accordingly, the court sentences you to serve five years imprisonment in Africa’. The guilty man would then be brought to Angola, Mozambique, Sao Tome and Principe, or Cape Verde, where he led an apparently normal life, except that he could not leave the colony before ‘serving’ the full sentence.

Such is the lot of a man like Sudan’s President. And it is becoming the lot of an increasing number of African notables, those who are ‘banned’ from Western countries, including those who will soon be sought after from Kenya by Luis Moreno-Ocampo.

They may behave around as if they are such important people, furnishing flashy and opulent lifestyles. But they are in many ways just edified honourable criminals on the run. African heads of government hug and wine and dine with suspected mass murderers in the same fashion you sit at a table with a character who has ‘gone to the toilet’ in his trousers.

Even as flies increasingly hover around his soiled and wet sagging trousers, you continue eating with him, now waving away the flies from your food, now greedily thrusting food into your mouth, then laughing out loudly at some dry joke. Initially you pretend not to notice the odoriferous smell from your friend’s toilet in the trousers. Then you get used to the smell. You might even miss the smell and the flies, if the source were to be taken away.

Such is the tragedy of African leadership, 50 years after independence. We clearly made a false start with rudderless leadership, devoid of the slightest makings of pride and dignity. Certainly there was no such sense in the national consciousness that Macmillan spoke of in 1960. For, how do you sit at table with a dozen or so men who have ‘gone to the toilet’ in their trousers and continue eating as if nothing has happened? Worse still, if someone should want to change El Bashir’s stinking nappies, Africa’s eating chiefs will be up in arms. What is the reason? We do not know who will explode in his trousers, next. And so the continent is full of sagging VIP trousers – soiled with political toilet and sundry ejected wet stench – hugging, laughing, wining and dining in VIP places. Where will the true wind of change come from?

—The writer is a publishing editor and media consultant. [email protected]