CAIPHUS KGOSANA | Enough fine words and smart suits. African leaders have a lot to answer for

Editor’s note: This story was originally published in Sunday Times Daily earlier in 2020, and is being republished as part of the editors’ choice edition.

There was a rare dose of good news for Kaizer Chiefs over the weekend of November 28. The PSL whipping boys registered a rare victory against Cameroonian league champions PSD Bamenda in a CAF Champions League preliminary round first leg match played in the west of the country. Chiefs are flirting with relegation here at home, but you wouldn’t believe this judging by how wildly their supporters celebrated on social media after that win in Cameroon.

I found it interesting that the bosses at Naturena chose to embrace the CAF Champions League this time around, given their reluctance in the past to partake in African club competition. Who would blame them, given the shambolic state of football on the continent, and the nightmarish logistical and travel costs of traversing a vast continent? I once flew to Gabon via France because there were no direct flights from Johannesburg and limited continental connections. Having to transit twice via Paris, I spent more time travelling than attending the conference I had been invited to.

How do we remain optimistic about this continent when so many of its leaders are a perpetual disappointment? The AU, which SA chaired until recently, produces reams of endless copy on bettering the continent and improving the lot of its people. Its leaders put on their finest suits and attend endless meetings where they pay lip service to the development of the continent, and then go back home to steal some more from their people, to oppress them even further, and use every imaginable to trick in the book to cling onto power.

Yoweri Museveni, who’s been in power in Uganda since 1986, has effectively banned his rivals from campaigning in the January elections, stopping just short of outlawing political contestation altogether. At least 37 people died after violent clashes between his security forces and opposition protesters. It’s the height of insanity when people have to die for you to remain in office at all costs.

It’s the height of insanity when people have to die for you to remain in office at all costs.

But even younger leaders that carried so much hope at the beginning are displaying a heavy handedness that is characteristic of the Africa of old. Ethiopia’s Abiy Ahmed won international acclaim and a Nobel Peace Prize for re-establishing civility with Eritrea after decades of wars and diplomatic silence between the neighbours.

Now how does one explain his decision to toss all that goodwill aside by declaring a senseless war in the Tigray region, where civilians are being murdered and displaced in the most brutal manner?

Next door in Zimbabwe, Emmerson Mnangagwa offered us a glimpse of hope, of a better future for our battered neighbour when he marched the elderly Robert Mugabe out of office after four decades of madness. But Mnangagwa has gone Mugabe-lite on his people, suppressing dissent and imprisoning journalists and activists.  

Maybe I’m being too negative. Angolan president João Lourenço has pleasantly surprised. As soon as he ascended to office, he set about dismantling the Jose Eduardo Dos Santos’ nepotistic kleptocracy. He has thrown the book at the Dos Santos family, which used the country’s oil and mineral riches as their own personal bank account. Isabel Dos Santos, the former president’s daughter whose $2bn (R30.5bn) business empire was amassed through lucrative state oil and telecoms contracts, is now facing a raft of economic crime charges including money laundering, forgery and influence peddling. Maybe Lourenço, who has made fighting graft his presidential mission, might prove to be the kind of leader this continent has been thirsting for — honest, incorruptible, democratic, truly concerned about the welfare of his people and the development of his nation. I won’t hold my breath.

Paul Kagame of Rwanda has performed miracles when it comes to developmental leadership, but still exhibits worrying behaviour when it comes to human rights and the irrational paranoia of a securocrat.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no Afro-pessimist. I strongly believe that this continent, with its majority young population and abundance of natural resources, can prosper with the right leadership at the helm. That it is, as Colin Coleman — former Goldman Sachs Africa head and lecturer at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs at Yale University — once described it, “the last frontier of global growth”.

But that growth will remain elusive as long as big men still call the shots. As former US president Barack Obama told the Ghanaian parliament in 2009: “Africa does not need strongmen, it needs strong institutions.”