21st Afri-CAN leadership demands

The 21st Century presents a good opportunity for leadership emergence in Africa.

Simply put, the continents' problems are it's very opportunities if a transformational and adaptive leadership emerges, such a leadership should be anchored on achieving the common goals of its society.

Africa's resources, the unprecedented youth bulge, growth projections, penetration of new ICTs and our increased awareness of the importance of indigenous knowledge are all indications of how the continent can take strides in this century and possible become the leader in growth and development.

Repositioning Africa demands for continuous leadership emergence, inter-generational dialogue and critical thinking on how existing challenges can be transformed into opportunities.

The obtaining challenges require the leadership's ability to utilize wisdom of the majority rather than the intelligence of the minority. Something that questions the fundamentals of our perception and practice of democracy. We need to make democracy work for African!

Although the existing model of representative democracy (with its foreign roots) is premised to promote the rule of the majority, for Africa it seems to perpetuate dictatorship of a minority by creating an elite ruling class that detaches itself from the rest of its people the moment that it gets elected into power.

Beyond elections, we need to develop leaders and systems that promote participatory democracy where there is collective visioning and dialogue on what Africa needs and the architecture of how to get there.

It is time we focus on creating leadership at multiple levels, something that we have already identified in African wisdom as captured in our thinking that "one finger can't crush lice".

 A leader no matter how great, cannot single handedly change situations and as such we need a slight departure from the thinking of the "great leader", "the mwalimu", "the father" or the "wise old leader".

Another critical challenge for the continent's leadership is how to create effective succession processes in our leadership. The dynamism of the world around us require that opportunities for the emergence of leaders be deliberately created.

We also need to rethink how we see conflict we need to depart from the current thinking were difference mean "bad or worse than" towards seeing diversity as our strongest characteristics that can enhance our collective creativity.

All these considerations will amount to nothing as long as we continue to perceive leadership as something about "them". More often than not we are critical of political leaders and we criticize them for all sorts of bad leadership tendencies without taking time to look into ourselves for a minute.

During the Leadership and Society training by the African Leadership Centre in collaboration with OSISA, one thing came out strongly that leadership start with us (you dear reader and me).

Africa needs a new generation of leaders who focuses more on making influence rather than earn a position of authority.

The power of this new generation of leaders is not positional power but rather it is the power to influence from where ever they are in whatever capacity they find themselves. 

Our Naked Society

We have lost our social cohesion as a society.

Our collective history has failed to mold us into a society anchored on genuine unity and positive peace.

When I grew up, our fathers (in their wisdom) used to run their own burial "societies" which have now been replaced by the modern day funeral services.

With modernity we have lost the communal responsibility of mourning with each other.

These days a proper funeral is only possible when one has a funeral policy, even in people's last moments- the transactional demeanor is more important than the relational responsibility.

Back in the days, our mothers used to have a simple mechanism for collective saving they called "round". The idea of rounds was enhanced to joint priority setting and assistance of each other in time of need in what they also called "societies".

As young men we would play football in community teams, had study groups where we would effectively utilise the thin collection of books among ourselves or share books we would have borrowed from the library.

During our high school days, we started  a group and named it "Troika". We would sit by the corner drainage at sunset to comment on social issues, advice each other and through satire challenge bad behaviour.

It is through discussions in Troika meetings that I picked some early lessons about adulthood. It was a space for sharing our individual plight with people of similar problems and aspirations. Back then there was always a society around me.  

In those subtle ways we had good models of social cohesion, where anybody's business was everyone's business.

It is back in those days when a  funeral would mean life stops for the whole neighborhood  We would not even switch on the radio and play loud music in our cars passing bye as we do these days.

Romanticising with the past does not in any way suggest that we had to be stagnant with our social development. Instead we should have taken the multiple lessons from these rich networks and seriously maintain our social cohesion.

In my own view, we have lost what we had back then because of two main reasons:

Firstly, party politics has divided us in bigger ways than what meets the eye.

The trust we bestow in our politicians to effectively represent our collective interests has continuously been betrayed.

Periods of political violence have caused negative peace in us. We see the absence of violence and think that we are enjoying peace when deep down we seethe with anger from unresolved conflicts. The one who perpetrated violence and the one who was a victim both pretend to be at peace with each other whilst both have wounds to bear-visible or not.

Sadly, in political contestations our voice has been taken away. A simple gathering like our "Troika" to discuss social issues or otherwise has been criminalised.

Independent thought or seeing things slightly different has been simplified to mean dissent. We have been schooled to think different mean bad or not good enough.      

Politics has left us convinced that there are people better than all of us whose only qualification is being "liked" by more people and being brave to stand in the rough terrain called politics.

Politics has worsened the divide, it's now more of an anointing or simply is it about economic clout and the need to be better than the rest of men.

Politics has also taken everything from power, decision making, livelihood from the micro level (from you and me) to the macro level (to them).

My second reason to explain why we no longer have social cohesion is nothing more than poverty with its twin cousins of disease and crime.

Now more than ever, our society is worried of the economic value of any action and decision. Social investments are no longer part of our priorities because of poverty or the fear of it.

We have slowly been mutating and now what matters more than anything is our selfish interests and never the collective.

We muscle out each other, out-compete and outwit to gain access to resources, gain the loudest voice and drive the most expensive cars.

Digressing a bit about cars, it is interesting to have a very big population of people driving those big trucks with 3litre engines to work- and work is an office in town or a suburb near town- isn't there something wrong there?

Our fear of taking responsibility of each other's welfare is much rooted in our insecurity. We feel that there is just not enough. It is our fear of poverty that has taught us that social cohesion threatens abundance.

Although we pride ourselves of being a Christian country, we have desisted from one fundamental of Christianity that of loving one another as Christ loved us.

We used to be a community that would help each other but now we cannot hesitate to tramp on each other to achieve our own personal goals.

Our hope lies in recreating the cohesion we once had.                                     

I am not sure whether the new networks that are cyber based will manage to stomach the increasing need for us to be stronger together again, I am not convinced that our politicians will take up the moral obligation of genuinely unifying us again, I am hoping that we become secure enough to stop worrying about the immediate self but start thinking of our common good. 

Have we benefited from youth participation?

My reflections on International youth day.

The International youth day is significant especially now when young people constitute 40% of the 7 billion global population.

Besides their numbers, youth constitute the economic active age group, emerging leadership, the today compliant - simply what others have termed the window of hope.

In countries like Zimbabwe, there is an unprecedented growth of the youth population (15-35 years), causing a "youth bulge" that communities, governments, the civil society and business sector has to comprehend.

Depending on the policies, strategies and systems that are developed to carter for this youth population, countries can either benefit or become more insecure depending on how they deliver to the demands of young people.

Given the global attention on promoting youth participation, harnessing the youth as agents of development and catalysts of sustainable societies remains an illusion.

Although global calls have been made to proclaim "decade of the youth", "year of the youth" and other internationally negotiated documents, the real aggregates of this focus are minimal.

The agenda of youth participation has resulted in a counterproductive culture were systems, regimes or structures have been created to either "feed" young people or "feed on" the young people.

There is an obvious divide of young people that have been "fed" by the status quo and those that have been "fed on".

The justified call for youth participation has created youth "activists" that have become an extension of systems, structures and regimes.

These young people participate in conferences, receive capacity building to the extent of saturation, have access to empowerment resources which they normally abuse as representatives of institutions and interests, they spend much of their time at airports than in communities they supposedly represent.

This group of young people has provided the status quo with a convenient justification that "look there are young people taking part in processes and being consulted".  They symbolise youth participation although most of their sentiments, issues and representation are not rooted in the organic affairs of "real" young people that you would find in communities.

Given that exposure, capacity building and opportunity has crafted in them an art of articulating issues, they dominate public forums and make proclamations of issues that either lack common appeal to young people or have been recycled to the extent of redundancy.

Especially now with the world of social media, there is a mediated reality that is foreign to the bigger population of young people and their discourse lack the ingenuity of real youth or is too emotive towards self gratification rather than common good to young people who are faced with high unemployment, high disease burden, a crippled education systems and political repression.

The youth movement has become a commodity for a minority youth that either have developed the tact of making convenient demands that scatter on real issues or those that can make case on how they can best represent the concerns and aspirations of young people.

The sad reality is that such platforms for articulating the plight of young people are important but unfortunately have been subject to abuse by those that have come to know the rewards of the development sector (perdiums, flights, five star hotels and visibility).

A lot of these proclaimed activists do not find time to interact with young people at the grassroots level, they increasingly distance themselves from the real young people through the convenient excuse of operating at higher levels.

The development architecture has robbed the need for a strong work ethic in these young people who no longer desire to work harder because their time is spent participating or seeking to participate in the lucrative forums.

Hope for the youth movement to become stronger is increasingly becoming difficult to foresee. Benefits from youth participation have been welcomed by those that access shifting attention from issues.

The other group of young people that has been created by the systems, structures and regimes is that which the status quo "feeds on".

This group of young people are the ones whose challenges are articulated in proposals, they are the helpless lot that need aid, support and the mercy of development, they are the "voiceless" who needs advocates and activists to speak on their behalf, they are the gullible who for a T-shirt would pose for a photo for the donor, instigate violence or consider themselves as lucky than the other.

This group of young people are the reason for aid and support not only for their direct benefit but rather for all those that are part of the supply chain. They are part of the approximately 238 million youth who live in extreme poverty of less than $1 a day; they are also the 11.8 million young people who are living with HIV or AIDS, they are the 300,000 child soldiers around the world.

They are the raw materials to the development agenda and they are the blood line to the call for participation.

Although it is their plight that we wish to address, they are marginalised from the public sphere because of real and created "barriers" of language, technology or simply clarity.

The real issue for now is how do we bridge the gap between these two distinct groups of young people especially given the corrupting tendency of the carrot dangled and the obvious stick that cautions those with access to resources to know the potential relapse into abject poverty.

The calls for youth participation have not been anchored on a sustainable model but rather they have ingeniously been created to continue serve the interests of those we sought to question. Participation is convenient and attractive but does not address the multi-faceted challenges youth face.

The youth movement has to take lessons from the women's movement that it is not participation they should celebrate but rather it is power that they should hope to negotiate.

Youth should find themselves in real positions were they are not only limited to influence an agenda but shape the direction and outcomes of development.

The Youth need to reorganise themselves for the common purpose of creating collective power based on their numbers, ideas and influence as the game changers of any future.

They need to increasingly recognise that they can also create so much power by being local but global citizens who learn from one another, create coalitions and identify how issues can be connected as dots of a common thread. 

A touch is a move, or is it?

Growing up we used to play a game called "draft" which was the closest substitute to the then elitist chess.

One of the golden rules of that game was that  “touch is a move”. This principle was adopted to ensure fairness. Each player was allowed to one move at a turn after calculating all possible scenarios. These preconditions meant each move had to be preceded by a clear understanding of implications towards winning or losing the game.

The rule was also punishment to those that misjudge and miscalculate their moves. Another rule was that if one plays wrongly their opponent will have an opportunity to punish them and have an extra chance to play, a scornful "good move".

Looking at the political dispensation today I am wondering whether the touch is a move applies especially now when everyone is either doubtful or convinced of the MDC's move of wanting to disengage from government after participating in the harmonised elections which they lost- rigged or otherwise.

The MDC has made an official announcement that they are regarding the recently held election as null and void- meaning their touch was not a move.

Going by what is circulating, news or opinions, it appears that the MDC had prior intelligence that the election was not going to be free and fair but they still went on to participate.

What then baffles anyone who cares to think differently is why did MDC participate convinced that it was going to be rigged- why make a touch and then decide not to move?

Maybe they considered a counter premise that one cannot judge the fairness of a fight without getting into the ring to fight it out. If so what gains then come from one getting into a ring with a monster fully aware that it would eat them up without even standing a chance?

Would it have been naivety on the part of the MDC that they thought ZANU PF wouldn't turn up to be the monster that they feared it to be all these years given the "intimate" relationship they had within the inclusive government?

Is it not wishful thinking that ZANU PF would at this 9th hour of their life (as symbolised by their candidate), participate in an election in which they knew would not usher victory?

The MDC should have known the opponent that they were dealing with- I think they did but the bravado of pending victory blinded them to think strategically.

The years of working together with ZANU PF should have taught them something- the COPAC experience, the outstanding reforms, the disregard of the office of prime minister, the constitutional court, the ZEC...are all pointers to what ZANU PF is capable of doing.

Or was it an issue of confidence that most people where fully behind them because they give all credit of the stability we enjoyed to MDC and rationally they will "vote for more".

The MDC has been a fierce opponent to ZANU for the last decade and it knows more than anyone that ZANU PF can adopt, create or reinvent any strategy necessary to win an election and gain "legitimacy" to rule.

You could sense it by the silence that befell the announcements of the election results that the country was mourning but unfortunately the collective emotions alone will not change the principle of a touch is a move.

MDC had an opportunity to play the offensive, they were right to demand for the voters roll before elections, they were tactful to demand reforms before the elections and they made sense to request extension of voter registration and postponement of the election. Unfortunately they still fell to the trappings- they made the touch and move.

Some feel that it was difficult to withdraw from the election given that people wanted to strongly participate and dislodge the regime.

It's fair to think so but then the dictates of strategic leadership demands that one thinks beyond the seemingly obvious.

MDC had an opportunity to sway public opinion and influence everyone to understand that they were not going to win this election under the prevailing conditions (isn't this what they are currently doing albeit a little too late-for a touch is a move).

If you ask me, people were prepared to have a prolonged inclusive government than to out rightly give power to ZANU PF as what happened in this harmonised election.

MDC had to cast its eye in the view mirror and remember how in 2008 they were supposed to assume power only to be matched by an unwanted but violent regime that changed a peaceful environment in March into an anarchy by June of the same year, all in the name of gaining political power.

We can mistake ZANU PF for anything else but not for its style of leading by polls. They will play to the gallery on anything else not elections and winning political power. Let's remember that in each passing year these guys would claim that they will go for elections even when all other indications showed otherwise- simply they had to make sure their structures remained active for the obvious.

It appears that in the false luxury of the inclusive government the MDC snoozed and forgot that there will come a time that they were supposed to make a move and that a wrong move would change fortunes.

Now can  we say a touch is not a move when SADC and the region is endorsing this election, when all we can gather as evidence is almost subjective now in retrospect, when on election day we were bubbling of an eminent victory?

As painful as it is, we have touched  and now is time to prepare ourselves into life after ZANU PF's "punishment plus good move".

Gains have been sold cheap by participating in a flawed process especially if we continue to pin our arguments on "we knew this and that" for if we knew why did we make the touch and then decide it's not a move when we should know "a touch is a move!".