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.
