Africa's crises is a leadership induced socio-pathology

By Franklyne Ogbunwezeh

African poverty remains a failure of leadership. History and geography are contributory factors, but history and geography can be transcended and deployed as a launch pad for development, where the political will exists. Kemal Atarturk single handedly launched the derelict Ottomann Empire on the path to becoming modern Turkey. India and Singapore, all of which where colonies have been able to shake off their colonial legacies and are marching confidently into the future.

African sociopolitics is a socio-pathological theatre, where indentured roguery meets civic timidity of the populace. Many African leaders are not only grotesquely incompetent; they are inglorious and visionless bandits, whose sole ambition in power is to satiate their lewd avarice; stealing as much as they can and bankrupting the state in the process. The electorate have been conditioned like Pavlovian dogs to feed themselves of the curds of ignorance, superstition and timidity.

What do we expect from the West, when our leadership has packaged our futures and brought it to the auction block for sale? African followership is equally not helping matters. With the populace still in the thraldom of ignorance, superstition and timidity, the leaders have no compunctions in conniving with foreign interests to dupe their countries.

A mixture of the West’s trade in hypocrisy; which some choose to call neo-colonialism and visionless oscillations of a rogue leadership remain the pivot of Africa’s contemporary predicament and developmental crises. History showed that when the clamour for independence became unbearable; and the resources to continue pacifying colonies became exorbitant, the colonial masters decided to grant quasi-independence to their milk-cows of colonies. Policies were put in place, which mortgaged the continent’s future by granting powers to the conservative elements; local pirates appointed and trained by the masters in a Pavlovian scheme gone awry. Since then, these pirates have continued to clone themselves in power, and Africa has continued to bleed her resources into foreign coffers.

This ancient trade of stealing Africa’s resources has not ended, it now has more prominent African participants; and attracts more brazen hypocrisy from the establishments of profit ruling our world today. That is what globalization has been all along.

With the present crop and system of leadership we have across Africa today, Africa will never matriculate into developmental felicity. Visionlessness has never been a driver of progress.