Gambia-L & Beran,
I am still not quite finished with that Rubin fellow from the Philadelphia
Inquirer who focussed his entire article on the predatory and tyrannical
leaders of Africa. Not once did he acknowledge the existence of the
successful/conservative and radical/ ideological African leaders that the
Continent has fortunately produced since Independence.  The Report he made
reference to and proceeded to credit it authorship to the World Bank has
identified four types of African Leadership. The original source is shown at
the end of this piece.

Four Types of African Leadership.

q SUCCESSFUL AND CONSERVATIVE LEADERS.   Recognizing the complex mix of
peoples and cultures arbitrarily enclosed within colonial boundaries, these
leaders introduced ethnically inclusive poli
cies and informal power-sharing
arrangements.  They also pursued growth-oriented policies and increased
human resource investments.  Botswana's founding president, Sir Seretse
Khama, provides a leading example-one that has been maintained by his
successors-as does Felix Houphouet-Boigny in Cote d'Ivoire between 1960 and
the mid-1980s.  Under Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya enjoyed stability and high
economic growth rates, though complaints about ethnic inequalities emerged
toward the end of his rule.
q RADICAL AND IDEOLOGICAL LEADERS. Motivated primarily by African (or
Marxist) socialism, these leaders sought an economic and social
transformation of their societies through state intervention and the
leadership of a mass-based one-party state.  In some cases (Kwame Nkrumah in
Ghana, Julius Nyerere in Tanzania) there was success in molding national
consciousness.  Elsewhere the policy proved socially divisive.
Econo
mically, state intervention yielded disappointing results.  When
combined with war in states such as Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique, the result
was economic regress.
q PREDATORY LEADERS.  Instead of focusing on efficient national policies,
predatory leaders did the opposite.  National and state offices were treated
as personal-making positions.  The archetypal case of Zaire under Mobutu
Sese Seko has been duplicated to a lesser degree in a number of other
states.  Conditions in Nigeria under Sani Abacha (1993-98) also fit that
mode.
q TYRANTS.  Because of the eccentricity that often marks tyrants, and the
shocking human rights abuses that they perpetrated, this form of leadership
has received more international attention than the rest.  Besides the cost
to lives, its economic legacy is the most catastrophic.  Uganda under Idi
Amin (1971-79) and Equitorial Guinea under Macias Nguema (1968-79) are the
worse e
xamples.  The Rwanda regime that organized the 1994 genocide
represents tyranny at its most extreme, costing more than 500,000 lives and
cutting GDP by two-thirds in a matter of months.

SOURCE: Chege 1999

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