http://www.modernghana.com/print/291690/1/old-leadership-new-leadership.html

Old Leadership, New Leadership
Essay
Development/ Africa


Leadership has become a buzz word for practitioners, bureaucrats and
theorists of African development. The term variously means a process
of getting work done through people. Leadership may not be science but
it is committed responsibility. Africans in civil service, in business
schools, in NGOs, in the mass media, in think tanks, in academic, in
State Houses, in opposition political parties use leadership as a sort
of reality refiner - a way of contrasting past and present, an
implement for cataloging out history at a moment of African changes,
the flowering of The African Century.

African leadership, being heavily over burdened and scatterbrained, is
part of the Old Leadership. For the past 50 years, Africa has been
sorting itself up into categories of Old Leadership and New
Leadership. We see this in one of Africa’s foremost leaders, Kwame
Nkrumah. Prof. A.K.P. Kludze, former Justice of Ghana’s Supreme Court,
observes that although President Kwame Nkrumah was a freedom fighter
and committed Pan-Africanist, he later succumbed to the Big Man
syndrome, turned Ghana into a one-party state and became the life
chairman of his ruling Conventions People's Party and general
secretary of the party’s Central Committee. It was considered treason
to challenge him. Nobody could stand as a candidate unless his
candidature was approved by the General Secretary of the party
(read-himself).

The 1960s to the 1990s have become a transforming boundary between one
age and another, between a format of things that has crumbled and
another that is taking shape. A millennium has come, a celestial
divide. Kwame Nkrumah’s era of autocracy of the 20th century is dead;
the 21st is a kernel, revealed in continental giant Nigeria’s Goodluck
Jonathan. New Leadership-Old Leadership makes a match of lists: what’s
in, what’s out in the African experiences. More imperative, it is a
way of considering what works (New Leadership) and what doesn't work
anymore (Old Leadership).

The horrible Central African Republic’s Jean-Bedel Bokassa was the Old
Leadership. The New Leadership is what we are seeking for – Liberia’s
Ellen Sirleaf-Johnson. One-party system and military juntas are Old
Leadership. African communism as seen in Ethiopia’s Menghistu Haile
Mariam is Old Leadership. Big one-party systems, military juntas and
Jerry Rawlings’ emotionally charged aggressiveness style are dead.
Democracy brewed from within African experiences is becoming more and
more alive as a development fertilizer. Botswana is one example;
Mauritius is another.

With over 45 years in Ghana’s and Africa’s turbulent politics,
ex-president John Kofi Kufour is more than qualified to examine
Africa’s leadership from very close range. His analysis: “Leadership
is key to unravelling the problems of Africa. With the right
leadership, good policies would be enacted that will create the right
condition for economic growth, respect of the rule of law and the
conducive atmosphere for business to thrive," observed Kufour. Kufour
said this in South Africa during the launch of “Why Africa is Poor and
What Africans can do about it,” written by Greg Mills, Executive
Director of the Brenthurst Foundation of the Oppenheimer and Son
Group.

Kufour diagnosed the awful Old Leadership this way: “Africa's problem
was that people assumed leadership positions without being adequately
prepared for it and they lacked the vision and drive to pursue
policies to the benefit of their people … Studies of individual
historic leaders exemplified in the likes of Biblical Moses, among
others, would show conclusively that each one of them had come through
relevant experiences to be imbued with epochal visions of great and
abiding development of their nations … The time when people just
jumped into leadership positions should be by-gone. Budding leaders
must bide their time and go through the apprenticeship exposures and
institutions to better prepare them to assume the rightful role
expected of them.”

Old Leaderships: Mobutu Sese Seku, military juntas, one-party and
communist systems, Sekou Toure, Mamadou Tandja, the Big Man syndrome,
tough talk, imperially threatening attitude (Yaya Jemmeh), arrogance
(Idi Amin), centralized bureaucracy and Big government, the leader as
a massive juju-marabou dabbler (Samuel Doe), the leader mired in
extreme superstitious believes (Marcias Francoise Nguema), the leader
under the control of warped spiritualists (Sani Abacha and Bokassa),
refurbished ancient paternalism (Siaka Stevens), dictatorship, “God
has destined me to be leader” (Jerry Rawlings), heavy cultural
inhibitions (all Africa), charisma, tribalistic blood-feud payback,
primordial corporate loyalties, Guinea Bissau, and Gen. Ibrahim
Babangida (the military politician as the face of the unrepentant
African traditional autocracy).

New African Leadership: Humility. God fearing. Deep decentralization
so much so that decision-making is pushed down as much as possible to
the people affected. Truthfulness. High sense of African history and
traditions. Traditional consensus building mixed with modern
leadership practices. John Kufour. Evans Atta Mills, Nana Akufo Addo,
Ian Khama. Balances. Democratic tenets, human rights, freedoms, social
justice, the rule of law. Goodluck Jonathan, Ernest Koroma, Jakaya
Kikwete. The African Union, the Economic Community of West African
States. Television news network, participatory communication,
information, facebook, fax machines, tweeter, myspace and other new
media. David Mark (the Nigerian soldier greatly democratized). The new
Liberia. Pluralism. The new Sierra Leone. Kwasi Pratt Jr. Botswana.

In the African context, Old Leadership is a mixed bag. New Leadership
isn’t necessarily the best. There are sham democracies and leaderships
– The Gambia and Yaya Jammeh. The New Leadership is an on-going
project that needs a lot of socio-political engineering constructed
from within Africa’s traditional values, but better than Old
Leadership. New Leadership is about output instead of input. The
assessment of the New Leadership is what works. It Africanizes
Botswana’s leadership skills, the capability to mix the traditional
with the modern so as to refine any inhibitions within the
traditional.

Old Leadership and New Leadership are often intermingled. Jerry
Rawlings and Jacob Zuma as awkward, stalled in stupidity, complete
dumbness, are Old Leadership. Foolhardiness is New Leadership, as seen
in Central African Republic’s Francois Bozize and the entire
leadership of Guinea Bissau, can be different style - small-minded,
dishonorable, blank, and uninformed of Africa’s painful past of agony
and sadness. New media, the medium of the New Leadership, has an
overwhelming addiction to the mediocre that it constantly wrestles
with. The New Leadership is a distraction that sometimes reveals
simple-mindedness.

In Emilio Mwai Kibaki’s mind, Old Leadership and New Leadership circle
each other suspiciously, as Kenya struggles for better leadership and
governance. Kibaki is often New Leadership in regional issues but Old
Leadership in domestic affairs. Under his watch, Kenya’s 2008 general
elections descended into fatal violence and saw over 1,300 people
killed and over 300,000 homeless. The International Criminal Court
coming into Kenya and planning to put six top Kenyans on trial saw
Kibaki dashing back toward patriarchal conclusions.

Rawlings and Atta Mills? Object lessons on how Old Leadership and New
Leadership clash with each other. Dictatorial Rawlings wants members
of the opposition National Patriotic Party arbitrarily arrested for
suspicion of being corrupt. With enormous pressure from Rawlings,
Mills reveals how fragile the New Leadership could be, how it could be
menaced by Old Leadership. Rawlings sticking to Old Leadership despite
the fact that its time is gone has become a dilemma for Mills. The
trouble is there is no New Leadership for Rawlings to migrate to.
Maybe never.

Either in the analysis of Kufour’s African leadership impasse or
Botswana’s and Mauritius’s ability to mix modern leadership practices
with their traditional ones that has paid off remarkably, the Ghanaian
Joseph William Addai argues in Reforming Leadership in Africa that
transformations in African leadership, as a way of improving the
quality of governance, should start from African traditional values
and then mixed with global governance practices. This means African
leaders should have a high sense of African traditional leadership
values in relation to global governance ideals.

In this sense, Africa’s leadership struggles are rationalized from
within Africa’s soul. It is a new intellectual construct to make
things work. A way of thinking about change. For long, Africans have
taken their leadership for granted seeing the likes of Bokassa, Doe,
and Amin mount power and destroy their countries. The New Leadership
is above all struggling toward a working model for the progress
mechanisms of The African Century.

Short of this, there will be huge imbalances in the quality of
leadership and governance, and this will impact negatively on Africa’s
progress. Kenya’s and Nigeria’s struggles for better governance
practices, as progress act, seen in their attempts to reform their
constitutions, illustrates Africa’s tussles to grapple with its
leadership challenges.

Fifty years after freedom from colonial rule, Africa is largely still
Old Leadership. But as the flowering of The African Century reveals,
Africa’s brilliance would be how it renew itself, how it improvise
itself, technically how it quickly grow New Leadership as a replacer
of Old Leadership, as part of its transformative endowment. This means
New Leadership should be the overarching idea, the signature of The
African Century.


By Kofi Akosah-Sarpong




Source: Kofi Akosah-Sarpong
Story from Modern Ghana News:
http://www.modernghana.com/news/291690/1/old-leadership-new-leadership.html

Published: Monday, August 16, 2010


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