Leadership in Postcolonial Africa

Trends Transformed by Independence

B. Jallow

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137478115
• eBook ISBN: 9781137478122
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Leadership in Post-Colonial Africa examines the leadership concepts and lessons that emerged during and after the attainment of independence with insightful studies of Africa's first female presidents, gangster elitism, Nelson Mandela, and beyond.

Chapter 1

Leadership in Postcolonial Africa: An Introduction

Baba G. Jallow

In Leadership in Colonial Africa, we demonstrated the existence of three main types of leader in African colonies and how their interaction culminated in the attainment of African independence. We also explicitly rejected the theoretical exceptionalism that Western leadership studies theory is not suitable for the study of African leadership. We argued that theories of transformational, transactional, and servant leadership may be used and have been used (Ello-Hart, Ngunjiri, and Lieberfeld, this volume; Jallow 2014; Saunders 2014) to study leaders like Nkrumah, Mandela, Zuma, Mugabe, and Wangari Maathai among others. We also suggested that organizational culture and information processing theories both lay out for us the physical nature of African governments as macroorganizations and help us put the spotlight into the heads of our leaders (Bolman and Deal 2003; Brown et al. 2004; Schein 2010). In other words, we made the case that Africa too needs “the theoretical benefits to be gained from a better understanding of organizations” (Scott 1987). The teachings of James Macgregor Burns, Warren Bennis, John Gardner, Barnard Bass, Barbara Kellerman, and Boas Shamir, among many other leadership studies scholars, might have been inspired by Western experiences, but they address the human condition everywhere.

That said, and as also mentioned in Leadership in Colonial Africa, first experiments in African leadership studies like this project should not be expected to draw too much on leadership studies theory. Few of the contributors to this volume and to Leadership in Colonial Africa are leadership studies scholars. Most are historians, political scientists, theologians, etc. who have an interest in leadership studies and in the study of African leadership. Their works at this early stage of the growth of the field of African leadership studies, therefore, often lack an infusion of leadership studies theory. The expectation is that more and more Africanists interested in the study of African leadership will increasingly familiarize themselves with the leadership studies literature and employ leadership studies theory in their works. It is comforting to note in this regard that some of the greatest leadership studies scholars did not study leadership in graduate school. Many like Burns were historians, political scientists, psychologists, and sociologists drawn to the field by its multidisciplinary nature and expansive research potential.

From a distance, leadership in postcolonial Africa seems generally negative and failed. This is true to some significant extent; there are many cases of negative and failed leadership in postcolonial Africa. In fact, Africa’s seemingly chronic developmental crises reflect a failure of state leadership on the continent since independence. Former nationalists leaders who took over from colonial governors maintained aspects of the colonial state in post-colonial space that inevitably engendered civic and civil conflict and sabotaged the continent’s prospects for creative leadership and growth. However, while some studies in this volume highlight in graphic detail the extent of leadership failure in postcolonial Africa, others show that good leadership has flourished in Africa in spite of the failure of state leadership, in some cases precisely because of the failure of state leadership (Carney, this volume; Ngunjiri, this volume). While there are only a few cases of good political leadership in Africa since independence, there appears to be a critical mass of civic leaders whose stories need to be studied and shared as done by some authors in this volume. In this introductory chapter, we start by looking at the “dark side” of postcolonial African leadership and transition into the “bright side” toward the end.

Leadership in Postcolonial Africa: The Dark Side

In Leadership in Colonial Africa, we also argued against the political exceptionalism that democracy, human rights, and the rule of law are not suitable for African conditions. We showed how hearing these words come from their former colonial masters; some first generation of independent African leaders loudly repeated them at home and used them as justifications for the imposition of authoritarian regimes and the invention of dubious “philosophies” of “authenticity” to help “fight” these Western “evils” (democracy, human rights, and the rule of law). “The new governments, challenged by critics, sought to bolster their legitimacy by drawing upon a new ‘patriotic’ style of history writing, in which the (liberation) struggle was seen as leading to a great triumph, achieved by the liberation movement on its own” (Saunders 2014). While Saunders refers to the leaders of former nationalist guerrilla movements, particularly Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and Sam Nujoma in Namibia, his observation is equally true or even more so for some of Africa’s postcolonial civilian leaders. Authoritarian tendencies reside as much in civilian as in military leaders. Perhaps they are inherent to human nature and just need to be expressed or suppressed.

Under colonial rule, Western political structures and institutions were haphazardly superimposed on African political structures and institutions characterized by notions and perceptions of leadership at variance with the new political frameworks. The immediate postcolonial situation demanded a transformation of the authoritarian cultures, if not structures of the colonial state into cultures of inclusiveness and collective responsibility for the new national project. The situation demanded “transformative-servant leadership” that would empower the citizens of the new nations, encourage them to actively question their government’s policies and actions, and motivate them to assume leadership of the national project.¹ Instead, what Africa got was mostly autocratic and transactional leadership of the sort displayed by Nkrumah in Ghana, Touré in Guinea, Banda in Malawi, Mobutu in Zaire, and more recently Mbeki and Zuma in South Africa (Jallow, Kamil, Banda, Carney, Lieberfeld, this volume).

Most postcolonial African leaders misread the demands of independence and did little to change the autocratic colonial political culture within which their new nation-states were forged (Mamdani 1996). Having justified their struggles against colonialism by appealing to the Atlantic Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights among other postwar international rights discourses, the new rulers now branded these same discourses harmful vestiges of imperialism and symbols of capitalist neocolonialism designed to undermine African independence. The idea of a struggle for freedom and equality was considered an alien and divisive aberration that had no room within the independent nation-state. The leadership and political aspirations of citizens were delegitimized; unquestioning subjecthood was routinized; citizens were denied the right to question the actions of their government or to freely support the political movements of their choice. Oppression became the preferred mode of governance. An imposed political uniformity smothered constructive dissent, stifled political creativity, and generated a culture of silent cynicism or anomie that has rendered Africa’s populations incapable of effectively adapting to the endless challenges arising in their immediate environments.

As far as the new postcolonial rulers were concerned, independence meant doing what they liked and as they wished with their own people, “just like any other sovereign government,” Avoiding human rights discourses, they now cited international instruments that emphasized the “sovereignty” and “territorial integrity” of the state and the rights of all sovereign states to noninterference in their internal affairs. The sovereignty and integrity of the African individual was suppressed and submerged under the sovereignty and integrity of the state, whose identity was often rendered synonymous to the identity of the leader. In Ghana, the mantra was Kwame Nkrumah was the Convention People’s Party (CPP) and the CPP was Ghana. Often, territorial integrity was equated with the state’s right to control everyone within those boundaries. Rather than see and nurture the nation, the new rulers threw a shroud of enforced silence over it, suffocating and subverting its creative potential, the only potential that could lead any nation to development, even as they justified their harmful actions in the name of national development. Draconian laws—including colonial laws—were deployed to muzzle the freedoms Africans struggled for and perpetuate the injustices they struggled against. It was, to borrow an apt phrase from Kim et al. (2008), truly a case of “rooting for (and then abandoning) the underdog.” After independence, the African underdog became the enemy, presumed to eye the coveted power of her former champions and severely punished for her imagined crime. What were expected to be spaces of freedom and hope during the anticolonial struggle morphed into spaces of oppression and fear policed by independent regimes often more tyrannical than the departed colonialists.

The hegemon-subject relations of colonialism morphed into ruler-ruled relations in which the distribution of power was totally weighted in favor of the rulers, just like they were under colonialism. The new African rulers emerged not as dedicated servants to the ideals of freedom and human rights they fought for, with and on behalf of their people, but as masters of their people who assumed the infallible right to define and decide what was best for their countries, what constituted human rights and freedom, and who among their people deserved to enjoy or be denied such human rights and freedom. Generally included in most independence constitutions but gradually nullified, the doctrine of citizen rights and obligations that characterized the Western nation-state system had no comparable presence in Africa. This doctrinal absence and its attendant-imposed uniformity in African politics led to the eruption of civil conflicts and instabilities—military coups, assassinations, assassination attempts, and, in some cases, bloody civil wars that exacted a heavy toll on the continent’s human and material resources. To parody J. F. K’s famous saying, Africa’s postcolonial rulers made peaceful change impossible and therefore rendered violent change inevitable. Yet political change in Africa, when brought about by violent means, rarely if ever brought about the desired results.

It would be simplistic to give the impression that African leaders of the postcolonial era did nothing good for their countries. A case in point is that in the majority of cases they were able to hold together their countries, the fragile creatures of colonial partition in Africa, in some cases violently and at great cost. In Senegal, successive governments since 1982 have militarily struggled to keep the southern province of Casamance from seceding. In Nigeria, Yakubu Gowon had to fight a long and bloody war to keep Biafra from seceding. In Sudan, the north was forced to fight a hard, long, and futile battle to keep the south from seceding. But by and large, the fragile and utterly artificial boundaries of the colonial territory survived intact as markers of the new nation-state system in Africa.

Some first-generation postcolonial African leaders also registered notable successes in building infrastructures and launching initiatives that directly improved their people’s lives. Among other things in Ghana, Nkrumah “established 52 state enterprises, including 25 manufacturing and industrial enterprises . . . instituted a free education and a free textbook scheme” and built two state universities in addition to the University of Ghana at Legon (Dekutsey 2012). “To give a boost to Black Studies, Nkrumah established the Institute of African Studies on the campus of the University of Ghana, Legon . . . On the sea, Ghana was sailing its own fleet of ships under the Black Star Line brand. In the sky, Ghana was flying its own airline, Ghana Airways” (Dekutsey 2012).² Similar developments took place in other countries such as the Ivory Coast.

However, alongside these “good” things ran a concurrent pattern of political intolerance in Nkrumah and other leaders’ behavior that made it impossible for African countries to flourish as viable nation-states and eventually to flounder on the rocks of severe and long-running political instability and developmental crises. In Ghana, what Nkrumah considered the demands of the new postcolonial situation bore little semblance to the actual demands of that situation. This was not because he did not see what needed to be done. Rather, it was because he assumed monopoly of knowledge of what needed to be done and insisted he was the only one who knew how best it could be done. Nkrumah’s vision of Ghana as a socialist republic led by a single vanguard party dictated his policy options and actions. He had larger goals, such as making Ghana the capital of a united states of Africa. But these goals were contingent upon Ghana becoming a powerful socialist republic. In pursuit of this goal, Nkrumah increasingly monopolized the political space, generated a slew of repressive legislation that systematically muzzled dissent and opposition, was declared president for life in 1963, and imposed a one-party state on Ghana in 1964. He was overthrown in a military-police coup on Februrary 24, 1966. His immediate political legacy was two decades of civil crises in Ghana, with military coups toppling sitting governments on January 13, 1972; June 1978; June 1979; and December 31, 1981. The second republic under Kofi Busia (1969–1972) and the third republic under Hilla Limman (1979–1981) were both ousted in military coups. It took massive civil society action for most of the 1980s to force Flt. Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings to institute multiparty politics in Ghana. The fourth republic has held since 1993; however, in 2014, Ghana seems to need better and more creative leadership than it has had since 1993. Growing unemployment, crumbling roads and other infrastructure, frequent power outages in a country that used to export electricity and now produces about 100,000 barrels of oil per day, and a growing sense of popular frustration call for better and more responsible leadership in Ghana. The culture of political exclusion created by Nkrumah remains quite visible in Ghana, in spite of the noticeable freedoms—of expression and association—that characterize the country’s political landscape since 1993.

Nkrumah, a former “freedom-loving” nationalist leader, used the Preventive Detention Act (PDA) of 1958 among other laws to eliminate any Ghanaian who dared suggest other forms of history writing in the country. Passed into law barely a year after independence, the PDA generated an obscene culture of political repression in Ghana that arguably remains unrivalled in postcolonial Africa. The PDA gave Nkrumah and his government the power to order the arrest and detention for up to five years, later increased to ten years, without charges, trial, the benefit of habeas corpus, or the intervention of any judicial or legislative authority, of any person suspected of “acting in a manner prejudicial to the security of the state or endangering Ghana’s relations with other nations.” What was prejudicial to the security of the state or what constituted endangering Ghana’s relations with other nations was exclusively defined by Nkrumah or the supporters of Nkrumahism who often used the PDA to settle personal scores (Omari 2000; Dekutsey 2012). The PDA contained provisions that literally crippled the judicial and legislative branches of the Nkrumah government and vested the power of life and death over detainees, and by extension any Ghanaian, on Nkrumah. Among the many repressive laws that the CPP government passed between 1952 and 1966, the PDA stands defiant of comprehension in its brutality and its colonial character. By the time of Nkrumah’s overthrow in February 1966, an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 Ghanaians languished under preventive detention, some as young as 14, some as old as 92, some for periods of up to seven years without charges or trial and still unsure what crime they had committed.³ While in power, Nkrumah was portrayed as a saint on the editorial pages of newspapers—all state-owne...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Chapter 1 Leadership in Postcolonial Africa: An Introduction
• Chapter 2 Hastings Kamuzu Banda: How the Cold War Sustained Bad Leadership in Malawi, 1964–1994
• Chapter 3 Ahmed Sékou Touré: The Tyrant Hero
• Chapter 4 The Quest to Reform the African State: The Case of William R. Tolbert Jr of Liberia, and Jerry Rawlings of Ghana
• Chapter 5 “The Bishop Is Governor Here”: Bishop Nicholas Djomo and Catholic Leadership in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
• Chapter 6 “I Will Be a Hummingbird”: Lessons in Radical Transformative Leadership from Professor Wangari Maathai
• Chapter 7 Nelson Mandela: Personal Characteristics and Reconciliation-Oriented Leadership
• Chapter 8 Patriarchy, Power Distance, and Female Presidency in Liberia
• Chapter 9 Female Presidents in Africa: New Norms in Leadership or Reflection of Current Practice
• Chapter 10 Leading through a Medicinal Plant: Transforming-Servant-Leadership among African Women in Portland, Oregon
• Chapter 11 Academic Leadership in Africa
• Notes on Contributors
• Index