The Ibrahim Prize is an annual $5M award given to former executive heads of state or government for exemplary leadership. The Prize has a rigorous criteria. Since its launch in 2007, it has been awarded a total of 7 times up through 2020, including one honorary laureate - Nelson Mandela. No laureate has been announced since 2020. We can agree that the Ibrahim Prize is a good benchmark for the standard of leadership that will move Africa forward - “The prize is an award and a standard for excellence in leadership in Africa”. It is also more than that.
It is a signifier of a dearth in exceptional leadership on the continent. To the best of my knowledge, no price of its likeness exists in any other region of the world.
The challenge the Prize committee faces in finding laureates is an indictment of the type of leadership the continent consistently selects/elects/produces.
It is one more indicator that despite all and many good intentioned efforts towards Africa’s development, the continent is still far from effectively marshalling all the conditions necessary to collectively launch Africa into the 21st Century. As Prof. Kingsley Moghalu, and others, have repeatedly demonstrated, the engine for economic development is good governance: “Leadership is the most important determinant of any social, economic, and political progress”.
The lack of development and financing deficit for development in Africa is a symptom of a lack of competent leadership. Governance shapes capital flows in two ways: enabling policies attract investment, while effective leadership sustains it. The current African political leadership class and political order does not entirely exist to develop the continent. For this piece, I am going to rely on the thinking and works of some of Africa’s leading minds engaging with the question of the continent’s governance and development. One of the questions I have always asked myself is “what does Africa think of itself?”. In the current world order, every other idea and plan matters more than that of the African. It is near impossible to find thoughts by Africans carrying any weight even in rooms where African issues are discussed. It is even debatable whether the issues discussed at the AU Summits are entirely those of Africans or entirely have the interests of Africans at heart. This lack of clarity on Africa’s thoughts on itself is the basis of most of Africa’s problems. Professor Moghalu answers this, partly in this recent presentation.
“Africans have a challenge, and that is that we are not, in the current dispensation, thinking deeply enough. Leadership is a mindset…We are not developing because we lack cohesive national worldviews. World views are the philosophical underpinnings that lead to development.
No nation, no civilization can rise, be great, and create prosperity for itself without a clear worldview that has been inculcated in the citizens and forms the basis on which that country is governed. Leadership is the most important aspect for development because it drives worldviews.
Worldviews matter because development begins in the mind. It doesn't begin anywhere else. As we think, so we do. We neglect this aspect. And we are all running around in our countries saying we are chasing development. For 60 years, we still have not transformed our countries. That's more than it took several Asian countries to become some of the world's greatest economic powers today. What is our excuse? We need to have a hard talk with ourselves...”
The kicker that ties the dynamics together is this: “World views lead to global strategic intent - how you project your influence, interests, and power, in the world.“
The majority of African nations (except four) lack this, and, consequently, Africa is relegated to a passive or invisible position in every situation. No one has ever advanced from a passive, inconsequential or invisible position.
Prof. Moghalu is the inaugural President and VC of the African School of Governance (ASG), a “pan-African graduate public policy university aiming to shape governance solutions for Africa’s needs in the 21st century”. The school was co-founded by President Paul Kagame and Hailemariam Desalegn, the former Prime Minister of Ethiopia with the support of the Mastercard Foundation. It is inspired by and has a strategic partnership with the Lee Kuan Yew School Of Public Policy. Moghalu was a presidential candidate in the 2019 Nigerian elections. Interestingly, he shares this experience with another intellectual and ethical leadership powerhouse whose work I will also refer to in this piece , Dr Oby Ezekwesili. Dr Oby campaigned for the presidency in 2019 but dropped out of the race a few weeks before the elections. She took a research sabbatical after the elections to understand the leadership challenge in Nigeria. The result of her research identified the prevailing political order as a critical obstacle to the rise of competent political leadership and socioeconomic development, not just in Nigeria, but across Africa. She established the #FixPolitics initiative to build the type of political order and class that will produce leaders who would do what governments are supposed to do - good governance. The most public pillar of #FIXPolitics is the School of Politics, Policy, and Governance (SPPG), an innovative leadership institute building a new political leadership by developing a new value driven political class.
This philosophical and political shift is even more relevant in the current geopolitical landscape. The sunsetting of the aid industry and evolution of the international development sector highlights another power dynamic that needs to evolve or be replaced. To paraphrase Professor Ken Opalo, one of the features of this shift is “the loss of legitimacy of the philosophical, ideological, and intellectual scaffolding that propped up the old aid model”. However, the “aid establishment” has not been swayed by this. As Prof. Opalo writes,
“I should reiterate that in my estimation most pro-aid constituencies in donor countries, elites in aid-dependent countries, practitioners/experts, and scholars of international development remain wedded to the old model.”
It is not surprising. This has been one of the sectors that have been resistant to change even before the current shifts showed up.
“This is absolutely understandable. To many, the coming changes are deeply personal. Jobs and livelihoods, as well as a sense of personal accomplishment and moral/intellectual worth are on the line.”
Another equally big obstacle, I might argue based on Prof. Moghalu’s thinking, has been the projection of their home countries’ global strategic intent towards a continent with no world view. This automatically relegated Africa to a passive consumer role despite, to paraphrase Opalo, “the actions of the donor countries being at variance with objective facts on the ground”. Despite their refusal to accede to material facts, the development sector cannot simply do away with the “aid establishment”:
“For better or worse, it’s these individuals … that remain in key decision making roles about the future of aid.”
However, recipients of aid technically have a say. Aid, as Trump and the “aid establishment” have re-affirmed, is not divorced from personal and strategic interests, more especially in a multipolar world. A cohesive national world view could have aided African countries negotiate a new dynamic that is progressive and devoid of the culture that Opalo describes;
“...the God Complex common among officials in donor countries and multilateral institutions…the tendency to suspend standard rules of economics and politics (and quite frankly, basic logic) when dealing with low-income countries…the soft bigotry of low expectations and an abiding inability to countenance the possibility that ideas from aid recipient countries can inform program design…the total lack of accountability for failures that impact countless lives; not to mention a radical embrace of a vernacular presentism that’s unburdened by history, anticipation of the future, or contextual knowledge…”
This is a defining moment for Africa and the only way to leverage it to drive Africa to the 21st century is through, as a priority, a philosophical and ideological transformation of the political class and order. I am aware that a scenario where most African countries’ international relations are driven by the projection of their global strategic intent and a political and other relevant sector leadership class that prioritises their interests is not likely in the short term. However, the current thinking and actions to develop such a scenario that will of course involve a structural change in the social, political, and economic relations of Africa with itself and the world must be recognised, applauded, and supported.
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