Credibility and Legitimacy in African Leadership: Issues, Opportunities and Challenges By Tade Akin Aina

The Chairperson, Members of the Board of Directors of DENIVA and other Civil Society partners present, the Executive Director of DENIVA, Professor Jassy Kwesiga, friends, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen. All protocols observed. May I begin by thanking Prof. Kwesiga and DENIVA for inviting me to share my reflections on "Credibility and Legitimacy in African Leadership: Issues, Opportunities and Challenges". I know that he has insisted for some years now that I share my views and reflections with a public audience on some topics that have both privately engaged over the years. I am glad that I am able to do so at this point in my tenure as I exit the region to face a new set of responsibilities.

Although the title of my talk is focused on "leadership", it is my intention to use it mainly as an entry point to interrogate some salient issues of African politics and development. Issues that concern and trouble many of us and which we often use the summary notion, the "African Condition" made famous by Prof. Ali Mazrui in his BBC Reith Lectures many years ago.

This lecture will attempt within the limitations of the scope by time to engage with us the questions that we often ask ourselves about our leadership, public sphere, state and politics and the failure of our leadership to deliver to the majority of ordinary Africans the promises of life-situations that are at least comparable to those found in other continents and societies in the world today. The question then is "Why have African leaders in the public realm that is the civic public failed Africans so miserably? Why do we have even the best of them with the most impeccable credentials and a track record of personal integrity and credibility become so inept or/and squander their credibility so quickly once they emerge at the helms of affairs in the public domain? And what can we as peoples, as Africans do about generations of what some people have called "mis-leadership", lack of vision and imagination, waste and plunder of national resources, perversion of political will and flagrant abuse of office? These are not only important questions but are framed in such strong terms because after more than 50 years of varying forms of self rule and formal political independence, dashed hope and opportunities, wasteful wars and profligate governments, Africans must not stop asking themselves the hard questions. And even, if we have no consensus or unanimity on the answers, we can at least save ourselves the complacency and indolence of mindless submission to political tyranny or the equally blind and irrational reaction of self brutalization in response to the frustrations of a stagnant and brutish life to paraphrase the Hobbesian statement of order.

Let us begin by recognizing that leadership does not exist in a vacuum, social, political or economic. Leadership is found, thrives and is perverted in actually existing societies with specific histories and structures of domination. These can be both external and internal to the societies. As Africans, our condition, given over 400 years of both Trans-Atlantic and Arab slave trade and nearly a century of colonial domination and of course decades of post-colonial interference and manipulation are both internal and external. But Africans must own Africa's problems in order to engage and transcend them. Foreigners will neither own them nor solve them for us, no matter how altruistic they are or how much they love Africa! While still on this subject, I want to quickly debunk a cliché that a people deserve the leadership they get. I do not think Africans ever craved or desired the Bokassas, Idi Amins, Abachas, Nguemas or the Mobutus that were imposed on them! All these ridiculous strutting parodies of Africa's colonial misfortune and mis-rule perverted and exaggerated through a direct heritage of the militarization of society and the alienation of state from society were thrust upon African peoples by circumstances and conditions in which ordinary peoples did not actively participate. This is why any return to military rule on this continent or any vestige of it is a tragedy. And it is why we all need to struggle to build institutions and leadership that are responsive, accountable, representative, participatory and transparent. In short, we are talking about institutions, structures and leadership that do not depend on the whims of our heroes in history. We are talking about democratic institutions. And this is why in the words of the African American public scholar, Colin West, ‘Democracy Matters'!

This is what this reflection is about: an engagement with the simultaneous importance of the workings of structures, institutions and agency to produce human outcomes and conditions.

Let me offer some shorthand clarification of notions here. I see credibility as a quality and attribute of actors either as individuals or as collective actors demonstrating practices, actions and values that encourage others to give to them an acceptance of their stated credentials, claims, vision, goals or beliefs. Others trust them because of their track records, origins or credentials. And because they believe or accept these claims to be true or of value.

Legitimacy, on the other hand is a quality or attribute of structures and institutions that through some processes and periods of social reproduction have produced authority and values that have become acceptable and internalized by all those who live or claim allegiance to the structures... Leadership occupies the terrain of the structural and institutional, the motor that drives and directs a system and leaders are individual or collective actors who exercise such influence and control to drive structures and institutions. They derive their authority from the location in the institutions and its inherent legitimacy.

I have intentionally used leadership that is the position of authority and direction, rather than leaders as the entry point in this discussion. Leadership, as Kimani Njogu (2007: xiii-xiv) points out, can be imagined in a multitude of ways, "in terms of power relationships" and in terms of the "transformational alternative mode" or in terms of a "knowledge and skills perspective". My argument that transition from one level, that of power relations to a more generalized transformational or alternative leadership or knowledge-based leadership as a dominant form in any society is dependent on the point and pattern of development of that society.

So, leadership for our purposes here is that defined by power relations in the public realm that is at the level of politics and the state. As any student of the social sciences know this like the state, politics and the public are all contested notions. I do not intend to distract you with a rendition of the contested definitions and their theoretical and ideological origins Abdul-Raufu Mustapha(2007) has done an excellent task of exploring and debunking the contemporary usage of these notions and ideas and their political and ideological projects. My immediate task is to navigate the stormy seas of these notions through a combination of critique and reflection that will provide some kind of map of my position on them.

The question is where do we find the expression and articulation of leadership and leaders? My answer is it is in the public sphere in society, politics and the state. And what are the dynamics and conditions of the state, society and politics in Africa? It is to this that we turn:

Leadership, the state, politics and society in Africa: evolution, tensions and directions.

As the literature amply demonstrates (Kimani, 2007; Mustapha, 2007; Ekeh, 1989; Ake, 1989; Mamdani, 1995), most African states as currently constituted, take their origins from the colonial arrangement and thereby suffer from a genetic crisis of legitimacy. That is, by their very constitution or make-up, they are fundamentally flawed in that they are alien in origin, function and relationships with the societies they are superimposed upon. Furthermore, they are distant from the majority of peoples they organize and have insufficiently incorporated them as citizens. In fact both Ekeh in his article, ‘The Public realm and Public Finance in Africa ‘ and Mamdani, in the book, Citizen and Subject, have demonstrated that the colonial project was not meant to create in any generalized way, African citizens, but rather an array of disparaged and devalued ‘natives' and subjects. The colonial state was the central mode of organizing politics and the distribution of power, privilege and strategic resources in Colonial society. But as Ekeh (1989) has brilliantly demonstrated in his discussion of the two publics, the African colonial subject demonstrated his resiliency and resistance by modifying and defining a public of his own relevance, which Ekeh called the primordial public. This public was the terrain of counter-legitimacy, authority and values that defined an often interacting, contradictory and at times complementary conditions of action. Ekeh explained politics, public finance and even ethnicity and alternative associational life (i.e. civil society) from the ways these two publics interfaced and were articulated. Thus the Colonial State related to African societies organized around remnants of kingdoms, peasants, serfs, castes and slaves, clans, kinship and lineage groups, age grades and age sets, in modes of interactions based on the singular goal of domination such as hostility, neglect, appeasement or destruction. The interactions of the two publics, the traditions of prejudice, discrimination and unmitigated violence amply catalogued by Anderson, and a host of recent European writers for King Leopold's Congo, Kenya and Eritrea formed both the moral and political basis of state action while forced taxation, corvee labor, evictions and displacements of indigenous populations along with the construction of extraverted and mono-cultural economies became the social and economic foundations of state building.

The tragedy for Africa was that the African nationalist project in most cases was about taking over these states and not reconstructing the state and/or society. Apart from a few African leaders such as Nyerere, Nkrumah and Patrice Lumumba, and the liberation struggles ANC, the reconstruction of the state was never on the agenda or part of the political or social project.

Thus the leaders of independent Africa negotiated and ascended their inglorious heights of illegitimate structure. A few of them recognized that the politics, society and economies that are based on these foundations were unsustainable in the emerging 20^th Century and tried to reconstruct. We all know the history, they fell. Others made the most of the situation and moved between the colonially-inherited civic public and the plural primordial publics seeking and creating multiple forms of legitimation. We all now better understand the crisis of African socialism, Ujaama, and Harambee for those with ideas. For those without ideas or imagination, it was straightforward rape and plunder of resources and the re-invention of some forms of perverted traditions in government and public life. For the modernists, it was a submission to the ideology of developmentalism again built on a superimposed conception of public sphere and values. What we had was an era of short lived success, euphoria, optimism and opportunity. After that as the structural and human demands and pressures mounted, it was descent in to the perversion of institutions, politics and social relationships. Ethnic politics, authoritarian rule, corruption, nepotism, wars and institutionalized violence were all characteristics of the articulation of publics and the perversion and malfunctioning of inherited structures. There was no legitimacy or re-legitimization here.

All of these continued until the era of liberalization of the late 1980s and 1990s, the return of pluralism, multi party electoral politics and the new age of civil society. Of course, again there was a lot of external impetus and drive, least of all by those who once colonized us joined by many others who saw Africa as a soft target or object of economic exploitation and domination. What was amazing in all our responses to these changes was the extreme gullibility of the majority of Africans who are in the public sphere. Because we hoped so hard, we believed so quickly. We allowed individual and collective credentials to define our leaders' credibility. But once again, the degrees of legitimacy were minimal and flawed and they were bound to crack under pressure. We are still using significantly unreconstructed post-colonial states. There are not many of us who can effectively claim citizens' status and rights. There is no substantive social contract or charter between the ruled and the rulers and the institutions of impartial adjudication and delivery of services are still very much underdeveloped. In society, there are no obvious or credible projects of social reconstruction to address historical and contemporary grievances and the economy and global politics provide very few lee ways for addressing the material and social redistribution.

Under these conditions, the leadership no matter how credible manages a flawed state in a crisis of legitimacy and promotes a politics of alienation and exclusion of the majority of its peoples. It often reverts in to power politics, sustaining and promoting itself and its interests and losing credibility.

The path is inevitable, particularly if it is a leadership that emerged with ample credentials, and then it believes in the superiority of its own knowledge, solutions and paths. We have all seen this before and we see it over and over again.

The Way forward:

So, what is to be done? That much abused Leninist question. Let us tease out the answers together.

First, let us stop being gullible as Africans. There is no credible leadership without an active and engaged citizenry and no rulers gave citizenship rights freely. Not even the USA, witness the civil rights struggles. The process of constructing citizenship and citizen rights is tortuous, fractured and filled with obstacles. That process must be reclaimed through an initial struggle for representation and participation and rights and the rule of law.

This means we must reclaim the right and opportunity to build new social contracts and charters in our countries. We have made progress in recent times. But constitutions do not confer legitimacy; it is rights, democracy and the rule of just law that confer legitimacy. We must reclaim the unfinished business of rebuilding our democracies through a well debated and participatory process of enacting our social contracts. Our current leadership on the continent because of its connections to a genetically flawed and unreconstructed state and politics is perennially in search of elite consensus and elite re-integration. The challenge is to build citizens through greater integration of the people in to a reconstructed and re-negotiated civic public.

So, reconstruct the state, rebuild citizenship, renew the social contract, reconstruct society and reclaim and rebuild an integrated and inclusive economy. These are immense challenges and opportunities but they must be the basis by which we judge the credibility of our leadership. It is also the moment for a social and political renewal able to build new social movements around the emerging spaces of new technologies, identities, communities and the vast vested interests of the increasingly marginalized, oppressed, disenfranchised and exploited. There does not seem to be much imagination, vision or hope in today's established African leadership cadre. The dominant mode is a staleness, tiredness, unnecessary ruthlessness and an empty and hollow posturing that somersaults between discredited male chauvinism, nationalism, ethnicity and the monopoly of wisdom. We need fresh vision and imagination, not the technocratic Vision 2020 or 2030! We need inspiration and direction. We must organize around a politics of healthy skepticism and not that of hero worship or venerated leadership. Thank you.

Lecture presented on the occasion of an Open Forum organized by DENIVA Uganda held at the Grand Imperial Hotel, Kampala, Uganda, August 26, 2008.