Africa’s Leadership Challenges in the 21st Century: What Can Leaders Learn from Africa’s Pre-Colonial Leadership and Governance?

Abstract

Africa continues to face serious development challenges. Such challenges as dependency, corruption, underdeveloped infrastructure and production sectors, leadership and governance, etc are some of the impediments to Africa’s quest for sustainable and equitable development. Explaining such development challenges has continued to elude scholars. To the radical leftist scholars, Africa’s underdevelopment can adequately be explained by its forceful and uneven integration into the global economic system. However, with over fifty years of independence, the debate is increasingly focusing on Africa’s leadership as good explanation for its poverty and underdevelopment. This paper argues that the current poverty and underdevelopment of Africa have much to do with enabling conditions created by African leaders and that addressing this requires Africans to go back to pre-colonial history where they can draw good lessons rather than continuing importing Western based models which may not necessarily fit into Africa’s unique characteristics.