Being a presentation by Dr.  JOSEPH OKPAKU  to the African eleadership Workshop of the 2011 UN  and Africa Public Service Forum at Dares Salaam, Tanzania recently.
The humility of leadership
IT is difficult, indeed impossible, to reflect on 50 years of governance and leadership in Africa without immediately recalling the dream and legacy of Mwalimu Julius Nyerere whose quintessential contribution to governance in Africa was his eminent personification of the humility of leadership.

That humility was born of a profound and seamless combination of knowledge, wisdom, perspicacity, focus and selfless commitment to the notion that Africa has a destiny that in order for us to achieve demands of its leadership and of all of us, a soberness of reflection and judgement that is relentless and indefatigable, given especially the overwhelming burden we bear of the worst experience of man’s inhumanity to man that history has witnessed to date.

This is a legacy that I have no doubt that the subsequent leadership of Tanzania has worn like the noble mantle that it is to this day. President Nyerere bequeathed to the people of this nation a modesty of disposition that permits the acknowledgement of and respect for the value and importance of the knowledge and genius of others in the common pursuit of nation-building here and in all of Africa.

A memorable encounter in Buenos Aires
I recall as if it was only yesterday, an opportunity I had many years ago in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to share with President Nyerere in a private conversation at the residence of the Nigerian Ambassador, our reflections on the African condition, the challenges before us and the prosecution of the African Dream. “Africa,” he said, “belongs to you now.

Take it and do with it as you will. Our generation has done its part, rightly or wrongly. It is now up to your generation.” “If you need our advice and opinion,” he added, “we will gladly provide them. But the future of Africa belongs to you now.”

The right of every generation to stamp its footprints
That sense that each generation of Africans has a right and responsibility to shape Africa in the image of its own vision and make its mark as best as it can, alongside the humility of leadership which embraces the maximum inclusion of the genius of all of us for the maximum good of all, are two of the most important essentials of governance and leadership that Africa needs and always needed in order to achieve a reasonable facsimile of our enormous continental dream.

The critical importance of strategic self-development
The third essential prerequisite for achieving effective governance and leadership in Africa is the belief in, and commitment to, strategic self-development, with an emphasis on “self”. By this I mean the primary responsibility and pre-eminent sole authority of Africans to craft our own dream and the ways and means of achieving it, unburdened and  unfettered by the demands, constructs or even anxieties of others, friends, foes and “indifferents”  alike.

The shortfall in these three fundamental requirements of the solid, proactive and durable design, prosecution and management of leadership and governance has undermined and obstructed the pursuit of Africa’s strategic self-development over much of the last 50 years of the post-colonial administration of most of Africa that has been free for this long.

Making Africa work once and for all
Given the importance of making Africa work once and for all so that we can migrate out of the burdensome and frankly boring preoccupation with building the foundations of nationhood, I will be compelled, of necessity, to avail myself of a little dose of stridency in order to underscore the critical importance of undertaking a sober retrospective on our legacy to date. I wish to beg your indulgence in advance in this regard. It is all for love of our dear Africa for whose better and more worthy future no sacrifice is too much.

Sweating to manage poverty and begging for crumbs a whole half century after we embarked with tremendous hope and vigour on the journey of self-development when we should be well advanced in crafting value-added capacities for globally competitive capacity-building, is neither a pretty sight nor a wholesome and noble feeling.

We must now commit ourselves, each and everyone of us African, to the urgency to shift gears now by finding the courage and genius to change our prevailing strategy, approach, guiding principles and paradigms that have clearly not worked well for us, and replacing them with a set of strategies and corresponding agenda for implementation most of which, ironically, were put in place 50 years or more ago by our founding fathers and mothers. Put simply, we must take back the sole right and responsibility for our own strategic self-development.

Right at the beginning, what then went wrong?
The irony of Africa’s stalled development is the fact that in critical essentials, we had it right at the very beginning. Our challenge then is to answer the question: What went wrong, when and how, and what do we do about it? We got derailed. We panicked when our plane hit turbulence and failed to hold steady and keep the course. We ran out of fuel too soon. We lost faith too soon. We got greedy. We changed from building to acquiring.

Our soldiers were dazzled by the pomp and pageantry of power and they went for it. We cut off the knowledge and ideas of our best and brightest whose genius that we needed for nation-building we begrudged them. Many of them also fell for the appeal of quicksand.  Pettiness replaced statesmanship as we lost focus and drifted away from our profound early dream at independence.

And all the while, those who reluctantly yielded their control of the destiny they had stolen from us simply waited in the wings ready to bounce back and take it all back while we fought each other for reasons that I am sure if we thought about them today will make no sense to us.

They told us we could not succeed without them. What did we do? What have we done? We simply ran back to them and continue to do so even to this day. We abandoned or cut off our own world-class sons and daughters whom we had trained at great cost to build Africa and instead handed over our fortunes and opportunities to just about every Tom, Dick, Harry or Mary that came from outside, anyone except our own people, local or continental. The prize we have paid for it is glaring.

The constant castigation of Africa and Africans as ne’er-do-wells has had the predictable psychological effect of undermining our self-confidence, making us to under-estimate ourselves and how profoundly capable we are of building our own future in accordance with our own destiny.

Definitions
But before we continue this common intellectual fellowship in search of new and better tools for crafting our common future, let me dispense with issues of definitions to ensure that we are on the same track.

eLeadership
Quite simply, eLeadership is leadership in an electronic age.  All other definitions, to the extent that they have efficacy, meaning and value are simply embellishments of this basic definition.

Development
In the past, I have defined development as nothing more than the very process of problem solving. Therefore, it is those who solve our problems, not us for whom they purportedly make the sacrifice, who in fact experience and derive development benefits, not us. This holds true even if we benefit from the use of especially the physical accouterments of the problem-solving process.

Several years ago in an address at the World Intellectual Property Organisation, WIPO, in Geneva, I introduced the concept of what I called “the right of ownership of problems as intellectual property”, I argued that “innovation and creativity come from problem-solving.

Therefore, if you steal my problems, you give me two new problems: You deprive me of the opportunity for creativity and innovation, and you leave me with the residual guilt of incompetence. And if you proffer your solutions on my problems and they fail, you blame me.”

This triple “whammy” defines the African dilemma. We no longer identify or define our problems, rather they are identified and defined for us; we have lost the authority to design the solutions to our problems, and even the measures and yardsticks by which our performance is judged are defined externally to us.

The process and outcome are, as a result, quite strange and alien to us, not having come out of our own sober reflections and deliberations. We have lost or ceded the ownership of Africa’s problems to others (individuals, corporations, governments and international organisations alike) and in the process, lost or ceded the benefits that accrue from masterminding their solution. The result is that having lost or outsourced Africa’s development, we now find ourselves consigned to be mere observers to the process  of shaping our own lives and destiny, stragglers on the sidewalks of our own contemporary history.

Strategic self-development
Strategic self-development is the process and result of a nation or a people, taking prime and foremost responsibility for their own development, well-being, destiny and legacy, setting out, with courage and perhaps a bit of prayer, to design the vision and strategic plan for their own future.

They craft and execute the vision in a coherent and enlightened manner over whatever length of time it takes, reinforced from time to time by the value and benefits of their achievements along the way. Strategic self-development is, of necessity, long-term and vey demanding.

But because it derives from the depth of a fundamental and profound common dream, it offers its own powerful reinforcement at each step of the way because it is predicated on the highest desires of the people and on a profound shared purpose.
The process of strategic development is essentially what participatory governance means.