It was USA former First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt who said, “Great
minds discuss ideas; average minds
discuss events; small minds discuss people.”
Compare and contrast with former First Lady of Mozambique/ South
Africa, Graca Machel/ Mandela’s words, “Africa does not need leaders who are 75
or 65 years old. We need leaders who are young‚ vibrant‚ innovative and who the
continent’s youth can relate to.”
Former first lady Graca Machel/Mandela said this at the Africa
Leadership Academy (ALA) in Johannesburg on Saturday.
If what Graca Machel/ Mandela said is a representative sample of
what the ALA has been teaching Africa’s present and future leaders then it is
little wonder the continent is in a real mess!
If the truth be told Africa’s politics has been about people,
what tribe one comes from what contribution they made during the liberation
struggle, who they know, etc. On the very odd occasion has our political
discourse been about events such as the liberation war or why Africa has been
dogged by poverty. And when it has done so, more often than not it has been a
one-sided narrative; people like Mugabe narrating their heroic contribution or
blaming the West for all the country’s ills. Discuss ideas, never!
Of course, if the nation political discourse is confined to the mundane
and personal level it is no surprise that most of the leaders are corrupt,
incompetent and mediocre. With leaders who have no clue what they are doing and
no vision; it is not surprising that Africa has performed well below its
expectation, if one looked at resource and potential minus human factor.
Africa is the dark continent ruled by corrupt, incompetent and
tyrannical leaders in which the majority of the people live in abject poverty under
the constant threat of hunger, disease, death and man-made chaos and civil
unrest. If Africa is ever pull itself by its own bootlaces our of chaos,
poverty and despair then we, Africans, must raise our intellectual game from
discussing people and events to discussing ideas.
Of course, the argument that we should elect someone leader
because he/she is young or a certain gender is dragging us back into the
mundane personal level and therefore foolish. Mugabe was 56 when assumed power
in 1980, that did not stop him destroying the national economy and commit the
Gukurahundi mass murders.
The reason why many people have become obsessed about the age of
dictators like Mugabe is because they had failed to remove him from office
through free, fair and credible elections. So instead of demanding that the democratic
reforms are implemented to ensure free and fair elections they were insistent
on having an upper age limit.
Leaders are elected on the basis of their understanding the
nation’s problems and having the best ideas of how to take the nation forward.
Sir Winston Churchill, UK’s PM during WW2, was 77 years old when he was elected
PM for his second term.
African needs quality leaders if the continent is ever going to
develop and pull its people out of ignorance, poverty and chaos. So far we have
failed to come up with quality leaders because we have been obsessed about the
mundane personality matters like tribe, race, etc. Asking people to look at age
and gender is not going to help us advance but drag us back. We need to elect
our leaders on the basis of the ideas they are offering to take us forward and
nothing else.
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