Bet you don't know......

•  The Gambia has only one university.
• . Equatorial Guinea is Africa’s only Spanish-speaking country. 
•  South Africa is the most visited African country. 
•  Nigeria has the richest Black people in Africa. 
• .Nigeria has won more football cups than England.  
•  Zimbabwe’s President, Robert Gabriel Mugabe is the world’s most educated resident with 7 degrees, two of them are Masters. 
•  Al-Ahly of Egypt is the richest club in Africa. 
• Johannesburg, South Africa is the most visited city in Africa. 
• Zinedine Zidane wanted to play for Àlgeria, but the selector rejected him, saying they are already many players like him in the team.  
•  President Jacob Zuma was once a referee in prison.  
• President Robert Mugabe is Africa’s oldest Head of State and the world's second oldest Head of State. He was born in 1924. 
• The Seychellois are the most  educated Africans. Seychelles’ literacy rates (Adult:
  92%, Youth: 99%) Zimbabwe is 2nd (Adult: 91.2%,Youth: 99%).
• Somalia got its first ATM on October 7, 2014.
• South Africa has the most Grammy award winners in Africa.
•  Ethiopia has the most airports in Africa.
• Ethiopia is Africa’s oldest independent country,
  it has existed for over 3,000 years without being
  colonised.
• Nigeria has the most monarchs in the world.
• Angola has more Portuguese speakers than  Portugal. 
• President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo is  Africa’s longest serving Head of State. He has ruled Equatorial Guinea since August 3, 1979 when he overthrew his uncle, Francisco Nguema.

I'm 40 !!

Today, I was woken up by phone calls, text messages from old and new friends. I just thought about how precious it is, to be able to close out another decade, still alive. Many have gone before me; since July I have lost 4 friends, all in very unusual circumstances. Life is valuable and I intend to make the most of the next few decades so help me God : ). There are many lessons I have learned over the years and there are many more I still learn on a daily basis. Yesterday, I had an interesting discussion with a friend; he walked into my office laughing, saying how pathetic it was for us to think we could actually change the world. We're both journalists and activists with varied backgrounds. He is significantly older than I am and has had much more experience working in the trenches, challenging governments. I sympathized as I realised that the work he had done over the years hadn't necessarily created the 'grand' change he had so hoped for. This happens to the best of us; we have a romanticized view of how we want the word to be like and how we could actually make it happen but the reality is change starts from the individual. You change one individual at a time and hopefully as their story changes, they attempt to change another individual. That's the way it works. Grand changes can happen when you have a critical mass of people who have come to together for a common cause but history has shown clearly that revolutions do not automatically lead to positive change; protests don't either. We can only keep at our work as individuals, groups and organisations, hoping that the seeds we plant in the lives of others will continue to be nurtured and eventually germinate and create a harvest but in the meantime, we will continue dreaming of a better world as we set out to change it, one person at a time.

It's the action, not the fruit of the action, that's important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there'll be any fruit. But that doesn't mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.~Mahatma Gandhi

Empty Suit Syndrome

This syndrome characterizes that which is largely responsible for the failure of leadership in Africa. As Nigeria prepares for the forthcoming 2015 elections, many empty suits are already on parade,with promises  to build hospitals, roads and schools. We demand so little of our leaders so it's no surprise these empty suits use the same script every election cycle. Once they're voted back into power, the parades will be over and not even a knock on their doors will attract their attention. That's the story of our lives ladies and gentlemen; the story of the empty suits and their 'subjects'. It's little wonder that despite attempts to rebase our economy, the human development index is still very low. 

Here's a description of who an empty suit is, hopefully you'll recognise one the next time they come calling for your votes:

'An empty suit is someone puffed up with his own importance but really having little effect on the lives of others. It is often used as an insult to disparage others who really don’t deserve the title. The true empty suit, which conjures up the image of a business suit of clothing without a person, really doesn’t know what he or she is doing. He or she is ineffectual, perhaps a phony, and is about as relevant or helpful as a suit hanging on a rack. 


To call someone an empty suit implies that you think they are a complete waste of time. Editorials on politicians love to use the term empty suit to describe people seeking political office. This politician is just 'an empty suit', to quote the words of numerous political critics, and is thus undeserving of our attention. 


Some politicians deserve the title. A senator with a very poor voting record, or failure to attend senate sessions could clearly be called an empty suit because he is not really performing the job for which he was elected. On the other hand, some politicians may advertise themselves as “not just an empty suit” in order to distinguish themselves from their implied empty suit peers. 

Urban Dictionary

Rules for Radicals

The passions of mankind have boiled over into all areas of political life including its vocabulary. The words most common in politics have become stained with human hurts, hopes and frustrations. All of them are loaded with popular opprobium and their use results in a conditioned, negative emotional response. Even the word 'politics' itself which Webster says is the 'science and art of government' is generally viewed in the context of corruption. Ironically the dictionary synonyms are 'discreet, provident, diplomatic, wise'.

The same discolorations attach to other words prevalent in the language of politics such as power, self interest, compromise and conflict. They become twisted and warped, viewed as evil. Nowhere is the prevailing political illiteracy more clearly revealed than in the interpretation of these words. That is why we pause here for a 'word about words'.

Whenever the word 'power' is mentioned, somebody sooner or later will refer to the words of Lord Acton and cite it as follows: 'Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.' In fact the correct quotation is 'Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely'. We cant even read Acton's statement correctly, our minds are so confused by our conditioning.

The corruption of power is not in  power but in ourselves.

Pascal who was obviously not a cynic, observed that 'Justice without power is impotent, power without justice is tyranny'. St. Ignatius the founder of the Jesuit Order said,'To do a thing well, a man needs power and competence'. We could call the roll of those who have played their parts in history and find the word 'power' not a substitute word in their speeches and writings.

To know power and not fear it is essential to its constructive use and control.



Rules for Radicals, A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals by Saul D. Alinsky (1971)

To lead or not to lead is really not the question

I have been reading a lot lately on African leadership.  I have followed debates on social media on this subject but felt I needed to delve deeper; I needed to go beyond the news, beyond the various opinions and actually look back to our history and find out if I will get any answers there. Well below is part of my feeble attempt to do just that.  

I do recognize, of course, that there are broadly three components to the equation for national development: system, leader, and followers. In an ideal world, each would mesh nicely and efficiently with the others. But quite clearly Nigeria is not in such a world, not even on the road to it. She seems in fact to be going in the opposite direction, towards a world of bad systems, bad leadership, and bad followership. The question then is, How do we redirect our steps in a hurry? In other words, where do we begin and have the best chance of success? To change the Nigerian system; to change the Nigerian leadership style; or to change the hearts of one hundred and twenty million Nigerians?

Proponents of the supremacy of system would argue that unless you have the right political-economic arrangement no good leader can emerge or survive and certainly no good followership can develop.

In my view the basic problem with efforts to bestow preeminence on systems is, however, their inability to explain how an abstract system can bring itself into being autonomously. Would it drop from the sky and operate itself? 

We need not spend too long on the argument for the preeminence of followers. It is enough to say that no known human enterprise has flourished on the basis of followers leading their leaders. The cliché that people get the leader they deserve is a useful exaggeration—useful because it reminds the general populace of the need for vigilance in selecting their leaders (where they have a chance to do so) and for keeping them under constant surveillance.

But to go beyond that and suggest, as one has often heard people do in this country, that when a leader misleads or fails to offer any leadership at all it is because Nigerians are unpatriotic and impossible to govern, or that when a leader accepts a bribe he is no more to blame than the man who offered the bribe, is completely to misunderstand the meaning of leadership.

Leadership is a sacred trust, like the priesthood in civilized, humane religions. No one gets into it lightly or unadvisedly, because it demands qualities of mind and discipline of body and will far beyond the need of the ordinary citizen. Anybody who offers himself or herself or is offered to society for leadership must be aware of the unusually high demands of the role and should, if in any doubt whatsoever, firmly refuse the prompting.

Sometimes one hears apologists of poor leadership ask critics whether they would do better if they were in the shoes of the leader. It is a particularly silly question, the answer to which is that the critic is not in or running for the leader’s shoes, and therefore how he might walk in them does not arise. An editorial writer can surely condemn a pilot who crashes an airplane through carelessness or incompetence, or a doctor who kills his patient by negligent administration of drugs, without having to show that he can pilot a plane or write prescriptions himself.

So the real problem posed by leadership is that of recruitment. Political philosophers from Socrates and Plato to the present time have wrestled with it. Every human society, including our own traditional and contemporary societies, has also battled with it. How do we secure the services of a good leader?

If we cannot compel greatness in our leaders, we can at least demand basic competence. We can insist on good, educated leaders while we wait and pray for great ones. Even divine leaders have needed precursors to make straight their way.

Chinua Achebe, The Education of  a British Protected Child

Laughter

Laughter is like changing a baby's diaper-it doesnt permanently solve any problems, but it makes things acceptable for a while : ) ~ John Maxwell, Sometimes You win, Sometimes You learn

Whats wrong with being African? Errrr.... Nothing really ....

For the past two weeks, my facebook newsfeed has been filled with affirmations made by my Sierra Leonean friends who are upset over the West's discrimination of Africans from Ebola hit nations such as Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. I see slogans like 'My name is David. I'm a human being. I'm Sierra Leonean; I'm not a virus'. 

I dont know if these affirmations will reduce stigmatization of nationals from these nations ; I really do not think so. I believe that rather than focus our pressure outwards, we need to focus inwards. A post I read on one of my favourite blogs, 'Africa is a Country' was able to put this Ebola crisis into perspective and perhaps even highlight why this crisis is not just a health problem. 

I learned that 73% of Liberia's income comes from foreign aid. A nation that dependent on foreign aid with scores of international NGOs in its capital, would have been able to deal with the crisis effectively if only foreign aid was the answer to all of Africa's problems; it obviously isnt. The problem with Africa can not and should not be blamed on Western countries; it's with us. We have failed to build institutions and where we have , we have simply copied and pasted a model that is alien to us and therefore can not work.  

Foreign aid has made our leaders lazy. They have not bothered to take advantage of foreign assistance to create systems that will ensure that their countries remain stable, long after they've gone.  Instead, our leaders feel entitled to  aid; they view it as a form of compensation for the damage caused by the former colonial masters. What our leaders dont realise is that we could have easily repaired that damage if we had wanted to. We could have dismantled the very structures left by the colonialists and created those peculiar to our context. Instead we inherited these structures and started practicing politics of exclusion just like our former colonial masters and we are where we are because of it. Just like when governments are overthrown, the structures remain the same even when the people dont; basically same script different cast. 

The African Union which apparently is meant to evolve into the United States of Africa (not sure this will happen in my lifetime) seems to have lost its relevance. The Union has failed to provide support to countries that need it; we have not seen the AU mobilise resources to curb the spread of Ebola or even stop wars on the continent, so I guess 'African solutions to African problems' remains distant in sight. 

Like Professor George Ayitteh says, 

' The statement that a people deserve the leader that they get is NOT true in most African countries. The statement would be true if and only if the people participate in the process of choosing the leader. But that requirement is often vitiated by two common mal-practices. The first is when a military officer stages a coup and imposes himself on the people. The second is, though the people participate in choosing the leader, the selection process (voting) is rigged and their votes nullified. Under those two circumstances, one cannot say the people deserve the leaders that they get.

The cause of bad leadership is systemic, not cultural. Bad leadership is the product of alien political systems and ideologies blindly copied from abroad with no cultural underpinnings; for example, one-party state systems, Marxist-Leninism, Confucius Institutes, etc.

Any political system that concentrates a great of power in the hands of a buffoon degenerates into dictatorship and tyranny. To fix the problem, reform the political system, not just change the leader through elections.'