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BOOK REVIEW
Title: Reforming Leadership in Africa
Author: J. William Addai
Publisher: Publishers Graphics Indiana, USA, 2009
Price: US$24.99 plus shipping
Reviewer: Kofi Akosah-Sarpong
Increasingly, leadership has emerged as a key factor
in Africa’s progress. Bewildered leadership schemes
have seen a good part of post-independent Africa
sinking, some leading to horrible civil wars and
state paralysis. Africa’s leadership jam reveals
that African elites have not understood their
environment in relation to Africa’s progress,
especially how to draw leadership materials from
within their raw cultural values. Nigerians,
Kenyans, Guineans and Central Africans will tell you
they have everything but leadership.
This acknowledgement was revived when I read
Reforming Leadership in Africa, a contribution to
the on-going discussions continent-wide for the need
to appropriate Africa’s cultural values and
institutions into Africa’s progress, as a matter of
psychology, confidence, dignity and logic. Such
appropriation will help the continent’s progress by
fostering the required self-assurance considered
necessary for progress. The schism in Africa’s
leadership organization has come about because the
ex-colonial structures have not been harmonized
skillfully enough with Africa’s indigenous ones,
especially in the on-going decentralization
exercises and the talk of developing new leaders for
tomorrow’s Africa.
The propaganda have been that the ex-colonial
structures are generally thought to be superior
(though wrongly) to that of Africa’s, not only by
the ex-colonialists of yesteryears but also Africa’s
elites of today. Visit African bureaucracies and you
will shocked whether they operate on African soil –
the leadership organizational values (the nuances,
for instance) are heavily non-African. The trick in
resolving these contentious African leadership
issues, argues the author, is to develop skills to
appropriate the differences to bring out the best in
Africa’s leadership potential. The author, an
Ashanti himself, draws heavily from Ashanti
traditional leadership values and institutions,
which he describes as his “research test tube,” to
explain the leadership reforms Africa feverishly
needs to drive its progress.
In his bold attempts to locate where the African
leadership-progress inadequacies come from (that’s
lack of Africa’s cultural inputs), it is easy to see
where Africa’s developmental troubles come from –
leadership mired in the notorious authoritarian,
individualistic Big Man Syndrome cooked in
ex-colonial European systems against Africa’s
traditional consensus building systems. If Africa’s
development challenges are first and foremost
leadership, then what value of leadership?
Leadership that for historical and cultural reasons,
flow from Africa’s innate traditional values, and
simultaneously balanced with Africa’s ex-colonial
heritage. The question is how African elites, as
directors of progress, can draw from Africa’s
cultural values to reform their trembling leadership
tests today. And short of that; continue to suffer,
as African leaders repeat the old mistakes that have
disturbed them and their people’s progress.
Against the backdrop of global intercultural
leadership studies, Joseph William Addai, an
administrator, a religious and international
development scholar, puts in extensive scholarly and
practical work to provide matter-of-factly answers
to Africa’s leadership predicament. These are
enriched by his participation in diverse programs in
North America, Papua New Guinea, Europe, the Middle
East and Africa. Of particular note is his drawing
from the Ashanti Kingdom’s Manhyia Palace and the
late heavyweight Ghanaian neo-liberal conservative
political leader William Ofori-Atta (Paa Willie).
It is clear from Addai’s work that from scratch
African states were in leadership dilemma – that’s
if they are aware of that and that it is a pressing
development issue, and how to reconcile ex-colonial
Europe’s individualist-oriented leadership
organization with Africa’s traditional
group-oriented system. Underpinning all these
systems are the foundational values of each society
as drivers for effective leadership organization for
progress. Africa has leadership difficulty at the
moment because its foundational cultural values do
not flow dexterously into its modern state
organization, as the Japanese have successfully
done.
In dealing with both inadequacies of the European
leadership system imposed on Africa and the
shortfalls of Africa’s traditional leadership
organization, Addai compellingly discusses various
leadership theories and practices (as an opener to
Africa’s) and come out refreshingly with the view
that some sort of hybridization of the European and
the African systems is needed to make progress.
Perhaps, Addai’s thesis, with the prominent argument
that an understanding of African cultural values is
indispensable to Africa’s leadership organization
and progress, will be of help to attempts to review
Ghana’s on-going 20-year old decentralization
exercises, which have been more about the “political
and fiscal” without weaving into it Ghana’s cultural
receptivity as an organizational necessity and
progress mechanism.
Kofi
Akisah-Sarpong, Canada. September 27, 2009
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