Leadership and Crime: Siamese Twins in Africa: The Disastrous Impact of Leadership Failure in an African Continent That Is Unable to Live up to Its Numerous Potential!

By Frisky Larr

"Leadership and Crime: Siamese Twins in Africa" is a work that examines the festering woes of Black Africa in the quality of leadership it has had across-the-board since the departure of European colonizers from its individual countries. Using Nigeria - the country with the highest population and the largest economy on the continent - as a case study, it identifies the respective areas of leadership failure by indigenous leader but not without highlighting the self-serving groundwork laid by departing colonizers to safeguard long-term strategic interests with zero thought of the future of the indigenes. The resultant impact of conflicts, dictatorship, and self-enrichment to the detriment of the vast, suffering masses is clearly showcased in this sober, matter-of-fact presentation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Jun 24, 2021
• ISBN: 9781665589383

Frisky Larr

Frisky Larr is a German-based Radio/Television Journalist with several years of working experience as a Freelance Radio Journalist in different regions of Germany. Four years of studying Radio/Television Journalism at the University of Ankara in Turkey was followed by a master's degree program in the combined study of Communication Science, Political Science and Social Psychology at the Ruhr University of Bochum, Germany. Besides authoring several articles on burning political issues in several Nigerian dailies at different points in time since 2006, Frisky Larr currently writes for several reputable Nigerian media outlets. He is also the author of "Nigeria's Journalistic Militantism" and "Africa's Diabolical Entrapment".

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© 2021 Frisky Larr. All rights reserved.

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transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse  06/23/2021

ISBN: 978-1-6655-8939-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-8938-3 (e)

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CONTENTS

Chapter 1   What is Leadership?

Definition of Leadership

Chapter 2   Indigenous Socio-Political Leadership

Street Leadership

The King and his cabinet and the political hierarchy

Structured order

Chapter 3   Post-Traditional Socio-political Order

Rule of Law and Constitutionality

Language and Religion

Chapter 4   Political Leadership in the Hands of Africans

Transition to independence rigged by Colonizers

The Colonies that were discharged into independence

Indigenes in Power

Dearth of nationalism

Misplaced priorities in regionalism rather than development

Chapter 5   Leadership collapse Across-the-Board

Student Unionism and the collapse of values

Leadership in the economic sector

Labor Unions

Leadership in the mass media

The Factor of Religion in the Post-Colonial World

Chapter 6   The Mentality Factor

Ethnic engineering

Chapter 7   Why is African Leadership deemed a failure?

The example of Equatorial Guinea

The example of Uganda

Nigeria as proof of ultimate decadence

Cult-like abuse of power

Godfatherism

Reasons for failure reflected in the impacts of failure!

Conclusion

Chapter 8   Missed and Wasted Opportunities!

Ethnic rivalry impeding development

Missed opportunities in health and educational infrastructures

Frustration and retreat to tribal enclaves risking civil wars

Chapter 9   Lessons from Worthy Examples!

The Example of China and other countries

Endnotes

Annex 1

Annex 2

Annex 3

1

WHAT IS LEADERSHIP?

It was my first day in class as a sophomore at the University of Ankara in Turkey. I was 21 years old and studying Mass Communication hoping to become a Radio and Television Journalist. We had moved from the ground floor of the building, which housed the freshman classes all through the preceding academic year and went one floor up to the sophomore classes. Our very first class in the second year, was to be led by an Associate Professor at the time, who was acclaimed for his good looks and likeable disposition, at least, judging by the general tone of feminine whispers across the grapevine corridors. His name was Ahmet Taner Kışlalı.

This first lesson as a sophomore stood out from all other classes thereafter for the unforgettable story that the Professor opened the lesson with.

At the start of every academic year, I tell my students this same story Professor Kışlalı said.

He went ahead to tell the story of two childhood friends in a rural community, who grew up in different families.

Erdem’s family was poor, and he lived his life toiling in the farm to support his parents for a moderate livelihood. Ismet’s family was rich, and he had all that he needed as a youngster to make life comfortable. Erdem and Ismet were inseparable friends, who were only born into contrasting realities.

When they grew up into adulthood, Erdem ended up as a career farmer with all the physical strains that hard work inflicted on his physique. Wrinkles all over the body, make him look twice as old as his age should have shown. On the contrary, Ismet became a Professor in an urban university with the freshness of a physique that knows no toiling strains. He looks much younger than his age. In spite of parting ways in career development through the years leading to adulthood, the two men remained bound by their inseparable friendship from the early days. All through the years, the two good friends have been in love with one and the same girl, who they both knew, also from childhood. It was a girl that ripped their individual fantasies apart in their separate dreams of becoming family fathers when the time finally comes.

The career now settled, and the age of maturity attained, the next best thought was to get married and raise a family. The two good friends agreed to approach the only girl they both love. They had to face the daunting task of asking her to make a choice between them both. After all, she has also shown an equal degree of affection to both of them since their early days of flirtatious adventures.

As the legend would have it, Leyla has a difficult choice to make having come to appreciate both men with their strength and weaknesses all through the years.

It’s a hard choice to make gentlemen Leyla says. Perhaps, you’ll have to do a duel. The winner can have me with all my strength and weaknesses.

Fate then leads two good old friends to confront each other in a duel that they never, ever dreamt would happen to them at any point in their life. They pull their swords and start a duel.

Then, the worst imaginable tragedy strikes. Both men succeed in chopping off each other’s head at the very same moment and they both drop dead.

The clouds turn dark with thick patches moving in accelerated succession. Total darkness envelopes the scene. Leyla stands in shock and awe. Scared, confused, and dejected with no sight in the midst of darkness, tears running down her cheeks, she drops on her cold, frozen knees. She stiffens like a statue simply unable to think. It dawns on her, slowly, that two men have just died in search of her elusive love. Not just two men. They were age-long friends with each other and with her as their adored other sex. They rendered meaning to her life at different stages in time. Helplessness and hopelessness force desperation on Leyla. On her knees, she cries out to God:

Lord my God, what have I done to deserve this? What life is this that I will now have to bear? What life is left for me to live when my pillars are taken from me? Take my soul too and let me go with my love to the immortal world of endless unison.

Leyla sobs and weep uncontrolled pulling her hair in torturous desperation.

Then, as the legend says, a voice comes through out of the eerie stillness of the surrounding.

Do not despair Leyla my child. Your friends are not gone. Their time of death is yet to come. Pick up the dismembered heads and put them back on their bodies and they will come back to life before the darkness turns to light.

Leyla realizes that God has just spoken to her and she makes haste to find the heads and the respective bodies in the darkness that pervades the scene. She finally picks up the heads and puts one each on the two lifeless bodies.

Alas, the second tragedy beckons. She has put the wrong head on the wrong body respectively.

The two men get back to life nonetheless, each body bearing the other man’s head. Then this: Erdem’s wrinkle-ridden, strained body bearing Ismet’s head suddenly transforms into the freshness and youthfulness of Ismet’s comfort-defined handsomeness. On the contrary, Ismet’s body carrying Erdem’s head suddenly transforms into the wrinkle-plagued physique of Erdem’s hardship-defined journey through the deprivation and rigors of life.

Overwhelmed by joy seeing the two men get to their feet again, and not realizing that she had placed the wrong heads on the wrong bodies, Leyla drops to the ground in a moment of bliss and thankfulness to God but in the uncontrolled fall, she struck her head violently but involuntarily, against a rock on the ground. Leyla dies instantly and left the two men stunned and in sorrow to figure their way out of a dilemma they did not bargain for.

The Lesson of this whole story is simple Professor Kışlalı subsequently added. This is a story that should teach you a major lesson in leadership and society.

The illustration was as exciting, tragic, saddening as it was simple and unforgettable. In driving his point home, the Professor emphasized that the bodies of Erdem and Ismet blending with their heads as implanted on them, simply drives the message home that the head always determines what becomes of the body. A rotten head can hardly bring forth, a vibrant and productive body. The society as the laboratory of social science has proven, time and again, that leadership as the head of every society (which is the body) determines the shape and orientation of the society itself. Yet, Professor Kışlalı fell short of defining leadership to us in outright terms as that was not the subject of the classes at that point in time. The subject was Political Thoughts and Regimes.

It is, however, doubtful that there is a single universally encompassing – the so-called integrative – definition of leadership to match the word in all its facets. Yet, the Professor’s illustration above seems to indicate just one point that Leadership is the head, and the head is leadership.

There is, nonetheless, much more to leadership than simply being the head. In its different forms of individual or collective manifestation, leadership entails several elements that can be endless in terms of quantification. It can be compared to a journey that is led by a Guide. In this sense, I will dare opine, within a limited scope, that leadership, basically, entails guidance since a leader, above all else, is generally, expected to define or make a choice on the path to tread. It is doubtful that leadership can be seen as such without an entity at the peak that should shine a light on the path to follow. Guidance in this sense is closely followed by the element of direction that a path should lead to. In other words, while shining the light on the way, it is inherent in the act that the direction of movement is always given in progression. This is crowned by intimating to the followers, the destination or goal that the journey will take the crowd. In all of these, the leader shall have the aura of popular acceptance to crown him/her with such authority that his/her guidance is not called into question and rubbished. The element of trust in the ability and qualification of a leader gives him/her the ultimate authority to exert control over compliance, to manage the process of realization and constantly take the initiative thereafter, in setting the agenda. His/her influence over the situation will determine the success or failure of the overall concept.

No doubt, these limited items identified above, namely Guidance, Direction, Target, Authority, Control, Management, Initiative, Influence and Concept are just but a few of the components of leadership that readily comes to mind on a spontaneous appraisal. Countless elements can be identified to fill the entire chapter of a book. In fact, writing for the International Journal of Leadership Studies, Bruce Winston and Kathleen Patterson of the American Regent University identified 90 variables that may comprise the whole of leadership( ¹). Few as those items identified above may be, it can be seen, nonetheless, that an attempt to provide an integrative definition of leadership to encompass just these few elements alone, is a daunting task.

Attempting to define leadership, The Balance, a New York-based business advocate specializing in the training of individuals for the establishment of small businesses, kept it simple:

A simple definition is that leadership is the art of motivating a group of people to act towards achieving a common goal. ( ¹)

As can be seen in this definition, the word motivating alone, aims to capture several elements that we identified above. It covers the element of guidance, direction, target, and initiative. Else, a subject can hardly be said to have been motivated to achieve a common goal without being guided, directed, and backed by productive initiatives. Yet how well this definition captures the remaining elements (identified above) is doubtful and arguable. Eliminating this deficit thus requires a more detailed elaboration of the simplified definition.

Continuing, The Balance explained as follows:

Effective leadership is based upon ideas (whether original or borrowed), but won’t happen unless those ideas can be communicated to others in a way that engages them enough to act as the leader wants them to act. … Put even more simply, the leader is the inspiration and director of the action. He or she is the person in the group that possesses the combination of personality and leadership skills that makes others want to follow his or her direction. ( ²)

Attempting to offer an integrative definition of leadership that encompasses as many of the known elements as possible, Bruce Winston and Kathleen Patterson of Regent University attempted defining who a leader is:

A leader is one or more people who selects, equips, trains, and influences one or more follower(s) who have diverse gifts, abilities, and skills and focuses the follower(s) to the organization’s mission and objectives causing the follower(s) to willingly and enthusiastically expend spiritual, emotional, and physical energy in a concerted coordinated effort to achieve the organizational mission and objectives. ( ¹)

This definition through the backdoor (because it seeks to define leadership by defining who a leader is) underlines one major difficulty in scientific works when actors try to move towards a consensus – a common ground that all actors may share by accepting the universality of a definition. In deviation from the above definition, however, reality shows that a leader, while always remaining a source of inspiration and guidance to his/her followers, must not necessarily select or be a part of the selection process of his/her followers. While a leader at the miniature level of society such as in companies and private organizations, may be key to the selection of followers to implement a vision, a leader in the broader society is, rather, often selected by the followers that he seeks to lead with the misleading slogan of being the servant of the people.

In this descriptive preamble to their envisaged integrative definition of leadership, the authors showed in their definition of a leader once again, how difficult it is to provide an integrative definition of leadership that will cover all the known individual components of leadership.

In other words, the efforts that will be put into this work in an attempt to offer a definition of leadership that may be broadly acceptable to stakeholders in scientific scrutiny will, no doubt, be an imperfect endeavor. It may be flawed depending on perspectives that may have escaped the mind in the process of evaluation and considerations. Yet, the attempt will be made to the best of abilities and knowledge.

Definition of Leadership

Viewing all the components identified above and the definitions inspired by the realities of the micro-world in the scope of companies and organizations, one thing stands out distinctively. It is the dominant characteristic of leadership. By the nature of its existence, leadership may mean dominance by the entity exercising it. How well or badly this element of dominance is shared or monopolized may spell the lifespan of the entire process.

Leadership in the broader macrocosmic society of competing nations, however, is, first and foremost, a responsibility. Some may say, a calling. Leadership is the responsibility of guiding and inspiring followers through a path or several paths chosen, identified and in some cases, defined by an entity at the helm, whose authority is generally accepted with little or no reservation, towards a commonly accepted goal in reflection of the shared interests of all the parties involved in the process.

In other words, as already stated above, this requires an entity that steers the boat. One or more person(s) at the top or helm, defining or constantly making the choices of the direction to steer the ship, with support rather than opposition being predominantly offered by followers at all levels, who, basically, identify with the decisions and choices made by the leading entity and recognize their common interests in the defined target of sail. This may go with the attendant variable of systemic deformity of socio-political imbalance when opposition begins to outweigh popular support or dissociation from the defined goal becomes the bane of followership reaction. This will be the subject of discussion at another point.

While the form and shape of leadership may differ from society to society, the presence of leadership in every society – primitive, primordial, advanced, or modern – is a constant denominator. It was so in primeval Africa. It was so in the early societies of the Native Americans, and it has been so everywhere in the world, in which unsolicited colonialism was transported for transformation.

When Europeans established trading posts on several coasts of the African continent and subsequently resolved to intrude in the socio-political lives of indigenous and Native Africans, some of them took, in some cases, the logical and clever step of first identifying political leaders and liaising with the folks through the leaders in a process of indirect control.

The pattern of leadership that the Europeans met in Africa had one common and predominant characteristic. It was, generally, patriarchal. It was founded in the microcosmic household reflection of the overall macrocosmic world of the broader society. The microcosm being the family and individual unit of the overall macrocosmic society ruled over by a ‘natural’ leader.

In spite of several decades of going through political and social transformation in the wake of European colonial intrusions, virtually all African countries basically persist in reflecting the fundamental characteristic that shaped them from the beginning of time in diametrical opposition to the newfound propagation of the misfitting reality of individual freedom and liberty as the signature of colonial presence.

The African family continues to be patriarchal and defined by paternal leadership, at least in the most traditional set-ups. No doubt, there are scattered exceptions including those that are integrated in the tradition of the Whiteman following diverse sources of influence since the days of colonialism. Overall, though, the man, in the typical African family, remains the head of the home and fends for the family most often, in polygamous arrangements but not limited to it and under rural and urban conditions. In spite of all that it is still, not uncommon to find women plying their trade in a subsistent scope to back up the limited resources that the head of the family can afford.

The man has his special position in the overall society. A male child is, traditionally, often accorded a particular position of influence that is generally denied the female child. There were (and probably still are), indeed, families that denied or still deny female children the opportunity of higher education out of the fear of wasting limited resources when a female child eventually gets pregnant and aborts the educational process halfway. Some families, thus, prepare their female children, basically, for the ultimate marriage and child-bearing process while the male children are, generally, prepared for the struggles of life in the hope of making it to greater heights. The most defining moment of male superiority is often experienced in times of inheritance and succession when the head of the family passes. Tradition in many African societies vests the burden of carrying the glory and responsibilities of the family head on male children, through several generations. The male, most often, inherits the lion share of the father’s estate. The male, most often, succeeds the father in social and traditional positions of influence. Chiefs and kings are often succeeded by male children. This is without prejudice to the few African societies that have produced female warriors and leaders through history.

Social order is maintained by the simple rule of ‘age before beauty’. Seniority defines authority and the higher the age, the more superior the elder. This is strictly enforced at family level straight into the wider society. The one most prominent exception is often seen in the ascension to the hereditary throne of a tribal chief or king. The age of a king is never questioned or considered a handicap since the office endows a natural authority of invincibility on the holder to make elders and youngsters prostrate in full and ultimate submission. Else, the generality of society almost across the African continent upholds the sanctity of age superiority.

In a nutshell, the African society that the colonial intruders met on the ground was not generally defined by individual freedom, democracy, or political ideologies but by a different set of indigenous rules, institutions, and moral values with which the natives maintained social justice and orderliness. At the center of these rules were individuals, whose ages played the defining role.

***

2

INDIGENOUS SOCIO-

POLITICAL LEADERSHIP

That society would mean nothing without political guidance seems to be an axiom in political parlance. From primeval times to the modern day, there is hardly any society on record without political leadership. The success or failure of any nation, empire, tribe, or political gathering (in a nutshell, the destiny of same) is, generally, dependent upon political guidance and leadership. The world holds many practical examples.

As already hinted above, African societies in general, knew no constitutions or a clear-cut idea of the separation of power with all rights to exceptions reserved. This much is known to history. They had their own differing ideas of social justice, bureaucratic administration, selection or imposition of leaders and the adjudication of conflicts for the attainment of fairness, judicial acceptability, and equity. While many traditional societies had absolute monarchs with the attributed forces of deism and spiritual leadership, the equivalent of cabinet ministers existed in almost all societies as did some rough equivalent of occasionally convened assemblies for one deliberation or the other. Be they in the forms of the Council of Chiefs or