Breaking the Challenges: Leaders of Underdeveloped Countries

By Matthieu W Yangambi

Awareness of the community culture is necessary for a successful leadership. No leader can successfully lead a community ignoring its culture. Knowledge of the culture helps shape the strategies that would convince people to buy-in and reduce resistance and weaken opposition attitudes.

A leader must govern with moral purpose on all his/her actions or initiatives. He/she cannot tolerate social vices such as stealing the community's money, embezzling money from the people's business, behaving as political gangsters, displaying indifferent attitudes in face of calamities, and ignoring people's misery.

A good leader is someone who strives to work for the betterment of his community. He/she is someone who helps everyone to succeed. He/she is the guarantor of the people's security and hope for the better.

Any political leader, any organizational leader who neglects the importance of the culture would cause chaos that would lead the country or the organization to its demise, sadly.

The relentlessness to quick enrichment from embezzling the country natural resources, squandering its assets through stingy abominable deals depriving the country from its economic and financial means is clearly the curse to the country development. Again, a leader must live with a moral purpose. He must be the embodiment of a decent model of live to the people he is in charge of or the organization he oversees. His first and utmost responsibility should be the welfare of the people and not his own quick enrichment. Some African leaders should consider going back to the traditional African model of leadership, adapting it to the world's everchanging events and realities.

This book is to remind African leaders the meaning of leadership.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fulton Books, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9798885057479

Book preview

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

Introduction

Part One: Tools For Effective Leadership

PART TWO: Place of African Culture and Values in Modern Leadership

PART THREE: Political Leadership Struggle in Africa

PART FOUR: Leading for Change: How to Proceed?

PART FIVE: Wise Leadership for Africa's Development

PART SIX: Necessity of Humility for a Political Leader

PART SEVEN: Crucial Leadership Lessons from Nelson Mandela

References

About the Author

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Breaking the Challenges

Leaders of Underdeveloped Countries

Matthieu W Yangambi

Copyright © 2023 Matthieu W Yangambi

All rights reserved

First Edition

Fulton Books

Meadville, PA

Published by Fulton Books 2023

ISBN 979-8-88505-746-2 (paperback)

ISBN 979-8-88505-747-9 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

This book is dedicated to my grandchildren—Devin, Sophia, Justin, Sebastien-Matthieu, ma Cherie Naima, and the one I feel is coming—whose love, hugs, laughter, and joy in seeing me teaching and learning inspire and enrich my life. It is also dedicated to my children Sylvie, Achille, Rose-Marie, Thierry, Mamita, and Prisca. My deepest hope is that new generation of children and new generation of world leaders would, one day, contribute to the leadership capacity of their communities and the world communities, without which the world would never be an optimum big village to live in.

Matthieu W. Yangambi, Ed.D.

Introduction

This book is about political leadership in African underdeveloped countries. My original intention is to write about the ways African countries are led with politically incompatible and disconnected strategies relative to their cultures. This book aims to help African leaders and those to come to be aware of what they need to consider to change the strategies intended to help develop their countries. It is past overdue to bring those countries toward development and to better the lives of those living in these.

Having grown up in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and spending a decade of my young adult life in a former African French colonized country prior to immigrating to the United States of America, in my fully adult life, I was concerned about why African leaders could not find ways to bring their countries to full development after multidecade of independence from their colonizers. This book touches on certain elements of the causes.

African countries have all the necessary natural resources that could bring peace and prosperity to their lands. African people could enjoy the delice of life that God has blessed them with if African political leaders could be inspired by their traditional, cultural genuine political strategies. Political leadership strategies adopted from non-African countries cannot help African political landscape. Instead of peace and prosperity, preventable calamities have created unbearable situations throughout Africa due to unwise socioeconomic and political leadership strategies.

Nowadays, African leaders are somewhat confused with imported culture from extra-Africa countries. This unmatched cultural reality has put Africa in a stand still. Africa needs impetus from the new generation of leaders to get by respectfully. Africa needs to be guided by their own and genuine cultures and keep them respected by their non-African friends.

In the precolonial African era, vices such as social misbehaviors, embezzlement of the people's money from state coffers, imposition of negative dictatorships, ignorance of people rampant miseries, etc. were not observable in precolonial African people's way of life. The remarkable and respected African culture that says It takes a village to raise a child is losing its flavor in most African countries, sadly.

African countries should educate their children from elementary school to higher education with the consciousness of African culture, such as respect for the elders and the society, socialization, mutual assistance, etc. Individualism does not belong to African precolonial societies. Curricula should give priority to the knowledge and the culture of traditional African toward its development. Africa must request respect from anyone in the village: the world. Africa can do it, but leaders need to start by adapting the traditional values and cultures to the reality of this cosmopolitan village that is the world.

It is known that Africa is the origin of the humanity. It is also known that Africa is the continent that had the first higher education school in the world—the first university in the world—the first and still standing black university founded in Timbuktu in Mali, one of the African countries. The philosophy of the University of Timbuktu was and still is the embodiment of sciences and excellent morality aimed at serving the people efficiently. Post-colonial African leaders should not demarcate from the philosophy of this university, the first one founded in the world by Africans: The University of Timbuktu.

Part One: Tools For Effective Leadership

Tools for Effective Leadership

Basic Elements for Successful Leadership

1. Basic Elements for Successful Leadership

1. What is leadership?

What is leadership? Leadership is the ability to help everyone to improve and meet the established goal. This ability is obtained through exposure to experiences that collect some characteristics explained below.

What do leaders look like? Do they always look powerful, impressive, and charismatic? And how do you measure the effectiveness of a leader? Can you put two people side by side and instantly tell which is the better leader? (Maxwell, 2007, p. 11). These are questions people have asked for hundreds of years and these questions keep bringing reflections to many future leaders (Maxwell, 2007).

What makes people want to follow a leader? Why do people reluctantly comply with one leader while passionately following another to the end of the earth? What separates leadership theorists from successful leaders who lead effectively in the real world? The answer lies in the character qualities of the individual person (Maxwell, 1999, p. IX). It is difficult to have two individuals with the same characters. With different characters, individuals act differently. Acting differently brings different leadership.

Becoming a leader takes time. Leadership develops daily, not in a day. Part of a leader's development comes from learning leadership principles, for those are the tools that teach how leadership works. But understanding leadership and doing it are two different activities. Leaders are effective because of who they are on the inside and the qualities that distinguish them from others. And to go to the highest level of leadership, people must develop acceptable societal characters. People will want to follow a leader who displays good characters that people admire.

2. What leadership is not?

What leadership is not? Leadership is often misunderstood. It is not about impressive titles or assigned leadership positions, it is about what an individual assumes as a leader, and his actions in helping people and the