Review of 'Reforming Leadership in Africa' by J. William Addai

Increasingly, leadership has emerged as a key factor in Africa’s progress. Bewildered leadership schemes have seen a good part of post-independence 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 ongoing 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 field has come about because the ex-colonial structures have not been harmonised skilfully enough with Africa’s indigenous ones, especially in ongoing decentralisation exercises and the talk of developing new leaders for tomorrow’s Africa.

The ex-colonial structures are generally thought to be superior to that of Africa’s, not only by the ex-colonialists of yesteryears but also Africa’s elites of today. 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 Africa leadership–progress inadequacies come from (that’s the lack of Africa’s cultural inputs), it is easy to see where Africa’s developmental troubles come from: a leadership mired in the notorious authoritarian, individualistic 'big man' syndrome against Africa’s traditional consensus building. If Africa’s development challenges are leadership first, then what value of leadership? Leadership that for historical and cultural reasons flows from Africa’s innate traditional values, and simultaneously balances Africa’s time-honoured traditional values with that of the 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, we will 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, has put in extensive scholarly and practical work to provide matter-of-fact 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 neoliberal conservative political leader William Ofori-Atta (Paa Willie).

It is clear from Addai’s work that from scratch African states were in a leadership dilemma – that’s if they are aware that it is a pressing issue, and how to reconcile ex-colonial Europe’s individualist-oriented leadership organisation with Africa’s traditional group-oriented system. Underpinning all these systems are the foundational values of each society as drivers for effective leadership organisation for progress. Africa has a leadership difficulty at the moment because its foundational cultural values do not flow dexterously into its modern state organisation, 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 organisation, Addai compellingly discusses various leadership theories and practices and comes out refreshingly with the view that some sort of hybridisation 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 organisation, will be of help to attempts to review Ghana’s ongoing 20-year-old decentralisation exercises, which have been more about the 'political and fiscal' without weaving into it Ghana’s cultural receptivity as an organisational necessity.

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* 'Reforming Leadership in Africa', J. William Addai, Publishers Graphics Indiana: 2009, US$24.99 plus shipping.
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