Good leadership is about turning ideas to concrete action not just delivering great speeches in front of obliging audiences yet that is exactly what postcolonial Africa has become. African leaders speak well, but do not live up to those words, just look at the outcomes for the regular African citizen, the picture will be clear. Uninspired citizens enable bad leadership; the elephant in the room is the gullible average electorate who blindly consumes the words without querying results. Riding on the knowledge that accountability is not on the table, African leaders will talk the talk but never walk the walk.
Docility is the most powerful weapon civilians can avail to an authoritarian regime. This generation of Africans is guilty of showing less passion to fight for their freedom thereby invariably extending a free ticket of control to the political opportunists.
Question: if citizens do not fight for what they ‘stand for’ with their passionate words and honest actions, do they really ‘stand’ for anything?
Regular citizens must urgently step-up efforts to improve accountability of those in power so all those who hold office or have the desire to do so can be held to the highest standards possible and those whose words are not matched by deeds can be detected sooner and vetted out of corridors of power. This means strengthening civil society and ensuring access to high quality information to all, so they possess informed opinion and make quality judgement on power.
Features of progressive societies include a strong civil society; we are no longer satisfied with being mere consumers of opinions from politicians, but we want to be co-creators of the politics and rules governing our lives. Creating the rules goes beyond words. Ideas get you into the race, execution puts you past the finish line.
Judging our leaders is a responsibility the public needs to take seriously and that judgement needs practical diagnostic tools weighted more toward action than how passionate the words sound.
Our experience is that many of these supposedly good speeches are long-winded, self-indulgent historical narratives, and deflections whose only purpose is to redirect the public attention away from the present-day leaders’ responsibilities and failings.
Partisan mainstream media and state-funded ‘private’ bloggers/ vloggers play an important role in shaping the public reality tunnel and engagement with the oftentimes predatory political elite and their ‘great’ speeches of self-preservation.
Keeping an open and enlightened mind is of essence for a future focussed society, and this will be achieved through intentional access to impartial media sources that demystify our political reality and save politics from scoundrels. People cannot be fooled any longer; Africa does not need great speeches of convenience founded on the now tired anti-Western rhetoric but decisive action that improves our livelihoods.
History is available for us to learn about the past from which we may understand the present as we walk in the future. Painful as some elements of the past may sound, we do not need to recreate a politics centred on hatred of certain population groups to feel better about ourselves. We need genuine understanding, internal validation of our feelings and a genuine platform to heal.
As regular citizens, we must appreciate the power that we hold and the important role we can play in the design of local politics hence how our leaders perceive and treat us; we need to understand that the vision of our true destiny does not reside within political leaders’ patios but in every household and every community.
Great speeches in the form of sorrowful narratives that invoke, in the public, anger and victim mentality do very little to motivate the public to take proactive and progressive steps to change their circumstances. We need inspirational speeches, speeches that acknowledge the wrongs done to us in the past, the mistakes of the present leadership, but that also make us believe we can redefine our fortunes.
There is need to start interrogating the true motive of these ‘good speeches’ seeing these leaders that dwell on the story of our pain and suffering and are too keen to offer solutions hardly engage with the marginalised population groups they claim to represent. Their lack of understanding of our story is evident in the limiting, poorly constructed solutions (which are often copyrighted foreign ideas) they attempt to impose on the public.
Politicians are no gods but predatory humans with limitations, we cannot afford to give them unrestricted trust so that their limitations do not form our limits too. We must never give up the responsibility of addressing our challenges to the dictates of politicians; we will never surrender our hopes and dreams to the fateful limitations these leaders have placed on their own capabilities.
Talking the talk is meaningless if you will not walk the walk. Until we start placing more emphasis on action, good speeches without tangible results will be the African norm. The public must now take the initiative and be brave enough to take practical steps to their imagined world.
MTHWAKAZI INDEPENDENT 