How Africa reflects, learns, narrates and deals with its past is crucial in understanding why its pathway to the future is punctuated by indifference and cruelty, is least African, is intolerable to every African norm and value system hence is unrecognisable to the continent and its population. Governance systems are shameless versions of colonial administrative structures. This is the single most important reason why the accumulation of power and corruption have remained the only constant across our governance institutions.

Colonialism had a need to upset native administrative institutions, so it did; it set in motion militarised institutions that sort to disenfranchise natives, weaken local power dynamics, and concentrate superior power on the White invader, and then extract resources from Africa to the metropole without effective legal demands for accountability. The systems saved the interests of the colonial rulers at the expense of marginalised locals who were excluded from state decision-making processes; emasculated chiefs were reduced to agents of the colonial State, serving the colonial master instead of their subjects.

When Africa achieved independence, the White colonial ruler was replaced by a Black dictator whose aspiration – despite the public declarations of the desire to free natives from abusive colonial systems – had always been to appropriate the colonial ruler’s administrative order and the privileges it guaranteed.

There is general acceptance that history has been unkind to Africa and black people, but that Africa has not always taken lessons from its history is Africa’s problem. If our governance institutions amplify foreign values and our educational institutions serve as the fertile soil for the cultivation of foreign perceptions of us, suboptimal policies with no local resemblance will be standard.

Africa retains an altered and harmful perception of itself – a direct consequence of colonialism that sees our traditional norms and values, systems and institutions disabled and/ or devalued and/ or distorted. How we approach our world is a foreign construct; our institutions and structures of governance are a foreign design with little reference to local traditions. We look up to everyone else but ourselves to blame for the challenges we face; for solutions, we take advice from everyone as long as they are not a native African.

Retention of colonial systems and structures of governance meant the establishment of a Black elite minority who replaced a White minority leadership, not institutions; that meant adopting traditional institutions already deprived of power – chiefs who had been stripped of their precolonial powers, a traditional leadership that had become subservient to political leadership and drew its power from the proximity to corruptible political leadership. This was no longer a leadership accountable to the public but a powerless bunch of gatekeepers for political rulers.

With the wider appropriation of colonial administrative structures was the unintended endorsement in our society of shamelessness, corruption, clientelist politics, perpetuation of economic structures whose sole purpose was the extraction and funnelling of power, decision-making processes, and resources away from locals to central government and the metropole. Civil servants became surveillance operatives who represented government to natives and monitored the public for the benefit of the State, thus controlled the public instead of serving them.

In the contemporary Africa things have not improved; there is disturbing indifference to public safety by the State that trivialises human rights; unrestrained State cruelty toward the public has been normalised; legislators answer to government, not to the public; partisanship and not merit determine who holds what leadership role and whose misdemeanours and felonies qualify for prosecution. This is a dangerous world where accountability is not important to governance but partisanship and proximity to power is everything.

Re-establishing African political and economic sovereignty and localising decisions was the goal for independence from colonial rule. Now it appears the public was stringed along and the goal had always been to create a corruptible Black elite that would manage the rest of the Black population on behalf of the White colonial masters.

Progress will not come from blaming the past and others but taking full responsibility for our actions now. We need to cultivate a healthy and sustained engagement in local and national dialogue. Increasing access to decision-making processes to women and ethnic minorities would be fundamental to communities taking control. Active engagement in local issues by the public is an important avenue for restructuring governance because it gives people the opportunity to define their own reality. 

Corruption is a cancer that has eaten into progress in Africa. Making changes to governance structures is imperative to increasing access to power and decision-making processes to the villager. Traditional leaders have been politicised, and local decisions are more partisan than not. Instead of having individuals hold more power, we must have committees of locally predetermined size making unanimous decisions on issues of local interest. A locally determined qualifying majority vote will be used to select committee members to serve over a specified time.

When we blame others, we lose the power to change our situation. Africa must model governance structures so those in power are accountable to the public. Decentralising power, legal institutions, and decision-making will help communities swiftly deal with corruption.