Toye Sobande

Africa is a continent rich in human and material resources yet perceived to be bereft of leaders imbued with requisite leadership skills to harness these resources for her growth and development. There are plausible reasons why universally acclaimed leadership principles do not work in Sub-Saharan Africa. This book posits that these leadership principles were Eurocentric principles forced down the throat of Africans by their heavy-handed and exploitative colonial masters who cared less about the sociology and anthropology of the peoples of Africa, and their governance structures, which hitherto worked for them in their different locales and settlements.

It argues that pre-colonial Africa was not utterly primitive, lacking leaders nor bereft of leadership principles as painted by the European colonialists who were everything but altruistic in their dealings with the peoples of Sub-Saharan Africa. To buttress this point, it paints a rich canvass of several defunct kingdoms across Sub-Saharan Africa whose leaders exhibited excellent leadership skills and organisational prowess that ensured order and stability in and within their domains. Painfully, the fall or decimation of these kingdoms cannot be delinked from the partitioning of Africa by the Europeans at the Berlin Conference. Indeed, the fall of Africa began at the Berlin Conference.

To solve Africa’s leadership challenge, today’s leaders of Africa must study the pre-colonial leaders of Africa and the leadership skills they exhibited, which engendered cohesion, order, peace, and development in their domains, and by so doing adopt those leadership principles that are centred on the norms, mores, cultures, and traditions of African peoples, known as ＂Afrocentrism.＂ The book goes further to list out the benefits derivable from adopting the concept of Afrocentrism if Africa wants to regain its lost glory while stressing that Eurocentric leadership will never work in Africa because Afrocentric leadership principles are tightly hinged on the ubuntu or ’omoluwabi’ principle, which places a huge emphasis on communalism, collectivity, and unity of purpose, as well as on empathy for others unlike the Eurocentric leadership principle, which is straitjacketed, individualistic and devoid of empathy.

Africa is not as bereft of quality leaders as painted by European colonialists and neocolonialists; the book extolls the leadership, managerial and organisational skills of notable and globally acclaimed leaders such as South Africa’s, Nelson Mandela, Nigeria’s Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Akinwunmi Adesina also of Nigeria, and a host of other Africans who has shown that Africa does not lack the people, but even in this 21st Century; parades men and women who have and still holds their own on the world stage across professions and human endeavours.

This book is a must-read for academics/scholars, students, politicians, administrators, and if you are not any of those, you are still asked to get a copy. It will open your minds and eyes to Africa’s great potential if she finds solutions to her leadership challenge.