What are the current issues in Africa for global politics?

For those interested in African leadership issues, the Mo Ibrahim Foundation award was at some time the rage on African continent. The award, which was accompanied by what was said to be the biggest prize on Earth, was for former African leaders who scored good marks on the good governance index during their constitutional tenure of office.

Some cynics said that the prize was like bribing African leaders to do what they are supposed to do. They argued that the money accompanying the award would have been better spent on whistleblowers exposing the wealth rogue leaders stashed away in foreign banks.

Former Mozambican President Joachim Chissano made history becoming the first recipient of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation’s $5m prize money.

For us, the significance of the Mo Ibrahim award was (past tense now?) that it brought leadership and governance issues in Africa into sharp focus. At that time, there were several processes in several African countries leading to constitutional amendments whose sole purpose was to perpetually keep incumbent leaders in power.

The Mo Ibrahim Award therefore came in handy for African global citizens like Mr Mohammad Ibrahim ‘to create a situation’ he thought could entice African leaders to relinquish power (in order to earn global glory as a retired African president). It doesn’t seem to have worked though. Which is why we are asking: what are the current issues on the African continent that feed into the architecture for global politics, peace, security and commercial thought?

Towards the end of the last millennium, there was what scholarship on Africa called Afro-Optimism. The continent had what US President Bill Clinton called a new breed of African leaders. Then there was NEPAD. When things started to turn red as leaders changed constitutions in order to keep in power, the West called them out. Then the sloganeering started: African solution for African problems. Stuff like that…

Now we cannot even solve a problem like that of M23 without the support of foreigners. And it so happens, the West is also trying to do its own “European Solutions to European problems somewhere in Ukraine. Who will come to the rescue of the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo who are now caught between a rock and a hard place; to speak of the armed rebels and the government?

We no longer have African leaders with strong Pan African credentials like Kwame Nkuruma of Ghana, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Sekou Toure of Guinea Conakry, Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, Ben Bella of Algeria and some others. Current African leaders are now more concerned with their parochial big-fish-in-a-small pond mentality. In East Africa, one leader is holding the region at ransom and causing a clear humanitarian crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

African leaders have been quiet on the return of military rulers usurping power through military coups d’etat. In the result, one is tempted to think that even what we thought could have been issues on the continent may have been the handiwork of the West. Now that the said West is quiet (finding European solutions to European challenges), we don’t seem to have any issue of global concern like security, political, peace etc.

In an engagement to generate ideas for this article, a friend said we need not seek out new challenges on the continent. “Please note that we have our traditional issues like famines, poverty, education and health issues”.

Unfortunately, African leaders don’t seem to look at those as issues that need to be tackled. Neither are their benefactors in the West who view their intervention in the social sector (health and education) as morally-driven acts of noblesse oblige (French: Noble obligation).

Asuman Bisiika is the executive editor of the East African Flagpost.

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