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A BRIEF REFLECTION ON AFRICA’S LEADERSHIP CHALLENGE
Speech at Nepad Lunch, 30 May 2012
By Dr Reuel J Khoza, Chairman, AKA Capital and of Nedbank Group Limited
To clearly conceptualise Africa’s contemporary Leadership Challenge it behoves us to acknowledge that Africa
has a date with destiny. Unequivocally, we must rise to the challenge.
Stemming from that we have to develop and sharpen our own personal sense of destiny and leadership craft,
and articulate a compelling vision. We have to reinvent ourselves with an action plan as a matter of urgency.
From my vantage point, the Africa I would like to see is one whose scope for growth and development is
limited only by its imagination. I exhort us to promote an Africa whose thinking leaders are nurtured by
wholesome constitutional principles and an insatiable sense of inquiry.
Allow me to envision the Africa we hope for and seek to see. It is an Africa whose discourses, airwaves and
media are dominated by issues of national and continental concern, images, actions and aspirations.
Our leadership should behave in a manner that redefines the term “emergent” from a notion of condescension
and derision – the view of outsiders – to a term that we ourselves embrace, signifying a positive and vibrant
outlook on economic, political, cultural and technological issues. Our prowess in these fields must be truly
deserving of unconditional international respect.
The Africa I dream of is one that seeks and employs the advice, skills, technology and resources of others for
our own ends, seeking a chosen destination; not serving the agenda of others whose intents and designs may
be inimical to Africa’s wellbeing.
Those who support Africa can help and encourage us, but in the final analysis, Africa will be the instrument of
her own salvation. It is through her own transformational leadership that Africa will develop.
The defining features of the leadership I envisage are probity, integrity, compassion and humanness. It is
leadership that stands for truth and affirmation of the good, and whose primary pursuit is noble causes and
the common good. Africa’s leadership must perforce demonstrate competence, tenacity, and a sense of
efficacy.
I yearn for African leadership that practises introspection and self-renewal and lives by the tenets of
consultation, persuasion, accommodation, and co-existence; shunning coercion and domination. Through
moral authority such leadership will generate trust, goodwill and confidence and will be politically and
personally as gracious, honourable and magnanimous in defeat as in success.
It will appreciate that the success of others does not diminish its own but adds to the Commonwealth. Such
leadership will strive to bridge the schisms and cleavages wrought by religious, tribal, social, ideological,
economic and political diversity which characterise so much of contemporary Africa.
This leadership will believe deeply that the locus of control for Africa’s future is within Africa herself. This
leadership will be as visionary as it is compassionate.
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NOT MYTHICAL
This form of leadership is not mythical; it does exist in Africa and is epitomised by our own icon, the
embodiment of great African leadership: Rolihlahla Nelson Mandela. He set the example of what Warren
Bennis, a noted leadership expert, referred to as servant leadership, where the true leader is the servant of all.
I prefer to call it at-your-service leadership because such a leader is not subservient.
Such a quality of leadership is not unique nor is it the result of pre-ordination. It is the result of choice,
discipline and application. Mandela does not have these leadership qualities because he is great. Mandela is
great because he has cultivated these leadership qualities.
The leadership to which I refer, is a quality that is borne with humility. Such leaders understand they are that
not leaders because they have power, public acclaim, wealth or privileged access. They do not confuse cause
and effect.
There is a paradox in leadership: it is both ahead and behind – ahead of the following and fully behind their
yearnings and expectations. It is power exercised by the leader and power given by the following.
True African leaders do not compound the conundrum of leadership by elevating the effects of leadership –
that is, power, wealth, acclaim – to ends in and of themselves. These qualities are to be sought and exercised
as virtues in and of themselves.
Our leaders should fully understand that the pursuit of power, wealth and acclaim as ends in themselves leads
us down pathways of corruption and venality. It matters not how the corrupt and venal leaders acquire their
status nor to what purpose they employ it. It is doomed from the start.
The leadership I refer to will set us all firmly on the road to regeneration through exemplary action. It will set
high targets for leaders and all others who take up the challenge. The principles will be applicable from
generation to generation, remaining as effective and as valuable as when they began. Above all, the solutions
and strategies will be do-able and sustainable.
I am talking of a form of leadership which, (to paraphrase James McCune Smith commenting on the great 19
Century African American leader, Frederick Douglas) will
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“….prove possible what had hitherto been regarded as an impossible reform, and then become a
shining light on which the aged may look with gladness, the young with hope, the downtrodden as a
representative of what they themselves may become”.
Thank you.