by Kofi Annan
The problems of Africa, however, have always stemmed from a lack of institutions: a lack of the institutional resources necessary to deal with the complex political, social, and economic problems faced on the continent. But irresponsible, unaccountable personalized systems of rule are the enemy of these. Cultivating the authority of a single individual over an entire and diverse population means that any institution that empowers the population’s various constituencies has to be blocked or crushed. It means institutions that uphold a system for the peaceful transfer of power between political parties and between leaders have to be eroded or eradicated. Civil society institutions, organizations, and activists independent of the state, and so beyond the control of the Big Man, can never be allowed to flourish. Free enterprise, underpinned by free societies and systems of regulation and law independent of the day-to-day whims of the leader—an essential feature for private sector–driven development—cannot be allowed.
This is the core of why I have long seen Africa’s problems as deeply intertwined. The problems of coups, the mismanagement of economies, brutal regimes, the continual violations of human rights, and underdevelopment are all mutually reinforcing. True leadership means institution building: the hard, enduring work of constructing the many forms of government institutions and the independent organizations of civil society necessary for Africa’s problems to be met. True leadership means throwing all of one’s effort into the mammoth political work of peacefully distributing power between different factions, groups, and constituencies for the common good. True leaders are those who seek to build the power of Africa’s people—not their personal power.
But there were few African heads of government who did this in the years after decolonization. This is where colonialism did play an important, destructive role, as it created many of the structural conditions for the politics that followed. This is not to soften African responsibility, which I still emphasize as paramount, but to falsify the suggestion that this system of rule is ingrained in the African psyche and in African culture. Instead, it emerged from the complications caused by externally imposed structures.
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The 1885 Congress of Berlin saw the colonial powers divide up Africa into territorial units that made no sense on the ground—partitioning kingdoms, states, and communities from one another, and arbitrarily melding others. Furthermore, the colonial system introduced laws and institutions that were designed to exploit local divisions to enable the strength of the colonial authority, rather than attempts to bridge these divides.
It was these arbitrary boundaries and these divisive institutions and systems of law that most newly independent African countries inherited in the 1960s. The resulting challenge of creating genuine national identities within the colonial-created boundaries gave too much opportunity for the new African leaders to assert the value of their personalities in papering over these divisions. In the absence of any organic unity, some African countries turned to the authority of individual rulers instead of attempting to cultivate political pluralism. The colonial state had not encouraged representation or participation, and neither did the leaders who followed.
Compounding this trajectory in African politics was the continent’s revolutionary experience. The struggles for independence, valiant in their purpose, created problems for the politics of the postcolonial era. For freedom fighters, and for good reason, unity was to be prized above all in the fight against colonialism, such was the internal discipline necessary to lead a successful campaign for independence.
This approach to the organization of revolutionary cadres and the mobilization of supporters for a common cause was translated into peacetime politics following these wars. Thus, the very qualities that made revolutionary leaders effective during times of armed struggle often rendered them poor rulers in peacetime. Into the postcolonial state they carried with them the rhetoric of absolute unity beneath their authority. They suppressed even the notion of division.
Thus, revolutionary movements, united in the goal of decolonization, gave way to one-party states, pretending away the divisions of their societies and providing further justification for personalized rule.
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The campaign for African democracy is sometimes tripped up by ideas of cultural relativism. The reasoning goes as follows: democracy is a Western value, not a naturally African one. As with views emphasizing the culpability of colonialism, this serves only those who desire the moribund status quo. More important, such arguments are built upon entirely bogus and defunct reasoning.
In fact, in Africa the values of pluralism and collective decision making are ingrained in our oldest traditions, identifiable in the deepest vestiges of African culture across the continent. The traditional means of dispute resolution is to meet on the grass, under a tree, and to stay until a solution agreed by all can be found. In Ghana, we have a saying: one head alone is not enough to decide. In reality, African communities from the village level upward have traditionally decided their course through free discussion, carefully weighing different points of view until consensus is reached. Even in the system of rule by chiefs, the leader still had to govern with the will and support of the people, otherwise the chief could be removed.
The concept of ubuntu, a Xhosa word describing a notion that all Africans instinctively relate to, is also highly relevant. It is an element of African humanism, loosely translating into a notion of collective dependence: “I am because we are.” It is a philosophy that denotes a sense of an equal share of all in society and in one another, a philosophy that holds at its heart principles that translate easily into notions of liberal democracy.
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In my years as secretary-general, I saw the sheer appetite in Africa for political change. But in 1997, it was mostly hidden from view, kept so by the fear of Africa’s overbearing rulers and the taboo against open criticism of these powerful men. It only took the slightest act of rhetorical leadership to bring this enthusiasm to the surface. One minor but telling incident was when I was in Gabon at a press conference with mostly African journalists. One of them asked me a grating question: “Mr. Secretary-General, you often criticize Africa and African governments. But is this fair? Why do you do this?”
“I work a lot for Africa and I recognize its hardships,” I replied, “but I’m an African and I reserve the right to criticize Africa and Africans. And I will keep doing this.” The response from the press was immediate and spontaneous applause. At a press conference this was a very strange thing to witness. But it showed how just touching on this hidden nerve was enough to expose the real desires of Africans for accountable and responsible systems of rule.
Great strides have been made in African governance in recent years, but much more is needed. Progress is deeply uneven. In Ghana, for example, since the repeating cycle of coups was ended, there have been three successful democratic elections, each involving a peaceful transfer of power. It is no coincidence that Ghana is also the only African state to have met both the poverty and hunger components of Millennium Development Goal 1, following its successful implementation of, among other things, strong agricultural reforms. However, in 2009, the Freedom House Report concluded that only eight African countries were fully democratic, twenty-five partially democratic, and twenty-one authoritarian. A problem is that elections have emerged in some instances as only a veneer of democracy rather than as a genuine feature of political transformation. Elections have been used to perpetuate the rule of the same dictators as before.
Good governance is not built on elections alone, but on accountable and responsible leadership—and institutions that build the rule of law. Responsibility for the future of the continent’s political landscape, in regimes built upon by the rule of law over the aggrandizement of individuals, is the responsibility of Africa’s people and the demands they make for themselves today. Enduring good governance is not a gift that can be given, but one that must
be demanded, made, and shared by the people themselves and as a whole. Agency lies with the people. But as these and other stories show, outsiders can help as well.
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You can’t say this. The UN Secretary-General cannot present this to an assembly of African heads of state!” On June 2, 1997, I was in Harare, Zimbabwe. Assembled in the audience were the heads of state and government from all of Africa, many of whom were in that position only by the grace of arms: coup-plot leaders enthroned simply because of the illegitimate power represented in their military uniforms. A brand-new secretary-general and the first black African to hold the post, I was there to carry a new, and to many a surprising, message to Africa’s military governments. As I walked to the lectern, I cast my eye over the crowd and recalled those stressed words of warning regarding the speech I was about to give—poorly formed but, sadly, traditionally conceived advice from one of my senior African aides.
I decided to open the speech directly on the issue that African leaders and diplomats had conspired to ignore for too long: “Armies exist to protect national sovereignty, not to train their guns on their own people,” I said. “Africa can no longer tolerate, and accept as faits accomplis, coups against elected governments, and the illegal seizure of power by military cliques, who sometimes act for sectional interests, sometimes simply for their own.
“Let us dedicate ourselves to a new doctrine for African politics. Where democracy has been usurped, let us do whatever is in our power to restore it to its rightful owners: the people. Verbal condemnation, though necessary and desirable, is not sufficient. We must also ostracize and isolate putschists. Neighboring states, regional groupings, and the international community all must play their part.”
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My long-held stance on military regimes goes back to their impact on my home country of Ghana in particular and across the continent generally. Between January 1956 and December 2001, a staggering 80 successful coups d’état took place on the continent, in addition to 108 coup attempts. Africa has many challenges—social, economic, geographical, and environmental. But in my view, and I see Africa’s history as bearing this out, leadership is the ultimate cause of the plight of Africa, and the greatest destroyer of leadership and good governance in Africa has been military regimes. The perversion of democratic rule, gross abuses of human rights, and economic mismanagement—the truly great curses of Africa—stem in so many instances from this one infection: the military coup.
Military regimes are collectively the worst-offending examples of poor leadership in Africa. But there are important considerations for the role of leadership in Africa more generally. Many Africans, particularly older Africans, will give you a single, blanket explanation for why Africa has had its problems: colonialism. Many academics will also give you an explanation for why Africa is in the state that it is, often focusing on the structural factors holding it back economically and so underpinning its long-troubled position in the world.
It is true that Africa’s short and intense experience of colonialism was destructive and divisive. It is also true that many African countries are landlocked and so denied the vital economic asset of direct access to seaborne trade routes—which many economists emphasize as an essential part of the explanation for Africa’s previous poor economic performance as a whole. However, it is inaccurate and, worst of all, irresponsible for Africans to blame colonialism alone. Similarly, if you consider some of the great failures of African development, such economic impediments are not the heart of the problem.
Leadership, and the responsibility of Africans for it, is the lynchpin of modern African history. This is the position that has informed my diplomatic interventions in Africa to this day. Consider my home country of Ghana. Ghana won its independence from Britain in 1957, at which point its per capita income was $390. Malaysia, too, won its independence from Britain in the same year, a country with, at that time, apparently similar prospects for economic development to Ghana’s but with a lower per capita income of $270. However, Malaysia went on to construct a framework of parliamentary government that formed the basis for a strong political system under which successful and prevailing economic growth could be fostered. Ghana, by contrast, went on to experience a repeating cycle of military coups, with the first striking as early as 1966, allowing the country only a sputtering process of political institutional development for many decades.
The contrasting impact of these different trajectories on the lives of all men, women, and children in these two countries is now very clear: today Malaysia has a per capita income approximately thirteen times higher than Ghana’s. Taking this example, colonialism is practically irrelevant to the debate. The nub of the problem is African leadership and African institutions.
Another example is Madagascar. This island nation is free of the economic curse faced by many African countries of being landlocked and of the threats to economic prosperity that can arise from having unstable neighbors on one’s border. In the late 1990s, Madagascar began to take advantage of the United States’ African Growth and Opportunity Act, which offered a more beneficial arrangement for African exports. Through the creation of a special export-processing zone, and effective government policies enabling conducive conditions for business activities, almost three hundred thousand jobs were created in a very short time. But when the president, Vice-Admiral Didier Ratsiraka, lost an election, instead of stepping down, he had the port blockaded for eight months to force acceptance of his continued rule. This killed off the export-processing zone, which otherwise may have come to create a striking example of how a very poor African country could take off and break into the world market.
Africa’s problems are often portrayed as if they were predetermined, as if the trials it has faced were inevitable, or, if not entirely inevitable, then made so by the colonists. But as the Madagascar story and others like it reinforce, nothing could be further from the truth. The responsibility lies with Africans, their systems of rule, and their leaders. Africa has had the experience it has, most of all, because of the decisions made by individuals and the systems of rule deliberately enacted by leaders and their supporters. Africa, the poverty of Africa, the violence of Africa, is not the inexorable product of its environment but rather the consequence of choices and decisions made by its leaders.
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African leadership, however, was rarely blamed when I came into office. Colonialism and the economic policies of the outside world, particularly donors, were the sole source of the problem, it seemed. Worst of all, the continued fostering of an anticolonial and outsider-blaming stance was really the servant of a few inglorious individuals in Africa. Typically among ruling cliques, these men had no interest in allowing changes to the moribund status quo that ensured their narrow interests. The function of the overarching debate on the evils of colonialism in Africa was really their tool, thus diverting the people from demands for real progress. It was a backward stance, in all respects.
This is why I sought to use my position to change the debate from early on. In my first year in office, the Security Council requested a report on African issues and how the international community could strive to address the results and causes of conflict in Africa. I tasked a team of UN officials, led by a senior African official, to set about compiling this report, and they put together a document that projected all too many of the same old arguments, with the focus once again on the evils of colonialism and the failures of donors.
I was disappointed with the text, to say the least. The authors had written a report in the same manner Africans had too often adopted when presenting their case internationally. It was an out-of-date, unhelpful, and ultimately dishonest mind-set that needed breaking. But, being an African, I knew I now sat in a prime position to force a change in the African side of the debate. Africans would not be able to dismiss my voice as easily as they could others’.
On seeing the draft of the report, I
called in a new team to take over the project and entirely rewrite it. Three new officials took over the lead, including, importantly, a young African, Stanlake Samkange of Zimbabwe, who represented a different mind-set to those of the older African generation. My instructions were simple: to pay the peoples of Africa the tribute of truth, by candidly assessing their challenges and aspirations. The old narrative of colonialism and the failures of donors as the chief target of blame for all Africa’s ills was to go, I said.
“It’s almost un-UN,” commented Under-Secretary-General Karl Theodor Paschke on its release. The Africa Report was direct and frank. This was not how UN reports had been written in the past, and with its release we were shedding a tradition of overt caution in the face of diplomatic sensibilities.
“For too long, conflict in Africa has been seen as inevitable or intractable, or both,” I said, when presenting the report to the Security Council on April 16, 1998. “It is neither. Conflict in Africa, as everywhere, is caused by human action, and can be ended by human action.” I was applying the new tone of accountability and responsibility that the report sought to invoke. “More than three decades after African countries gained their independence,” the report went on to say, “there is a growing recognition among Africans themselves that the continent must look beyond its colonial past for the causes of current conflicts. Today more than ever, Africa must look at itself.”
The implication, as clear as I could make it, was that the failures and human tragedies in Africa hitherto were failures of Africans and their leaders, as much as anything else. The report noted the impact of colonialism, but as a historical factor among many, confining it to the periphery in explaining the present. It emphasized the failures of the international community, too, including the UN’s failure, in helping the peoples of Africa, the failure of all to help them ensure peace and create the conditions for sustainable development. But it stated these failures as orbiting features of a core problem: internal African politics and African leadership.
