Why African leaders must stop blaming the West for their own failures - IOL

When President William Ruto of Kenya is pressed on his own failures, foreigners become the convenient enemy.

AS heads of state gather this week at the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in New York, African leaders will once again invoke colonialism, slavery, apartheid and climate justice.

They will demand reparations and moral reckoning. Then many will fly home to preside over the same systems of corruption, tyranny, patronage and decay that keep their people poor, in squalor and in degradation.

The continent holds some of the world’s largest reserves of cobalt, lithium, gold, and oil. It has the youngest population on earth. Yet it remains the poorest continent. That is not an accident of geography. It is the result of a political elite that has mastered the blame game.

This is because for decades, African leaders have travelled to Western capitals demanding justice for the past. They speak eloquently at the UN about historical sins yet they return home to systematic corruption, institutional collapse, sponsored conflict and squalor.

But it is time we remind African leaders that we know the West and Arab conquerors are responsible for much of the past, but they are responsible for the present.

Consider the economic record. After independence, countries such as Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and South Africa had GDP levels comparable to South Korea and Malaysia. Today they lag far behind. Was this solely the West’s doing? Or did post-independence elites choose cronyism and state capture over institutions and human capital?

We are watching leaders who claim the mantle of liberation heroes while governing with the impunity of tyrants. They want the moral authority of Nelson Mandela and Sékou Touré without the sacrifice, and the wealth of Elon Musk and Strive Masiyiwa without the innovation.

Instead of holding those elites to account, citizens are often turned against one another. Xenophobia is used as a political tool in South Africa, Kenya and Ghana. When young people demand accountability in Senegal and Uganda, governments scapegoat the LGBTQ+ community.

When President William Ruto of Kenya is pressed on his own failures, foreigners become the convenient enemy. When the economy collapses, tribalism, religious fanaticism and homophobia fill the vacuum in Nigeria.

Democracy in much of Africa has been hollowed out. It has become a device for legitimising imposed power rather than reflecting popular will. The choice is too often a corrupt civilian government or a military junta. The ballot box secures the elite; afterwards the public is left hopeless. What is practised is frequently illiberal: majoritarian tyranny dressed as democracy.

These are not mere “developing nations” with growing pains. Too many are failed states run by kleptocrats.

To be clear: the West, the East and the Middle East share responsibility for extraction, arbitrarily drawn borders and a lingering architecture of dependency. That history still matters. But there is a statute of limitations on using it as a shield for present incompetence. The West is accountable for the past. African leaders are accountable for the present.

They cannot keep shouting “colonialism” to avoid explaining cabinet-level theft. They cannot keep shouting “slavery” while children starve and young people are wasted under their watch. This narcotic habit, the weaponisation of history, has paralysed African political life for sixty years.

Confronted with collapsing hospitals, ruined roads and looted treasuries, the reflex is always the same: Pivot to the slave trade, colonialism or neocolonialism.

The strategy is dangerous. It turns the poor against the poorer. It breeds a culture of dependency on a hollow state. Leaders remind us constantly of Western sins so we will not look too closely at their own atrocities against their own people.

This week in New York, the United Nations, the West and the East should stop treating African heads of state as victims who need coddling. Hold them to the same standards of governance expected elsewhere. More important still: Africans must reject the infantilisation of their own leadership.

Demand leaders who care about the starving child, the boy who has been turned into a soldier, the trafficked girl, the men crossing the Atlantic for a “better” future, and the unemployed youth.

The narrative of the permanently victimised continent cannot remain the staple of kleptocratic rule. African leaders cannot keep using the past to steal the future.

* Phapano Phasha is the chairperson of The Centre for Alternative Political and Economic Thought. The views expressed here do not reflect those of the Pretoria News.