By Ozodi Osuji
Leaders are people who perceive problems that need to be solved, and needs that need to be met; they come up with the capital, money, and human resources needed to solve the identified problems and meet the needs; they mobilize people through their excellent interpersonal skills to get them to work together and achieve the goals they want to achieve. It is not an easy skill to identify where to get capital and negotiate getting it; it is a herculean task to mobilize diverse people and get them to work together to achieve goals and objectives set by the organization, control the necessary work organization needed to accomplish the goals, and punish those who sow dissent and conflict in the organization. Leaders are people with extraordinary skills, especially charismatic leaders, skills that most people do not have. A country is lucky if it has an outstanding leader in a generation (33years), a transformational leader in a century.
Every once in a while, my mind returns to Africa, and as a political scientist, I survey those who call themselves leaders in Africa and generally despair. To avoid depression, I quickly look away from Africa because nothing good is coming out of that continent.
Years ago, I wrote academic books and articles on leadership. Later, my mind moved on to other subjects, such as psychology, and I left Africa to its uninspired leadership patterns. Are Africans so mentally deficient to the point that they cannot know what leadership is and do it?
On my desk is James MacGregor Burns’ book titled Transforming Leadership (Grove Press, New York, 2013). I devoured Professor Burns’ books while in graduate school, trying to understand leadership.
Leaders see problems in their world and set about trying to understand them. They study and think about them. They think about what they can do to solve the identified problems. They observe the people, followers, and try to understand what they desire.
Transformational leaders do not just impose their visions, dreams, and goals on the people but scrutinize the political and or business environment and see what the people desire and initiate political or business action in those areas.
If you want people to follow you to achieve your own vision, dreams, not the people’s desires, they will not follow you.
Donald Trump knows that at least thirty-three percent of Americans are racists, so he articulates racist policies, and they follow him. If you articulate rational policies that the people do not want to pass into laws, they will not follow you.
Business leaders, through their marketing studies, understand what the buyers desire to buy, then manufacture and sell those to the people; if they try to sell what there is no demand for, no one will buy it, and they will waste their capital and go bankrupt and out of business.
Of course, they can try to stimulate demand for their goods and services, but by and large, people are not stupid; they buy what they like, not what you want them to want.
TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERS
The world has produced admirable transformational leaders, such as Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, Franklyn Delano Roosevelt, and John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.
Transformational leaders change the trajectory of their society. Napoleon, for example, took the French Enlightenment all over Europe and nudged Europe to rational approaches to phenomena, as opposed to its hitherto religious interpretation of reality.
Stalin moved a pre-industrialized Russia to become a giant in heavy industries. Franklyn Roosevelt injected Keynesian socialism into an America that saw socialism as an anathema and, in doing so, changed America.
Kennedy and Johnson moved America away from its past rabid racism to the Great Society that allowed black folks to make a reasonable living in America instead of always working as maids and servants of white folks.
Churchill, hate his racism as you may, worked day and night to prevent Hitler from conquering Britain and imposing Asiatic dictatorship on the Island.
If you look at Africa, all of Africa below the Sahara Desert, what you see are primitive people living in the pre-scientific and industrial age, guiding their lives with superstitions instead of reason. You realize that a transformational leader could push Africa into the industrial and scientific age, get the primitives to apply the scientific methodological and logical approach to phenomena. Why hasn’t an African leader done this? If an African leader does it, he becomes a heroic figure on whom myths are spawned.
Why has Africa not produced one such transformational leader? Why is Africa mostly producing thieves in government who see government as a place they go to steal from the people’s money and gratify their wish for existential significance by seeming like big men?
Good leaders come up with ideas of what they want to do, barnstorm their country, selling their ideas of what needs to be done (it helps if they have an independent source of income to be able to defray the cost of going around their country talking about their ideas on what needs to be done…this is why poor people seldom make good leaders, good leaders generally come from the well to do upper middle classes, people who have satisfied what Abraham Maslow calls the basic needs in his hierarchy of needs schema).
Outstanding leaders generally have strong characters and do not care about what other people think of them but instead are focused on doing what they believe is right for the people; liking them or rejecting them does not bother them. What bothers them is the realization of the goals they believe are good for their people. Why can’t Africa produce such men who change the trajectory of society?
In the USA, the various Republican-controlled think tank organizations carefully study and write what they think their country needs and encourage conservative politicians to embrace those and try to implement them. They saw radical changes in the USA since the 1960s, when nonwhites were allowed to participate in American politics as a threat to white control of the country. They went insane when Barack Obama, a black man, was elected the President of white America, and were scheming on how to return power to white folks.
They select racists like Donald Trump to run for office and implement their wishes. Trump is currently implementing Project 2025, which aims to remove black and brown people from America’s leadership positions, eradicate all multiculturalism, and return America to mainstream Western European ideas, not some stupid third-world rhetoric on how to improve America, which means redistributing wealth and giving money to black and brown people. Republicans obviously want to return the USA to the pre-1960s era when white folks ruled the roost. MAGA means ” Make America racist again!”
How about Democrats? In the past, Democrats produced admirable, transformative leaders like Franklyn Delano Roosevelt, John F Kennedy, and Lyndon B Johnson, but since the 1980s, they seem to have checked out of reality. All they now talk about is how to force every American to embrace the homosexual lobby’s gender equality agenda.
Democrats have forgotten fighting for working-class America and have allowed Republicans to take control and set the political agenda.
America cries out for politicians to initiate providing all Americans with publicly paid health care and provide all young Americans with publicly paid education through universities and vocational colleges, but instead of doing so, Democrats talk rubbish about gender and sex equality, issues that irritate Christian Americans; it is as if they have death wish and do not want religious Americans to vote for them.
Good leaders articulate what they believe needs to be done in the human polity, initiate action towards achieving it, give public speeches that motivate the people to support it, arouse the people into supporting it, hold meetings, public speeches, lectures, studies and fight the inevitable opposition to their ideas; they set the tone of public discourse and not just respond to the tone set by others.
Why can’t Africa produce men who do this sort of thing? What Africans call politicians are thieves! The current Nigerian head of state is a known drug baron. The five governors in Alaigbo are best described as political gangsters who are in government to steal and certainly not serve the people; these thugs do not actually know what leadership is all about and certainly are not leading their people to do what needs to be done to modernize and develop their land.
Go to their cities, and your immediate conclusion is that no one is governing these dilapidated towns, run-down slums that they call cities. These men are primarily interested in seeming like African big men, stealing as much money as they could, and using that money to buy the accoutrements of African bigmanism, but certainly not to develop their area economically.
Nigerian politicians are nothing; their names are not even worth mentioning. None of the thieves would be remembered one hundred years after their death.
The story of Nigeria is the story of Africa, except in Rwanda and Ethiopia, and the people in those two countries generally do not consider themselves Africans but identify with the Semitic world.
DISCUSSION
You may ask, why am I not doing what I ask other people to do. It is because each of us has a task to perform. I am an intellectual, a thinker, a philosopher, and not suited to being a politician.
If I was a politician I would conscript all African youth, ages eighteen to thirty eight, train them in the military, have millions of soldiers and use them to unify Africa and make each tribe a state; divide each state into several counties and organize Africa as a federation of these tribe based states which will come to about 500 states and subject the continent to draconian ruling.
By nature, I do not tolerate nonsense and do what I believe needs to be done and do it with unusual energy and efficiency. I would use the military to march from one end of Africa to the other, west and east, north and south, and accomplish the desired task and not just talk about the African Federation of Nations as we do on paper. So, it may require fighting and killing, and millions killed to achieve the objective, so be it. Nobody makes omelets without breaking eggs; you are not going to unify Africa without millions dying. What are people living for anyway? They might as well die in the pursuit of a worthy cause.
After unifying the continent, I would initiate the construction of roads and railways from one end of Africa to the other. Africa has limestone that could be crushed to manufacture the cement necessary for road construction.
Africa has iron ore that could be used to manufacture iron and steel for the steel needed for road construction and housing construction.
I would construct freeways and rail lines from one end of Africa to the other so that all people would be able to take roads or railways to every part of Africa. I would build airports in most large towns and build seaports where appropriate, so that imports and exports are facilitated and encouraged.
I would build elementary and secondary schools and universities everywhere. Every state must have enough universities for the top thirty-three percent of its secondary school graduates.
All education, elementary, secondary, and university, must be paid for by the public. All health care will be paid for by the public so that all people have medical insurance and access to medical treatment.
I would industrialize Africa, and that can be done within thirty years. Every person must have work, and work until retirement, which cannot occur before age seventy.
The streets and towns must be paved and cleaned up daily and become the cleanest in the world. Throw trash on the streets, and you are arrested and fined, even jailed. Whereas it is a nice idea for individuals to build their own houses, the government will build houses and apartments and sell them to individuals to own and maintain them.
Marriage must be between a man and a woman, no experimentation with alternative sexual forms. Each family must be limited to having no more than two children.
All orphans must be taken care of in group homes or adopted by families. There will be no homeless kids, as they have in Northern Nigeria, where Almajiri kids are on the streets begging for food, all dirty, an eyesore.
At present, Africa is the sick man of the world; nothing in it works out well, it is as if no adults are governing the place, as if everything in it has collapsed, and that must be reversed.
Africans’ tendency for corruption will be whipped out by sending anyone who takes bribes to twenty years of prison with hard labor, using the prisoners to do public work.
People must have completed their formal education, which is university or vocational studies, and have done so by the age of twenty-six, and have worked for five years to have the money to provide for a family before they are allowed to marry.
Human civilization, especially writing, has been going on for at least five thousand years, but black Africa was cut off from reading and writing until about 150 years ago, when Christian missionaries brought reading and writing to Africa.
Why didn’t Africans develop writing or develop the wheel? Here is not the place to explore that question.
Why was Africa cut off from the rest of the world and remained primitive until the twentieth century? Regardless of the why, Africa can be modernized in thirty years.
Contemporary Africa, as Donald Trump called it, is a shithole; folks out of political correctness do not tell Africans that they are backward and need to become modernized. No more political correctness: if you are backward, I call you backward and work with you to bring you to modernity.
Africa can be brought to the level of first-world countries in a generation, no more excuses, no more doing the wrong things while blaming Europeans for their backwardness. No more capturing and selling their people and blaming others for why there were African slaves all over Arabia and the Americas.
What is the population of black Africa? Maybe one billion people. How many universities, mostly science and technology, are needed to accommodate the expected one-third of secondary school leavers? Maybe ten thousand universities. Then build them, now.
Build vocational schools for the other two-thirds of kids who will not go to universities, build at least thirty thousand of them, at least one in every county.
Kindergarten, elementary, and secondary education must be compulsory and mandatory.
The tone of this write-up is negative, and you ask why not be positive. How long does it take to start modernizing Africa? Why must we always find an excuse for Africa’s backwardness? Why is it that Asia has modernized in fifty years of its post-colonial experience, and Africa has gone back to primitivity? What is the matter with Africans? Why must they always be last in everything people do?
If you travel around the world and see that immigration officials treat those with African passports as garbage, suspected of coming to seek work in Europe, America, and Asia, that degradation alone is enough to motivate African leaders to do what modernizes their people, but no, they are only interested in stealing from their people, not developing them. I feel like flogging these thieves masquerading as leaders, to shape them up.
I really no longer want to see primitive Africans. Enough rationalization for why Africa remained backward. Africa must get on with civilization and stop making people ashamed that they belong to the most primitive people on planet earth.
CONCLUSION
Why are true Negroid Africans unable to govern themselves? White folks made South Africa a first-world country, and then Africans took over and returned it to what they like, underdeveloped slums.
And while not really doing anything to develop Africa, Africa’s so-called scholars specialize in talking about how Europe in the past enslaved Africans; they want Europeans to feel guilty for enslaving them, for colonizing them, for current neocolonialism, but roll up their sleeves and do what needs to be done to develop Africa, they would not do.
African leaders make me want to vomit, and I must look away from them to avoid being nauseated by their incompetence.
So, what is the matter with Africans? Can’t they rule themselves, and if that is the case, should they ask the Chinese to come and rule them?
James Watson, the co-winner of the Nobel Prize for discovering the DNA, once said that Africans are unable to govern themselves well because their average IQ is like the IQ of morons (which is 70 and below). Is he correct?
All I know is that folks like me are sick and tired of making excuses for why Africans are unable to do what they must do to break into the modern world but merely complain about what Europe did to under develop Africa.
Dah, Europe has no obligation to develop Africa; only Africans can develop Africa. If other people exploit Africa, are Africans not exploiting Africans, indicating that exploitation is the mark of homo Sapiens?
REFERENCE
James MacGregor Burns. Transforming Leadership. New York: Grove, 2013.
Ozodi Osuji
March 28, 2026
Dr. Osuji can be reached @
ozodiosuji@gmail.com
(541) 636-6682
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