Epic moment that shaped African leaders
3 min readBy INDIATSI NASIBI
Posted Tuesday, August 9 2011
In 1958, French President Charles de Gaulle recognised that a group of African leaders led by Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Sekou Toure of Guinea were agitating for independence.
He organised a referendum in Francophone Africa, but only Sekou Toure’s Guinea voted for independence. All the other Francophone countries, led by Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Côte d’Ivoire, Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal and others, preferred to remain French.
Enraged by Sekou Toure’s agitation for independence, the French pulled out of Guinea in a huff. They destroyed electricity and telephone lines and left the country in a mess. The countries which remained in the French community were rewarded for good conduct.
Things took a different turn after Guinea’s celebration of independence when Sekou Toure was invited to the UN.
At the Waldorf Astoria, a landmark, luxurious hotel in Manhattan, Toure was received with a 21-gun salute, and driven in a convoy of vehicles to the UN headquarters, while Houphouët-Boigny waited for a taxi to take him to the same venue as an observer representative of the French Government.
The turn of events at the Waldorf Astoria from whence the two Africans had emerged changed Boigny’s perspective.
Here he was, a representative of a colonial power, while Sekou Toure was the leader of an independent African country. He immediately went back to Côte d’Ivoire to agitate for independence, which the country achieved in 1960.
And thus was born the false start of African leadership at the revolving doors at the Waldorf Astoria. The continent has seen nothing but bad leadership since then, characterised by coups and counter-coups, as well as official corruption.
By 1993 when Houphouët-Boigny died, he was the longest serving African leader in history. He bequeathed a mess to the people of Côte d’Ivoire.
He aided conspirators to overthrow Nkrumah in 1966 and worked for France and other former colonial powers to stifle growth in Africa.
He was at the heart of the Monrovia Group of nations, which insisted on inclusion of article III in the OAU Charter, which stressed the power of the state against the ideals that Sekou Toure and Nkrumah fought for.
Houphouët-Boigny and his ilk became guardians of self-aggrandisement and agents of imperialism.
During his commencements speech at the 40th graduation ceremony of the United States International University, President Paul Kagame of Rwanda summed up the African predicament when he defined “a failed state as evidence of failed leadership”.
While the Vienna Declaration of 1993 emphasised that human rights were universal, indivisible and inter-dependent, African leaders never saw it as a priority.
If the rain began beating us at Waldorf Astoria, the light at the end of the tunnel was in Cape Town during the World Economic Forum on June 11, 2008, when African leaders admitted that the continent had a serious leadership deficiency.
The speeches during the convention in Mombasa in which greed, corruption and other malpractices were cited as an impediment to development are a tired old song sung by the same folks who brought us to where we are today.
Prof Nasibi teaches at the United States International University, Nairobi.
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