Positioning Africa for the 21st Century: The Pivotal Role of Leadership and Think Tanks

Positioning Africa for the 21st Century: The Pivotal Role of Leadership and Think Tanks

James B. Magara | 2017

Abstract

In the early 1960s, one would not have been faulted to predict a better future for sub-Saharan African countries in comparison with their East Asian peers. With abundant natural resources, vast amounts of arable land, and for some countries, a modest number of intellectuals and professionals, many newly independent African countries looked set for prosperous futures. Over the last fifty years, these sub-Saharan countries and their East Asian peers have charted different paths. The latter have prospered while the former are still floundering. What did the East Asian countries do differently? What can contemporary and emerging African leaders learn from their experience? Some of the answers are traceable to the type of leadership they had, how leaders exercised the practice of national management, and how they approached the thinking about the futures of their countries. The failure of leadership and dearth of adequate development think tank capacity has been a major constraint on Africa’s development. This treatise submits that if African countries address the question of the quality of their leadership, and maximize the prudent use of their intellectual potential through fostering the use of think tanks in policymaking and planning for the future, Africa’s pace of development would accelerate exponentially.

The book defines and discusses the concepts, types, and genesis of think tanks. It gives an overview of leadership and policymaking on the African continent from the pre-colonial era to the present-day, and covers the impact of failure of leadership and planning on Africa’s development. Botswana is studied as an outlier on the African continent, while lessons on transformational leadership and the use of think tanks are drawn from Malaysia, South Korea, and Singapore. The treatise explores the differing consequences of the shock waves of globalization on Africa and Asia with recommendations on how African countries can reposition themselves to ride the waves. It propositions a requisite African leadership paradigm for the twenty-first century and recommends roles that think tanks can play in the development of African countries. Finally, it considers the thorny issue of financing African think tanks.

The deficiency of think tanks on the continent has resulted in African countries mortgaging their long range planning function to outsiders, and in some cases to a few indigenes, thereby denying themselves the participation and input from some of the best minds in the countries. As the continent journeys deeper with the rest of the world into the 21st century, that constraint must be removed to unfetter African nations into accelerated development. This treatise is a contribution towards unlocking Africa’s leadership and thinking potential. It is a call for current and emerging African leaders to avoid mirroring the leadership mistakes of the first fifty years of independence; a call for clear-sightedness and decisiveness so that the growing opportunities for the continent do not slip through its fingers.