135 - Positive, Inspiring Leadership is Required in 2023 and Beyond: II
Nelson Mandela demonstrated immense leadership acumen before, during, and after his presidency of South Africa. Legitimated by long imprisonment, he gained further public and international trust by his deft handling of a transition from apartheid to African rule that avoided lasting inter-communal strife and – as I wrote on Friday – gave all citizens of his country and of Africa a sense of belonging to a great, global, crusade of progress.
Neither South Africa nor much of the rest of the African continent has since glimpsed Mandela’s like. Leadership both near and far in Africa in the years since Mandela has been self-serving, often disruptive, and too frequently corrupt. Aside from a few places with smallish populations such as Botswana, Cape Verde, and Mauritius, many leaders have entirely neglected their peoples while accumulating personal riches and ruling autocratically. There have been too many military assumptions of power. Even where elections have been free and fair – a rare phenomenon – only bare handfuls of heads of state and heads of government have improved the lives of their constituents.
In far too many polities, ruling classes have curtailed rather than expanded essential freedoms. Even a once lauded country like Senegal is now curtailing the press; its president also threatens to abrogate his country’s constitution and run for a third term in office, succumbing to the dreaded disease of “third-term-itis.”
Fortunately, amid this gloom, a few new African leaders have emerged potentially to take up Mandela’s mantle. Foremost is President Hakainde Hichilema of Zambia. Nearly all of his national predecessors, even the late beloved President Kenneth David Kaunda (in office 1964-1991), were corrupt or enabled corruption to flourish. President Edgar Lungu (2015-2021) was an outlandish autocrat as well, ending free speech, locking up opponents, rigging elections, and even imprisoning Hichilema for imagined offenses. Fortunately, the Roman Catholic Church, lawyers, and the rest of civil society turned on Lungu and unexpectedly ousted him from office in the 2021 presidential election.
Hichilema had sought the presidency five times before, always promising to rule honestly and efficiently. But Hichilema is a southerner in a country hitherto run by northerners and their allies. Ethnicity preferences thus prevailed until 2021, when a modern generation of increasingly middle-class Zambians decided that enough was enough.
Now Hichilema needs to deliver, and to demonstrate that he is among the very few current African presidents who leads genuinely in the public interest. Fortunately, late last year, Zambia repealed a dangerous law that had made criticism of a president illegal (and under which Hichilema, journalists, and other commentators previously had been imprisoned). Next, presumably coming soon in 2023, are revocations of legislation that Lungu used to curb the press and freedom of assembly. Additionally, and even more tellingly, Hichilema in word and deed has given Zambians a sense self-worth. No longer should Zambians be ashamed of how and for whom they are governed.
Admittedly, to lead well in the manner he promises, Hichilema must help to solve his nation’s shortages of new investment and jobs, cope with a major fiscal crisis inherited from Lungu, erase production bottlenecks in the dominant copper and cobalt mining industry, and prevent influence peddling and corruption.
Top of the economic list is Zambia’s staggering debt burden; Zambia owes about $15 billion to European lenders, to China, and to the IMF. Owings that could not be paid prompted a major default – a first for modern Africa – in 2020. The IMF has promised $1.3 billion in relief, covering Zambia’s immediate needs. But how the remainder of the borrowing is to be repaid constitutes a major problem for Hichilema’s administration.
To add to Zambia’s troubles, thanks to recent droughts, Lake Kariba’s water levels dropped on Dec. 28 to an unprecedented 1 percent of capacity. That means that the Zambezi River hydropower supplies from the Kariba Dam on which most Zambians rely must be cut; Zambian industry and consumers are now without power up to twelve hours a day. Hichilema will have to use uncommon skills to cope with such a catastrophic loss of electricity.
Earlier, in talks in New York in December, Hichilema said that he had managed despite adverse circumstances to reduce Zambian inflation from an annual rate of 24 percent to 9.7 percent during his brief time in office. He also said that a major test of his leadership abilities was coping with China’s profound economic influence on Zambia. It owns coal mines and processing facilities for cobalt and copper. He provided no numbers, but (as the former head of major accounting firm) he indicated that he would provide the kind of economically focused leadership that Zambia (and most of Africa) has long lacked. He further indicated that he intended to preside over an audit of all government finances to ensure that corrupt dealings within ministries and elsewhere were reduced, if not banished. If in 2023 Hichilema can make good on such promising opening salvoes of change for Zambia, he will set both his own country and many of his neighbors on an altogether new and promising path of progress.
Similar advances in nearby Malawi, a much poorer country to Zambia’s east, are still pending. President Lazarus Chakwera, a fundamentalist preacher, took office in 2021 and made many promises similar to those voiced by Hichilema. But corruption, and some nepotism, has persisted in Malawi, with prominent cabinet ministers being arrested. Amid major climatically influenced concerns, Chakwera has not yet been able to deliver economic improvements to his agriculturally dependent people. Malawi’s cash crop is flue cured tobacco, almost entirely sold to China, and reliant on rainfall. But that market is receding; Malawi remains in large measure dependent on foreign assistance from the West.
In both Zambia and Malawi, as in the rest of Africa, the impress of leadership is paramount. If Hichilema becomes the kind of truly stirringly progressive leader that Africa requires, the future of the continent will be uplifted in a manner that Mandela proscribed.
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P.S .A thoughtful and acute reader objected to Friday’s favorable comparison of President Zelensky to President Mandela. “Zelensky is no Mandela,” that subscriber wrote. While I fully understand and appreciate the critique, in terms of what Zelensky is doing to give Ukrainians and citizens of the rest of the free world a sense of common cause and greatness (plus the self-worth that comes from belonging to an esteemed enterprise larger than themselves), I still believe that the comparison is apt, and fair. But I invite further reader comments.
Without Zelensky’s remarkable leadership abilities, Ukraine would long ago have succumbed to Putin’s invaders. Important, too, the West would not have rallied to his side and to his cause absent his consummate mobilization of defenders and supporters behind a vision of victory that is now embraced by followers as well as distant supporters. Mandela sustained South Africa. Zelensky sustains the freedom of Europe and the world.