«Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, betray or fulfill it.» -Frantz Fanon
Yesterday, the African School of Governance was launched in Kigali, Rwanda. The prestigious school, co-chaired by HE Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda, and HE Hailemariam Desalegn, former Prime minister of Ethiopia, is, in its own words, « a leading institution in public policy and leadership education, dedicated to empowering a new generation of purpose-driven African leaders. With a foundation rooted in African perspectives and global standards, ASG is committed to cultivating leaders who can address the complex challenges of the 21st century, both on the continent and worldwide.»
Looking at the state of our continent in comparison to other parts of the world, it is clear that we have faced a recurrent governance crisis since independence. Our leaders who were keen to preserve colonial borders as is, failed to accommodate fellow countrymen who looked slightly different. They took oaths to serve the nation but recruited from their villages. They looted our countries to invest abroad and took no issue with non-Africans funding the African Union.
We manufacture nothing. Our activity has been limited to digging stones and oil from the ground, cutting trees from forests, and shipping all that to those with a better use for it. Sadly, unlike our Arab brethren, we do not even get a fair price for it. We have outsourced research and innovation. We still die of medieval diseases and grapple with archaic problems, such as malnutrition, sanitation, transportation, and basic infrastructure, solved three centuries ago, by every other continent. With such a foul bill of health, it is indeed timely that we create an African School of Governance (ASG).
The ASG should start by asking the question: Why? Why is Africa in this state? why did a mother of all civilisation fall behind?
Any excuses that Africans could advance: colonialism, neo-colonialism, slavery, etc., are valid for China, India, Indonesia, Singapore, etc, yet they possess only a fraction of our natural resources.
So Why? Why are we here? The answer is simple: our leaders have let us down!
Once we have understood that, then we must shape a school of the future. A school of answers. In this piece, I will illustrate how others did it.
The French Model
At the end of the Second World War, the French asked themselves why their hitherto administration had collaborated with the Third Reich. Why, with no resistance, did all high-ranked officials give in to antisemitism, to fascism? Why did they persecute the French Jews?
So they decided to found a school that would train a new breed of French leaders with strong republican values that would have resisted Fascism, and in October 1945, only a month or two after the war ended, they created the «Ecole Nationale d’Administration» (ENA).
The new school would recruit people from all walks of life to dismantle the caste system that characterized its pre-war high administration. It would train students, but also civil servants already in positions to enable mobility for all. The first three intakes were made of those who had suffered the most from the «Regime de Vichy» under collaborator Maréchal Pétin: former prisoners of war, the deported, or those who waged the resistance to Nazism. The new school needed people who yearned for something bigger than themselves. Something transcendental: The “Res Publica”: The public good. The school quickly earned prestige as its fresh graduates helped General Charles De Gaulle rebuild a war-torn French state.
Over time, however, the pupils’ nationalistic goals would give way to personal ambition. Its graduates saw the school as a launchpad to individual success. When one of them, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was elected president, he appointed Jacques Chirac, another schoolmate as prime minister, and together they recruited an impressive number of classmates to occupy key government portfolios. French media at the time titled: The republic has fallen in the hands of “Enarchs”.
A phenomenon known as “Pantouflage” would consist of enticing civil servants educated on government scholarships at ENA to abandon their initial calling and join top corporate firms to make money. The founding principle of recruiting from all social classes was abandoned for private school graduates in Paris. ENA graduates behaved no different from barons and marquis of the Napoleon era. Instead of serving the Res-Publica, they serve the “Res-Persona”. Instead of training civil servants, the school ended up training politicians and CEOs; obnoxious, arrogant, power and money-hungry characters, frequently accused of being detached from the people. They succumbed to « Enarchy ».
Enarchs monopolized political and corporate seats. The “Grands Corps Administratifs”: High administrative bodies of the state recruited its top brass exclusively from ENA, who in turn, blocked any government reforms to take away their privileges. While in the following elections, trade unions would call to vote for anyone except an Enarch, the non-Enarch incumbent quickly realized that he could not govern without them. They had become indispensable, until the last Enarch, Emmanuel Macron, made a radical decision to dismantle the school altogether, in response to year-long demonstrations of the “Yellow Vests”: farmers and laborers who denounced privileges of the French elite.
The Rwandan experiment
We too, have had horrors of our own with intellectuals. In the seventies, Rwandan students identifying as “Hutu” studying in Belgium, wrote a petition calling for Tutsi students to be expelled from the National University of Rwanda, and during the genocide against the Tutsi, journalists wrote hate propaganda, doctors killed their patients, and men of the cloth killed their faithful.
After the genocide, we had to find a new philosophy. One that appeases and motivates the people. Paul Kagame best captures Rwanda’s doctrine in the form of three choices: “Staying together, being accountable, and thinking big.” Although we are educated in various countries abroad, whenever we come home, we are called to think and act in line with that doctrine. We are encouraged not to discriminate against our fellow Rwandans, fellow Africans, and fellow humans; we are asked to act with probity and always seek, within our limited means, to make a difference by reaching for the stars.
A few years ago, a colleague and I were asked by the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission – at the time, to design a “Museum of Reconciliation”. As it turns out, African brethren who visited the Genocide Memorial in Gisozi and the Museum of the campaign to stop the Genocide, were keen to learn how we got ourselves out of that mess.
They had also faced violence in their countries and needed to understand the management of peace after conflict. Eleven plaques illustrating the major steps to Rwandan Unity are now exposed in the lobby of the Ministry of Unity and Civic Engagement.
Africa needs a conscientious Elite
In their book “Why Nations Fail”, economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson explain that nations fail because their leaders want them to fail. They contend that leaders do the wrong things deliberately!
Indeed ASG students should be taught unity, reconciliation, and pacification. They need to learn how to conduct a true diagnosis of the ills plaguing their states. They should be taught to build nations out of the eclectic, divided territories inherited from the Berlin conference of 1883-1884. They should be taught to trust their own processes instead of mimicking dysfunctional colonial relics. This is our school. It needs to foster indigenous knowledge and indigenous discourses.
While at the University of Pretoria, my classroom did most of the clinical work of the African “Commission” and “Court” on Human and Peoples’ Rights, only the programs were funded by the European Union, and we were taught Westernized governance processes.
However, there is no need to throw the baby with the birth water. We need an African elite, only one that is conscientious. In every leading economy, leaders are trained in schools designed precisely for that. American leaders come from the Ivy League, the Brits from Oxford and Cambridge, and the Chinese from Tsinghua, while most army generals come from Saint Cyr, Sandhurst, and Westpoint academies. Nothing is left to chance.
This must also be true for African leaders. Contrary to some of our leaders’ beliefs, we Africans are a precious people, and our governance should not be left to peasants, villagers, and parvenus.
Laws and treaties should regulate this new school. The African Union, at the summit level, should consecrate this school. The school, in turn, should assist fledgling or post-conflict countries with technical support, using a new methodology that dignifies the people, is humble, and is sensitive to the history and context of those countries.
Instilling a pan-African philosophy
Author Goethe once wrote, “Dream no small dreams, for they have no power to move the hearts of men.” The school needs to build a unique narrative. An ideal that will motivate and guide the students. What will set ASG apart? Why would one come to that school instead of going to the Political Science or law department at the University of Pretoria, Stellenbosch, or the University of Rwanda?
The world has always been led by ideology. The Christian crusades, the Islamic Ottoman Empire, the Bolshevik Revolution, Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, and Capitalism. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, American author Francis Fukuyama wrote a pompous treatise titled “The End of History and of the Last Man”, and his counterpart Samuel Huntington published “Clash of Civilisations”.
Those two schools of thought have structured the geopolitical decisions of the last half-century, with Fukuyama infusing the “Democratisation of Africa” and Huntington justifying all the wars in the Middle East to date. Like the divide of Africa before them, none of their self-serving truths were designed by or in the interest of Africans. While Africans sublimed “Ubuntu” as our guiding philosophy, we never unpacked and structured it and as a result, it remained a romantic, utopic ideal not meant to be made into a reality.
In his latest book, “The Defeat of the West”, French anthropologist Emmanuel Todd predicts an incoming, irreversible decline of the West that, he argues, is subsequent to the loss of the “Protestant Ethics” that once shaped the USA, Germany, the Nordic Countries, and the United Kingdom. In contrast, India’s Foreign Minister Dr. Jaishankar lays out India’s doctrine to conquer the world in a recent book: “The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World”.
It seems other powers are gearing up to adjust their positions to best take advantage of the emerging geopolitical trends. It is incumbent upon us Africans to do so too, and the African School of Governance can help in that critical endeavour.
I will end this letter with a quote from Karl Marx: «Philosophers have hitherto analysed the world, in all its aspects, the point, however, is to change it».