Great leaders should be measured in the legacy, institutions they created

In the book Nationalism and New States in Africa (1984), Prof Ali Mazrui and Michael Tidy refer to Uganda’s second president, Dr Apollo Milton Obote, as a great man who made great mistakes. When Uganda got independence from Britain in 1962, the people wanted to kiss Prime Minister Obote.

Dr Obote was their blue-eyed boy, recently returned from his domicile in Kenya. He led them to independence ahead of his former hosts, with himself as Prime Minister. The Kabaka of Buganda was his President.

Tragically, by the time Idi Amin overthrew Obote’s in January 1971, nobody wanted to kiss Obote any more. They wanted to kick him, instead. He was now a veritably red-eyed ill-tempered alcoholic, thriving on megalomania.

In 1966, Obote ended Buganda’s partial autonomy, in a drunken fit of political anger. He promoted himself to President.

He exiled the first President, Sir Edward Mutesa II. He abolished all the monarchies, throwing his country into turmoil. He armed himself with a draconian new constitution in 1967. Uganda was ready to wallow in the slough of despond.

Four years down the line, Kampala would burst into pomp and razzmatazz. Those who had celebrated the coming of Obote now reveled alongside armoured military vehicles.

Obote had been overthrown. His open floodgates of blood were expanded at the behest of Amin, the illiterate military fat cat that Obote had used to do his dirty work. Uganda was indeed a rotten affair by the time Amin and his unschooled friends took over. The blue-eyed boy had laid the foundation for rot, pillage, mass murder, social and economic disintegration.

In his grave, Milton Obote, however, takes solace in the knowledge that he was not alone. Many of the first generation of independent African leaders did just as badly. Others were far worse.

The difference would be in degree, and style, not in substance. Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana was overthrown in 1966, after nine years in power. Kwame was easily the most charismatic and beloved of Africa’s independence leaders. Martin Meredith records that by the time of his overthrow, Nkrumah was a lonely man, presiding over a collapsed Ghanaian economy and nursing a lonely African dream.

Like Obote, Kwame presided over a rotten economy, full of thieves in high places. His own sharp appetite for praise and being worshipped did not make matters any easier, Meredith records in The State of Africa, A History of Fifty Years of Independence (2005). Sekou Toure of Guinea, Felix Houphoet Boigny of Ivory Coast, Leopold Senghor of Senegal, Mohammad Siad Barre of Somalia, Modibo Keita of Mali, Kamuzu Banda of Malawi, Ahamadu Ahijo of Cameroon, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, Dauda Jawara of the Gambia, Marcias Ngwema of Equatorial Guinea.

They all failed to place their countries on the path to political stability and socio-economic success. And there were many others.

Their successors did not do any better. People like Joseph Mobutu who took over from the hapless Patrice Lumumba and Moise Tshombe in the Congo went on to preside over empires of graft. By the end of the Cold War in 1989, Africa was sighing under a massive burden of corruption and misrule. Robert Guest, writing in the volume The Shackled Continent: Africa’s Past, Present and Future (2004), expressed the lonesome hope that Africa’s new leaders, at the turn of the century and the millennium, would probably raise the continent from the morass. Among them, Guest mentioned Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni and Rwanda’s Paul Kagame as leading lights.

Kenya’s Mwai Kibaki, then only a few months in power, was also mentioned as a probable case. Historians could begin putting together their reports on his tour of duty.

President Museveni no longer inspires those of us who were in early adulthood when he took over in 1986. Then he was our champion, blasting his way into Kampala to end two and a half decades of state sponsored decadence.

Today Museveni ranks among the most intolerant leaders. He presides over a one-man dinosaur regime. Even some of his erstwhile trusted allies like Amama Mbabazi and Kizze Besigye are his virulent foes. It is anybody’s guess where Uganda will end up. Suffice it to say that Museveni has failed to build institutions that can be trusted to outlive him. But if Museveni disappoints, is Paul Kagame Africa’s new hope now going the wrong way?

President Kagame is certainly a political giant of our times. This likeable soft spoken and gentlemanly President was the man who restored sanity to Rwanda after the murderous events of 1994 – the Rwanda Genocide. Just this week, the Global Competitive Report ranked Rwanda Africa’s most efficient government. President Kagame is without a doubt iconic leader.

Yet should President Kagame stay in power forever? This week, Parliament voted for the removal of presidential term limits, to pave the way for a third term for President Kagame. The matter will now go to a referendum. It will in all probability sail through. And so President Kagame could stay on as life President, a la Hastings Kamuzu Banda who failed Malawi.

It is instructive that President Banda was the darling of the people of Nyasaland (as Malawi was then called) no less than Rwanda has loved Kagame and Uganda loved Obote and Museveni. Yet perennial stay in power led to loss of focus, invention of enemies – where none existed – and opening up of the gates of misrule.

Lord Acton famously said that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. One of the surest ways in that direction is unlimited stay in power.

It is easy to appreciate Rwandans’ fear that their country could backslide into the anarchy of 1994 and before, if President Kagame leaves power. Yet must we all not leave someday, anyway? The failure in Africa is systemic and institutional. Leaders must fix the institutions and systems and prepare to leave.

Great leaders should eventually be measured in the institutions they created and in the legacy generally. If you have no succession plan, you can only build a temporary personal empire. If President Kagame has no succession plan, then he has laboured in vain.

He should avoid the temptation to go the Museveni way, which can at the very best, be described as a time bomb. In this regard, Tanzania stands to be admired for her emerging success with political transition. Africa has yet many more lessons to learn from the legacy of Tanzania’s founding President, Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere and Chama Cha Mapinduzi.