Africa is sitting delicately at the crossroads of hope and despair

Africa is sitting delicately at the crossroads of hope and despair. It is one of those defining moments in world history, when winds of change seem to effortlessly blow societies wherever they will. When they are done with them, new orders are born. Those who bend to give way to the winds survive to tell the story. Those who stand in the way of these winds are blown towards destruction. The wise will either bend to let the winds pass, or they will use them to paddle their canoes of state.

The apocryphal story has been told of King Canute of the 11th Century, detailing how he tried to stop the tides of the ocean. The storyteller Huntingdon says one day the king sat on his throne on the seashore and commanded the violently approaching tides to stop. “I am the king of England. I order you to stop,” he told the tide. But the tides came, all the same, causing him to run away in indignity. Do African leaders have the flaw of failing to read the tides of time?