By Ganu Komla Sam

In this 21st century, Africa does not have dynamic leaders that can meaningfully challenge adverse world policies affecting its people on the continent or in the diaspora.

There is no equivalence of the 1960s and the ’70s who led most of the African states out of the clutches of imperialism and bondage into independence.

The modus operandi of the current leadership is just a pure manifestation of greed coupled with docility. They spring into power invariably through the use of force; and many a time, they hail from backgrounds of abject poverty and once they catapult into the leadership, their sole aim is to amass wealth from the public trough at the expense of the unwitting citizenry they are supposed to be serving.

Fundamentally their agenda for seeking public office is just to transform their lives into opulence. You’ll see that no sooner had they stepped into office than their skins begin to glow with power as they traverse through the corridors of influence and wealth.

They are not nation builders, nor do they have any interests or agendas in creating the necessary conditions that can generate enough public good for their people. Poverty, squalor and or human degradation are often the hallmarks of their legacies.

If you want to see how weak and ineffective our African leadership is today, you must take a trip to the UN and see their accomplishments there. They don’t have their own agenda there as a bloc to be able to challenge any global policy issue being debated at the UN on their own accord.

Rumor has it that most of our permanent representatives at the UN just sleep through the General Assembly debates in a passive manner because their mission there is just to kowtow to the dictates of their former imperial powers. They therefore don’t put any premium on live debates happening there because they knew already before the debate begins what their votes are going to be at the end.

This may sound like an exaggerated metaphor to most of you but it’s for real. “Let our former imperial rulers write our narratives for us at the UN”. So if you are from a Francophone African state, you get to vote the interests of France and same goes for the Anglophone African nations too.

The Africans do all these for a measly financial aid which quite often are in fact loans with hefty interests. The Francophone nations also suffer from more exploitative schemes buried in the formation of their currency bloc which is controlled by France.

As a guarantee for the stability of their currency, the CFA for example (which is underwritten by France), France gets to retain about 60% of their foreign exchange emanating from trade and when they are in need of a loan from France, Paris would lend them the money from that same foreign exchange account and charge them interests for their own money.

Who actually gets to use that money is neither told nor accounted for to any of the currency bloc members and none bothers to inquire for fear of retributions from France.

In recent developments, the new President of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte lashed out at the UN and the United States for interfering with his domestic measures against heavy drug trafficking and threatened to leave the UN if they continue. Just look at the structure of the UN itself as a democratic institution.

Here we have a Security Council (SC) with all its permanent members being nuclear powers; and all five of them have veto powers which are willfully used from time to time to throw a monkey-wrench into any world issues being debated at the UN that they disagree with; then we have the plebeians in the name of the General Assembly out of which ten member states are elected on a two-year staggered term to the Security Council that have no veto power at all; and unfortunately that’s where most of the third world nations are located; powerless, muted and controlled.

The only thing they get is an insipid power through their roving Council membership which only enables them to vote with the so-called Super Powers, the nuclear warlords. This kind of hierarchical structure is nothing close to an egalitarian system which must be the bedrock for all democratic institutions.

The Security Council thus is just a tool for the so-called developed nations to maintain their hegemony over the rest of the world. If nuclear arm is not good selectively for North Korea, it should not be good for any of the permanent members of the Security Council either. Ever heard of any that is ready and willing to relinquish its stock piles of nuclear armaments? Never!

Not a single one of them is willing. Instead they are rather building more or modifying the olds in terms of technology to add to their stockpiles. After all, don’t they gain access to that body (the SC) by their acquisition of nuclear power? Nuclear armament is immoral and should not be allowed for any country at all, be it Pyongyang, Tehran, Islamabad or Jerusalem nor the 5 permanent members of the UN Security Council.

In the past, those powers that met at the Berlin Conference in 1884 to divide Africa up in their scramble for Africa did so by the power of their military might. They convoked to partition the continent without any representation from the Kingdoms of Africa itself. This is the epitome of the imbecility the so called Western powers operated with in the past and still at it today but with high level of subtleties.

By the ending of this conference Africa would forever change for the worst. The looting and pillage of its resources would intensify and continue up till today. Part of the Congo Basin for instance actually became Belgium’s King Leopold’s personal Kingdom and under his reign, over half of the region’s population died while countless others were also brutalized and or mutilated.

I think the African nations should examine these as examples of the atrocities and inequalities that they have condemned the continent into and try to free themselves from all the superficial international organizations from which they are gaining nothing favorable in return.

Not long ago, Gambia dropped out of the British Commonwealth of Nations and they are doing just fine to date. This is about fairness! The Africans were coerced into signing nuclear non-proliferation treaty and they were all “contented” to sign as dictated by our former colonial rulers despite the fact that they don’t have any nuclear armaments to proliferate in the first place.

What a colossal blunder! Why pledge not to proliferate something you don’t even have? I remember growing up in the early 1960s in Ghana when Nkrumah was at the helms of the African leadership; there used to be a place near the University of Ghana, Legon, Accra we used to refer to as Atomic Energy; a very revered place that sparks goose bumps but mixed with fillips (if you were a patriotic Ghanaian) on your skin when you tried walking towards the area.

The kinds of people you see there in those days as workers were very refined and their skins glowed with power. Nkrumah was allegedly working on Ghana’s acquisition of nuclear power in addition to his hydro-electric energy ambitions at Akosombo. The Akosombo dam has helped Ghana and its neighboring nations for years in terms of energy supply. That’s nation building “101” in action.

It is high time the current African leaderships cease and desist from their crippling levels of mental masturbations and provide a dynamic leadership that has high utility values for its people both at home and in the diaspora.

President Duterte of the Philippines recently took the courage to question the inordinate police killings of black men and members of other minority groups in the United States. There is a kernel of truth in Duterte’s contention from my point of view as a black man living in the US. Right now the US ridicules communist bloc nations about how brutal and or oppressive they are towards their citizens but hides behind its states’ authorities which continue to allow one sided police brutality and oppression against the minority citizens unabated.

Invariably too, the US Justice Department quite often finds no probable cause for the civil rights violations of the police’ shooting victims. The US is a very hypocritical nation brutalizing its colored citizens while at the same time pointing fingers at other “totalitarian” nations how oppressive they are.

If the leader of the Philippines could see this and recognize it why then do the African leaders continue to remain muted on this vital issue affecting the diasporic Africans? It is high time the African countries too threaten to leave the UN if their High Commission on Human Rights is not going to take a stance and seriously cite the US for these egregious violations against its minorities.

It is intrinsically a human rights issue no doubt about it; when a black man lying on his back with his hands raised in the air and yelling to a disabled Caucasian man he was caring for to do the same in order to play it safe, yet got shot by the police officer anyway then one could see what we the blacks are up against here in America.

Many a time a law enforcement officer would shoot a black boy down because the officer perceives his/her life in an imminent danger; a black boy barely out of his diapers with a toy gun! These are just some of the synopses of the things that blacks in America are up against.

One might also ask why the so called world leaders (especially the freedom and liberty loving Western nations) too remained asininely silent on these police brutalities against minorities in the US? The new President of the Philippines, despite his abrasive nature, is a true measure of a world leader; the caliber very much needed in this 21st century.

The African leadership has to start thinking. They must try to think through the values of the benefits that they reap from us in the diaspora and start getting involved with protecting our interests abroad. In 2010, it was reported by the World Bank that the remittances coming from the diaspora Africans to their various origins surpassed $300 billion. It might probably be close to a trillion dollar now.

These remittances at times represent a major resource inflow that often exceeds a host of other balance of payment flows. Most sensible nations protect the interests of their citizens abroad. It is quite amazing that with all the police brutality incidents that have permeated the Internet, none of the African nations managed to speak out against it; at least if not at the UN then maybe in their own countries thus bringing the issue to the consciousness of the populace at home.

As an American citizen from Africa, my American born children and I are more concerned about police brutality here in the United States than we are about terrorism. Every time we stepped outside, we are constantly worried about any possible encounter with the police (who are supposed to be protecting us but are biased against us) than the Islamophobia being propagated by the current Republican Party’s standard-bearer.

Whatever is happening to our leaderships, it has become glaringly clear that they are all lacking spines. That none has the gut to stand up to the injustices being visited onto the Africans both at home and abroad. What Africa wants today is a radical redistribution of global power and wealth away from the white world and its hegemony.

A Nigerian journalist wrote a couple years ago that what Africa needs as a whole is 4 cardinal Rawlings; I will recommend 5 instead; one in the North, one in the South; and one in the East, one in the West; and finally one situated at the Center to create a balance for the continent. Up till today most Ghanaians don’t recognize their blessings through Jerry Rawlings. Instead out of tribal prejudice they have become very blind and clannish in every conceptual way about poor Jerry Rawlings.

Rawlings did a lot of good things for Ghana; and just for the love of his country. He didn’t enrich himself with Ghana’s paltry revenues from its natural resources like others. On the contrary, he sought to increase them for the people of Ghana.

In addition to bringing the first true democracy in Africa, he was able to fight the West, vis-a-vis the UK to have the Ashanti Goldfields listed on the open London Stock Exchange in 1994. That move alone is benefiting Ghana now tremendously.

Just imagine more and more of our commodities circumventing all trade restrictions and middle men and heading straight to the open market. Just imagine that. This should become the standard for all Africa’s natural resources/commodities. According to Mark Curtis (Huffintonpost.co.uk):

Companies listed on the London Stock Exchange control over $1trillion worth of Africa’s resources in just five commodities - oil, gold, diamonds, coal and platinum. My research for the NGO, War on Want, which has just been published, reveals that 101 companies, most of them British, control $305billion worth of platinum, $276billion worth of oil and $216billion worth of coal at current market prices. The ‘Scramble for Africa’ is proceeding apace, with the result that African governments have largely handed over their treasure (July 26, 2016).

These are practically the reasons why the British find it necessary to remain in any form of association with us. It is part of the neocolonialism’s economic exploits which is based on practically a unidirectional flow of resources; our natural resources flowing to them incessantly while we get farthing in return. This is the only rationale why the Brits try to keep as around as parts of the empire but operate with us with a remote control.

Just think about the most recent events leading to the Brexit. Most of the Brexit proponents’ contention is predicated on being in a union with inferior people or nations from Eastern Europe; mostly the breakaway republics from the former Soviet Union. The Brits have difficulties being in a Union with people who are anatomically identical to them, why then with the people of sub-Saharan Africa?

The same foreign companies which are in control of our commodities also try to use manipulative tax schemes to further cheat on the African governments’ measly revenues from these commodities. Right now there is an issue with the distribution of Ghana’s oil revenues and what had been presented or being debated is a total lunacy.

A movement led by Professor Lungu calling for approval of Production Sharing Agreement (PSA) which will guarantee more revenues for our crude oil in lieu of the current awful “Ghana Hybrid System" oil bill recently passed by Parliament is being taunted by the so called elites of Ghana’s society. The people working or who have worked this bill think Ghanaians are stupid and could be easily bamboozled into a dubious deal.

Why they are choosing to go against the obvious is beyond comprehension. It is like the entire country is being negotiated away into an infantile deal that hands everything we have over into the hands of the foreign players. This could never happen under strongman Jerry Rawlings! Is someone making money out of this deal secretly? Certainly there are some pages in this dubious oil bill that we are not seeing but I submit to you all that sooner than later the light will shine on the entire deal.

Back to the politics of police brutality in the US; this is not a new issue at all. It has been there time and time again. One of Malcolm X’s contentions in the 1960s was about the police brutality against blacks under the former Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty.

Paradoxically too, the United States’ National Anthem turned out to contain scornful lyrics in some of its stanzas ridiculing the demise of slaves fighting for their freedom and the US tries to shield that away from its people and still takes pride in its obnoxious National Anthem; a sure proof that the US puts no premium on the lives of its black citizens at all from inception.

Malcolm X once said in the 1960s that “To be black in America is enough to be deemed “un-American”, but to be black and Muslim is to be “anti-American” (Sohail Daulatzai, Aljazeera July, 2012).

No matter what we do or do not do as a people, the West will always see us as non-humans; and any rebellion from the Africans both at home and abroad will always be deemed as coming from fringe fanatical psychopaths and must be squashed or dealt with heavy handedly.

Unfortunately that’s the way the West underdeveloped Africa and kept it impoverished for centuries now. Similarly what they have done to the sub-Saharan Africa the same they did to the Africans especially in the Americas too from the time of slavery to date.

Just take for instance the formation of the current Brazilian government; a nation with 50.7% of its population being of African extractions yet has no representation in their current cabinet. And they even threatened to close down their embassies in Africa and the Caribbean.

Africa only has spineless leaders who are sheepishly herding us into the abyss. That gloom and doom are what have guided the recent Ghanaians’ petroleum deal. If we continue down this path with these calibers of leaderships we are going to be ruined forever beyond any salvation. We have to remember that neither the World Bank nor the IMF will be able to help us out by their same old rigged economic schemes. It is time we to take the bull by the horn ourselves.

The mutant infantile behavior of our leaders on important world issues, the useless kowtowing to the West, signing away of our resources into penury exchanges and above all remaining silence on police brutality against Africans especially those in the diaspora are detestable acts which are not parts of the African repertoire from antiquity.

They should refrain from them and walk onto the world stage with some levels of maturity, intelligence and accountability. They must understand that the buck stops with them. Africa needs new strong and intelligent leaders now. This must come very quickly if at all there is going to be any salvation for the continent.

Komla Sam Ganu, Ph. D is a retired Sociology Professor at the City University of New York; and formerly had worked for the New York City Commission on Human Rights for eleven and half years as one of its two Research Associates (1991 to 2003).

The Author of: 1. The dilemmas of the Uptown Street Vendors (Harlem and its environs).

2. Patterns of Hate Crimes and Incidents in the City of New York.

E-mail: kganu@earthlink.net