Do Africa’s Leaders Really Care About their People?

I am not an expert in African politics except maybe for an amateurish interest in it and information I get from shows in CNN and BBC which feature Africa - but when I watched Susanne Bier’s In A Better World today, I was again thrown into these thoughts of the hopelessness of Africa.  The movie had some parts shot in Africa, and the place could’ve been Sudan. 

I think the leaders of many African nations don’t really care for their own people.  I remember a grade school friend of mine tell me that in Burundi, where he served as a UN peacekeeper, he would see the leaders in BMWs and fancy cars, not far away from the poverty of their own people.  When I told him, “Yeah, just like the corruption in the Philippines”.  He replied, “No, Tony, it’s a hundred times worse than our corruption.  At least in our country, we still care for the poor.”  “But, we’re poor too.” I retorted.  “No, the situation there is much worse.  I can’t even describe it.”  He answered.

In 1984, when I was just 13 years old, the whole world, rallied to save the hungry in Ethiopia with USA For Africa’s We Are the World and Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas.  Those efforts showed to me the situation in Africa.  Twenty seven years later, except maybe for South Africa, Ghana, Kenya, Senegal, Namibia and Morocco, the rest of Africa is still where it was, since I was a kid. Of course, I am only observing through an armchair thousands of miles away but I also wish that things would’ve been much better, since those searing images of poverty when I was still a kid, of a place of stunning beauty and bountiful natural resources, are still fresh on my mind.

Is there hope 20 years hence?  South Africa and Ghana are leading the way.  The continent really needs leaders of Nelson Mandela’s caliber – and they all should work towards the welfare of their countrymen.