State Emissary, November 2017. Issue 1 2017 Edition | Page 27

SM | POLITICS
world. His conceptual originality has led Rwanda’s
ruling party to own and run profit-making business
corporations. That’s better than stealing state
resources to fund partisan politics. Leadership. therefore engaged with ideas, and with translating
them into policy against the background of clear
worldviews. The outcomes indicate successful
economic performance.
In Mauritius, President Ameena Gurib-Fakim is a
former university professor who has done research and
published tons of scientific papers. She is a leader who
is an intellectual, and has argued that citizens get the
leadership they deserve because it is their vote that
selects and elects their leaders. Leadership. To paraphrase a popular saying, the problem in our
country is that many in power have no ideas, and those
with ideas have no power. We once were led by
intellectual politicians, the likes of Nnamdi Azikiwe
and Obafemi Awolowo. Most of our politicians today
don’t read. Many are Ghana-must-go bag-carrying
characters or ethnic irredentists for whom politics is
all about the self-preservation of the status quo. They
are more interested in peddling ethnicity, religion and
other primordial factors as their passport to power.
Naively drawn in by these sentiments, we are left with
the short end of the stick at the end of the day. High
poverty and unemployment rates have been our lot.
In Botswana, the founding President Sir Seretse
Khama, a British-trained barrister, instituted a
superior culture of leadership grooming and
succession that has assured the country’s stability and
economic growth from 1966, when it was one of the
world’s poorest countries, up till today when
Botswana’s nominal GDP per capita, at $7,000, is one
of the highest in Af