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| Challenges of Political Leadership in Africa: Nigeria’s Fourth Republic in Focus |
Udegbunam Victor Emeka & Onwunyi, Ugochukwu Mmaduabuchi
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Abstract:
Africa continues to be confronted with intense development crisis despite sluggish pace of growth. These crises of dependency, corruption, poor infrastructure, poverty, unemployment, leadership and governance challenges are some of the impediments to Africa’s quest for sustainable and equitable development. To the radical leftist scholars, Africa’s underdevelopment can adequately be explained by its forceful and uneven integration into the global economic system. However, with decades of independence, the debate has increasingly focused on Africa’s leadership as good explanatory framework for understanding Africa’s poverty and underdevelopment. This work attempts an intellectual discourse on bad leadership as responsible for the current poverty and underdevelopment crises in Africa using Nigeria’s 4th Republic as a case in study. The work engaged the Marxist class theory of the state as the relevant framework of analysis and employed the descriptive methodology. The work was able to find out amongst others that most states in Africa including Nigeria inherited weak political structure from colonialism. That this weak political structure produced and shaped a political class that distances itself from its subjects and this accounts for the leadership crisis the continent is bedeviled with. Based on the fore going, the work recommends amongst others patriotic leadership that is based on Northouse leadership approach and active followership devoid of trepidation rooted in Africa and Nigeria in particular for responsive and accountable political leadership in the continent.
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