Gambia-L & Beran, I am still not quite finished with that Rubin fellow from the Philadelphia Inquirer who focussed his entire article on the predatory and tyrannical leaders of Africa. Not once did he acknowledge the existence of the successful/conservative and radical/ ideological African leaders that the Continent has fortunately produced since Independence. The Report he made reference to and proceeded to credit it authorship to the World Bank has identified four types of African Leadership. The original source is shown at the end of this piece. Four Types of African Leadership. q SUCCESSFUL AND CONSERVATIVE LEADERS. Recognizing the complex mix of peoples and cultures arbitrarily enclosed within colonial boundaries, these leaders introduced ethnically inclusive poli cies and informal power-sharing arrangements. They also pursued growth-oriented policies and increased human resource investments. Botswana's founding president, Sir Seretse Khama, provides a leading example-one that has been maintained by his successors-as does Felix Houphouet-Boigny in Cote d'Ivoire between 1960 and the mid-1980s. Under Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya enjoyed stability and high economic growth rates, though complaints about ethnic inequalities emerged toward the end of his rule. q RADICAL AND IDEOLOGICAL LEADERS. Motivated primarily by African (or Marxist) socialism, these leaders sought an economic and social transformation of their societies through state intervention and the leadership of a mass-based one-party state. In some cases (Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, Julius Nyerere in Tanzania) there was success in molding national consciousness. Elsewhere the policy proved socially divisive. Econo mically, state intervention yielded disappointing results. When combined with war in states such as Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique, the result was economic regress. q PREDATORY LEADERS. Instead of focusing on efficient national policies, predatory leaders did the opposite. National and state offices were treated as personal-making positions. The archetypal case of Zaire under Mobutu Sese Seko has been duplicated to a lesser degree in a number of other states. Conditions in Nigeria under Sani Abacha (1993-98) also fit that mode. q TYRANTS. Because of the eccentricity that often marks tyrants, and the shocking human rights abuses that they perpetrated, this form of leadership has received more international attention than the rest. Besides the cost to lives, its economic legacy is the most catastrophic. Uganda under Idi Amin (1971-79) and Equitorial Guinea under Macias Nguema (1968-79) are the worse e xamples. The Rwanda regime that organized the 1994 genocide represents tyranny at its most extreme, costing more than 500,000 lives and cutting GDP by two-thirds in a matter of months. SOURCE: Chege 1999 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html ----------------------------------------------------------------------------