You can not become a good African leader. You’d be celebrated only if you are dead hero or a permanent opposition.
Why? you asked
Our current states are set up in ways to be a continuation of colonialism, the only thing that changed is that rented black faces and mouths had replaced the white colonizer.
Instead of fighting the white, you fight your own African brother, while the white are chuckling in the back office.
In you’d refuse to run it as a colonial farm, you’d be killed, physically or morally. You become a dead hero. Reason why most African heroes are failed dead folks.
If you make a career out of criticizing the colonial farm and the handlers, you’d be famous with a cheering crowd. However, once you’d get into power, your fate would change dramatically. You’d join the traitors list, puppets in suits, or incapable leaders, because the system as it’s won’t let you do any wanted change.
The choice is either you run it as colonial farm or you are crippled to powerlessness.
Is this too subtle to understand?
Here in my country, people want change. A lot. However any new leader would be a huge disappointment, because the system will beat them. The system is against change. The system is against African interests.
I hear the opposition parties saying we will manage this better. Managing well a slave plantation doesn’t end the slavery of the people. It’s like improving the prisoners conditions in a prison, while what we want is freedom.
‘We will improve your conditions in this prison. We will serve you better meals, guards won’t beat you anymore, you can listen to radio. That’s all we can do now, because we can’t open the prison doors and free you right away, because we too we have kids to raise. We don’t want to die’. The summary of the political and economic program of most opposition parties on the continent.
Reason why they will fail. Because we want to get out of this invisible prison, not get better conditions in the prison.
Becoming African leader in the current setup is a trap, if there is no hidden agenda to scrap down the colonial apparatus.