CURRENT efforts to set up an African School of Governance (ASG) in Kigali, a graduate institution designed to offer world-class education programmes in public policy, research, governance, leadership and management is among the more interesting news bits of late.

Initial reports say it was co-founded by Rwandan President Paul Kagame and former Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn. They worked in tandem with a number of African leaders, academics and philanthropists, for once.

Summary expositions of this initiative say that it is intended to address the continent's pressing governance challenges, where the paradigm the school will pursue is equipping emerging leaders with the mindsets, skills and concepts necessary for effective leadership for Africa's future. 

That is what is especially interesting, to find out if there is a working paradigm that a cluster of African academics and statesmen can hold up high and say ‘this works.’ Not that there were no leadership schools earlier; there were quite a few, and indeed it is questionable if leadership as such needs a school, or it is just an addition to things that one learns in schooling, higher education.

Within East Africa, the past few decades were marked by opening schools for young people cutting across borders, with expectations that fallout from the schools would help develop a pan-African view of things. 

The Eastern and Southern Africa Management Institute (ESAMI) was initiated in 1982 in that framework, at the same time as the start of the trade pact that became COMESA.  The Mandela Institute of Science and Technology was an even more ambitious initiative, to become a centre of excellence in the region, at a time where well equipped facilities were largely a rarity.

With the Kigali School something else is visible, not grooming young people either into management skills or technology, but actually imparting a mindset and conceptual formulations that are assured to make a difference in the development challenge. 

Just how the matter has a preliminary solution that has enabled cobbling together a workable curriculum to be imparted less to students seeking first degrees or post-graduate qualifications but emerging leaders, is a conundrum.

It is unclear how the sponsors raise a team of academics who are on the same plane of ideas on governance, as alternatively they can show the problems in a seminar series.

News watchers could have noticed on the presentation of the ASG president, Nigerian academic, diplomat and UN consultant Kingsley Moghalu, who had years with law institutions of the East African Community in Arusha. 

It is not surprising that he earned the respect of leading statesmen in the region, who now seek him out of an eventual retirement to help guide an institution that needs razor sharp clarity on what works and what doesn’t work, in leadership. 

Nobody can say the school will be crowned with success but it’s a helpful endeavor, just as we have such efforts here with the National Defence College or the Mwalimu Nyerere Leadership School.  Earlier it was the Kivukoni College of TANU.

An introductory note says that in addition to its education programmes, the ASG will advance governance through dedicated research centres, like the Centre for Home-Grown Innovations in Policy and Governance, the Centre for African History and Leadership, the Centre for Trade and Regional Integration, and the Centre for Technology and Effective Delivery. 

That provides a picture of the paradigm in its orientation, a largely homegrown philosophy on innovation and leadership, but it leaves aside so many issues.

While it is essentially an academic pursuit, it is anchored in existing media controversies on African governance, where the matrix of discussion is democracy and human rights. Yet this paradigm has always been contested and is regarded as Western in its origination, with a traditional view for instance with Mwalimu Nyerere in a 1962 essay to open Kivukoni College,  titled, ‘Ujamaa, the Basis of African Socialism,’ where he talked of African democracy. ‘The elders sat under a tree and talked until they agreed,’ hence implying that the ruling party central committee is sufficient, represents all.

These are largely issues of image that each African country stakes around the world, and it appears that there is sufficient consensus on the continent on the need to do away with some essential prerogatives of the multiparty system. 

Its basic format is that there will be periodic elections that will be organised in ways that the country itself sees fit, and not teams of United Nations, NGOs or other observers as is now the case. At the global level, it is an attempt to raise the BRICS position to a paradigm of governance, tied to clear relativism of what is meant by democracy, human rights, elections.

An authoritative image maker for most of the post-independence years until his death in 2014, starting to raise issues about Africa’s capacity for self-governance right from the start. He saw Africa as grappling with a triple heritage it can’t solve, namely its Judeo-Christian heritage arising from colonial experience, an Islamic heritage from the religions much earlier expansion, and then its proper African heritage that is alive and well in language, customs and to that effect, in governance behaviour. It is still that way at the moment, so it is curious if the African heritage can save us,

While the predominant view in the African Writers Series was that of a calm and communal Africa, as Mwalimu speaks of it in his early 1962 essay, it did not take long for Mwalimu to admit there was a big problem. 

He was shocked by the killing of President Sylvanus Olympio of Togo, first national pleader after independence to be killed in a military coup, and said in a later speech, ‘there is a devil in Africa.’ Prof. Mazrui was saying in his final years that perhaps the colonial experience was too short to durably change Africa – not to fight wars with pregnant women having wombs ripped by bayonets, or centuries of slavery leading to genocide in Rwanda to prevent renewed Tutsi hegemony. 

The International Criminal Court helped to bring a halt to beastly behavior, while incidents of albino killings, routine witchcraft disabling individuals, and lately the regional political reality of abductions, killings show the devil is still there. African governance is its modified image, ethic.