By Whose Yardstick Do We Judge African Leadership?

By Wavinya Makai

There is a reflex in African political conversation that tells us more about our habits of mind than about our leaders.

Ask me who my favorite leader on the continent is, and name Ibrahim Traoré, and the response is almost scripted. “But he is a military ruler.” “He came to power in a coup.” “Africa does not need that.”

These objections are not frivolous. A military takeover raises grave questions about democratic legitimacy, accountability and the right of citizens to choose who governs them. But notice what happens next. The conversation ends. The manner in which power was acquired becomes the only fact that matters, and everything about how that power is used goes unexamined.

So let us examine it. What is the government doing with the authority it holds? What are its policies delivering? How are public resources managed, and who benefits? How closely do the leader’s stated ambitions match the lived realities of Burkinabè citizens?

And a harder question follows: do we put our own elected leaders through the same interrogation?

Separating Legitimacy and Performance

Two things are true at once. A coup is a rupture in the democratic compact. But an electoral victory is not proof of good governance, economic justice or public accountability. Ballots confer a mandate; they do not guarantee that it will be honored. Across the continent, citizens know leaders who won clean elections and then presided over stagnant wages, captured institutions and public services that exist mostly on paper.

The trouble begins when the word “democracy” is treated as sufficient evidence of good leadership, even as citizens’ daily experience tells a more complicated story. Why are we so often quicker to condemn a government’s origins than to interrogate the material conditions it produces? Process matters. So do outcomes. A serious analyst holds both in view, and neither is a substitute for the other.

None of this is an argument for excusing power. Traoré’s critics make a case that deserves a hearing: that he has extended his transition well beyond its original timetable, restricted political parties and cracked down on dissent. Those are precisely the kinds of questions rigorous scrutiny should ask. My point is that scrutiny must be applied evenly, to the soldier and to the senator alike.

Whose Standard?

This brings me to the deeper question: whose standards are we using?

For decades, African institutions, researchers and development practitioners have worked within frameworks shaped by particular historical experiences and intellectual traditions. Those frameworks have given us valuable ideas about constitutionalism, accountability and citizens’ rights. I do not dismiss them. But no framework should be exempt from critical examination, least of all when it is applied to societies with different histories, political conditions and development challenges.

We cannot afford to confuse intellectual discipline with intellectual obedience.

Consider what we actually measure when we assess governance. Which indicators determine success? Whose conception of development shapes the evaluation? Do our frameworks capture what citizens live through, or do they reward governments for ticking institutional boxes while material conditions stay exactly as they were? A country can hold elections, publish budgets and ratify treaties, and still fail the farmer, the nurse and the schoolteacher.

The Case for Epistemic Sovereignty

These questions go to the heart of what scholars call epistemic sovereignty: the ability of a society to take part in defining the standards by which it is understood and judged. It is not a rejection of outside knowledge. It is a refusal to let others set the terms of the debate while Africans merely supply the case studies.

African researchers, thinkers, philosophers and development experts have a particular responsibility here. We must reclaim the freedom to interrogate the frameworks through which our own realities are interpreted, and to ask whether they serve the people they claim to describe.

Scrutiny for Everyone

My position is simple: no leader should be beyond scrutiny, and no framework should be beyond question.

That means holding Traoré to account for his record, and holding elected presidents to account for theirs. It means asking what citizens gain, not merely how a government came to be. The task before us is to develop the intellectual courage to assess African leadership through inquiry that is rigorous, sensitive to context and centered on people. Anything less is not scholarship. It is deference.

Wavinya Makai is a Kenyan author, development strategist, and Pan-African scholar specializing in African economic sovereignty. Her work focuses on youth development, unemployment, and education reforms that cultivate innovators. She is the author of Capital Violence: The Economic War on African Dignity and holds a Master of Philosophy in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge. Makai has been featured as a development analyst on Citizen TV Kenya and is a frequent speaker on leadership and human rights.