What I know is Africa's leaders, even the most disagreeable, are from African communities. They are nurtured within African communities. Their morals and values are learnt from within the same communities that nurture other Africans. They don't grow up in outer space on a planet somewhere before being brought to Africa and made leaders here. They are, simply put, products of our communities.
If they become kept men and women of the western powers-that-be and are groomed for leadership roles, then they get the propensity to be this from within our communities.
This means that if they are unbelievably naive, cruel, greedy, petty, foolish etc., if these are the salient traits they abundantly display, then this is representative of us. This is how we are.
Our leaders are examples of what our communities can bring forth in terms of personality, and if theirs leaves much to be desired, then we need to do better as a collective, and the best place to start is in our homes.
There is no doubt that we Africans have degenerated over time because there is ample evidence to the effect that we weren't always like this. What we have become, what is displayed the most in the personalities of most of those who become our leaders, is the product of what colonialism did to us.
Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart" comes very close to outlining the process that led to us becoming this way. This book is as such not just a best selling novel, but a documentary.
Colonialism is an evil system that requires evil things to be done to the colonized in order to make them controllable. The conquest and colonization process isn't cheap, and it isn't done for nothing. There is no mercy shown until the conqueror is sure the mission will pay its dividend.
If you have ever seen what happens to a cock that gets incapacitated in some way so that it can no longer assert its authority and lead, then you have seen a semblance of what the process of colonization looks like, then you know the process Chinua Achebe was outlining. The deposed cock isn't just ignored, but it is physically attacked till death by the new leader.
Before being brutally killed, though, it is put through a process of cruelty and abuse that may seem like overkill if not gratuitous in intention. The new leader may even literally bite it on the back of the neck and f*vk it.
The fear driving the weird behavior of the new leader is the same as that which causes a conqueror to do the things they do to those they have conquered. It is simply trying to ensure and be assured that the old leader is no threat in fact.
The procedure to ascertaining this status is never pretty.
We find parallels of this behavior throughout human history, the most egregious of which happened during the major wars.
The Katyn forest massacre of Poland, which was a series of mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish military officers and intelligentsia carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD ("People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs", the Soviet secret police) in April and May 1940, is a good example.
After the Russians invaded Poland during the last major World War, military victory wasn't enough. They also took away the best and slaughtered them mercilessly. This way, they cut off the head of the polish and could impose their will on them without encountering any resistance.
The British, French, Portuguese, etc, did the same to Africans before instituting indirect rule and then leaving the continent in the hands of Africans themselves, who continued the colonization of their own selves in a system known as neo-colonialism.
Ask yourself how the colonizers became sure that if they left Africa, Africans would be better at controlling themselves?
The colonizers would most definitely have passed the whole continent through a procedure that ensures and leaves them assured that there was nothing left of Africans that could manage to launch a comeback, in much the same way the cock does, or the Russians did to the poles.
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