Africa needs fresh thinking on its leadership and governance challenges, particularly when it comes to the disconnects between traditional leadership models and governance structures within the modern state. In this open access book, Kofi Anani finds ways forward through the Blended Representation Principle (BRP), which stipulates that power be shared between leaders selected on the basis of Western-democratic ideals and leaders chosen on the basis of traditional African norms and conventions. Drawing on his research and professional experience, Anani shows how incorporating the BRP into African leadership and governance thinking would encourage more voluntary public participation in politics, guarantee transparency and accountability in decision-making, particularly when it comes to the use of public resources, and ultimately encourage more public confidence in leaders. Anani also provides concrete suggestions for how to achieve all this, not through quick fixes, but rather through educational campaigns directed at public officials and through new communities of learning and practice designed to champion the BRP in villages, schools, workplaces, places of worship, and other social organizations. This book is a must-read for all scholars and students of postcolonial governance and leadership, and it is of keen interest to anyone concerned with how Western-style state-making might ultimately find a balance with other, indigenous modes of social organization. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Bloomsbury Open Collections Library Collective.

Africa needs fresh thinking on its leadership and governance challenges, particularly when it comes to the disconnects between traditional leadership models and governance structures within the modern state. In this open access book, Kofi Anani finds ways forward through the Blended Representation Principle (BRP), which stipulates that power be shared between leaders selected on the basis of Western-democratic ideals and leaders chosen on the basis of traditional African norms and conventions. Drawing on his research and professional experience, Anani shows how incorporating the BRP into African leadership and governance thinking would encourage more voluntary public participation in politics, guarantee transparency and accountability in decision-making, particularly when it comes to the use of public resources, and ultimately encourage more public confidence in leaders. Anani also provides concrete suggestions for how to achieve all this, not through quick fixes, but rather through educational campaigns directed at public officials and through new communities of learning and practice designed to champion the BRP in villages, schools, workplaces, places of worship, and other social organizations. This book is a must-read for all scholars and students of postcolonial governance and leadership, and it is of keen interest to anyone concerned with how Western-style state-making might ultimately find a balance with other, indigenous modes of social organization. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Bloomsbury Open Collections Library Collective.

'A superb book...genuinely innovative' Jack Spence OBE, King's College London Over the last half century, sub-Saharan Africa has not had one history, but many. Histories that have intertwined, converged and diverged. They have involved a continuing process of decolonization and state-building, conflict, economic problems but also progress and the perpetual interplay of structure and agency. This new view of those histories looks in particular at the relationship between territorial, economic, political and societal structures and human agency in the complex and sometimes confusing development of an independent Africa. The story starts well before the granting of independence to Ghana in 1957, but the book also looks at Africa in the closing decades of the old millennium and opening ones of the new. This is a book, too, about the history of the peoples of Africa and their struggle for economic development against the global economic straitjacket into which they were strapped by colonial rule and decolonisation. The importance of imposed or inherited structures, whether the global capitalist system, of which Africa is a subordinate part, or the artificial and often inappropriate state borders and political systems is discussed in the light of the exercise of agency by African peoples, political movements and leaders.

Positioning Africa for the 21st Century takes the reader through a journey of policy and decision making in Africa. It features case studies of Botswana, Malaysia, South Korea and Singapore illustrating the role leadership and think tanks played in their development. It explores the different roles think tanks can play in fostering Africa's rapid development, and advocates for a different leadership paradigm from the one that has characterized Africa in the last sixty years. This book is a clarion call for current and emerging African leaders to avoid mirroring the mistakes of the past six decades and rise to the challenge of taking Africa to its preferred future.

An innovative analysis of political leadership in Africa between 1960 and 2018, drawing on an entirely new dataset.

Africa is forever on our TV screens, but the bad-news stories (famine, genocide, corruption) massively outweigh the good (South Africa). Ever since the process of decolonialisation began in the mid-1950s, and arguably before, the continent has appeared to be stuck in a process of irreversible decline. Constant war, improper use of natural resources and misappropriation of revenues and aid monies contribute to an impression of a continent beyond hope. How did we get here? What, if anything, is to be done? Weaving together the key stories and characters of the last fifty years into a stunningly compelling and coherent narrative, Martin Meredith has produced the definitive history of how European ideas of how to organise 10,000 different ethnic groups has led to what Tony Blair described as the 'scar on the conscience of the world'. Authoritative, provocative and consistently fascinating, this is a major book on one of the most important issues facing the West today.