African Governance Quotes

The whole structure of African government, as far back as we know, was based on tyranny. One guy ran the show. Chiefs like Chaka and Mzilikazi committed terrible atrocities. That is the tradition from which modern African rulers spring. It won't change easily overnight.

Democracy is not for Africa. There was only one African chief and here in Zaire we must make unity.

U.S. failures when it comes to the Gulf of Guinea are many: a failure to address the longstanding concerns of a government watchdog agency, a failure to effectively combat piracy despite an outlay of tens of millions of taxpayer dollars, and a failure to confront corrupt African leaders who enable piracy in the first place.

We Africans continue to allow tyrannical regimes to impose themselves on us.

Thanks to aid, a distressing number of African leaders care little about what their citizens want or need - after all it's the reverse of the Boston tea-party - no representation without taxation.

Western-style multi-party democracy is possible but not suitable for Africa.

What you and I understand as a government doesn't exist in many African countries. In fact, what we call our governments are vampire states. Vampires because they suck the economic vitality out of their people. Government is the problem in Africa.

I want you to know that I don't have any right, Malawi has no right to stop any president from coming to an African Union summit because that is an African Union meeting.

African people need to stop shouting 'nationtime' until they are clear about the responsibilities of running a nation.

Almost every country in Africa has now instituted multi-party democracy.

Traditional African tribal government was entirely different from Parliamentary democracy in the sense that we understand it. The essence of our system is we can change our Government, and therefore change or even reverse the policy it is pursuing, without bloodshed or violence, by the simple process of persuading our fellow citizens to put their vote in the ballot box. But once a Chief, after fullest consultation with his Council, had arrived at a decision, any further argument or opposition became treasonable. That is why in Africa you can never have a "loyal opposition". It follows from this that when the multi-party system of Parliamentary Government has been tried out in Africa, it has almost always become one-party rule.

The problem of Africa in general and Uganda in particular is not the people but leaders who want to overstay in power.

There is a crisis of leadership and governance in Africa, and we must face it.

There's a rising tide of concern among activists, economists, and artists about Africa. Theres a temptation to think of it as a monolith as opposed to all these different countries with different problems.

I saw how the Government was run there [in Africa] and I saw where black people were running the banks. I saw, for the first time in my life, a black stewardess walking through a plane and that was quite an inspiration for me.

One of the reasons why I've written The Challenge for Africa is to save it. Surely there are so many problems we can solve in Africa, but first and foremost, we need a government that feels responsible to protect their own people from the exploitations, from the misuse, from the mistreatment that they can easily get.

Leaders in Africa are so corrupt that we are certain if we put dogs in uniforms and put guns on their shoulders, we'd be hard put to distinguish them.

Instead of more money, what Africa really needs is governments that are responsible to their own voters, that are largely self-financing, that are internationally respectable, and that can attract home some of the hundreds of thousands of talented Africans who currently live in the West. New infusions of aid would likely just perpetuate the kleptocratic regimes that have slowly strangled the continent since independence.

People ask me all the time, ALL the time, they say the same exact thing. They say, 'Bo, you're an artist... how do we fix Africa?'

Traditionally, Africans hate governments. They hate tyranny.

You cannot even begin to understand contemporary African politics if you have not read this fascinating book