African View: A question of leadership

In our series of weekly viewpoints from African journalists, columnist and filmmaker Farai Sevenzo considers issues of leadership and that Obama trip to Ghana.

My fellow Africans, it is an honour for me, indeed for us as a people, to be living in these times.

From Accra to Zanzibar, from Lusaka to Libreville, we have been witnessing leadership the likes of which we may never see again.

Just the other week, somewhere in a Libyan backdrop, a great leader said we should become the United States of Africa immediately, that we should not wait.

And within the last 12 months, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi had been shouting from every mountain-top for the African people to share in his grand design of African Unity.

"We want an African military to defend Africa, we want a single African currency, we want one African passport to travel within Africa," the colonel told assembled kings, chiefs and traditional rulers last year - before being declared "King of Kings" by the gathered chiefs, who were themselves in danger of being declared clowns with crowns.

Predictable leadership

But nobody listened then and they weren't listening only two weeks ago when those who purport to be our leaders gathered in the colonel's tent in Sirte and gave us another predictable African Union conference in which the brotherhood of presidents nod to each other and ignore issues of human rights.

They talk up the idea of union even as they wage wars against their neighbours and kill their own for voting the wrong way, and choose to stick together when the International Criminal Court accuses one of their own of crimes against humanity.

Save Bashir from the evil ICC, they cried. No he must face the music, said Botswana.

Occasionally there is a lone voice of dissent, but leadership as we have come to know it is predictable fare and the pace of change on our continent remains tied to the fate of men and women who have no wish to give up that leadership.

Friend in the White House

I was in the middle of these musings over a very late breakfast, when the airwaves seemed to go up a pitch in great excitement. It was as if the second coming was here.

Journalists, broadcasters, ordinary people were positively gushing over the expected speech of one Barack Hussein Obama to the parliament of Ghana in Accra.

Whenever this grandson of Kenya opens his mouth, it is to spew great floods of hope and purpose, to carry all our ears to the loftiest clouds of possibilities. Furthermore, unlike an Obama Beer, he leaves no trace of a hangover after these flights of fancy.