Former Director for Kenya’s Anti-Corruption Commission, Professor Patrick Loch Otieno Lumumba has said that there is a major crisis in Africa when it comes to governance. During a zoom interview on Tv Africa’s breakfast live morning show with host Dennis Osei Gyamfi, Prof. Lumumba added that africa as a continent is facing problems with elections and party politics and urges that the time is due for Africa to explore new methods of electing leaders into public offices.
He declared this to be a collective responsibility among African countries ” And this is a task that we must all undertake because it has now emerged that in every election in almost all African countries, we don’t get it right”
He continued to lay emphasis on the fact that Africa has been saddled with political party politics which we (Africans) imitated from Europe and also been saddled with government infrastructures which we (Africans) inherited from Europe and also rely on instruments which are made in Europe and America or else where and it evidently shows that we (African) don’t handle them well despite the best intentions backing them.
He went ahead to question the credibility of African’s democratic political parties. He said“ We have what we call political parties but are they political parties in the classical sense?, in many cases, they are just groups of people who are animated by ethnicity and quest for power”.
He further revealed that African leaders are being elected loosely and have created environments to run systems that we don’t control as we are manipulated by our oppressers. He further stated that there is lack of trust between ourselves as Africans and we are under the threat of disintegrating as a continent because we can’t handle elections and also our leaders see power as the shortest avenue to acquire wealth and therefore hunt for it by any means possible.
REPORTER – AMPONSAH PHILIP
