Cancelled!

Seems I've been 'cancelled' by AFLI Archbishop Tutu Leadership Fellowship

Is it me or yet another case of #InsitutionalCapture?

You'll enjoy my story. Promise. Thoughts please...

• - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Sine Timore - - - Without Fear

Kwame Nkrumah’s book NEO-COLONIALISM THE LAST STAGE OF IMPERIALISM caused such panic that the US State Department sent a sharp note of protest and $25million of American "aid" to Ghana was promptly cancelled.

I first met the great Pan-Africanist when I was five, at home. Nkrumah had sponsored my mother to study parasitology at Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and was keen to check on his investment on her return to Ghana.? He was kind and business-like, smiling at me from beyond the line of black and white clad policemen.?

Soon after, I watched the firefight on the top of the hillside facing our house as the coup d’état, which would remove him from office, took place. Ending the thrust of Pan-Africanism, disrupting the non-Aligned movement (an early version of today's BRICs) and putting an end to the plans for nuclear power to fuel Ghana’s growth, and the control of cocoa and bauxite prices, two top exports. At the time the economy of Ghana dwarfed all other emerging countries like Korea. Ostensibly this coup was to free Ghanaians in some way but I fail to recall how.

At school aged 12. I remember talking about the Biafran refugees camped out having escaped the Oil Industry-funded civil war in Nigeria. By accident I saw an image of a slaughtered victim of the war, an image that still haunts me today.

It’s 10pm at night and I’m 15 and I can’t believe Africa can be so cold. We left our house in Patrice Lumumba Road – another Pan-Africanist martyr – six hours ago and now I’m at the top of the airplane steps in Nairobi Airport, Kenya.? We’re here for my mother’s new job where eventually she would lead the African environmental group for UNEP. ?

I was the only and second-ever African to have attended the British public school I was sent to (the first African had been an Ashanti Prince, Son of Prempeh I, fifty years earlier who arrived with a retinue of about 100 people! I think the school were a bit disappointed when I just turned up with a trunk!) There were other pupils who had lived in Malawi, South Africa and Rhodesia and I had to build my knowledge of the rest of Africa fast. By now I was paying attention.? I had discovered Rattray, had read Walter Rodney’s “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” and Julius Nyerere’s “Education for Self-reliance”. ?At university I marched against Apartheid and boycotted the banks that funded it.

...imagine my joy when Sean Lance and Peter Wilson approached me to help with their idea to actively grow young African leaders..

So, imagine my joy when Sean Lance and Peter Wilson approached me to help with their idea to actively grow young African leaders who would finally be able to address the issues and opportunities of the continent. ?They had in mind nothing less than an African Leadership Institute (AFLI).? That they had managed to get the support of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, one of my heroes, was just the cherry on the top!

So for a couple of decades my routine had been that two weeks before the course module in Oxford I have revised the histories of the participants’ countries and read daily news and current affairs from those countries to be better able to tailor my message on leadership.? Always I would plan to illustrate the key learning points of the session by doing what I was teaching – so for example if the point was to lead by challenge, I would ask simple challenging questions to get the participants to engage – this took a fair amount of preparation but I was keen to do my best. Then having woken up at dawn on the Saturday, I would travel to Egrove Park to meet participants for breakfast and the session and then staying to lunch to answer any personal questions the participants had felt uncomfortable asking in the big group.?

I am an introvert and rarely talk about myself but for these young upcoming leaders I would fight against my nature and answer even the most intimate question asked, honestly.?

I had small misgivings in the last several years. The agenda was shifting. It had moved from being Afro-centric to a wider view.? Guest speakers on the program, like David Cameron, though informative, had no real understanding of the African situation except from a Euro-centrist view.? Participants’ questions to me and focus seemed less on specifically African issues and more on the issues such as #climate and American politics.? It seemed that the storm of persuasion science that was causing people across the West to absorb and believe narratives without critical thinking, was beginning to envelop them also.?

We, the faculty and management were old and frightened.

And then with #covid my worries rose further.? The course is intended to develop #leaders. These are leaders who are going to attempt to move Africa out of a 500-year quagmire.? Participants were all young and healthy and at low risk. We, the faculty and management were old and frightened. But surely it was our duty to show the courage we would demand of such leaders in a real and challenging situation?? But it seems the fear won. ?And we role-played to participants how to be fair-weather leaders. ?

“Don’t be distracted... or talk of legacies – we don’t care what happens when you’re dead. NOW. Today is your legacy

By the time I taught the group again the ethos was significantly different.? In the middle of my teaching session, I had to rescue a mutiny by the delegates, brought on by the management not walking the leadership talk.? By now there was a global focus, not an African focus.? Most participants had been swept up on one side or another of fake partisan narratives. And it was obvious nothing had been done to address this in the previous modules.? Some even spoke the language of typical Ivy-league grads about ‘legacies’ as if the issues in Africa were of no immediate importance and could wait for grandiose solutions.? I told them I cared not about my legacy because the imperative was to help people who needed it now, in a real way, not towards some hypothetical goal for a statue that would be torn down by future generations. “Don’t be distracted by propaganda designed to ensnare the peoples of the West. Or talk of legacies – we don’t care what happens when you’re dead. In Africa we need leadership NOW. Today is your legacy”.

In a continent where #child #slavery is on the increase to provide the manpower for mining the #lithium and #cobalt to drive electric vehicles and where abundant energy means food, any African leader's view on #climate emergencies must be more circumspect and nuanced.

Some participants just repeated government, mainstream media or industry talking points. They spoke of climate change without any connection to the impact of energy availability on health, death and poverty in Africa. They intoned phrases from the UN Agenda 21, a document that crushes the African dream, relegating it to be at best subjugated to a global-neo-colonialism They recited key aspects of the World Economic Forum, Fourth Industrial Revolution and Great Reset which are vacuous, quick-reads and hold no special place in them for Africa – ignoring the continent and its people almost entirely except as resources to exploit. ?I knew I had to explain to them that unless they could regain their #integrity and critical thinking and stop relying on highly-respectable but bogus-biased news sources, they would be no use as leaders, - worse they would be ‘mis-leaders’ effectively taking their fellow Africans to a future of further exploitation and underdevelopment.?

Across the continent today, is a swathe of coup d’états in Niger, Burkina Fasso, Gabon, Mali…? Ostensibly they are to throw off the yoke of Francophile neo-colonial influence.? They may be, and they may succeed.? African Leadership is needed now more than ever.

And then. The business model of AFLI had always been on a knife edge requiring sponsoring organisations and donations.? Sponsoring organisations send a delegate of their own choosing and fund another person - an upcoming leader who can't fund themselves.

...philanthropy is a way to buy, with money, what is not for sale, for example favour, access and repute!

Donations can be a different challenge Many think that philanthropy is kindness because they don’t have excess wealth and can’t imagine giving money away without noticing it.? Others realise that philanthropy is a way to buy, with money, what is not for sale, for example favour, access and repute.? But then to begin to accept money from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was counterproductive and na?ve in an African context.? Was no note taken about the damage they had inflicted in Guinea Bissau?? It’s a repeat of the experiments performed on Africans by Big Pharma famously captured in the film, The Constant Gardner, all over again.? And what provenance. #AFLI now has a connection with Jeffrey Epstein.? And with such a significant funding sometimes come pressures for conformity.

I was therefore unsurprised to discover that I was to be unceremoniously kicked off the programme, cancelled as it were, and replaced with a ‘cooking session’ (CONTEXT: in a course on leadership!).? I wear that as badge of honour to your recognition that I will not compromise my integrity in teaching the future leaders what is required of them by the people of Africa instead of what is required by the paymasters or narrative.? So thank you.

But I am truly saddened.? I am proud to have been part of the AFLI journey and I hope I have in a small way contributed to the leadership journey of the wonderful participants I had the honour to spend time with.? I am saddened because deep in my gut, I fear the future of AFLI will be just to perpetuate a New Colonialism.? It seems imperialism continues to be in its last stage and unlikely to end soon.?

Thank you to all and good luck,

?

Eddie

Professor Eddie Obeng