Reversing external aid dependence: Prioritise higher education - Lord Paul Boateng to African leaders

A member of the UK House of Lords, Lord Paul Boateng, has challenged Africa’s emerging leaders to place premium on higher education to break the vicious cycle of dependency on external aid and the great powers.

The great powers, he said, “have fed and continue to feed on Africa’s resources”, and that their “activities with their willing collaborators hold Africa down in an impoverished and conflicting posture".

Delivering a lecture at this year's leadership series by the University of Professional Studies, Accra (UPSA) in Accra yesterday, Lord Boateng said at the heart of trying to reverse the trend was leadership and the knowledge that education "gives legs to leadership".

The lecture was the sixth in the series since it was established in 2017. The annual leadership lecture serves as a platform for national and global discussion about issues and challenges that cut across humanity.

It was on the theme: "Fulfilling the Promise — The Challenge of Leadership: Moving from Rhetoric to Delivery". Lord Boateng said academia had a huge responsibility to shape leaders in changing the fortunes of the continent.

He said leadership was high performance, innovation, service, entrepreneurship and respect. "But the best form of leadership is the one that puts others before self," Lord Boateng, born and raised in Accra before relocating to the UK, said.

"Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other, and leadership is hinged on excellence in service delivery," he said.

Audience

Speaking to a packed auditorium of people from all walks of life, including the First Lady, Rebecca Akufo-Addo; the Managing Director of Graphic Communications Group Ltd, Ato Afful; business mogul, Sam Jonah; students and lecturers, the UK Member of the House of Lords said the current leaders were facing a crisis of competence and deficit of trust due to a number of conspiracy theories all around on social media.

According to him, the cure to this was evidence, expertise and science. "Each and everyone of you, the young ones, the future leaders, need those in academia and faculty staff to shape your future.

"The leadership challenges require a framework, and that framework is influenced by the Sustainable Development Goals," he said. He said institutions of higher learning such as UPSA had a critical role to play in shaping and producing leaders and in delivering evidence-based policies.

"We live in the world where there's crisis of competence, a deficit of trust in all our institutions," he said. He expressed worry that the world's 63 democracies were being overtaken by the 73 authoritarian regimes.

While touching on democracy across the globe, the British lawmaker said he would not be tempted to address elections and its likely outcomes for obvious reasons. He, however, stressed that the COVID-19 pandemic had rolled the global economy backwards, and that a lot had