The Convener of Correct Connect Africa Foundation (CCAF), Father Aleakwe Odior, has said that the governance crisis in Africa, where lands of extraordinary wealth still produce extraordinary poverty and nations whose soil holds the raw materials of global technology yet cannot guarantee electricity to their hospitals, is due to the systematic dismantling of African institutions.
 
Speaking at the weekend during a programme to mark the Africa Memorial Day 2026, themed Political leadership and governance in Africa, Odior noted that despite Africa’s enormous resources, young men and women of uncommon brilliance still board dangerous boats in the dead of night, not because they lack ambition, but because their nations have failed to build conditions worthy of that ambition.
 
“This is the governance crisis of our time. And it did not arrive by accident. It arrived through the systematic dismantling of African institutions over centuries of conquest. It was deepened by borders drawn to divide people and unite enemies.”
 
It has been sustained by leaders – in government, in business, in religion – who learned to speak the language of liberation while practising the logic of extraction.”
 
Odior, a Catholic priest, added that the philosophers of Kemet taught Ma’at – truth, justice, and balance – not as an abstract ideal, but as a governing standard.
 
“The ruler who violated Ma’at did not merely fail politically. They failed cosmically. They betrayed the order of things,” he said.
 
According to him, by that ancient measure, much of what passes for governance on this continent today is a betrayal. But history also shows us what genuine African leadership looks like.
 
He said: “It looks like Nkrumah standing in Accra in 1957, declaring not merely Ghanaian independence, but the liberation of the entire continent as an unfinished obligation.
 
“It looks like Nyerere, building a nation on the principle of Ujamaa – that development without dignity is no development at all.
 
“It looks like Amílcar Cabral, warning his people to ‘claim no easy victories,’ reminding them that the hardest battle is not against the enemy outside, but against the colonial mentality within. It looks like Sankara, who reduced his own salary, drove his own car, and told his people plainly that the man who feeds you controls you.
 
“These were not perfect men. But they each asked the right question: Governance for whom? That remains the only question that truly matters.”
 
He stated that the Africa Memorial Day was created to keep that question alive and to refuse the comfort of amnesia as well as insist that remembrance is not nostalgia, but orientation.