ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the importance of Africa’s leadership structures and the policy choices of three different generations of African political leaders (APLs) since independence. Based on historical evidence, we contend that the first generation of APLs failed to build a rock-solid economic-political-social foundation necessary for sustainable long-term economic growth, and that their policy choices were growth-retarding. To analyze Africa’s growth predicament over the past six decades, we employ a deductive theoretical framework using the conventional aggregate production function, and we compare the growth rates of real gross domestic product (GDP) during three generations of APLs. We show that per capita real GDP growth rates increased during the first generation but became negative during the second generation and turned positive during the third generation of leaders. Based on the leadership governance structures and the policy choices of different generations of APLs, we conclude that African countries need ethical and transformational entrepreneurial leaders.
